Recently
by Thomas Sowell: News
Versus Propaganda

Books about
the history of Harlem have long fascinated me – my favorite being
When
Harlem Was in Vogue by David Levering Lewis. However, a
more recent book, titled simply Harlem
by Jonathan Gill, presents a more comprehensive history – going
all the way back to the time when the Dutch were the first settlers
of New York, and named that area for the city of Haarlem in the
Netherlands.

Most of us
today think of Harlem as a black community, but it was not that
for most of its 400-year history. John James Audubon, famed for
his studies of birds, was among the many people who at various times
organized efforts to keep blacks from moving into Harlem – efforts
that, in the long run, met with what might be called very limited
success.

Among the many
well-known people who were not black who were born in Harlem were
Groucho Marx, Milton Berle, Arthur Miller and Bennett Cerf.

Like other
communities, Harlem held many very different kinds of people at
the same time, both before and after it became predominantly black.

There was an
Italian community in East Harlem, but it was not just an undifferentiated
Italian community. People from Genoa lived clustered together, as
did people from Naples, Sicily and other parts of Italy. Jews from
Germany lived separately from Jews who originated in Eastern Europe,
who in turn lived in separate enclaves of people from different
parts of Eastern Europe.

Harlem had
the highest crime rate in New York before blacks moved there, and
a photograph in this book, taken a hundred years ago, showed the
worst housing conditions I have ever seen in Harlem. In some of
the poorer Italian neighborhoods in East Harlem, people went barefoot
in the summer and lived on one meal a day, consisting of thin soup.

There were
also more upscale areas of Harlem, and different classes of people
sorted themselves out, both when Harlem was white and after it became
black. During the early era of black Harlem, as author Jonathan
Gill notes: “Observant subway riders could see the porters and domestics
get off at West 125th Street, the clerks and secretaries depart
at West 135th Street, and the doctors and lawyers leave at West
145th Street.”

By the time
I was growing up on West 145th Street in the 1940s, its inhabitants
were by no means limited to doctors and lawyers, or even clerks
and secretaries. But the pattern of internal self-sorting continued.
With the later breakdown of racial barriers in housing, many of
the black middle class and those aspiring to be middle class moved
completely out of ghettoes like Harlem. It became a much worse place,
for that and other reasons.

Complaints
that the old neighborhood is going downhill have been made by people
of all races. Even though that may be true, it can be misleading
when the people who lived in those neighborhoods have moved up economically,
and now have more upscale housing in more genteel neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, the newcomers in their old neighborhoods may likewise
be living in better housing than they had before. People moving
up often means neighborhoods moving down.

Nevertheless,
it is painful for me to realize that youngsters growing up in the
same places in Harlem where I grew up more than 60 years ago have
far less chance of rising economically, educationally or otherwise.

Harlem
youngsters today undoubtedly have more material things than I had
in my day. I was 23 years old, and living in Washington, before
I had a television set, given to me by my sister when she bought
a new television set for herself.

But what I
got growing up in Harlem was an education that equipped me to go
on to leading colleges and universities, long before there was affirmative
action. That is what youngsters growing up in Harlem today are very
unlikely to get – and affirmative action in college admissions is
no substitute, if you come in unequipped to make the opportunity
pay off.

People didn’t
live in fear of drive-by shootings, in the Harlem of my day, if
only because we had nothing to drive by in. Old photographs of Harlem
show ample parking space on the streets. It was not an idyllic community,
by any stretch of the imagination, but it had values that mattered
in our daily lives, and common decency was in fact common. No material
things can substitute for that.

August
7, 2012

Thomas
Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.
To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other
Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators
Syndicate web page.

The
Best of Thomas Sowell

Copyright ©
2012 Creators Syndicate