Editor’s Note: This is the fourth post in our theme for February 2025, “Celluloid City,” which explores the role of and interplay between cities and film. You can see all posts from the theme here
By Alyssa Lopez
In March 1935, when sixteen-year-old Lino Rivera pocketed a knife while cutting through the S.H. Kress dime store on 125th Street in Harlem, neither he nor the white employees who chased him throughout the store knew the extent to which the neighborhood’s Black community would respond to the incident. Decades of poor treatment from white business owners, police brutality and disrespect, and the heightened social consciousness brought on by the Great Depression led to a rumor that Rivera had been beaten and killed, followed by violent unrest (mostly) targeting the area’s white businesses, largely between 124th & 130th Street. The aftermath, which drew national attention, was a police presence in the thousands, four deaths, and nearly 200 injuries. Mayor La Guardia formed a biracial committee to research the cause of the violence, though many within Harlem’s Black community already knew the roots of the disturbance: limited employment opportunities, dilapidated living conditions and housing options, and racial discrimination in the area’s theaters, stores, restaurants and from the local police. On the other hand, white New Yorkers blamed Black Harlemites’ supposed innate criminality and lawlessness, lamenting their move into and around Harlem.[1]
In his assessment of the “riot,” Alain Locke noted the stark contrast between 1935 and just a decade before: “Eleven brief years ago Harlem was full of the thrill and ferment of sudden progress and prosperity,” he lamented. “Today, with that same Harlem prostrate in the grip of the depression and throes of social unrest, we confront the sobering facts of a serious relapse and premature setback; indeed, we find it hard to believe that the rosy enthusiasms and hopes of 1925 were more than bright illusions or a cruelly deceptive mirage.”[2] Though the economic and social realities of Harlem had been clear to some, including sociologists, reformers, and journalists, even before the Great Depression, the unrest brought them into stark relief for the rest of the city and country.
In this atmosphere of a publicly scrutinized Harlem, twenty-six-year-old Edward W. Lewis produced Life in Harlem (1940). The brief ten-minute film captures a single day in Harlem from dusk to dawn, offering viewers a snapshot of the neighborhood with scenes of streets, businesses, dance halls, and ordinary life. Lewis used Life in Harlem, conceived of six years before its release, to challenge the neighborhood’s reputation as rundown or dangerous. His cataloguing of various sights and people also works to humanize Black life, rejecting the racist logic of discrimination and troubling language of pathology. Lewis gives audiences a Harlem full of life: work, play, and the in-between all position the “city within a city” as a home, refuge, and site of joy.
Referred to as “the young man with a camera,” Lewis was a well-known face around Harlem.[3] Born in Florida and after migrating to Chicago, Lewis moved to Harlem at age nine. From a young age, he was attuned to the community, becoming a boy scout reporter for the popular Black weekly the New York Amsterdam News.[4] Eventually, he joined the New York Daily News as a photographer. Praised in the Black press alongside the likes of George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington, Lewis was lauded for his “intelligence and grit, and courage,” marked by “an all-consuming ability…willing to sacrifice all for an ideal.”[5]
In 1939, his “Great Idea” of “Negro shorts on achievement,” was nearly realized when he signed a contract with Million Dollar Productions for twelve shorts, six each in two series titled “Colored America on Parade” and “Colored Champions of Sport.”[6] Lewis’s work—across both series—was constantly described as “a sort of Negro ‘March of Time,’” revealing the extent to which the documentary genre was important for him.[7] In other words, Lewis’s work was meant to be as educational and informative as it was entertaining.
Life in Harlem opens with a pan to Manhattan’s skyline, while text crawls up the screen describing Harlem’s status as “a city within a city,” where “people work and play, live and die amidst poverty and prosperity, tragedy and laughter.” Here, Lewis sets up Life in Harlem as a film about contrasts. A shot of the Edgecombe Avenue street sign introduces the viewer to the “prosperity” of Harlem on Sugar Hill. Scenes of smartly dressed residents of “swanky apartment houses” follow, where doormen open taxi doors for arriving and departing passengers, while two young women go bike riding on decidedly empty streets. On the other hand, Harlem’s working class (or everyone not deemed white collar) is depicted in crowded conditions, both at home and on the neighborhood’s streets. This “bustling and noisy atmosphere,” notably among the “upper” Eighth Avenue Street vendors, holds much of the film’s attention, standing in stark contrast to the brightness and youth displayed near Sugar Hill. When the film shifts to Harlem nightlife, these tensions are evoked yet again through “wild swing and dignified enjoyment.” So, too, does Lewis point to the irony of a saloon and church on almost every block. These scenes, as much as they display the contrasts within the neighborhood, should be read as a call for those outside of Harlem to recognize its diversity. The film also accomplishes this through shots of a range of activities and people in Harlem: nightlife, labor, parades, Black police officers, Father Divine, and mothers strolling their babies or Harlemites reading the newspaper on park benches.
