Sociological & Cultural Studies Blog
A Great Day in Harlem
3 July 2025
Les Back
It’s February 28, 2025, a brisk, sunny morning, when my friend Dave and I jump on the subway from 125th Street and head for Harlem’s Sugar Hill district.
It’s a pilgrimage of sorts. In the 1930s and 1940s, Sugar Hill was a relatively affluent part of Harlem where black artists, musicians, and activists lived. It’s called Sugar Hill because in the hopeful days of the Harlem Renaissance, it offered the promise of “the sweet life.”
Sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois lived in Sugar Hill, at the 409 Edgecombe Avenue Apartments, then called the Colonial Parkway Apartments, a towering brick block of grandeur overlooking the Harlem River on Coogan’s Bluff.
Du Bois had lots of notable neighbours: civil rights activist Walter White, Ruth Ellington, Duke Ellington’s sister, plus doctors and lawyers like May Chinn who was the first African-American woman to graduate from Bellevue Hospital Medical College, now NYU School of Medicine, and the first African-American woman to intern at Harlem Hospital.
Dave and I walk up the hill to 409 Edgecombe, two curious white Englishmen cradling coffee cups. The Edgecombe doorman is polite and steers us to a brass plaque by the entrance illustrating the building’s history.
“But if you want to know anything about this place, talk to her,” he says, gesturing across the street to a tiny grey-haired lady sitting on a park bench in the sun. “She’s lived here 88 years.”
We semi-sprint across the street and sit down with Anne LeVerne Gaither. The extraordinary 94-year-old explains that the area was known as “The Park Avenue of Harlem.” She remembers W.E.B. Du Bois as a child, as a man who “loved people.” Paul Robeson visited to play chess with Du Bois. Although LeVerne remembers Du Bois was a terrible loser. Other notable individuals who resided in the building included the artist Aaron Douglas and Jazz violinist Eddie South.
As I sit on the park bench next to LeVerne and Dave casually walks around snapping photos of us on his phone, it’s easy to imagine what Ralph Ellison meant by Harlem also being the setting for African American “transcendence”.
LeVerne is full of stories about 409 Edgecombe. If she’s confused by two white English guys asking probing questions, she doesn’t show it. “Oh, I played the cello when I was a girl, 12 or 13 years old.” She gestures toward Amsterdam Avenue around the corner. She tells us a story of a kindly neighbour who was a lawyer.
“I used to have my cello lessons at 30 Hamilton Terrace. I’d take the trolley. He said give me your cello, I’d say ‘it’s not heavy, it’s empty inside, there’s nothing inside.’ I had my arm around it and hooked inside, carrying it. He said, ‘No, I want to carry it for you,’ and he took the cello out of my hands and he walked me all around off the hill to Amsterdam Avenue, and we both would wait there until the trolley came. He’d tell the driver, ‘let her off at 138th St and Hamilton Terrace.’”
That lawyer’s name? Thurgood Marshall – another 409 resident.
“Yes, then he got a job in Washington DC and we didn’t see him much anymore.”
Indeed.
Marshall became the Supreme Court's first African American justice. Before that, he was an attorney who fought for civil rights, leading the NAACP Legal Defence and Educational Fund.
Marshall was a towering figure in the movement to end racial segregation in American public schools, even before being elevated to the Supreme Court. He won 29 of the 32 civil rights cases he argued before the Supreme Court, culminating in the Court's landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which rejected the separate but equal doctrine and held segregation in public education to be unconstitutional.
We leave LeVerne on her bench and continue uphill to another prominent brick tower, 555 Edgecombe – home to Joe Louis, Paul Robeson and Jane Brolin. We wander past 9938 St. Nicholas Avenue, home to a couple called Victor and Alma Green, who put together a travel guide for African Americans that became known as “The Green Book.” We stop at Ralph Waldo Ellison’s grave, we visit the James Baldwin exhibit at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on 135th St. The next day, I deliver a CUNY lecture on Howie Becker’s life, work and our long friendship.
But our chance encounter with LeVerne sticks with both of us. What an amazing 45 minutes that was; and what would Marshall and Du Bois make of America’s current situation?
My 10 days in Harlem coincided with the first few weeks of the second Trump presidency, which was already quickly lurching to the far right in its policies and executive orders. I immediately noticed a nervousness already in the air among sociological colleagues, a mere 40 days after Trump’s inauguration.
Now, some 160 days in, it’s clear that the populists in the White House are taking aim at black history in multiple ways while furiously denying doing so. But reverting military base names to those of white Southerners who fought for slavery, banning visitors from 42 predominantly black countries and removing books including Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple and Jeff Chang’s history of Hip Hop Can’t Stop Won’t Stop from military libraries is not particularly subtle.
America’s struggle to reconcile its racist history is moving into a new phase, and it will need places like 409 Edgecombe and people like LeVerne make their ideological intentions clear.
Harlem resident and author Ralph Ellison wrote an essay in 1948 called ‘Harlem is Nowhere’. He observed in the 1940s that when asked “How are you?”, Harlemites would often reply “Man, I am nowhere.” For Ellison, this was a clue to the psychological damage caused by racism but also its heartbeat. “For if Harlem is the scene of the Negro’s death Agony, it is also the setting of his transcendence.”
The comingling of American modernity and racial feudalism created, he said, a kind of psychological vertigo. “Here a former cotton picker develops the sensitive hands of a surgeon, and men whose grandparents still believe in magic prepare optimistically to become atomic scientists.”
The signs in the street, as Marshall Berman put it, indicate the battle for America’s past and future is far from over. Around six million people in 1,800 locations attended the “No Kings” protests that protested against the policies of the new President on his birthday on June 14, 2025, quite possibly the largest single-day protest in US history.
Despite desperate desires to erase history, a century of artistic and political struggle to make Harlem somewhere will not be overwritten; its history of struggle is indelible and will endure and survive the turmoil and the darkness of America’s present, something reinforced during a casual stroll around Sugar Hill on a brisk, sunny February morning.
A playlist to accompany this piece can be heard here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/48Qj5uLt6AYvTgECIRnSUU?si=Bm-HGW8KRf2H35k0R7MR3g&pi=yNuaW4qqSUeeM