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.
Social life and the arts flourished, sometimes together, as the Lincoln and Apollo theaters, the Cotton Club, and the Savoy Ballroom provided first-class entertainment. Paul Robeson was known worldwide for his singing and acting as well as his controversial politics. Tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson was called “The King of Harlem.” Writers such as Langston Hughes, artists such as Jacob Lawrence, and musicians such as Fats Waller and Duke Ellington contributed to the explosion of creativity.
However, many blacks were struggling even in the 1920s, and whites owned most of the businesses. The Great Depression, beginning in 1929, hit hardest the poor. Employment improved during the United States’ involvement in World War II (1941–45), but Harlem’s economy sank in the next twenty years. By the 1960s, when The Contender takes place, housing conditions had deteriorated; there were extensive slums. The African American middle class, made up of people like the novel’s Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Wilson, left Harlem for suburban areas like Queens. The repressive mood of Lipsyte’s first chapter is justified. It is the Harlem that Alfred first wants to escape and then wants to change.
