North Omaha: Jazz, Malcolm X, and Urban Renewal

Twenty-fourth and Lake Street in North Omaha was once called the Harlem of the Plains. The phrase was not hyperbole. In the nineteen thirties and forties, the intersection anchored a commercial corridor that stretched for blocks in either direction, lined with jazz clubs, barbershops, pharmacies, pool halls, and hotels that served a Black community that the rest of Omaha had deliberately and systematically excluded from its other neighborhoods.

Black residents began arriving in Omaha after the Civil War, many of them from the South, taking jobs in the stockyards and on the railroads. Racial covenants in real estate deeds and informal practice confined most of them to a defined area north of the downtown core. North Omaha became its own city within a city. The Dreamland Ballroom at Twenty-fourth and Grant brought national jazz and blues acts through Omaha when no white-owned venue downtown would book a Black performer or serve a Black audience. Count Basie came through. Louis Armstrong came through.

Malcolm Little was born in Omaha in nineteen twenty-five, at thirty-four forty-eight Pinkney Street, to a family that experienced Ku Klux Klan threats within months of his birth. The family eventually left for the Midwest and he would come to be known as Malcolm X. The house on Pinkney Street no longer stands.

In the nineteen fifties and sixties, urban renewal and highway construction dismantled the core of North Omaha. Interstate Four Ten and the construction of the North Freeway cut through neighborhoods, displaced thousands of residents, and removed blocks of commercial property that had taken generations to build. The Dreamland Ballroom survived but went quiet. The Harlem of the Plains lost its physical geography.

The history remains, claimed by those who know it. A Black Cultural Center, murals, and preservation efforts in the twenty-first century have worked to mark what stood and what was taken.