Civil Rights, Black Power, and Beyond

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Despite the social measures of the domestic policy known as the Great Society of the 1960s, that decade and the following two were a period of decline for New York in general and for black New Yorkers in particular. Between 1958 and 1964, the manufacturing sector, one of the strengths of the city’s economy, suffered a net loss of 87,000 jobs. In the new service-based economy, job opportunities for blacks in finance, communications, and publishing, for example, were limited. Thus changing circumstances led to a depression among black New Yorkers who were still seeking access to the American economy. The Vietnam War compounded economic problems. For the first time, New York City was not strategically positioned to play a major role in an overseas conflict. Benefits that had accrued to the New York economy during most previous wars simply were not by-products of the Vietnam conflict.

          The 1960s saw the continued rise and tragic death of Malcolm X and the emergence of black elected officials. The period was also a time of immense creativity and self-awareness for black New Yorkers as the Black Power Movement and its cultural arm, the Black Arts Movement, shaped black consciousness and identity. A new liberalized immigration law, commonly known as the Hart-Celler Act, which was passed in 1965, went into full effect on July 1, 1968, and launched a new wave of immigration from the Caribbean and, by the 1980s, from Africa.

          In the 1970s New York City was on the brink of bankruptcy and its most vulnerable residents bore the brunt of its spectacular downfall. The dispersal of some of the black middle class from Harlem, among other factors, would leave the former capital of the black world a shadow of its former self. Upwardly mobile residents moved to Brooklyn or Queens, taking with them their economic resources and social power.

          The South Bronx became a national symbol of urban decay, but also the birthplace of an artistic and cultural movement that would take the world by storm. The emergence of hip-hop had a lasting influence on the cultural, social, and physical landscape of the city as rap, emceeing, breakdancing, and graffiti spread throughout the Five Boroughs, then the country and the world, documenting and reflecting on the young black urban experience.

          The 1980s brought signs of economic recovery, along with gains in the struggle for black access to the city’s institutions of higher learning, government, and corporate life. The passage of national affirmative action legislation opened the doors of opportunity for thousands of black New Yorkers. But the eighties were still a time of economic hardship for many, and the crack cocaine epidemic and the AIDS crisis added to the community’s woes. The poverty rate for African Americans went from 29 percent in 1979 to over 32 percent in 1984. Overall, blacks represented close to 34 percent of the city’s poor, whereas their percentage in the total population was 25 percent.

          The tenures of David Dinkins and Rudolph Giuliani as mayors between 1990 and 2001 saw racial tensions erupt in open confrontations and incidents of police brutality that marked that decade and the following one under Michael Bloomberg.

Elected Officials

          In 1917, Republican Edward Austin Johnson, an educator, author, and attorney born in slavery in North Carolina, was the first African American elected to the New York State Assembly, but it took several decades thereafter for black New Yorkers to be voted into office. Benjamin Davis, Jr., of the Communist Party who, like Johnson, represented Harlem, was elected to the City Council in 1943. Two years later another Harlemite, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was the first black New Yorker in the U.S. House of Representatives. Saint Lucia-born Hulan Jack became Manhattan Borough president in 1953, the first black to hold a key elective office in a major American city.

          Over the next two and a half decades, the number of elected officials rapidly grew. Charles Rangel, Shirley Chisholm, Major Owens, Edolphus Towns, and Floyd Flake would be elected to multiple terms in the U.S. Congress. In 1968 Shirley Chisholm, U.S. Representative for the Twelfth Congressional District in Brooklyn, became the nation’s first black Congresswoman. In 1972 she launched a bid to be the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, the first black person to run for the presidency in one of the major parties.

          Black New York representation on the City Council increased from only a few members in 1965 to seventeen at the turn of the twenty-first century. Between 1965 and 1998, Percy Sutton, David Dinkins, and C. Virginia Fields were elected president of the Borough of Manhattan. And in 1990, David N. Dinkins became the first African-American mayor of New York City, after defeating Republican nominee Rudolph W. Giuliani.

          When New Yorker H. Carl McCall, won a special election for state comptroller in 1993, it was the first time in the history of New York that an African American held a statewide office (he was reelected in 1994 and 1998). David Paterson became lieutenant governor in January 2007 and held the office for a year before succeeding Governor Eliot Spitzer, who resigned in March 2008. Paterson finished his term but, after a short campaign, did not run for the 2010 election.

Malcolm X

          In 1960, Malcolm X founded Muhammad Speaks, the Nation of Islam’s official newspaper. Malcolm X broke with the NOI on March 8, 1964, and two days later the Nation ordered the family to vacate their Queens house, which they refused to do. Malcolm formed the Muslim Mosque, Inc. A few days later, he explained the mission of his movement,

          The Muslim Mosque Inc. will have as its religious base the religion of Islam which will be designed to propagate the moral reformation necessary to up the level of the so-called Negro community by eliminating the vices and other evils that destroy the moral fiber of the community—this is the religious base. But the political philosophy of the Muslim Mosque will be black nationalism, the economic philosophy will be black nationalism, and the social philosophy will be black nationalism. And by political philosophy I mean we still believe in the Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s solution as complete separation.

          Throughout April he traveled to the Middle East and Africa. Turning to mainstream Islam, he performed the hajj in Mecca, and became El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. His views concerning Islam, white people, and separatism evolved and on June 28, 1964, he announced the formation of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) at the Audubon Ballroom on Broadway and 165th Street. A secular political organization modeled on the Organization of African Unity (OAU), it was meant to attract a broad spectrum of African Americans around issues of education, economic security, self-defense, and pan-African unity. Malcolm, scholar John Henrik Clarke, and others wrote its charter.

          From July 9 to November 24, Malcolm X toured Africa, the Middle East, and London, visiting fourteen nations and meeting with at least eight heads of state and numerous other leaders. He petitioned the OAU summit in Cairo to bring the cause of Afro-Americans to the United Nations as a human rights issue. Back home in Harlem, through both of his organizations—which did not survive him—Malcolm tried to strengthen ties to the civil rights movement and local community leaders struggling around issues such as housing and education.

          Threats, assaults, and murder attempts on Malcolm and his followers’ lives had become a regular occurrence. On the morning of February 14, 1965, his home in Queens was firebombed. The next day, he still held an OAAU rally at the Audubon Ballroom for an audience of six hundred. On February 18, he gave his last speech, “The Black Revolution and Its Effects Upon the Negroes of the Western Hemisphere,” at Barnard College.

          On February 21, at 3:10pm, as he started to speak at the Audubon, he was gunned down. Talmadge X Hayer (aka Thomas Hagan), a member of the NOI, was arrested, as were Norman 3X Butler (paroled in 1985) and Thomas 15X Johnson (paroled in 1987). Hayer—who always claimed the other two were innocent and implicated four other NOI members who were never indicted—was paroled in 2010.

          Two days after Malcolm X’s murder, the Nation of Islam’s Mosque No. 7 was firebombed. It relocated to 103 West 116th Street and, no longer affiliated with the NOI, was renamed Malcolm Shabazz Mosque in 1976 by Imam Warith Deen Mohammed, who had succeeded his father, Elijah.

Civil Rights, Black Power, and Beyond

          Some black New Yorkers joined the struggle for civil rights by participating in voter registration in the South. They also welcomed Martin Luther King, Jr., as he came to the city to rally support and raise funds. (An earlier visit had almost proved fatal: on September 20, 1958, King was stabbed in the chest by Izola Curry, a black woman, while autographing copies of Stride Toward Freedom, the story of the Montgomery bus boycott, in a Harlem store. Curry was later ruled insane.)

          In November 1965, at the invitation of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the civil rights leader preached to overflow audiences at two successive Sunday morning services at the Abyssinian Baptist Church. On April 4, 1967, King declared his opposition to the Vietnam War during a press conference in New York City and reiterated his hostility at Riverside Church in Harlem. Dr. King came back to New York on March 27, 1968, to raise support in Harlem and Queens for a planned march on Washington, D.C., as part of his Poor People’s Campaign.

          The presence of the United Nations gave black New Yorkers and African leaders, heads of state, and diplomats the opportunity to meet, build international networks, and rekindle pan-Africanism. In 1960, President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev, and Sam Nujoma, leader of the Southwest Africa Peoples Organization and future first president of Nambia, visited Harlem. Castro stayed at the Theresa Hotel.

          One of the early formative influences of the Black Power Movement took place in New York on February 15, 1961, at the United Nations. About sixty African-American men and women made their way to the Security Council Chamber. As they denounced the UN policy toward the Congo and the killing of its premier, Patrice Lumumba, they fought with the UN police. Outside, demonstrators including LeRoi Jones were beaten and arrested. This dramatic event, in the words of scholar Komozi Woodard, “marked the birth of the New Afro-American Nationalism.” One that, beyond domestic civil rights, was also interested in liberation from colonialism in Africa and the search for a new black, African-rooted, identity.

          Trinidad-born Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and fellow SNCC worker Willie Ricks raised the call for “Black Power” in June 1966. Many of the movement’s evolving tenets and practices were rooted in the teachings of New Yorkers Marcus Garvey, Carlos Cooks, and Malcolm X. It is not surprising, then, that New York was the place where some of the most developed social and cultural expressions of black power concepts and ideas emerged.

          Carmichael lived in Harlem and the Bronx, where he attended the prestigious Bronx High School of Science before graduating from Howard University with a BA in philosophy and turning down a Harvard scholarship for graduate studies. As he was involved in the Civil Rights movement, most of Carmichael’s early activities took place in the South, where he was jailed numerous times. He became chairman of the SNCC in 1966 but resigned the following year to join the Black Panther Party. After immigrating to Guinea in 1968, he left the BPP in 1969 and took the name Kwame Ture in homage to Pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, and Ahmed Sékou Touré, president of Guinea.

