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

Historians, however, have not adequately assessed African American health, well-being, and the subsequent strategies used by black residents to improve their physical and emotional dispositions and environments during the initial decades of African American residence in Harlem and elsewhere. Scholars have noted the flowering of artistic and intellectual endeavors born from the marriage of white philanthropy and black creativity, the creation of an ethnically diverse black community through the arrival of Southern-born and Caribbean-born blacks, as well as divergent political ideologies and movements forged through intellectual debate and grassroots organizing.⁸ While Building a Healthy Black Harlem could not have been written without the influence of these foundational works in black urban history and those on black Harlem, it provides a complementary way of understanding racial politics and community formation by discussing the ways in which communities and community institutions were shaped by, and mobilized around, community health issues. Though focused on health and wellness in community building, this study is multifaceted in its approach since it concerns itself with the community agency and the adequacy of wellness provisions in Harlem, not the structure of the ghetto. Furthermore, it examines the capacity to improve the prospects of wellness and the responses ranging across government, philanthropic, and community action. In this way, by acknowledging the national shift from racialist to environmentalist paradigms during the early twentieth century, which led many African Americans to create broad-based health programs, this work takes a social environmentalist perspective to ascertain the nature and scope of mass illness in black Harlem.

Because this work looks at issues that affect not only the physical health of an individual, but also the emotional, psychological, and spiritual aspects of persons, it is necessary to define and explain my terminology. My definition of health comes from the World Health Organization and is defined as “a state of