In 1920s Harlem, when banks redlined Black neighborhoods and landlords doubled the rent, our people threw parties. Guests paid a small fee at the door. Inside there was jazz, fried fish, dancing until dawn, and enough money raised by morning to keep another family in their home.

Rent parties were never just about rent. They were a refusal — a way of saying that even in scarcity, we have music, we have food, we have each other. They were blueprints for mutual aid that built the Harlem Renaissance and shaped every Black cultural movement since.

We gather in that lineage this fall.