          The Black Panther Party’s main New York chapter, located at 2026 Seventh Avenue in Harlem, was established in 1968. It was considered to be the central office for the entire state. The BPP also had branches in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Corona-East Elmhurst, and Jamaica in Queens, on Staten Island, and in Mount Vernon. Like other chapters, the BPP organized a free breakfast program for schoolchildren and also opened a health clinic in the Bronx.

          The New York chapter gained national attention when in April 1969, District Attorney Frank Hogan charged twenty-one Panthers with conspiracy to bomb department stores and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and to dynamite railroad tracks. Among the accused were Harlemites Lumumba Abdul Shakur and Afeni Shakur (mother of Tupac Shakur). In all, twelve members were arrested in five raids at 5:00 a.m. on April 2; others were already in custody, and a few escaped capture. The group became known as the “Panther 21.”

          A long battle ensued to lower the bails set at $100,000 for each defendant. It went up to the U.S. Supreme Court. By the spring of 1970, thirteen Panthers, the “Panther 13,” were still in jail. But on May 13, 1971, after forty-five minutes of jury deliberation, all defendants were acquitted. Although a vindication and victory of sorts, the long time the Panthers spent in jail and the disruption of the trial had unsettled the Party and hampered some of its activities.

          In addition, the national leadership expelled the Panther 13, and then the entire New York chapter, which in turn rejected national leaders Huey Newton and David Hilliard and established a new national headquarters of the Panther Party with its own newspaper, Right On, as the organ of the East Coast Black Panther Party. This Party was short lived. In New York as in the rest of the country, the FBI COINTELPRO—a covert program mostly designed to infiltrate and disrupt leftist, civil rights, and Black Power organizations—had successfully split the leadership.

          In 1969, the New York chapter of the Chicago-born Young Lords was formed and served as the East Coast center under the leadership of Felipe Luciano, an Afro-Puerto Rican and a member of The Original Last Poets. The New York chapter split from the central organization the following year and became the Young Lords Party. Influenced by the Black Power Movement, it modeled itself partly after the Black Panthers, notably with its 13-point Program and Platform and its 10-point Health Program.

          On October 13, 1970, after two months on the run, political activist Angela Davis was arrested by the FBI in a motel in midtown Manhattan. She had been charged with helping supply the guns for a shootout at the Marin County Courthouse in San Rafael, California, on August 7, which left four people dead, including the presiding judge. She was acquitted in June 1972 by an all-white jury.

The Black Arts Movement

          On the cultural front, New York saw the birth of the Black Arts Movement (BAM), the cultural arm of the Black Power Movement—or as scholar and BAM contributor Larry Neal put it, the BAM was the “aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept.” Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) launched the movement when he moved from the Village to Harlem in 1965 (following Malcolm X’s assassination), took the name Amiri Baraka, and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BART/S.)

          A precursor of the movement was the Umbra Writers Workshop that met in the Lower East Side. After it split, some of its members moved to Harlem, where Askia Muhammad Touré, Al Haynes, and Larry Neal formed the Black Nationalist “Uptown Writers Movement.” Some members joined Amiri Baraka at BART/S. Neal and Touré belonged to the national Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), which had a strong following in New York. Another component of the Black Arts Movement was the Harlem Writers Guild.

          In 1968, LeRoi Jones (the name he still used in the book) and Larry Neal edited Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. A collection of essays, (mostly) poetry, fiction, and drama by seventy-seven contributors, including John Henrik Clarke, Stokely Carmichael, Sun-Ra, and Sonia Sanchez, the book captured the spirit of the Black Arts Movement.

          As poet and Black Arts Movement activist Kalamu ya Salaam explained, “The two hallmarks of Black Arts activity were the development of Black theater groups and Black poetry performances and journals, and both had close ties to community organizations and issues. Black theaters served as the focus of poetry, dance, and music performances in addition to formal and ritual drama. Black theaters were also venues for community meetings, lectures, study groups, and film screenings.”

          In March 1964, LeRoi Jones’s Dutchman, his most celebrated play, had opened off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre and won an Obie. Jones later brought it to BART/S. Actress and director Barbara Ann Teer, dissatisfied with the lack of respect for black culture in American professional theater, founded the National Black Theatre (NBT) in Harlem in 1968. (In 1983 NBT purchased property on 125th Street and Fifth Avenue to develop the National Black Institute of Communication through Theater Arts, a block-long complex that combines commercial retail businesses with theater and arts activities.)

          New Yorkers Jayne Cortez, Sonia Sanchez, and Sekou Sundiata were among the best-known poets of the BAM; while Bronx-raised Gil Scott-Heron, and spoken word group The Last Poets were some of the movement’s most creative musicians. Gil Scott-Heron, the son of an American mother and a Jamaican father, was born in Chicago and raised in the Bronx. He released his debut album A New Black Poet—Small Talk at 125th and Lenox in1970. The title of the track “The Revolution will not be televised” was borrowed from the Black Power Movement.

          The spoken word group The Last Poets was founded in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park) in Harlem on May 19, 1968, on the occasion of Malcolm X’s birthday. Members changed over the years. Their most famous pieces, “When the Revolution Comes,” “Niggers Are Scared of Revolution,” and “New York, New York,” were recorded in 1970. The Last Poets, like Gil Scott-Heron, are credited for being a major influence on the emergence of hip-hop.

          The Black Power Movement’s various ideologies and the literary creations of the Black Arts Movement were disseminated throughout the country by magazines, some of which were edited in New York. Freedomways, cofounded in 1961 by W. E. B. DuBois and edited by Shirley Graham DuBois; The Street Speaker and The Black Challenge, organs of Carlos Cooks’ s Nationalist Pioneer Movement; and Dan Watts’s Liberator were precursors in the black revolutionary journals genre and found a new readership among Black Power activists. New literary publications like Umbra Magazine, Black Theatre, and Black Dialogue were also New York–based, although the main publications of the Black Power Movement emanated from the Bay Area and Chicago.

          The African National Memorial Bookstore—subtitled The House of Common Sense and the Home of Proper Propaganda—owned and operated by Lewis Michaux at Seventh Avenue and 125th street in Harlem until it closed in 1974; and Liberation Bookstore, opened in 1967 by Una Malzac at 131st Street and Lenox Avenue (renamed Malcolm X Boulevard in 1987), acted as cultural, political, and social centers.

          The Ocean Hill–Brownsville struggle for community control of black education was fueled by the energy, ideas, and ideology of the Black Power Movement. In 1968, in the wake of school disruptions, the board of education, with financial assistance from the Ford Foundation, established I.S. 201 in Harlem, along with experimental districts in lower Manhattan and Ocean Hill–Brownsville in Brooklyn. Ministers, parents, and teachers in Ocean Hill–Brownsville created the People’s Board of Education. Their goal was to decentralize the administration of the local schools in order to improve the quality of education available to nonwhite children.

          The People’s Board began making personnel decisions in the local schools. As a result, the community found itself at odds with the United Federation of Teachers. The unified experiment collapsed because of a teachers’ strike in the fall.

          In higher education, John Henrik Clarke, one of the leading architects of the then-emerging discipline of Black Studies, founded the Department of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College in 1969; and 1970 saw the opening of Medgar Evers College, a senior college of the City University of New York, in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. Named for the slain civil rights leader, it was the result of a request by community organizations. The same year, the City University of New York (CUNY) inaugurated an open admissions policy designed to increase the number of poor and minority students.

          The Black Power movement inspired other marginalized groups to assertively fight for empowerment. Among them was the black gay and lesbian community. Black gay men were part of the rebellion against the police that took place at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, in June 1969, an event that launched the gay liberation movement. Actually, the Gay Liberation Front allied itself with radical black groups such as the Black Panther Party. “However,” note scholars Robert Reid-Pharr and Justin Rogers Cooper, “as most gay political groups abandoned their radical beginnings and reverted to predominantly white, middle-class outlook and membership, gay black activists became alienated from and less involved in their activities. Many blacks continued to feel unwelcome in the white gay community.” This reality led some years later to the creation of black gay institutions. The Pentecostal preacher Charles Angel, who had contracted AIDS, founded Gay Men of African Descent (GMAD) in 1986; and the Audre Lorde Project (ALP), a gay and lesbian organization for people of color, was organized in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

Race Relations

          The racial tensions that characterized the 1960s and ’70s were encapsulated in the founding of SPONGE: the Society for the Prevention of Negroes Getting Everything in 1968 by white residents of Queens and Brooklyn. It was their response to the increase in civil rights and Black Power protests. Race relations were so poor that Mayor John Lindsay established a commission to study racial hatred and tension in the city. Ten years later, seeing little improvement, the National Urban League declared the state of race relations in New York City to be at a twenty-year low, especially in the relationship between the New York Police Department and African Americans. A series of incidents of police brutality and racial profiling occurred in the upcoming decades.

          On July 16, 1964, fifteen-year old James Powell was fatally shot by a white police officer (later cleared of all wrongdoing). For six nights African Americans battled with the police in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. The uprising left one dead, hundreds of people injured, and 465 arrested. On December 20, 1986, Michael Griffith, of Trinidadian ancestry, was run over by a car while being chased by a white mob in Howard Beach, Queens. On August 23, 1989, Yusuf Hawkins was killed by a gang of white youths in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. A “Day of Outrage and Mourning” gathered 7,500 demonstrators across the Brooklyn Bridge. The march ended in violence as police clashed with the protesters.

