Building a Healthy Black Harlem: Health Politics in Harlem, New ...

the experiences of African-descended people.³ Consequently, sociological, historical, and psychological approaches become necessary to adequately explain the influences that shaped and circumscribed political and health options in the community. Even literary sources are important, not because they chronicle actual events, but because in the African American literary tradition these works reflect reality and express the dreams of black people. Using a broad range of sources, including medical journals, health reports, court cases, the black press, and archival records, Building a Healthy Black Harlem provides a reperiodization of Harlem's past. The 1929 stock market crash did not act as a distinct and unambiguous moment in Harlem's life, separating one era from another as it may have elsewhere; instead, in terms of the community's fight and search for meaningful avenues to improve health, the 1930s were a continuation of the 1920s, in which Harlem residents sought to define their own rules for survival and create a neighborhood that was a dynamic center of negotiation, cooperation, and contestation. By placing health issues, and by extension issues of life and death, at the center of political debates and institutional building in Harlem and New York City, this study provides an alternative approach to both the politics and the everyday living conditions of black communities in the urban North during the period between the two World Wars.

My approach to this subject has been primarily influenced by other historians who have produced cogent studies of the African American experience during the 1920s and 1930s. Some utilized the ghetto synthesis approach—a conceptualization that places black spatial segregation and interracial relationships at the center of analysis to describe and understand how socioeconomic differences and inequalities between blacks and whites occurred and persisted. Others conceptualized the creation and expansion of black urban communities during the interwar years. In River Jordan: African American Urban Life in the Ohio Valley, for