Philip A. Payton Jr. and the Making of Harlem Revisited

Abstract

Philip A. Payton Jr. and the Making of Harlem Revisited Oliver Ayers (bio) James Weldon Johnson's 1930 book, Black Manhattan, remains a defining text of the Harlem Renaissance. Weldon Johnson wrote the manuscript while executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and blended political analysis with a historical survey. The work added to a chorus of interwar intellectuals emphasizing Harlem's centrality to the African American experience. When it came to the roots of this story, one figure loomed large: the movement of Black people to Harlem in the first decades of the century was "fathered and engineered" by real estate entrepreneur Philip A. Payton Jr. The transformation of Harlem into "the intellectual and artistic capital of the Negro world," in this bourgeois and paternalistic conception, stemmed from the benefits of modern and sanitary houses, opportunities that had opened, in turn, "due to the efforts made first by Mr. Payton."1 Payton's reputation as the "Father of Colored Harlem" was already established by the time Weldon Johnson put pen to paper, and in some ways, his legend proved resilient. Through various twists and turns in urban scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century, Payton and his most high-profile business endeavor—the Afro-American Realty Company (AARC)—usually played at least a supporting role. Gilbert Osofsky afforded the subject a whole chapter in his classic work Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, tracing the trials and tribulations of Payton's business career to conclude that he and the AARC "helped [End Page 346] lay the foundation of the largest Negro ghetto in the world."2 Even as scholars shunned the pejorative connotations of "ghettoization" in favor of more nuanced readings of Harlem's birth, Payton remained a popular character. David Levering Lewis afforded Payton an entertaining walk-on part in his classic study of the Harlem Renaissance, When Harlem Was in Vogue. In this account, Payton was a "high-rolling young Afro-American realtor" who was quick to seize on opportunities, especially the one afforded by a murder at an apartment on 133rd Street where Payton capitalized on white residents fleeing in panic by replacing them with "reliable tenants of his own race."3 Irma Watkins-Owens, meanwhile, deployed a case study of the "Payton block" on 131st Street to make a series of valuable larger points about the ethnonational and socioeconomic diversity of early twentieth-century Harlem. Most recently of all, Kevin McGruder's worthy efforts to break down simplistic narratives of Black "invasion" versus white "resistance" in Harlem's early years still had room for the AARC's rise and fall, pointing out that Payton remained active on the real estate scene even after this venture's controversial collapse in 1908.4 Yet these fine-grained local studies occupy just one place in a sprawling interdisciplinary literature on Black Harlem's first decades.5 To highlight three important directions in this work, interdisciplinary scholars have studied the manifold cultural productions [End Page 347] (especially literature, art, and music) produced in and about Harlem during the 1920s "Renaissance"; studies have emphasized the contributions of women in Harlem as political agents, builders of community, and cultural producers; and historians have established Harlem's position as a hotbed of protest important in its own right that also connected to national and, in a particularly popular line of inquiry, international historical currents. There are innumerable subsidiary debates and points of contention across these works, but there is one common thread: Philip Payton, the "Father of Colored Harlem," is largely missing in action.6 The voluminous literature cited above has, of course, enriched our understanding of Harlem's historical importance, and an attempt to resuscitate ahistorical paternalistic clichés about the area's birth would not be a wise exercise. Yet this article contends, when interrogated in a critical and expansive fashion, Payton's historical story improves our understanding of Harlem's early days and their long-range significance, not least because of the live nature of some fundamental questions about what, when, and where should be the focus of scholarly attention. In regards to the interwar "Renaissance," start dates range from toward...