from the 135th Street subway exit, said that he felt
vitality and hope throbbing in the air. In Black Manhattan, James Weldon
Johnson said that Harlem was not a slum or a fringe. Rather, he insisted
that it was one of the "most beautiful and healthful sections of the
city."

According to Johnson, the stranger traveling through Harlem would be
totally surprised by its appearance. Crossing 125th Street on his way up
Seventh Avenue, Johnson said, the visitor would not expect to find
himself in the midst of an Afro-American community. The character of the
houses did not change. For the next twenty-five blocks the streets,
stores, and buildings looked no different from those he had already
passed. With the exception of their color, the appearance of the people
on the streets was the same too. Moreover, Johnson insisted that Harlem
was an integral part of metropolitan New York and was not just a quarter
within the city in the sense that was true of the communities inhabited
by recent European immigrants. Its citizens were not aliens. They spoke
American; they thought American.

Harlem Negroes, claimed Johnson, were woven into the fabric of the
metropolitan economy. Unlike the Negroes in other Northern cities, they
did not work in "gang labor"; rather, they had individual employment here
and there scattered throughout the city. He believed that this
integration into the society as a whole made a difference in the kind of
race relations which existed there, and he said that it explained why New
York had not had a major race riot in the "bloody summer" of 1919. He
contended that Harlem was a laboratory for the race problem. Many had
argued that when Negroes moved north, the race problem would follow them.
Johnson pointed out that 175,000 Negroes had recently moved into Harlem
without any substantial racial friction and with no unusual increase in
the crime rate. Unfortunately, Johnson's views were not to be fulfilled.
Before long, crime rates rose in Harlem, and race riots occurred there as
well as in other parts of New York City.

Johnson was aware that there had been considerable racial tension at
earlier dates as Negroes first moved into Harlem. The community had been,
in turn, Dutch, Irish, Jewish, and Italian. Originally Negroes, living
in New York, worked for wealthy Whites and lived in the shadows of the
large mansions surrounding Washington Square. Several of the streets in
Greenwich Village had been almost entire