          Several cases of police brutality during the mayoralty of Rudolph Giuliani got national attention. In 1996 Abner Louima, a Haitian American, was arrested after fighting outside a nightclub in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Four police officers beat him and he was then tortured in the bathroom of the 70th Precinct. On February 4, 1999, Amadou Diallo, a twenty-three-year-old Guinean, was killed by four plainclothes police officers in the doorway of his Bronx apartment building. As he tried to take his wallet out of his pocket, they shot forty-one bullets; nineteen hit him.

          The brutal death of Diallo sparked massive demonstrations, as did the change of venue to Albany for the trial of the officers, and their acquittal of all charges in February 2000. In the end, the City of New York settled a suit brought by Diallo’s parents by agreeing to pay $3 million. In 2000, twenty-five-year-old Malcolm Ferguson and Haitian-American security guard Patrick Dorismond were killed by police in the Bronx and midtown Manhattan, respectively; and in 2006, twenty-three-year-old Sean Bell was killed in Queens the night before his wedding by five undercover police officers. The three men who were tried were acquitted of all charges. A civil settlement awarded Bell’s family $3 million.

Arts and Culture

          Nineteen sixty-eight was an important year in the cultural life of black New Yorkers. The Studio Museum in Harlem opened its door on 125th Street and Fifth Avenue to promote the works of artists of African descent. The Negro Ensemble Company began operations with the goal of developing black actors, playwrights, technicians, and managers. Walter J. Turnbull founded the Boys Choir of Harlem; and the concept of the African American Day Parade was born. Its first edition was held in Harlem in 1969, with Grand Marshal Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.

          In 1970 New York native Arthur Mitchell, moved by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., founded the Dance Theatre of Harlem to provide African-American youth with the opportunity to learn and perform classical ballet. Harlem businessman Lloyd Williams launched Harlem Day in 1974. It became Harlem Week (today it lasts a month), a celebration of the borough’ s multiethnic economic, political, social, and cultural history.

          But the most far-reaching artistic, social, and cultural movement of the 1970s, one of the legacies of the Black Power Movement, was the birth of hip-hop in the postindustrial landscape of the South Bronx. Hip-hop emerged in 1973 with the street dance parties of the legendary DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell). Kool Herc, born in Kingston, Jamaica, had migrated to New York City in 1967. Inspired by the Jamaican yard parties of his youth, he organized large parties, looping break-beats from soul, jazz, funk, and disco tunes to which break-dancers could showcase their acrobatic talents.

          Afrika Bambaataa, who founded the Universal Zulu Nation in 1973, popularized the term “hip-hop” coined by DJ Lovebug Starski. Bambaataa stated, “When we made Hip Hop, we made it hoping it would be about peace, love, unity and having fun so that people could get away from the negativity that was plaguing our streets (gang violence, drug abuse, self hate, violence among those of African and Latino descent). Even though this negativity still happens here and there, as the culture progresses, we play a big role in conflict resolution and enforcing positivity.”

          From the Bronx, hip-hop, made of MC’ing (rapping), DJ’ing, break dancing, and graffiti art, expanded throughout the city, the nation, and the world. Grandmaster Flash and KRS-One from the Bronx; Heavy D, Run-DMC, Salt-n-Pepa, Nas, Chuck D, 50 Cent, LL Cool J from Queens; Notorious BIG, MC Lyte, Mos Def, Jay-Z, and Talib Kweli from Brooklyn; and Puff Daddy and Tupac Shakur from Harlem are some of the hundreds of rappers who grew up in the city.

          Also notable were break-dancers The Rocksteady Crew, Crazy Legs, Mr. Wiggles, Fast Feet, and Tony Touch; and graffiti artists such as Cornbread, Cool Earl, and Taki 183.

Immigration

          Starting in the late sixties, the newest black New Yorkers, more ethnically and culturally diverse than ever, were no longer mainly southern migrants. The Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 opened the doors to immigrants from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa. Immigration from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, St. Vincent, Grenada, Barbados, Panama, and Guyana increased dramatically. Nearly half of all immigrants from these islands settled in New York City, as did more than three-quarters of all Dominican immigrants. Dominicans are the largest foreign-born group in New York City, Jamaicans the third largest, Guyanese the fourth, Haitians the seventh, and Trinidadians the eighth.

          In 1967 Carlos Lezama, a Trinidadian of black Venezuelan origin, became president of the West Indian American Day Carnival Association, which had been holding a small celebration in Crown Heights after Carnival moved from Harlem in 1965 following the large influx of Caribbeans to Brooklyn. Lezama obtained the right to have the parade along Eastern Parkway in 1969, and since then it has become the largest event in New York, drawing over 2 million people every year, and thousands of marchers, bands, and floats.

          Half the Caribbean immigrants today live in Brooklyn, primarily in the neighborhoods of Crown Heights/East Flatbush, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Brownsville/East New York. In Queens, they settled in Cambria Heights, Jamaica, Queens Village, Springfield Gardens, Laurelton, Jackson Heights, and Rosedale; they also settled in Central Harlem and Washington Heights in Manhattan, and in the northeast and south Bronx.

          Growing numbers of Africans have made New York City their home. By 2010, they numbered slightly more than 92,400. Nigerians are the most numerous with about 15,700 (35 percent live in Brooklyn and 27 percent in the Bronx). Ghanaians number about 15,000, 62 percent of whom live in the Bronx. Ethiopians, Senegalese, Sierra Leoneans, Liberians, Ivoirians, Malians, and Burkinabe are also increasingly represented in the African population. More generally, about half of the African-born population lives in the Bronx and Brooklyn, 20 percent in Queens, 17 percent in Manhattan, and 7 percent in Staten Island.

          The African presence has become very visible, especially on 116th Street in Harlem, where Africans—mostly from francophone West Africa—own restaurants and stores. African businesses are also numerous on Malcolm X Boulevard and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard above 125^± Street. In mid-Manhattan, about six hundred West African traders sell African arts and crafts out of a mini-storage unit.

          Religious institutions have mushroomed. Ethiopian immigrants have established Ethiopian or Coptic Orthodox Christian churches. Protestants of many denominations have done the same. There are over 100 African churches. The Redeemed Christian Church of God, a Pentecostal church based in Nigeria, has established over forty branches in New York. The Presbyterian Church of Ghana has several branches in the city. Dozens of mosques frequented by West Africans have opened since the mid-1990s. They are mostly storefront mosques like the storefront churches that were the hallmark of the southern migrants during the Great Migration, some of which still exist today.

          July 28 has been officially declared Cheikh Amadou Bamba Day in New York. The late Cheikh Bamba, the founder of the Murid Sufi order in Senegal, has thousands of followers among the Senegalese diaspora in New York. Men, women, and children walk up Fifth Avenue in Harlem every year in what is the most visible West African Muslim event in the nation. In 2005, young African professionals established the African Day Parade, which includes a street fair, music, dance, and fashion.

          Despite the influx of immigrants, for the past few years, New York City’s black population has been on the decline, losing over 5 percent of its numbers between 2000 and 2010. According to the 2010 census, 1,861,295 “Black/African American non Hispanics” lived in New York City. They represented 22.8 percent of the total population of over 8 million New Yorkers. Manhattan, once the city’s “blackest” borough, has been outdistanced by Brooklyn and the Bronx.

          Brooklyn has by far the largest concentration of black residents: 799,066. They made up 32 percent of the borough’s population and 43 percent of New York City’s black population in the last census. Its 416,695 black residents represent 30 percent of the Bronx’s population and 22 percent of black New Yorkers. In Queens, 395,881 black inhabitants represent 18 percent of this borough’s population and 21 percent of all black New Yorkers. Manhattan counts 205,340 black residents. They represent 13 percent of the borough’s population and 11 percent of the total black population of the city. Numbers for Staten Island are 44,313 (9.5 percent of the borough and 2 percent of black New Yorkers).

          At the turn of the twenty-first century, even though the black population of New York City had increased by 6 percent, its representation in the overall population had declined to 24.5 percent. Ten years later, in 2010, black New Yorkers represented 22.8 percent of the total population.

          One factor in the decline of New York’s black population has been the reverse migration or return south migration. Starting in the 1970s, after most of Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty programs had been dismantled by President Richard Nixon and because of the dismal economic and social conditions faced by inner-city communities, African Americans started a new migration pattern from the urban North to the South. The trend often involved people born in the South, retirees, and single mothers. It was followed by the departure of college-educated young people. Between 1995 and 2000 New York was the top brain-drain state, losing more than eighteen thousand African-American college graduates. Another factor has been the migration of the middle class from the city to the suburbs.

People and Neighborhoods

          New York was one of the first cities in the country to pass laws banning restrictive racial covenants in housing, but discrimination and segregation in housing nonetheless continued to be major problems for black New Yorkers. In 1965 The New York City Planning Commission reported that 70 percent of families who could not find housing of reasonable size and price were black or Puerto Rican. Despite the federal Fair Housing Act passed by Congress in April 1968, the 1970s and ’80s were marred by numerous incidents of housing discrimination.

          In 1971, City Commission on Human Rights Chairman Eleanor Holmes Norton investigated block-busting real estate agencies and found “ample circumstantial evidence to indicate that unscrupulous realtors are deliberately fomenting fear and racial bigotry.” In Queens, the Department of Justice investigated the Lefrak building firm—developers of Lefrak City—for discriminating against nonwhite applicants; and the Trump Management Corporation—owners of fifteen thousand apartments—was sued by the Justice Department in federal court for violating the Fair Housing Act by refusing to rent to nonwhites.

