Roi Ottley

What is Harlem? In New World A-Coming: Inside Black America, Roi Ottley presents this city within a city and its one million people, packed sardine-fashion into some two square miles, as something more than "the capital of clowns, cults, and cabarets and the cultural hub of the Negro world." Since its beginnings around 1900 as a little community of "black aristocracy," Harlem's modern history began with the purchase, by Negroes, of thirteen large apartment houses on 135th Street. Now Harlem, woefully overcrowded, is infinitely subdivided and intermixed with all shades and varieties of color. There are about 2,000 native pure black Africans; 5,000 Moslems; as many more Jewish Negroes, descendants of the "lost Black Tribe" of Abyssinia. Among 125,000 others are French-speaking Haitians, Spanish-speaking Puerto Ricans and Cubans, pro British East Indians. In Harlem also live some 2,000 Chinese.

The memoir of Roi Ottley, an African American soldier in World War II.

"His only novel. He died of an heart attack before revising this book for publication. His wife completed the editorial work by fitting together from the various versions he left."--