2015 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Winner of the Anna Julia
Cooper/CLR James Award for Outstanding Book in Africana Studies
presented by the National Council for Black Studies
**Demonstrates how Harlemite's dynamic fight for their rights and
neighborhood raised the black community's racial consciousness and
established Harlem's legendary political culture
**
In Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?, Shannon King vividly uncovers early
twentieth century Harlem as an intersection between the black
intellectuals and artists who created the New Negro Renaissance and the
working class who found fought daily to combat institutionalized racism
and gender discrimination in both Harlem and across the city.
New Negro activists, such as Hubert Harrison and Frank Crosswaith,
challenged local forms of economic and racial inequality in attempts to
breakdown the structural manifestations that upheld them. Insurgent
stay-at-home black mothers took negligent landlords to court,
complaining to magistrates about the absence of hot water and heat in
their apartment buildings. Black men and women, propelling dishes,
bricks, and other makeshift weapons from their apartment windows and
their rooftops, retaliated against hostile policemen harassing blacks on
the streets of Harlem. From the turn of the twentieth century to the
Great Depression, black Harlemites mobilized around local issues--such
as high rents, jobs, leisure, and police brutality--to make their
neighborhood an autonomous black community.
In Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?, Shannon King demonstrates how,
against all odds, the Harlemite's dynamic fight for their rights and
neighborhood raised the black community's racial consciousness and
established Harlem's legendary political culture. By the end of the
1920s, Harlem had experience a labor strike, a tenant campaign for
affordable rents, and its first race riot. These public forms of protest
and discontent represented the dress rehearsal for black mass
mobilization in the 1930s and 1940s. By studying blacks' immense
investment in community politics, King makes visible the hidden
stirrings of a social movement deeply invested in a Black Harlem. Whose
Harlem Is This, Anyway? is a vibrant story of the shaping of a
community during a pivotal time in American History.