Life in Harlem itself displays tensions in how it tells Harlem’s story. At the height of the Great Depression, nearly half of the city’s Black population received some form of public assistance, and forty percent of Black men were unemployed.[8] Yet, even as Lewis’s narration speaks to these issues in Harlem, his visuals refuse to adopt a negative lens. For example, audiences hear about Harlem’s high unemployment rates across two shots: one of a young man and two women having a conversation and another in which an older woman holds a baby. In the former, one of the women laughs, presumably at something said, the other offers a coy smile and inaudible reply. In the second shot, the grandmother bounces the baby on her lap with an animated smile, seemingly enjoying herself. Later in the film, a shot centers two men resting between a sign that reads “positively no loafing.” One man reclines, his foot resting on the steps, the other simply eats his lunch, neither looks particularly bothered. Each of these moments—seemingly random street scenes of the neighborhood—evoke moments of resilience or defiance in the midst of financial crisis.[9] Rather than frame Harlem’s economic realities as tragedy or bleak, Lewis works to find joy, life, and friendship in the city.
So, too, is there an incongruity between narrative and visual in how Lewis addresses the aftermath of the March 1935 unrest. In the section of the film dedicated to 125th Street as a business district, the film’s narration states that “it provides the ordinary necessities of life, giving in exchange some employment.” The following shots clash with his words: a blind man begs for money on the street; one storefront’s windows are fully plastered with signs signaling its demise, reading “IT’S THE END” and “LOST LEASE MUST VACATE.” When he more directly addresses the Depression, Lewis only hints at the violence just a few years before and its impact on Harlem.
Interestingly, Life in Harlem, unlike the first episode of the “Colored America on Parade” series, was advertised to both Black and white audiences. “Theatres catering to white patrons,” wrote one review, “will find it excellent entertainment…”[10] So well-done was Lewis’s film, the review continued, that it could supposedly satiate a white desire to peek across racial lines that spanned beyond those glittered slumming days of Harlem yore. Now, white audiences could do it from the comfort of their theater seat, avoiding the potential dangers in line with the neighborhood’s unsavory reputation. Yet, Life in Harlem actively aimed to dispel this myth. Though not necessarily focused on “Negro achievement” as advertised when he first shared his ideas with the local Black press, Lewis’s emphasis on Harlem recognizes the community’s significance—both as a unique Black urban neighborhood and its applicability to the Black urban experience more generally.
With Life in Harlem, Lewis was contributing to a discourse on Harlem’s symbolism and reality dating back to the 1910s, as Black New Yorkers and migrants moved there en masse, that evolved in the wake of the Great Depression and Harlem unrest in 1935.[11] Like others before him, Lewis served as a booster of sorts for the city who provided a “retelling” of urban Black life.[12] Indeed, Black commentators were impressed with his general attention to Black uplift images, as opposed to the seemingly crass and stereotypical works believed to be coming out of Hollywood and even the race film industry.[13] Yet even Lewis himself resists the urge to overgeneralize, closing the film with the words, “But all of this is just a part of Harlem. Just a portion of the whole, fitting itself into a grand pattern which evolves finally as a city within a city. Crowded with people that make up what is life in Harlem.” Even as he offers a representation of the city that challenges popular discourse, he recognizes its limitations.[14] As one of the few race (or Black-directed) films still to exist from this period, Lewis’s Life in Harlem serves as an important example of Black storytelling about life in the city.
Alyssa Lopez is Assistant Professor of History at Providence College. She is the author of Reel Freedom: Black Film Culture in Early Twentieth-Century New York City (Temple University Press, forthcoming April 2025).
Featured image (at top): African American man wearing apron standing in doorway of Harlem grocery store, with sign, “Our Own Community Grocery & Delicatessen,” Aaron Siskind, photographer, 1940, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
[1] Shannon King, The Politics of Safety: The Black Struggle for Police Accountability in La Guardia’s New York (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2024), chap. 3.
[2] Alain Locke, “Harlem: Dark Weather-Vane,” Survey Graphic (August 1936): 457.
[3] “Brown Bomber Short Filmed by Harlemite,” New York Amsterdam News, November 18, 1939.
[4] See: “Boy Scout Writes on Movement,” The Pittsburgh Courier, May 21, 1927; Scout Edward Lewis, “Boy Scout News,” New York Amsterdam News, Mary 25, 1927.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.; “Edward Lewis Gets Movie Company Job,” New York Amsterdam News, July 15, 1939; Advertisement for Million Dollar Productions, Boxoffice, August 19, 1939.
[7] “Brown Bomber”; “Motion Picture Film of Harlem Completed by Edward Lewis,” New York Age, March 23, 1940.
[8] Cheryl Greenburg, Or Does it Explode?”: Black Harlem in the Great Depression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 144, 66.
[9] It is unclear how much of the film was staged/ or planned versus truly actuality footage. Some shots show the subject looking at the camera, others no one pays attention. In one interview, Lewis noted that “he must outline what he wants; then he must contact people he will use; then do the actual photographing…” See: “Brown Bomber.”
[10] “The Exhibitor’s Servisection,” The Exhibitor, March 20, 1930, 495.
[11] For more on this, see: Andrew M. Fearnley and Daniel Matlin, Race Capital? Harlem As Setting and Symbol (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).
[12] Pearl Bowser, “Pioneers of Black Documentary Film,” in Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video, eds. Phyllis R. Klotman and Janet K. Cutler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 4.
[13] Paula Massood, Making a Promised Land: Harlem in 20th-Century Photography and Film (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 86.
[14] The All-American Newsreels, starting in 1942, engaged in similar representational strategy of racial uplift through positive imagery. For more on this and the tensions inherent in that strategy see, Joseph Clark, “Double Vision: World War II, Racial Uplift, and the All-American Newsreel’s Pedagogical Address,” in Useful Cinema, Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 263-288.
