Aaron Siskind

The Harlem Document, created between 1937 and 1940, was a project of the Photo League's Feature Group, a documentary production unit that focused on the disparity between socio-economic classes. The Feature Group photographers, primarily of Jewish working-class immigrant families, were approached by Black sociologist Michael Carter to collaborate on an extensive cultural study of Black Harlem. This image, one of many that Siskind contributed to the series, portrays the Harlem nightlife that attracted so many from outside the community. When a selection from the Harlem Document was shown at the New School for Social Research in 1939, it was accompanied by a statement:

In the past twenty years thousands of Negroes have trekked north to increase Manhattan's colored population from 60,000 in 1910 to 224,000 in 1930. Most of them have come to escape the outspoken racial hatred of the south only to encounter a subtle, but equally cruel racial intolerance in the North.... Concentrated in Harlem's 202 square blocks they make Harlem an international Negro metropolis.... The white world discovered Harlem in the early 1920's.... Writers exploited whatever exotic manifestations an impoverished race can demonstrate. In the general rush to visit Harlem "hot spots" the real work-a-day Negro and his numerous problems were overlooked.