I thought I should share this brilliant essay on Harlem by Langston Hughes published in 1944. From my recent visit to Harlem, it seems as if things haven't changed much since 1944!
Enjoy!
Shola
http://www.tnr.com/book/review/down-under-in-harlem
The New Republic, March 27, 1944
If you are white and are reading this vignette, don't take it for granted that all Harlem is a slum. It isn't. There are big apartment houses up on the hill, Sugar Hill, and up by city college—nice high-rent houses with elevators and doormen, where Canada Lee lives, and W.C. Handy, and the George S. Schuylers, and the Walter Whites, where colored families send their babies to private kindergartens and their youngsters to Ethical Culture School. And, please, white people, don't think that all Negroes are the same. They aren't.
Last year's Harlem riots demonstrated this clearly. Most of the people on Sugar Hill were just as indignant about the riots as was Mayor LaGuardia. Some of them even said the riots put the Negro race back fifty years. But the people who live in the riot area don't make enough money really to afford the high rents and the high prices merchants and landlords charge in Harlem, and most of them are not acquainted personally—as are many Sugar Hillites—with liberals like Pearl Buck and John Haynes Holmes. They have not attended civic banquets at the Astor, or had luncheon with emancipated movie stars at Sardi's. Indeed, the average Harlemite's impression of white folks, democracy and life in general is rather bad.
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