MGJR Volume 3 2014 | Page 36

ront page headlines in the venerable New York Age offered for a nickel a glimpse into Harlem’s state of mind: “Dunbar National Bank to Close”; “Dr. Emmett J. Scott to

“Mme. Sinclair in Jail, Sufi Remarries”; “Negro Company Enters Commercial Fishing Business Here”; “Girl Wins $1,200 Fellowship Award to Study at Yale”; “Harlem World’s Fair Committee Elects Officers”; “Police Seek Identity of Man Stabbed to Death in Altercation.” Just inside, on Page 3, was more news from as near as 125th Street, where blacks demanded jobs, and as far as Ethiopia, which Italy sought to conquer. Even Morgan College was news with a photo and an accompanying article about the $226,700 state-of-the-art library under construction on its Baltimore campus.

This was just another day in the life of a people living through what scholars have defined, analyzed, debated and rhapsodized about as a transformative time in the United States. Well into the Great Depression that the nation’s less fortunate had felt long before the Wall Street crash of 1929, this was a period not only of economic uncertainty as President Roosevelt rolled out his New Deal, but also of seismic shifts in the loyalties of blacks to place and to politics.

More than 145,000 blacks poured into New York City in the 1930s, many of them from the South and most of them headed to Harlem. Poetizing their plight, favorite son and sometime journalist Langston Hughes noted that life was “no crystal stair.” Indeed, for all the celebrity of the Harlem Renaissance artists, writers and musicians, the flip side was this: By 1935, more than 40 percent of black families in Harlem relied on public assistance.1

In this dynamic mix of people striving and people struggling, newspapers like the Age – a 12-page weekly with separate sections for entertainment and for sports – leapt into the fray rather than observed from the sidelines. Its publisher, editor and writers were leaders in all aspects of New York life – from social clubs to political clubs , from churches to small businesses. The pages of the Age chronicled their activities and those of their cohorts in doing what they deemed best for the race. But by 1938, the Age was a shadow of what it had been during its days as a leading molder of opinion going back to the 1880s when it was known as the Globe, then The Freeman.2 Until 1907, T. Thomas Fortune had been its leader. A complex character and stalwart race man, Fortune was recognized in an 1891 study of the black press as “the most noted man in Afro-American journalism”; denounced in a New York Times editorial in 1902 as “a very foolish negro” for urging blacks to leave the South and to retaliate against whites who stood in their way; and lauded near the end of his life by the National Negro Press Association as “the ablest and most forceful editorial writer the race has ever produced.” 3

In 1907, Fred R. Moore took over the paper as Fortune’s mental illness and alcohol abuse spun out of control, but “the Age did not maintain the literary and journalistic qualities which had made it the most distinguished race paper.” 4 The man who secretly controlled the purse strings and to a great extent the editorial voice of the Age – Booker T. Washington – complained before his death in 1915 that its content no longer appealed to the black elite and its editorial voice was unfocused. “It is getting noised abroad throughout the country that the Age is edited by anybody who wants to write an editorial.” 5

Pages From The Archives

By E. R. Shipp | New York Age | April 23, 1938

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