          Throughout the 1970s, cross burning, vandalizing, threats, and fire bombs and pipe bombs were used against black New Yorkers trying to rent or buy homes in Staten Island, Queens, and Brooklyn. People fought back against housing discrimination. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., called for a protest in front of an apartment complex purchased by Columbia University, claiming that the university had raised rents to force out black and Latino residents. Black students staged a protest at Columbia University against the construction of a large gymnasium in Morningside Park, saying it would dominate the park, preventing its use by local residents, which prompted Columbia to stop the construction. Families brought a class action lawsuit against the Starrett City housing complex in Brooklyn, challenging its 35 percent black residency ceiling. In May 1987 a federal court barred racial quotas that limited nonwhite residency.

          White migration to the suburbs opened up some neighborhoods to African Americans until then segregated in a few overcrowded areas. Members of the middle class were the first to leave. Between 1970 and 1980, Central Harlem, then 96 percent black, lost over 33 percent of its population, and Harlem as a whole lost 60 percent of its residents between 1950 and 1980. Four out of ten Central Harlem residents were officially poor. With underprivileged tenants and rising tax and maintenance costs, landlords in the South Bronx, Harlem, and some areas of Brooklyn forsook their properties or burned them down for the insurance money. Abandoned buildings, vacant lots, boarded-up brownstones and townhouses, and the absence of stores and services characterized these neighborhoods.

          Properties that went into foreclosure passed into the hands of the city, which in the 1980s owned 35 percent of Central Harlem’s housing stock, while it also ruled over 26 percent of the units as public housing or publicly assisted buildings. Only 38 percent of housing was in private hands. Under Mayor Edward Koch’s “Redevelopment Strategy for Central Harlem,” townhouses were auctioned off for an average of $50,000 each (some went for as little as $2,000) to local residents. But in 1981 Koch stopped the policy of giving preference to neighborhood residents when selling off city property.

          To address the issue of housing, community-based organizations came to the forefront. In 1979, the Council of Churches of New York City reported that 133 congregations had formed 84 nonprofit housing organizations and constructed over 33,000 apartments in the previous four years. Starting in the 1980s and continuing today, the Pratt Area Community Council in Brooklyn, the Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement, and the Abyssinian Development Corporation, for example, have been involved in renovating and building affordable housing units, facilitating home ownership, opening commercial spaces, attracting retail stores, and revalorizing entire neighborhoods.

          As once depressed areas stabilized and became more inviting, gentrification accelerated in the late 1990s. In 1995, 144 blacks and 19 whites received mortgage loans to buy Harlem property; in 1998, the loan numbers increased to 348 and 107, respectively. With an influx of wealthier residents and renovated units, rents increased, as did property taxes, which led to the displacement of some old-time residents.

          The gentrification of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant led to a 22 percent increase in rent between 2005 and 2010, while the median household income rose only by 4.7 percent. Some people who could no longer afford the neighborhood moved to Brownsville, leading to housing competition between low-income residents.

          In all areas undergoing gentrification, residents voiced their fear of displacement and organized to preserve mixed-income communities and to get some of the benefits of the new developments. Scholar Lance Freeman notes that “blacks are an integral component of the gentrification process” in New York and that African Americans fled the desolate, segregated inner-city neighborhoods of the 1960s and ’70s, pointing out that “a gentrifying black neighborhood provides an alternative not available in a depressed ghetto, suburban black enclaves, or nonblack neighborhoods. . . . The gentrification of the hood . . . can represent a spatial manifestation of an urbane black middle class.”

          But segregation endures, and a 2013 study of the city’s residential patterns from 1970 to 2010 has shown the existence of an “emerging black/non-black color line, where Asians and Hispanics are increasingly aligned with whites while distancing themselves from blacks.” The study’s authors, Ronald J. O. Flores and Arun Peter Lobo, emphasize that “integrated, without blacks” neighborhoods nearly tripled from 13 percent to 37 percent in 2010. These neighborhoods include white-Hispanic-Asian, white-Hispanic, and white-Asian residents. On the other hand, they assert, “integrated, with blacks” areas fell from 22.4 percent to 14.9 percent. If residential segregation, a reality in New York since 1626, eased over the years, it appears that it is actually increasing in the twenty-first century.

WWII, Housing, and Politics

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Entry of the United States into World War II, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, led to the end of the Great Depression as the war effort jumpstarted industry. As the nation prepared for war in the summer of 1941, jobs in the war industries of the city, especially at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, were opened to black men and women—albeit in low-paying jobs—and they took advantage of opportunities in shipbuilding and other industrial trades. Still, the armed forces and the war industries continued to be segregated until New Yorker A. Philip Randolph—founder of the predominantly black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—threatened a march on Washington. In June 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 banning discrimination in the defense industries and government.

          Black males experienced improved employment opportunities during and after the war as well. The G.I. Bill offered those who had fought in the armed services unprecedented opportunities to purchase housing and to pursue college and university degrees. The abolition of restrictive covenants and discrimination in housing, coupled with the G.I. Bill, opened housing opportunities for black New Yorkers in the outer boroughs. There was a downside, however, to this prosperity. Over the next two decades, the dispersal of the black middle and upper classes from Harlem, among other factors, would profoundly change the dynamics of the neighborhood.

          Victories over discrimination in the military and on the domestic front during the war heightened African Americans’ expectations and renewed their commitment to dismantle America’s entire system of racial segregation once the war ended. The NAACP and its Legal Defense and Educational Fund took the lead after the war, prosecuting cases that challenged racial segregation in education, public accommodations, housing, and employment. Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who entered the U.S. House of Representatives during the war, brought a new focus of attention on discriminatory practices in the nation’s capital as well as its Congress.

          The 1940s saw the beginning of the Second Great Migration that lasted until the 1970s. The exodus of African Americans from the South to the North and West was much larger and quite different from the more famous movement that had preceded it. By 1970, about five million African Americans had migrated. They became a more urbanized population than whites: more than 80 percent lived in cities, as compared to 70 percent for the general population; and while 53 percent remained in the South, 47 percent made the North and West their home.

          Between 1940 and 1950, 211,153 southerners settled in New York City. But there, as in other cities, segregation and discrimination created an explosive situation. The resentment over discrimination in jobs and housing, police brutality, and humiliations of all sorts culminated in major riots in 1943, from Detroit to New York. The Second Great Migration resulted in the “ghettoization” of the African-American population, with long-ranging social, political, and cultural consequences.

The Second World War

          The war effort did not benefit black New Yorkers as much as they had expected. They were denied access to many factory positions. When industrial jobs were available, they were often the least skilled, least desirable, and lowest paying, offering the least opportunity for advancement. African Americans were disproportionately represented in janitorial and service industry jobs that offered few (if any) benefits and little chance for upward mobility.

          Women found some openings in the war industry. Belle Cahoun, an active member of Local 36 of the United Wire and Metal Workers’ Union, was chosen to be “Miss Negro War Worker.” She had bought ten war bonds and was presented with an eleventh at a “Negro Freedom Rally” in Madison Square Garden. There were opportunities—albeit limited ones—for African-American women to gain clerical employment. Sometimes, however, company decisions to place black women in clerical positions were rooted in the desire to prevent contact with white customers or coworkers in sales positions.

          Notwithstanding numerous obstacles, some African-American women rose to preeminence in the professional world. Bettie Esther Parham, born and raised in North Carolina, received degrees in education and chemistry and took additional advanced courses in North Carolina and New York; she taught chemistry at Dillard University in New Orleans. She was the owner and founder of the National Beauty Supply Company and its subsidiaries, which operated from New York and provided products geared toward black women. They were sold to beauty shops, with a full line of cosmetics added for the consumer trade. In the 1940s Parham became the first black retail owner on 125th Street. Her subsidiaries were Esther Beauty Aids Company, manufacturing cosmetics; The Esther Beauterias, beauty salons in Brooklyn and Manhattan; and Esther Hair Goods Division, which produced wigs and other hair goods.

          In 1959 Parham became the first African American to expand her business to Africa by exporting her line of products to Nigeria. (In the 1970s she entered the food business, marketing sauces.) She also wrote articles in newspapers and magazines in exchange for advertising space, and authored a pamphlet entitled “How to Get Money through Positive Thinking.”

          Born in 1922 in Edgefield, South Carolina, into a large middle-class family, Ophelia DeVore moved to New York in 1938, did some modeling, and later attended New York University, where she majored in mathematics. In 1946, she launched the Grace Del Marco Agency, one of the first modeling agencies and charm schools to book African Americans. Diahann Carroll, Cecily Tyson, Gil Noble, Camille Cosby, and Richard Roundtree were among the alumni of the agency.

          Rose Morgan, born in Mississippi, owned the Rose-Meta House of Beauty, Inc., in Harlem, which, according to Ebony magazine, was the “biggest Negro beauty parlor in the world. … Only three years old, it has zoomed overnight to the top among the 3,000 Negro beauty salons all over the nation which collect over 3 million dollars in receipts annually.” Morgan gave her customers—who came all the way from the South, Detroit, and Chicago—luxurious service that included pink Champagne. She also owned an international mail-order business, was vice-president of the National Council of Negro Women, and was instrumental in the launching of New York’s only black-owned bank, the Freedom National Bank, in 1965. Between 1955 and 1958, she was married to heavyweight boxer Joe Louis.

