The Rent Was Too High So They Threw a Party

During the Harlem Renaissance, some Black people hosted rent parties, celebrations with an undercurrent of desperation in the face of racism and discrimination.

By Debra Kamin

March 28, 2024

A series of cards with dates and bits of poetry advertising rent parties.

A card reads “A social whist party given by Lucille and Minnie.”

Minnie Pindar was at home in Harlem on a Saturday in 1929, and she had a party to throw.

She and her sister, Lucibelle Pindar, had passed out invitations, printed on cheap, white card stock, promising a good time in their ground floor apartment at 149 West 117th Street. “Refreshments Just It” and “Music Won’t Quit,” the invitation read. Their invitation, one of dozens of similar party invitations tucked into the Langston Hughes papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library, hints at the rich but difficult lives of Black people living in New York at the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance.