658 Chapter 24 Postwar Society and Culture: Change and Adjustment
insisted. He organized black businesses of many sorts,
including a company that manufactured black dolls.
He established a corps of Black Cross nurses and a
Black Star Line Steamship Company to transport
blacks back to Africa.
More sophisticated black leaders like Du Bois
detested Garvey, whom they thought something of a
charlatan. In 1923 Garvey’s steamship line went into
bankruptcy. He was convicted of defrauding the
thousands of his supporters who had invested in its
stock and was sent to prison. Nevertheless, his mes-
sage, if not his methods, helped to create the “New
Negro,” proud of being black and prepared to resist
both mistreatment and white ideas. Many were
inspired by his exhortation, “Up you mighty race,
you can accomplish what you will!”
The ghettos produced compensating advantages
for blacks. One effect, not fully utilized until later,
was to increase their political power by enabling them
to elect representatives to state legislatures and
Congress, and to exert considerable influence in
closely contested elections. More immediately, city
life stimulated self-confidence; despite their horrors,
the ghettos offered economic opportunity, political
rights, and freedom from the everyday debasements
of life in the South. The ghetto was a black world
where black men and women could be themselves.
Black writers, musicians, and artists found in the
ghettos both an audience and the “spiritual emanci-
pation” that unleashed their capacities. Jazz, the great
popular music of the age, was largely the creation of
black musicians working in New Orleans before the
turn of the century. By the 1920s it had spread
throughout the country and to most of the rest of the
world. White musicians and white audiences took it
up—in a way it became a force for racial tolerance and
understanding.
Jazz meant improvisation, and both players and
audiences experienced in it a kind of liberation. Jazz
was the music of the 1920s in part because it
expressed the desire of so many people to break with
tradition and throw off conventional restraints.
Harlem, the largest black community in the
world, became in the 1920s a cultural capital, center
of the Harlem Renaissance. Black newspapers and
magazines flourished along with theatrical companies
and libraries. Du Bois opened The Crisisto young
writers and artists, and a dozen “little” magazinesBlack Harlem, 1911
Predominantly
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rThe Making of Black HarlemIn 1911, African Americans lived mostly in a dozen-block region of Harlem; by 1930, they had created a
predominantly black city of well over 100 city blocks.
Black Harlem, 1930
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