VIRTUAL Barcelona

Abstract

On June 17, 1940, some 25,000 Black celebrants from across the East Coast streamed into Rocky Mount, North Carolina enroute to the “World’s Largest Negro Dance” at a local tobacco warehouse. For twelve hours on a Monday night in June the tobacco town became a Black metropolis, a temporary outpost of Black entertainment and commerce, celebration and reunion. In this paper, I conceptualize Black metropolitanism as a roving spatial practice amid an era of Jim Crow apartheid and internal migration. Building on theories about the right to the city and to urban space, this paper looks at North American Black cultural practices as a form of urban community formation. This paper focuses on the aforementioned dance–Rocky Mount’s June German–as a way of understanding Black placemaking practices in the era of migration, and the ways in which cultural exchange was both spatialized and reciprocal. It builds upon several years of ethnographic and archival research focused on Black pleasure in urban space. Crucially, this work refocuses scholarly focus on cities not solely as dense, urban centers, but rather as a series of communal cultural and spatial practices. In this way, we can see the city as inextricable from cultural formation and cultural heritage. The paper will discuss my historical documentation of the dance alongside contemporary memories of this and other Black cultural practices that have been relegated to history through demographic and cultural changes. I conclude with a meditation on the uses Black communities might continue to derive from both the memory and revival of these cultural pasts.