50 years later, Harlem Week shows how the New York neighborhood went from crisis to renaissance

NEW YORK (AP) — In 1974, Harlem’s deserted streets and crumbling tenements told the story of a neighborhood left behind. Decades of disinvestment had led to a mass exodus generally known as urban flight, with residents watching as their wealthier, more educated counterparts abandoned the New York borough en masse.

But that modified when Percy Sutton, then Manhattan borough president and New York City’s highest-ranking black elected official, launched a campaign to revitalize the historically African-American neighborhood, which was generally known as a world mecca for black art, culture and entrepreneurship.

It became generally known as Harlem Week, intended to bring back those that had left. On Sunday, organizers celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Harlem Week after 18 days of free programming that showcased all the iconic neighborhood had to offer.

Harlem Week has been “a constant for the last 50 years in America’s most historic black neighborhood,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, whose National Action Network is headquartered in the neighborhood. “The dream of Percy Sutton and his peers in government, the arts, the church and other elements of Harlem lives on, stronger than ever.”

In the Seventies, Harlem needed greater than a festival if it wanted to be reborn. Those who remained in Harlem because it fled to the city—mostly low-income black families—turned on their televisions to watch a relentless stream of despair: crime reports, grim statistics, and reporters who called their home a “sinking ship.”

Sutton knew that Harlem was about to experience an invigorating and uplifting moment.

That summer, Sutton gathered religious, political, civic, and artistic leaders, including Tito Puente, Max Roach, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, and Lloyd Williams, and together they envisioned an event that will shift the highlight from Harlem’s problems to its living legacy: Harlem Day.

Radio hosts Hal Jackson and Frankie Crocker hosted a concert on the plaza at the Harlem State Office Building, while actor Ossie Davis cut the ribbon at the intersection of 138th Street and seventh Avenue, announcing the starting of a “Second Harlem Renaissance.”

At a ribbon-cutting ceremony, seventh Avenue was renamed Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, in honor of the first African American elected to Congress from New York. It was the first time a street in New York City had been named after an individual of color.

“About two or three weeks later, Percy Sutton called us all and said it had been a great success,” said Lloyd Williams, one in all the co-founders of Harlem Day and current president of the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce. “It meant so much to other cities that were emptying out, Detroit and Baltimore, Washington and Chicago, that they asked if we would do it again every year.”

And so it did, and Harlem Day morphed into Harlem (*50*), and eventually Harlem Week, which grew right into a full month of programming before the pandemic.

“Only in Harlem could a week be longer than seven days,” said Williams, whose family has lived in Harlem since 1919.

This 12 months’s celebration featured entertainment including a performance by hip-hop star Fabolous, a tribute to Harry Belafonte and Broadway shows. Other live shows showcased the jazz, reggae, R&B and gospel traditions nurtured in Harlem, and a whole lot of food and merchandise vendors.

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Organizers also included empowerment initiatives, comparable to financial education workshops and health screenings at Harlem Health Village and the Children’s Festival. Every child who attended the event received a college backpack.

Harlem Week has all the time been a vibrant tribute to Harlem’s history, to great figures like WEB Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Augusta Savage and Aaron Douglas. It recognizes the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, and honors landmarks like the Apollo Theater and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Many historians consider the late Sixties and Seventies to be the darkest years in Harlem’s history.

The area was hit by riots, including the 1964 riot by which an unarmed black teenager was killed, the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X, and the 1968 riots following the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Household incomes declined dramatically, and the infant mortality rate was high.

“The neighborhood was run-down,” recalled Malik Yoba, an actor born in the Bronx in 1967 who grew up in Harlem and spent his days playing in the filth of vacant lots. Yoba went to school on the Upper East Side with peers who had country houses in the Hamptons.

“I didn’t understand why the place we lived looked so dramatically different from the place they lived,” he said. “I knew something was wrong.”

But Harlem residents are creative and entrepreneurial, visionaries and leaders. Where others saw decline, they saw opportunity, and the determination to match Harlem’s potential was high.

Yoba, now 56, built a profession as an actor bringing Harlem to audiences across the country. His experiences with housing inequality also fueled his passion for real estate.

Yoba combats the effects of redlining through his company, Yoba Development, which connects young people of color to the industry and has lively projects in Baltimore and New York.

“When you grow up in disenfranchised and disenfranchised communities, you can’t see the forest through the trees,” Yoba said. “You can grow up believing that walking past burned-out buildings is your birthright, as opposed to understanding that building is a business.”

Hazel Dukes, 92, a distinguished New York civil rights activist and Harlem resident for 30 years, dedicated her life to fighting discrimination in housing and education. She lived in the same Harlem constructing as Sutton and arranged with him, later becoming national president of the NAACP in 1989.

“I know what it’s like to be outcast,” said Dukes, who was born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama, during Jim Crow segregation before moving to New York along with her parents in the Nineteen Fifties.

Today, Harlem real estate is coveted due to gentrification and the neighborhood’s enduring cultural appeal.

“There was a waiting list because everyone wanted to live in Harlem,” Dukes said. “People wanted to come to Harlem before they passed on from this world.”