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NEW YORK IS HARLEM...
HARLEM
by Mel Patrick

HARLEM- The guide book's definition says it is that part of New York City where the people have a culture and a way of life all their own - Harlem or the Apple is a state of mind and coming to Harlem or the Apple was to reach the zenith of one's ambitions. The saying was that if you could make it in the Apple or Harlem, you could make it anywhere; and this was how it began.

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Coming to Harlem or the "Big Apple" was a phrase coined by Blacks migrating from the rural south to that colored portion of New York City known as "Harlem" during the early twenties.

The record will show that the first Negro family to settle in Harlem lived at 2 West 136th Street around 1907. And even this date of migration is disputed because Judge Stout's wife claims that her family lived at 127th Street between 7th and 8th round 1905.

My father-in-law, the late Peter Smith, told me that he came up from 30th Street and 9th Avenue in 1907 to settle in Harlem. He made the transition to 30th St. via Chauncey St. in Brooklyn where he had brought his bride from Charleston, S.C. to start his family. My part of this migration ot Harlem began in 1918 when my father arrived there from Barbados by way of Panama where he had worked as a chef, cook during the construction of the Panama Canal.

As long as I can remember, I have been associated with the state of mind, known as Harlem. However, history says that in 1913, St. Philips Church, the largest Black

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Episcopal congregation in the City bought a row of houses on 135th St. between Lenox and 7th Ave. to bring their parishioners uptown. This move was recorded as a great victory for Nail and Parker, a budding Black Real Estate firm.

At the beginning of World War 1, Negroes left the South in droves coming north to Harlem and Camden, New Jersey and Newark, New Jersey to work in war plants which were thriving at that time, producing arms and ammunition for the United States and the allies to use in World War I.

Negro militancy, and notice I use the word Negro, because before this piece is finished, I will have five different appalachians for myself. Negro militancy began in 1910 when a budding anthropologist by the name of W.E.B. Dubois and a group of his cohorts met in Niagara, New York to form an organization known as the National Association for the Advancement of the then colored man. In 1912, Dubois led a parade of Negroes in a series of marches down New York's 5th Avenue seeking equal rights for these people. During that period Bert Williams, a fair skinned Negro entertainer from the Island of Jamaica was making theatrical history as the principal star of the Zeigfield Follies, the zenith of show business at that time. In fact, Mr. Williams was so highly thought of that he was inducted into a white Masonic lodge in Harlem in the year 1910, and I have a picture to prove it.

Negro militancy shifted from working in the war industries to putting on uniforms of the Army and Navy of the United States during World War I. The

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famed 15th, known today as the 369th Regiment, was the fightingest force in the U.S. Army during World War I in France. The regiment was in the line for some 300 and more days and never lost an inch of ground. The 15th Regiment was also the first American troops to cross the Rhine. When the boys returned home home after World War I, it was a struggle to keep them down on the farms after they had seen Paree. So, two waves of migration left the South for Harlem (N.Y.), Chicago, St. Louis, and California. The boys were so anxious to get off the Southern coming North that after they made the connection in Washington to come to freedom, some jumped off the train in Newark, New Jersey because they mistook the conductor's call of Newark for New York.

I can remember Sinclair Jones who recently resigned after 37 years as the second man in command of the Parks Department of New York; Dr. Samuel Brisbane, Harlem physician; Emmett Matthews, who now lives across the court from me in the Riverton; Dr. Charles Hunt, Lemenual Bullock who had become a member of the Fire Department after World War II, and Carl Ball, all starting out in public school together at PS 68 on 128th Street between Lenox and 7th Ave. We moved from PS 68 to PS 89, the original site of the now Adam Clayton Powell apartments, 134th and Lenox Ave.; then to PS 139, the Frederick Douglass Junior High School, located at that time in the heart of a white neighborhood, 140th St. between Lenox and 7th Ave., and then on to Dewitt Clinton H.S. located at 59th St. and 10th Ave. After high school some of us matriculated to City College in the evenings because we had to work to help out at home during the depression. I can recall pushing those "Georgia Buggys" in the Garment District for Harry Frechtel Women's Coat Manufacturing Co.

But, I am ahead of my story. I did not know at the time we were sent from P.S. 68 to P.S. 89 that we were the start of an integration movement in the New York City Public School System. So much

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a start, that the Board of Education hired a lady by the name of Ms. Handy, the daughter of the famed musician, W.C. Handy to teach us in P.S. 89. Two scholars who preceded us at P.S. 89 were Judge Thomas Dickens of the Supreme Court and the late Percy Ifill, the architect of the State Office Building.

The Harlem of my youth was a Harlem in which stickball, baseball, ice skating in Central Park for the Daily News; amateur boxing at St. Christopher's and Salem Crescent gymnasium were the thing of the day. I can remember many a time Morton Colridge Patrick reprimanded one C. Melvin Patrick for being brought home by a kid cop by the name of Dash, for playing ball in the street.

The Harlem of my youth, around the time that I went to P.S. 139, was a Harlem in which a Black Renaissance in arts and culture of the twenties was emerging. Countee Cullen, the great New York poet was one of my teachers at 139, Manhattan.

On the corner, down the street from 139 was located the famed Savoy Ballroom, and I can remember slipping off

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from church to go to the Savoy Ballroom many a Sunday afternoon, after delivering papers to raise the quarter to pay my way in.

At the Savoy Ballroom, I came to know great Negro jazz musicians like Cab Calloway, Jimmy Lunceford, Teddy Hill, Willie Bryant, and Fats Waller who used to leave the back door of the Lincoln Theater open so that the kids could sneak in to sit in the front rows to see Elmo Lincoln on the silent screen as Tarzan and

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