          The irony of fighting a war for democracy abroad while suffering the injustices of racial discrimination and segregation at home was not lost on African Americans during World War II. Seeing the war as an opportunity to strengthen their demands for equality, the NAACP, the black press, the National Urban League, and other organizations launched the “Double V” campaign, which stood for victory over Axis fascism abroad and victory over racism at home.

          On June 16, 1941, twenty-two thousand African Americans rallied at Madison Square Garden in support of A. Philip Randolph’s demand that the federal government act to end employment discrimination. Randolph threatened to stage a March on Washington, D.C., on July 1, that would attract more than a hundred thousand people. A week before it was scheduled to take place, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 banning racial discrimination in the war industries and government and setting up the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), whose task was to investigate violations and redress grievances. The march was called off.

          Hearings held in New York showed the extent of the discrimination: numerous defense firms acknowledged they did not have a single black employee. Only ten of Wright Aeronautic Company’s 10,000 workers were African Americans. The Fairchild Aviation Corporation had four blacks among its 1,800 employees. Despite the law, discrimination in employment did not disappear from the Five Boroughs. In 1946, The National Urban League reported that there were only twenty-two licensed black electricians in New York City and only six had been admitted to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers; only six black men were in the plumbers’ local; and only two belonged to the plasterers’ union.

          The war years saw a major eruption of racial disturbances. During the summer of 1943, more than 250 incidents occurred in forty-seven American cities, including Detroit; Mobile, Alabama; Beaumont, Texas; and New York City.

          On August 1, 1943, a black woman, Marjorie Polite, was involved in an argument over a room she was not satisfied with at the Hotel Braddock on 126th Street. A white policeman trying to arrest her struck her. Robert Bandy, a soldier in the U.S. army, intervened, and during a fight with the police officer, he was shot in the shoulder. Rumor spread that he had been lethally shot in the back. A crowd gathered in front of Sydenham Hospital on 123rd Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. For two days, facing a force of 6,600 city and military police, 8,000 State Guardsmen on standby, and 1,500 civilian volunteers, angry residents (including the elderly and soldiers on leave) poured into the streets. More than 1,400 stores between 112nd and 145th streets were attacked, damaged, or looted. Six people were killed. Close to 500 people were injured and as many were arrested. Damages amounted to $5 million.

          Richard Wright, who went to Harlem on August 2, stated, “I don’t think it was a race riot though it had the possibilities of turning into one. I had the feeling it was a spontaneous outburst of anger, stemming mainly from the economic pinch. The shooting of the soldier was indeed the spark that set it off.”

          The riot had several causes, according to reports to the Office of War Information. There was widespread resentment over the army’s treatment of black soldiers; Harlemites resented the police of the 26th Precinct, whom they accused of brutality and “viciousness”; and residents were also bitter at not getting good jobs. “Negroes feel that though they do not enjoy war wages,” the report underlined, “they are subjected to war-time prices.” The lack of a number of goods, the high price of others, and the bad relations that existed with storeowners were also part of the tensions that boiled over during the riot.

Migration and Housing

          During the Depression, the migration out of the South was insignificant. Finding work anywhere was a challenge. But World War II, just like World War I, unleashed a vast movement of Africans Americans eager to leave the segregation, violence, and economic stagnation of the South in search of jobs linked to the war effort.

          Between 1940 and 1960 half a million black southerners migrated to New York State; 185,000 came from South Carolina, 148,000 from Virginia, 143,000 from North Carolina, 97,300 from Georgia, and 43,000 from Florida. The vast majority headed to New York City: between 1940 and 1950, for example, out of 266,000 newcomers, 211,200 settled there. By the early 1940s, there were 485,000 black New Yorkers, and about 300,000 of them lived in Harlem.

          Harlem in the 1940s was home to a struggling working class and a rising middle class. To Southern migrants it was a magnet and the possibility to escape the dire conditions of their hometowns. In his autobiography, Manchild in the Promised Land, Claude Brown—the son of South Carolina sharecroppers who had settled in New York in 1937— wrote, “Going to New York was good-bye to the cotton fields, good-bye to ‘Massa Charlie,’ good-bye to the chain gang, and, most of all, good-bye to those sunup-to-sundown working hours. One no longer had to wait to get to heaven to lay his burden down; burdens could be laid down in New York.”

          The influx of newcomers resulted in a shortage of housing that, along with segregation, led to extremely crowded conditions. Like the people who preceded them during the Great Migration, families doubled up and strangers had to share bathrooms and kitchens. The “kitchenette apartment” was characteristic of the period, as large buildings were carved up into several one-room apartments and single-family houses were turned into tenements that lodged several large families. Overcrowding and the lack of enforcement of housing and sanitation codes resulted in unsanitary conditions. Landlords had a captive population and took advantage of it by raising the rents.

          “There were too many people full of hate and bitterness crowded into a dirty, stinky, uncared-for closet-size section of a great city,” Claude Brown wrote. “The children of these disillusioned colored pioneers inherited the total lot of their parents—the disappointments, the anger. To add to their misery, they had little hope of deliverance. For where does one run to when he’s already in the promised land?”

          Starting in the mid-1940s, the Promised Land’s landscape was drastically altered and the city became increasingly segregated. The main architect of these transformations was the urban planner Robert Moses, who controlled New York City highway and housing development from the 1930s to the 1950s, leading the offensive that would restrict black residents to ghettoized neighborhoods.

          In 1943, he engineered the passage of New York State’s Urban Redevelopment Companies Act, which made it legal for real estate companies to exclude blacks from housing developments such as MetLife’s Parkchester in the Bronx and Stuyvesant Town on East 14th Street in Manhattan. MetLife announced the building of the Riverton in Harlem in 1944 to answer critics. The 1949 Housing Act providing federal funds for “slum clearance” enabled Moses to launch vast programs. His evictions of predominantly black, Hispanic, and poor people—250,000 to build expressways, and another 250,000 to build housing and other non-highway public works—created new slum areas as he eliminated old ones.

          The razing of black neighborhoods was paralleled by the construction of low-income projects. They were often unsafe, segregated, poorly planned and constructed, and located in the most impoverished neighborhoods. During the 1950s, about one-third of East Harlem was leveled to create the Wagner, Taft, and Jefferson complexes. More than 75,000 low-income units were constructed, housing more than 500,000 tenants. “The Projects” would become virtually synonymous with “the ghetto,” shaping perceptions of African-American life and culture.

          The Federal Housing Act of 1954 made low-interest loans available for urban renewal and redevelopment. Critics argued that slum clearance was used to control the city’s racial geography, demolish black neighborhoods for white private development, and buffer white neighborhoods from blacks. Most private projects were segregated; the Amsterdam News revealed in 1952 that of 23,000 apartments in 22 private but publicly assisted buildings, a mere 27 were rented to African Americans. By 1955, 300,000 people lived in 74 New York City public housing projects, one-third of whom were black.

          Middle-class African Americans encountered housing obstacles of their own with banks reluctant to lend them money. One of the most influential forces in maintaining housing segregation was the federal government. The policies of federal agencies such as the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration furthered racial segregation. Mapping and appraisal systems developed by these agencies favored the growth of white, suburban housing developments and created obstacles for African Americans who wished to obtain home loans. They were forced to remain in poor, substandard neighborhoods. It is in this context that on November 5, 1948, African Americans founded the Carver Federal Savings and Loan Association, named for scientist George Washington Carver. The bank—still the largest black-operated bank in the country—opened at 53 West 125th Street in Harlem in January 1949, providing mortgages to local residents.

          On December 5, 1957, New York became the first city to legislate against racial or religious discrimination in the housing market with the adoption of a Fair Housing Practices Law; but notwithstanding continued protests and sustained actions, New York City remained thoroughly segregated. In the Bronx, 91 percent of African-American and Puerto Rican residents lived in the borough’s southern part. Harlem was almost entirely African-American, and 86 percent of all black Brooklynites were concentrated in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Political Activism

          During the Cold War, the “Red Scare” of the 1940s and ’50s hunted down leftists and Communists and their sympathizers. Several black intellectuals and artists were targeted. Harlem Renaissance writer Gwendolyn Bennett was suspended from her job at the head of the Harlem Community Arts Center in 1941 because of accusations that she was a Communist. She was charged with violating Section 15-F of the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, which stipulated that no Communist could be employed on any WPA project. Bennett denied the accusation, stating: “I am not a Communist and have never been one. I am perfectly innocent of any charge.”

          Two years later the House Un-American Activities Committee targeted two alternative community-based Harlem schools, the Jefferson School for Democracy and the George Washington Carver School, as hotbeds of communism. Bennett, director of the Carver school, was ousted from her post. NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White, distancing his own organization from any possible charges of Communist influence, characterized the schools as among “a group of similar institutions with which the communists were seeking to increase their influence among Negroes.”

          Black Nationalist, Communist Party member, and editor of Negro Affairs, Trinidad-born Claudia Jones spent a year in prison for “un-American activities.” When she was deported to the United Kingdom in December 1955, several hundred people gathered at the Theresa Hotel in Harlem to send her off.

          New York City Councilman Benjamin Davis, Jr., was one of eleven Communist leaders convicted on September 23, 1949, in federal court of conspiring to overthrow the United States government. Nevertheless, his name remained on the November election ballot, but he lost to a coalition candidate representing the Republican, Democratic, and Liberal parties. In 1951 Davis was sent to federal prison in Indiana, where he remained for three years and four months. At the end of his sentence, he served an additional two months at the Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for having refused, in 1953, to reveal the names of people belonging to the Communist Party’s Commission on Negro Work.

