Rent parties and Harlem social enterprise

Whites' images of the African-American community all too often mirror our perception of Africa itself--poor, helpless, needing us to intervene.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Throughout the nation's history, a rich array of ventures blending business with social benefit emerged from African American networks, both slave and free. Today Kottke calls attention to one whose influence we still hear everyday:

According to Wikipedia, a rent party is:

a social occasion where tenants hire a musician or band to play and pass the hat to raise money to pay their rent. The rent party played a major role in the development of jazz and blues music.

Further reading suggests that rent parties started in Harlem in the 1910s as a way to offset rising rents.

Harlemites soon discovered that meeting these doubled, and sometimes tripled, rents was not so easy. They began to think of someway to meet their ever increasing deficits. Someone evidently got the idea of having a few friends in as paying party guests a few days before the landlord's scheduled monthly visit. It was a happy; timely thought. The guests had a good time and entered wholeheartedly into the spirit of the party. Besides, it cost each individual very little, probably much less than he would have spent in some public amusement place. Besides, it was a cheap way to help a friend in need. It was such a good, easy way out of one's difficulties that others decided to make use of it. Thus was the Harlem rent-party born....