Carl Van Vechten’s Harlem Color

Ella Fitzgerald, 1940 In “White Mischief,” in this week’s issue of the New Yorker magazine, Kelefa Sanneh writes about Carl Van Vechten, a “New York hipster and literary gadabout” who was an unlikely champion of the African-American experience as it unfolded on the streets of Harlem in the nineteen-twenties.