The Bronx African American History Project

Mark Naison

What makes a large group of people invisible to historians and how do they overcome that invisibility? What role do academically trained historians play in defining who becomes historical “subjects?” What is the historians relationship to community leaders who seek to preserve the past in non-academic forms?

These are the questions I have been preoccupied with for the last three years since I was recruited to direct a community history project documenting the experience of the more than 500,000 of African descent in the borough of the Bronx.

My recruitment began when Peter Derrick, chief archivist of the Bronx County Historical Society approached me at a book party and asked if I would help the BCHS develop a documentary base on Bronx African American history to respond to the growing number of requests for information on blacks in the Bronx from community residents. Intrigued by the request, I did a little background research and found that:

• Even though most people think of the Bronx as “Latino,” the half million people of African descent it contained, coming from the Caribbean and West Africa as well as the South, made it the eighth largest concentration of urban African Americans in the United States.
• The major research universities and cultural institutions in New York City had completely overlooked this population. No dissertation had ever been written, in any field, dealing with black life in the Bronx and the Schomburg Center’s landmark volume The Black New Yorkers, devoted three pages to the Bronx out of a total of 480.
• Major popular narratives of black life in the Bronx—such as those contained in the works of Jonathan Kozol—dealt almost exclusively with crime, disinvestment urban decay, or the rise of hip hop. There was no depiction, in literature, film or academic writing about family and community building among black working class and middle class families in the Bronx.

The vacuum of information and documentation I uncovered on this large and diverse population was too compelling to pass up so I decided to do what social historians have been doing since the Federal Writers Project—start an oral history project and place people’s experiences on record and help locate collections of primary documents. For my first interview subject, I chose a social work supervisor named Victoria Archibald Good who had been my student at Fordham in the early 1970s and who grew up in a low income housing project in the South Bronx called the Patterson Houses in the 1950s.

The interview depicted a historic moment (from the early 1950s through early 1960s) when public housing was the residence of choice for many working class black and Puerto Rican families who had recently moved to the Bronx from Harlem, reinforced by excellent public services, comprehensive youth recreation programs and the joyous sharing of cultures between blacks and Latinos. People slept with their doors open, helped raise one another’s children, and sustained a powerful sense that life was improving until a heroin epidemic hit in the mid-1960s.

But most importantly, the interview revealed how many people were passionately committed to putting this experience on the historical record. Within one week of the interview, I got three calls from old friends of Victoria from the Patterson Houses asking to be interviewed. “We’ve been trying to tell this story for thirty years,” a social worker named Nathan Dukes told me. “No one ever writes about black neighborhoods in the Bronx as great places to grow up in.” Dukes began lining up interviews with me at the rate of two or three a week, and by the summer of 2003, I had interviewed fifteen people and had started working with Dukes on a documentary film about his childhood experience.

As I would soon discover, the passion to document black life in the Bronx extended far beyond the Patterson Houses. In response to a New York Times article on the research that Dukes and I had been doing, I received no less than fifteen calls and emails from people who had grown up in a South Bronx neighborhood called Morrisania demanding that community be the focus of my research because it was “The Harlem of the Bronx.”

As I responded to these inquiries, I realized that what excited people the most was not that a scholar at a major university was interested in documenting their community, but that custodians of community traditions were guiding that process at every turn. To formalize this, we created a category of individuals called “Community Researchers” who not only recruited interviewees, but identified institutions, or cultural traditions in the community that merited more intensive investigation.

Within six months, we recruited a team of experts on community history from Morrisania, whose insights have transformed our understanding of Bronx African American History: Robert Gumbs, a graphic designer who promoted jazz concerts in the Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s; Arthur Crier, a legendary singer, songwriter, and arranger who was known as the dean of Bronx “Doo Wop”; Jesse Davidson, a retired postal worker led the Bronx chapter of the NAACP in the 1940s and 1950s; Leroi Archible, a former district leader and youth worker who was an expert on black politics in the Bronx; and the Pruitt family, a group of five educators who grew up in Morrisania and had worked as teachers, principals, staff developers, and district administrators in Bronx schools for over fifty years.

We learned from the Morrisania interviews that:

• Morrisania’s first African American residents were upwardly mobile families from Harlem who saw signs and advertisements that said “We rent to select colored families,” a code phrase for Pullman porters, postal workers, and extremely light skinned people. This migration, which began in the early years of the Depression, accelerated greatly during World War II and eventually turned Morrisania into the Bronx’s major African American neighborhood.
• Morrisania had a great live jazz and rhythm and blues scene in the 1940s and 1950s which no historian has ever written about. All of the top be bop artists of the era played at Club 845 and the Hunts Point Palace, the Bronx’s most important live music venues and many important jazz musicians including—Elmo Hope, Donald Byrd, Herbie Hancock, Tito Puente, and (for a time) Thelonious Monk—lived in the Bronx.
• The Bronx had a powerful tradition of anti-racist activism spearheaded by the Morrisania branch of the NAACP, an activist minister named Edler Hawkins, local labor unions and radical parties, and chapter of Bronx CORE.

How do we take this information, “common knowledge” to Morrissania residents, but never captured or discussed in any work of history, and make sure it is not lost to future generations? Here, the role of university trained scholars and heads of cultural institutions has been crucial. While the research team at Fordham has concentrated on conducting and transcribing interviews, collecting supporting documents, and writing articles about our research, the Bronx County Historical Society has taken responsibility for housing and cataloguing the Oral History Collection, preserving and organizing new documents, and publishing what we write about the project in its journal. In addition, both organizations, and the Community Research Team, have worked together in organizing tours, sponsoring lectures, concerts, and media broadcasts, and developing programs in the public schools. As a result of our collective effort, we have created a database of more than one hundred transcribed interviews, acquired two major documentary collections (one on black politics, the other on jazz and latin music) created an excellent interactive website at <http://www.fordham.edu/baahp>, and put Bronx African American History “on the map” in local broadcast media and the local educational system.

Working together, professional historians and history-minded local leaders, have created a research project which has captured the imagination of a neglected section of the New York’s black population, and made thousands of people excited about recording and preserving their own history. In the process, our collective understanding of how people live “race” in New York City has been dramatically deepened and enhanced.