To get the most out of reading The Contender, the student should have some understanding of the historical and cultural context in which the story takes place. History and culture are one in the Harlem of the 1960s, and some knowledge of that setting helps in appreciating Alfred and his world.
In 1658, a Dutch governor named Peter Stuyvesant named a village on northern Manhattan Island "Nieuw Haarlem" after Haarlem in the Netherlands. Africans, slaves of the Dutch West India Company, built the first road into the area in the seventeenth century. African American slaves worked the land for Dutch and, later, English farmers for nearly 200 years. In 1790, one third of the area's population was made up of slaves. The village developed as a fashionable white suburb of New York City in the 1800s. Real estate prices soared but later collapsed due to excessive speculation in the early 1900s. The Lenox Avenue subway line connected Harlem with lower Manhattan at about the same time, and blacks began moving in. By 1930, the African American population of Harlem had soared to 180,000.
Black Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s was a cultural Mecca, home to the center of an intellectual and cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. As Jim Mendelsohn points out in an essay for Africana.com, many of the residents were reasonably well off financially, in neighborhoods like Stridel's Row on West 139th Street. They supported churches such as The African Methodist Episcopal Zion and newspapers such as the Messenger. W. E. B. Du Bois, a founder (in 1910) of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), edited the organization's magazine, Crisis, along with Jessie Fauset.
