Rent parties helped residents make ends meet
Black folks in 1920s underpaid for work, exploited in housing
Minnie Pindar was at home in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City on a Saturday in 1929, and she had a party to throw.
She and her sister, Lucibelle, had passed out invitations, printed on cheap, white card stock, promising a good time in their ground floor apartment at 149 W. 117th St. “Refreshments Just It” and “Music Won’t Quit,” the invitation read. Their invitation, one of dozens of similar party invitations tucked into the Langston Hughes papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library, hints at the rich but difficult lives of Black people living in New York City at the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance.
On that Saturday, Nov. 2, the Pindar sisters most likely readied their home to welcome guests. Maybe they moved the furniture to make room for dancing. Maybe Pindar wore her best dress. There would very likely be revelry and laughter that night, but throwing the party was a necessity. Every guest was expected to give them a quarter. The rent was due.
Minnie Pindar was 23, had two young sons and worked as a housekeeper, a job that paid about $50 a month in 1929, the start of the Great Depression. Lucibelle, who went by Lucille, was 19. The rent for the apartment that the four of them shared with their mother, Sylvia Walker, 45, and two of Sylvia’s other grandchildren, was $55 a month.
It was a steep price to pay for the promise of Harlem, a siren for Black Southerners who were rewriting the story of their lives in the midst of the Great Migration. Escaping the terror of lynchings, Black migrants were flowing from south
to north in a movement of millions.
By 1920, 75,000 Black people had made Harlem their permanent stop, shaping it into the largest Black community in the country, a place for Black public life in America to be resurrected on their own terms. Its streets crackled with the energy of renewal, and in its cafes and clubs, an electric revival of Black literature, scholarship, poetry, music and politics was playing out in real time and kept reverberating well into the 1930s.
Inside Harlem’s packed tenements, however, the
picture was more grim. Black people in 1920s Harlem were underpaid for their work and exploited for their rent, often charged 30% more per room than white working-class New Yorkers.
I don’t know how many rent parties Minnie threw. I do know that her younger son, Cleveland Gilmore, never liked to talk about his childhood and the poverty he lived with as a boy. I know this because nearly 100 years after she and her sister passed out invitations and opened their home, I called her grandson, Amir Gilmore, and asked him
about his family’s past. I had come prepared with questions. But what I actually gave Amir was answers.
Gilmore, 33, never knew his grandmother’s name. Today, he is an assistant professor and associate dean at Washington State University. He has spent his academic career focused on dissecting the meaning of Black joy and perseverance, always digging, he said, toward some unknown corner of Black history. Turns out that it was his own.
Pindar could probably never have dreamed of such a future for her grandchild. The present was enough to navigate. In 1929, a quart of milk cost 16 cents; a dozen eggs, 47 cents. That Saturday, the mercury kept climbing, all the way to an unseasonable high of 72 degrees. Thousands of New Yorkers sought respite at Coney Island, where some in bathing suits ventured into the water. But for Pindar, that day was all about the rent.
Rent parties were playing out behind thousands of other closed doors in run-down Harlem buildings. Tenants would use the proceeds to pay their landlord on the first of the month, and then hopefully make it another 30 days before scrimping again.
Because of Hughes, there’s an extensive record of Harlem’s rent parties.
Hughes saved dozens of invitations, squirreling them away in a red box that once housed his checkbooks. He would later donate them as part of a much larger collection of his papers housed at Yale’s Beinecke Library, where they have a permanent home in the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters.
Harlem was the ideal muse. In his autobiography, “The Big Sea,” he describes how as the Harlem Renaissance gained steam, “white people began to come to Harlem in droves,” prompting Black dancers, musicians and singers to shift their acts to please their visiting audiences. It was a phenomenon of economy that obscured the historical record.
“The gay and sparkling life of the so-called Negro Renaissance of the ’20s was not so gay and sparkling beneath the surface as it looked,” he wrote. “Nontheatrical, nonintellectual Harlem was an unwilling victim of its own vogue. It didn’t like to be stared at by white folks.”
Minnie Pindar’s name reappears as Minnie Gilmore in a 1952 license of marriage to Scotty Eckford, an organizer for a union of Black hotel employees in New York City. Eckford was also the uncle of Elizabeth Eckford, an American civil rights activist who made history in 1957 when she enrolled in the all-white Little Rock Central High School and attended class.
Pindar died in the Bronx in 1997. Her younger son, Cleveland Gilmore, was 2 on that unseasonably warm November night in 1929. As an adult, he never talked about rent parties, or life in Harlem at all.
When I contacted Amir about his family’s history, he said he was stunned to learn that his grandmother was at the epicenter of the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance.
“My dad was all about bits and pieces,” Amir Gilmore said. “He grew up poor. He didn’t like to talk about his life. He would tell us little things, like how he would buy watermelon for a nickel, but I never knew about his family.”
In his dissertation for his doctorate, Gilmore set out to answer the questions his father left open, dissecting the roots of Black joy and pulling the thread on what Black aesthetics mean without the presence of a white patron. Without realizing it, he was circling close to that Harlem ground-floor apartment and to all the reasons his grandmother gave a party, with jazz and dancing filling the air and with Hughes quietly taking note of the date and time.
“I was always so curious about my origins and who I am,” Gilmore said. “I’ve always thought there has to be more. I talk about history, Black life and the things Black people had to do to make it. So, to learn my grandmother was doing those things, living through these times in abject poverty and finding not just a way to survive but also to have fun and find joy, that’s so badass.”