By , the African American population of Harlem had soared to , Black Harlem in the s and s 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. 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. However, many blacks were struggling even in the s, and whites owned most of the businesses. The Great Depression, beginning in , hit hardest the poor. Employment improved during the United States' involvement in World War II , but Harlem's economy sank in the next twenty years.
By the s, when The Contender takes place, housing conditions had deteriorated; there were extensive slums. 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.
The "nationalist rally," which Alfred and his family pass on their way to church at the beginning of Chapter 4, and whose supporters Alfred later encounters, further reflects the culture of the time. During the century from the Civil War to the setting of the novel s , African Americans struggled with the question of whether to try to live with whites or separate from them.
Marcus Garvey, who founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in , led one of the first popular black nationalist movements. In just a few years, Fard developed the Temple into a force for economic independence and racial separatism. He advocated the rejection of white society and warned against the evils of the "blue-eyed devil.
White authorities came to distrust Fard as a violent subversive. Fard disappeared in when he was offered a choice of leaving Detroit or going to prison. Elijah Muhammad, Fard's top lieutenant, took charge of the Temple of Islam and was the most powerful black nationalist in the country for the next forty years.
Under Muhammad's leadership, there were eventually more than one hundred temples nationwide. Major and his click beat him up for that. For the most part, Lipsyte uses a third-person narrative, limited to insight into Alfred's mind The Contender is a coming-of-age novel, and its essays on the contender major themes are universal. The themes of The Contender inform all of us about life, which is Mr. But he continued on and on, He fought for his three in-a-row wins.
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