          On June 28, 1950, famed singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson, speaking at a Civil Rights Congress rally at Madison Square Garden, called on President Truman to stop sending troops to Korea, stating, “I have said it before and I say it again, that the place for the Negro people to fight for their freedom is here at home.”

          Robeson’s career and income tumbled as he refused to denounce the Soviet Union. With his wife and manager, anthropologist Eslanda Goode Robeson, he was summoned to testify before a Congressional Committee on June 12, 1956. When asked why, if he liked Russia so much, he did not stay there, he replied, “Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I’m going to stay right here and have a part of it, just like you. And no fascist-minded people like you will drive me from it. Is that clear?”

          Langston Hughes too was called to testify before the Senate Permanent Sub-Committee on Investigations chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy. He admitted past sympathy for the Communist Party but denied having ever been a member.

          Following the demise of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, several nationalist groups with international and African-centered interests emerged in New York. One was the United Sons and Daughters of Africa, headquartered in Brooklyn. But the two most prominent organizations were based in Harlem. The Universal African Nationalist Movement led demonstrations against colonialism in Africa. The other group, the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement, was founded by Dominican-born Carlos Cooks. Before the Black Power movement of the 1960s and ’70s, Cooks organized a convention in 1959, which proposed that “Negro” be replaced with “African” and “Black.” He advocated a “Buy Black” campaign, stating, “Patronize your own race. Build a solvent foundation for your children. Help create employment and independence for your race.”

          The United African Nationalist Movement, founded in 1948 by James R. Lawson, wanted the United States to advocate decolonization and provide as much aid to African countries as to Europe. The UANM had close ties to anticolonialist leaders and the United Nations African diplomats and heads of state from independent countries such as Guinea, Sudan, Ghana, Morocco, and Tunisia. The UANM cosponsored, with the New York Temple of Islam and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, a “Miss Africa Day.”

          The period was also marked by numerous boycotts and demonstrations against discrimination in employment. Black New Yorkers fought for unions and against low wages. They demonstrated against lynching and the degrading portrayal of blacks in films such as D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and Walt Disney’s Song of the South. Scandal erupted and demonstrations were organized in 1951 when entertainer Josephine Baker accused the Stork Club of refusing to serve her.

          The 1950s in Harlem saw the charismatic presence of Malcolm X on his second sojourn in the city. Although he was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and lived in Detroit and Boston, at age sixteen, in 1941, Malcolm Little had moved to Harlem. He worked at the famous Smalls Paradise on 135th Street and by 1942 he was involved in prostitution, gambling, and drug rings. Malcolm moved back to Boston in 1944 and spent six years in prison, where he converted to Islam.

          Working diligently for the Nation of Islam throughout the country, Malcolm X (he had changed his name in 1953) moved back to New York City in 1954 when he was named Minister of New York Temple 7 in Harlem. After marrying Betty X (Saunders), he moved to East Elmhurst, Queens, to a house owned by the Nation of Islam.

          In 1957 Malcolm X assembled the city’s first major Muslim protest and negotiated a release to the hospital for Johnson Hinton, a member of his mosque who was arrested and brutally beaten for intervening with a police officer who had beaten two African Americans. The group marched in formation behind the ambulance and remained at the hospital until doctors pronounced Hinton out of danger. In the temple and on Harlem street corners, Malcolm lectured on his Black Nationalist doctrine, “We are black first and everything else second.”

          Garveyites, Nationalists, Muslims, Communists, and the emerging fashion of African-inspired clothes were noticeable on the streets of Harlem; while the struggles of colonized peoples and the new reality of African diplomats inspired the crowds. As Maya Angelou recounted, in 1959, 125th Street “was to Harlem what the Mississippi was to the South, a long traveling river always going somewhere, carrying something. . . . Men told concerned crowds of the satanic nature of whites and the divinity of Elijah Muhammad. Black women and men had begun to wear multicolored African prints. . . . Clever appliance-store owners left their TV sets on the channels broadcasting U.N. affairs. I had seen black people standing in front of the stores watching the faces of international diplomats.”

Culture and Entertainment

          With few facilities for recreation, a large part of people’s life revolved around the street. Children and adults alike transformed it into playgrounds and sports fields. People gathered on the street to celebrate, to see and be seen, to spend evenings in the breeze, away from the oppressive heat of small and overcrowded apartments. Street vendors and markets established themselves.

          Segregated residential patterns spawned flourishing institutions in black neighborhoods, including a thriving nightlife. On the musical front, the 1940s were a high time for jazz in New York, particularly in Harlem. Black saxophonist Henry Minton opened Minton’s Playhouse in 1938 on West 118th Street. Two famous clubs were born in 1942: the Lenox Lounge at Lenox and 125th Street; and Lucky’s Rendez-Vous, owned by Lucky Roberts—Duke Ellington’s pianist—at St. Nicholas Avenue and 148th Street. The latter attracted a large gay clientele. The Baby Grand, owned by a former Cotton Club dancer, opened its doors in 1947 at 319 West 125th Street.

          Bebop was born at Minton’s, and the most creative and famous musicians played in all the uptown clubs. Many were southerners of the first or second generation. Max Roach, a North Carolinian, had grown up in Brooklyn; Dizzy Gillespie migrated from South Carolina in 1937; John Coltrane, born in North Carolina, joined Miles Davis in New York in 1955 after several years in Philadelphia. Thelonious Monk from North Carolina grew up in Manhattan. Kansas-born Charlie Parker moved to New York in 1939; Miles Davis from East St. Louis arrived in 1944.

          The Negro Actors Guild (NAG), formed in New York City in 1936, counted seven hundred members in the 1940s. The Guild was a welfare and benevolent organization. Noble Sissle served as its first president; Bill Bojangles Robinson was honorary president; Fredi Washington, who starred in the 1934 film Imitation of Life, was the first executive director and secretary and also worked as a columnist and theater editor for the People’s Voice, a weekly newspaper published by her brother-in-law, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.; W. C. Handy was treasurer; Cab Calloway was chairman of the executive board; and Ethel Waters, Marian Anderson, Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, and Louis Armstrong, among others, were vice presidents.

          The Guild worked to aid actors in distress but, as Edna Thomas, one of its vice-presidents, emphasized, “we are at the same time striving to make a record of the Negro contribution to the world of entertainment. We want to make it possible to give expression to the great reservoir of underdeveloped talent in our group.” Operating from its office at 1560 Broadway in midtown Manhattan, the heart of the theater district, NAG published a quarterly journal, The Negro Actor, from 1938 to 1940, which was superseded by a monthly newsletter.

          Determined to “break down the barriers of Black participation in the theater; to portray Negro life as they honestly saw it; [and] to fill the gap of a Black theater which did not exist,” writer Frederick O’Neal and actor Abram Hill founded the American Negro Theatre (whose acronym ANT reflected the cooperative nature of the enterprise) in 1940. The company, based at the 135th Street Branch Library (the future Schomburg Center), provided training for African Americans interested in playwriting, acting, directing, and the technical aspects of play production. The ANT’s first production, in the fall of 1940, was a caustic commentary on social climbers in Harlem: Abram Hill’s On Striver’s Row. Novelist Ann Petry performed the role of Tilllie Petunia for a year, and another character was played by a young, emerging actress: Ruby Dee.

          Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier debuted at the ANT. The theater’s major success was the 1944 production of Anna Lucasta, which soon left Harlem to be performed on Broadway and was later made into a movie with Eartha Kitt and Sammy Davis, Jr. The ANT moved out of the 135th Street Branch Library in 1945.

          Katherine Dunham, a dancer and choreographer who majored in anthropology and pioneered the study of dance in the African Diaspora, opened the Katherine Dunham School of Dance and Theater (later the Katherine Dunham School of Cultural Arts) at 220 West 43rd Street in 1945. Among her students were Sidney Poitier, Toni Cade Bambara, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Arthur Mitchell, Warren Beatty, Chita Rivera, and Eartha Kitt.

          Another pioneer in African-American dance was Pearl Primus, an internationally recognized dancer and choreographer with a PhD in anthropology from New York University. Born in Trinidad, she is best known for presenting African dances, which she researched in Africa in the 1950s. But Primus first found her most creative impetus in the cultural heritage of African Americans, exploring racism, as well as the dignity, beauty, and strength of black people.

          In 1958, Texas-born dancer Alvin Ailey formed Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, a company of modern dancers whose inspiration was rooted in the black experience. Its first major production was the acclaimed Blues Suite.

          In literature, one of the revelations of the 1940s was Ann Petry, a pharmacist who moved from Connecticut to Harlem in 1938. She later became an editor for the Harlem-based leftist newspaper People’s Voice, founded in 1942 by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Her first novel, The Street, was the story of Lutie Johnson, a single mother living in Harlem and working as a domestic. The social realism of her book aptly captured the difficult life of the Harlemites.

          She could hear the word ‘cheap,’ ‘cheap,’ ‘cheap,’ whether she was asleep or awake. . . . Cheap cuts of meat, cheap yellow laundry soap, yeast in bulk because it was cheap, white potatoes because they were cheap and filling, tomato juice instead of orange juice because it was cheaper; even unironed sheets because they saved electricity. They went to bed early because it kept the light bill down. . . . It seemed to her their whole lives revolved around the price of things and as each week crawled by she grew a little more nervous, a little more impatient and irritable.

          Published in 1946 to great acclaim, The Street sold 1.5 million copies.

          Rosa Guy, John Oliver Killens, John Henrik Clarke, Willard Moore ,and Walter Christmas established the Harlem Writers Guild in 1950 “to develop and aid in the publication of works by writers of the African Diaspora.” Alice Childress, Sidney Poitier, Maya Angelou, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Lorraine Hansberry, and other distinguished writers and artists were members of the Guild.

          Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun opened in 1959 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater with Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil, Ruby Dee, and Diana Sands. It won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play of the Year. At twenty-nine, Hansberry was the youngest American, the fifth woman, and the first black playwright to receive the award.

War and Renaissance

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The First World War had started in Europe in 1914, but the United States entered it only in 1916. The conflict brought a halt to the massive immigration of Europeans, which resulted in a severe labor shortage at a time when workers were needed in the booming arms and war-supplies industries. Potential workers were in large supply in the South, where agriculture had been devastated by the boll weevil. Soon African Americans, seizing the opening of job opportunities and fleeing the violence of southern racism, made the journey north to “The Promised Land.”

          The Great Migration of hundreds of thousands of southerners changed the political, social, racial, and cultural landscape of the country. Often traveling by train, the migrants settled in northern cities along the railroad routes. The vast majority of those who made New York their home came from Virginia; far behind were South and North Carolina and Georgia.

          Migration and immigration continued to transform the fabric of black New York. In 1920 New York City counted 152,467 blacks as compared with 91,709 in 1910. The increase was 60 percent, whereas it was only 16.9 among whites. By 1930, New York City’s black population had reached 327,706, and Harlem not only had become the largest black urban community in the United States but also possessed a dynamic, ethnically diverse population. Black Brooklynites numbered about 70,000, 42 percent of whom were born in the South.

          Between 1920 and 1923, about 35,000 Caribbeans (and a few Africans) migrated to the city, primarily to Manhattan and Brooklyn. By 1930, almost a quarter of black Harlem was of Caribbean origin, and Caribbeans represented one-third of Harlem’s professionals. Caribbeans made up about 16 percent of Brooklyn’s black population. The new immigrants, skilled and often well-educated, coming from black-majority countries under colonial rule, frequently brought a sense of racial identity and political nationalism that affected not only the African-American economic, political, and social fabric but also literature, the arts, and entrepreneurship.

          On the political and social front, the period saw the birth of the largest Pan-Africanist movement ever, led by Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey; the proliferation of antilynching campaigns; and the emergence of black socialist and communist militants.

          The 1920s were characterized by what has since been called the Harlem Renaissance. Known then as the New Negro Renaissance, its influence extended well beyond Harlem to Washington, D.C., Chicago, Kansas City, the Caribbean, France, and Brazil. It was a time of renewal and affirmation for black New Yorkers, but by the end of the decade, they and millions of others throughout the world were hit by an event of catastrophic proportions. New York, the banking and commercial capital of the world, was the epicenter of the Crash of 1929 that brought on the Great Depression, which affected African Americans particularly severely.

          By the early 1930s, about 50 percent of African Americans nationwide were unemployed, and racial violence had steadily mounted. There were twenty-eight lynchings in 1933.

          The Harlem Race Riot of 1935, a protest against the entrenched racial discrimination that had plagued black New Yorkers’ existence for centuries, focused local and national attention on the black plight during the Depression and served as a catalyst for improving African Americans’ access to jobs, programs, and welfare services. By 1936 one-seventh of all Works Progress Administration (WPA) spending was flowing into New York City. That same year, President Roosevelt organized key black leaders to ensure that blacks got a fair share of the available funds.

          African Americans en masse switched from the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, to the Democratic Party.

The First World War

          Participation in the war was a divisive issue for African Americans. New York socialist A. Philip Randolph stated he “would rather fight to make Georgia safe for the Negro.” W. E. B. Du Bois for his part encouraged African Americans to join the war effort. Arguing that what Germany represented spelled “death to the aspirations of Negroes and all darker races for equality, freedom and democracy” he urged them to “forget our special grievances and close ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy.”

          About 380,000 African Americans served during World War I—blacks made up 13 percent of the draftees although they were only 10 percent of the population—and 200,000 were sent to Europe. At home and abroad, they continued to suffer discrimination, indignities, and humiliations. Forbidding them to be part of the American Expeditionary Force, the U.S. Army assigned the vast majority of black soldiers to service units, reflecting a belief that black men were more suited for manual labor than for combat duty. Those who did serve in combat were detached to the French Army.

          Among the first regiments to land in France was the 369th Infantry Regiment (originally the 15th New York National Guard), an all-black regiment of 4,500 men, 70 percent of whom lived in Harlem, led by mostly white officers. Baptized the “hell fighters” by the Germans, they became known as the Harlem Hellfighters but called themselves “men of bronze.” The 369th Infantry left New York in December 1917. They were assigned to the 16th Division of the Fourth French Army in May 1918 and later reassigned to the 161st Division.

          The 369th highly distinguished itself. In May 1918, as they were mounting guard in an isolated post, Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts were attacked by a twenty-four-man German unit. They suffered disabling wounds, but refused to surrender and continued fighting hand-to-hand with a knife and a rifle butt. As the New York Evening Post recounted, “Having shot one of his foe down and clubbed another with the butt of his rifle, [Johnson] sprang to the aid of Roberts with his bolo-knife. As the enemy fell into disorderly retreat, Johnson, three times wounded, sank to the ground, seized a grenade alongside his prostrate body, and literally blew one of the fleeing Germans to fragments.”

          For their heroism, Johnson and Roberts were the first Americans to be awarded the French Croix de Guerre. (Johnson received a Purple Heart from the U.S. government in 1996.) In the end, 171 Harlem Hellfighters received medals individually and the unit as a whole received the Croix de Guerre for having taken back the village of Séchault. (A monument in their honor was dedicated there in 1997, and a 12-foot-high replica of the obelisk was erected in New York in 2006 at Fifth Avenue and 142nd Street across from the 369th Armory.) After the Armistice of November 11, 1918, the Harlem Hellfighters were the first Allied troops to reach the Rhine, on November 26.

          The 369th Regiment achieved renown not only for its combat skills, but also for its band. James Reese Europe’s military band played in Europe and introduced jazz to enthusiastic audiences, especially in France. Noble Sissle was the drum major.

          The “men of bronze” spent more days in combat—191 in frontline trenches—than any other American unit. The French general Henri Gouraud stated that they were crucial in the counteroffensive that led to the end of the war. Yet, the United States refused to allow any remaining black American soldiers to march with other Allied soldiers, including colonial African troops, in the victory parade up the Champs-Elysées in Paris on Bastille Day in 1919.

          The end of the war brought the troops back home. On February 17, 1919, the three thousand men of 369th Infantry Regiment marched up Fifth Avenue into Harlem to the music of James Europe’s band before a crowd of a quarter of a million people.

          Commenting on the parade, the New York Tribune wrote, “Never have white Americans accorded so heartfelt and hearty a reception to a contingent of their black country-men.” But in the May 1919 issue of Crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois perceptively observed in his editorial “Returning Soldiers,” “We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.” Indeed, the following decades were marked by continuous struggles for civil rights and economic and social justice.

          On May 9, 1919, James Reese Europe was fatally knifed in the neck by one of his musicians.

Marcus Garvey and the UNIA

          Born in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica, Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887–1940) left school at fourteen and traveled abroad, learning many lessons that shaped his later endeavors. In 1914 he returned to Jamaica and founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), whose aims included advocating that blacks create an independent state in Africa. Garvey traveled to America in 1916 and established the UNIA in Harlem. Its first office was at 235 West 131st Street, but the organization soon expanded to a larger space at 2305 Seventh Avenue. Garvey lived at 552 Lenox Avenue (138th Street) with his first wife, Amy Ashwood, and at 133 West 129th Street with his second wife, Amy Jacques.

          Garvey drew his following largely from the lower end of the economic scale. Southerners, servicemen returning from the European battlefields, and his fellow West Indians seemed particularly attuned to his philosophy.

          Garvey’s charismatic style and effective oratory skills, as well as his emphasis on self-reliance and pride, helped him gain national and international prominence. His version of Black Nationalism argued that African Americans’ quest for social equality was a delusion. They were fated to be a permanent minority who could never assimilate because white Americans would never let them. African Americans, therefore, could not improve their condition or gain autonomy in the United States. Only in Africa was self-emancipation possible.

          In August 1918, the association began publishing the Negro World in English, with Spanish and French editions. The newspaper had a circulation of 50,000 to 200,000 copies weekly. At its height in the mid-1920s, the UNIA had hundreds of chapters in Africa and throughout the Caribbean. In 1919 Garvey launched the Black Star Line steamship corporation from its berth on the Hudson River at 135th Street to encourage trade and migrations among black communities in North America, the Caribbean, and Africa. Its flagship, the SS Frederick Douglass, made its maiden voyage to the Caribbean and Central America. But the Black Star Line turned out to be a disastrous business venture and closed down in 1922. Although it did not accomplish its objectives, the steamship company was a potent symbol for the masses of dispossessed black men and women who had invested their money, hope, and pride in it.

          The first International Convention of Negro Peoples of the World, which lasted the entire month of August 1920, drew more than 25,000 delegates to New York City’s Madison Square Garden, and announced to the world that the “New Negro” who had surfaced at the turn of the century had burst full force onto the historical stage, and “knew no fear.” The convention elected Garvey as Provisional President of Africa.

          The UNIA purchased Liberty Hall at 120 West 138th Street, and Garvey regularly drew more than five thousand people to hear him invoke his message ‘‘Up, you mighty race!” In 1920 Garvey’s Negro Factories Corporation filed a certificate of incorporation to provide loans and technical assistance to blacks who needed help developing their own small businesses. With stock sold at five dollars per share, it helped develop a chain of cooperative grocery stores, a restaurant, a laundry, a tailor and dressmaking shop, a millinery store, and a publishing house.

          But Garvey had powerful foes such as A. Philip Randolph, W. E. B. Du Bois, the NAACP, and Robert S. Abbott (publisher of the Chicago Defender). They believed he was a fraud and organized the “Garvey Must Go” campaign. It reached its height after Garvey held a secret meeting with the leader of the Ku Klux Klan in June 1922. Garvey had declared, “This is a white man’s country. He found it, he conquered it, and we can’t blame him if he wants to keep it. I am not vexed with the white man of the South for Jim-Crowing me, because I am black. . . . I never built any street cars or railroads. The white man built them for his convenience. And if I don’t want to ride where he’s willing to let me ride then I’d better walk.”

          Garvey was accused of mail fraud, found guilty, and condemned to five years’ imprisonment and a fine of $1,000. After his appeals failed, he was taken into custody in February 1925 and sent to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. President Calvin Coolidge commuted his sentence, and in November 1927 Garvey, who had unsuccessfully applied for U.S. citizenship, was deported to Jamaica. He later migrated to England, where he died in 1940.

Political Activism

          Over the years, lynching had become ever more sadistic and exhibitionist. People were horribly tortured, mutilated, and burnt in front of large crowds that included women and children. Riots by white mobs left hundreds of people dead, injured or homeless. In 1917 a race riot erupted in East St. Louis “in which four hundred thousand dollars’ worth of property was destroyed, nearly six thousand Negroes driven from their homes, hundreds of them killed; some burned in the houses set afire over their heads,” recalled poet and novelist James Weldon Johnson. He suggested that the NAACP hold a silent parade to register black New Yorkers’ protest.

          On July 28, fifteen thousand African Americans marched down Fifth Avenue. Boy Scouts passed out leaflets saying in part, “We march because we want our children to live in a better land and enjoy fairer conditions than have been our lot.” Johnson stated, “The streets of New York witnessed many strange sights but, I judge, never one more impressive. The parade moved in silence and was watched in silence.”

          In August, a delegation of prominent African Americans—including New Yorkers Fred Moore of the New York Age, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, realtor John Nail, cosmetics mogul Madame C. J. Walker, Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., and Rev. George Frazier Miller—went to the White House to present a petition to President Woodrow Wilson, urging him to support legislation making lynching a federal crime. They were denied an audience. During the “Red Summer” of 1919 twenty-six race riots claimed the lives of over one hundred African Americans and thousands were injured or left homeless.

          The Fourth Pan-African Congress opened at St. Mark’s Methodist Episcopal Church at 137th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue on August 21, 1927. It was the first time the Congress was held in the United States. Its primary organizer and sponsor were Addie W. Hunton and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. According to the Crisis, 208 delegates (from the United States, the Caribbean, South America, Africa, Germany, and India) and 5,000 participants followed the sessions held in a number of Harlem churches until August 24.

          A. Philip Randolph—who helped organize the Socialist Party’s first black political club in the city—and Chandler Owen—who had launched the Messenger, subtitled “The Only Radical Magazine Published by Negroes,” in August 1917—opposed participation in the war, and advised African Americans to resist the draft and to align themselves with trade union and socialist movements. In 1925, Randolph led the first successful movement to organize black labor nationally with the founding of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters established at 2311 Seventh Avenue in Harlem.

          A crucial ally of Randolph’s was Frank R. Crosswaith, a lifelong socialist, a labor union organizer, and an editor born in St. Croix. During the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the most effective organizers of black workers in the city and was known as the Socialist Party’s foremost black orator. He ran for various offices on the American Labor Party and Socialist Party tickets. Crosswaith was chairman of the Negro Labor Committee (NLC), which maintained the Harlem Labor Center, established in 1935 at 312 West 125th Street. It served as a headquarters for trade unions, bringing together many black workers who, because of economic conditions, had a newly aroused interest in organizing. The NLC established the Negro Labor News Service that disseminated information to newspapers on events relating to black labor throughout the country.

          Richard Benjamin Moore was another vocal Caribbean activist. A civil rights advocate, Communist Party leader, bibliophile, and champion of Caribbean and African self-determination, Moore, who was born in Barbados, migrated to the United States in 1909 and played an influential role in Harlem for more than fifty years. By 1918 he had become radicalized by the racism he experienced personally and the violence visited upon blacks across the country. He joined the Socialist Party and the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), a paramilitary organization affiliated with the Communist Party that advocated armed defense, before enrolling in the Communist Party, which expelled him in 1942, allegedly for his advocacy of Black Nationalism.

          Still another major figure of the left was Hubert H. Harrison—the “father of Harlem radicalism,” according to Randolph—who had emigrated from St. Croix. Harrison was the Socialist Party’s leading black speaker and campaigner from 1911 until he left around 1915. He published the Voice, “A Newspaper for The New Negro,” as the organ of the Liberty League of Afro-Americans. It promoted race- and class-consciousness and internationalism, and demanded a federal antilynching legislation. Harrison, a highly influential leader and prolific writer, briefly edited the UNIA’s Negro World in 1920, before breaking with Garvey.

          Journalist Cyril Briggs, a native of Nevis in the Caribbean who immigrated to Harlem in 1905, became the editor and publisher of the Crusader, which first served as the organ of the Hamitic League of the World—a nationalist organization founded by African American George Wells Parker—and then of the African Blood Brotherhood for Liberation and Redemption, until it ceased publication in 1922.

          Jamaican poet and novelist Claude McKay, a member of the African Blood Brotherhood, left New York for the Soviet Union in 1922 to attend an international Communist conference, during which he spoke about racism in the United States and criticized American socialists as being unwilling or unable to transcend their prejudices. With him was Otto Huiswoud, born in Surinam, candidate of the Workers Party of America—an arm of the underground Communist Party—for the New York state legislature. After the dissolution of the ABB, Briggs, Huiswoud, and Richard B. Moore became active members of the American Negro Labor Congress, a Communist organization.

          In 1932, the Communist Party chose New Yorker James Ford as its vice presidential candidate, the first time in the century that a black person was selected to run for the nation’s second-highest office. The Party appealed to black voters, stating: “The Negro people suffer doubly. Most exploited of working people, they are also victims of Jim-Crowism and lynching. They are denied the right to live as human beings.” Harlem Renaissance writers Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes endorsed the ticket. Later that year, Hughes and nineteen other African Americans traveled to the Soviet Union, where Hughes remained for a year.

          In the following years, the Communist Party continued to attract artists and intellectuals. In 1937, Richard Wright moved to Harlem to work as a writer for the party’s Daily Worker. Civil rights activist Bayard Rustin joined the Young Communist League. Sculptor Augusta Savage organized the Vanguard, a left-wing social club from which a chapter of the Friends of the Soviet Union developed. (She founded and owned Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts at 163 West 143rd Street and also ran the Harlem Community Art Center. She produced Lift Every Voice and Sing, a sculpture commissioned for the 1939 New York World’s Fair.)

          To black New Yorkers, the most significant international event of the mid-1930s was the October 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia, which rekindled the Pan-Africanist movement. In Harlem the Provisional Committee for the Defense of Ethiopia, the Ethiopian World Federation, and the Black Legion and others vowed to help the country. Black nurses raised money to ship medical supplies and a seventy-five-bed hospital to Ethiopia. Over one thousand black men signed up to go and fight the invaders. Nationwide, more than seventeen thousand promised to defend Ethiopia, but obstacles put up by the U.S. government prevented them from joining the fight, and they turned to fund raising instead.

          John C. Robinson, nicknamed the Brown Condor of Ethiopia, trained pilots there when Italy invaded the country and became Emperor Haile Selassie’s personal pilot. Hubert F. Julian, originally from Trinidad, called the Black Eagle of Harlem (where he settled in 1921 after a sojourn in Canada), was in command of the Ethiopian Imperial Air Force.

          In New York, African Americans created the Ethiopian World Federation with the support of Emperor Haile Selassie. Its preamble read: “We the Black People of the World, in order to effect Unity, Solidarity, Liberty, Freedom and self-determination, to secure Justice and maintain the Integrity of Ethiopia, which is our divine heritage, do hereby establish and ordain this constitution for The Ethiopian World Federation, Incorporated.” On August 4, a crowd estimated at twenty thousand marched in Harlem with Ethiopian flags.

Religion

          The church was the cornerstone of the community, providing guidance and relief. In the 1920s, 150 blocks in Harlem counted 140 mostly storefront churches. The more established churches grew rapidly too as Southerners became used to city ways and joined them in great numbers, leaving the storefront establishments to the new arrivals.

          In 1920 the Abyssinian Baptist Church, located on West 40th Street, purchased lots in Harlem near Seventh Avenue. In 1925 Mother AME Zion Church was completed at 140 West 137th Street. George W. Foster, Jr., one of the first black architects in New York State, designed the neo-Gothic stone church. In 1929 the Riverside Church was constructed at 122nd Street and Riverside Drive. Its dedication as an “interracial, interdenominational and international” church body made it among the nation’s first avowedly interracial churches.

          Other religious movements developed and recruited heavily in the migrant population. Father Divine, a southerner, established the Peace Mission Movement. Calling himself God, he preached racial and gender equality and counted tens of thousands of followers, including in Canada, Australia, Panama, England, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. In 1918 he moved his growing congregation from Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn to Sayville, Long Island, and then established his headquarters at 455 Lenox Avenue in Harlem. Father Divine owned restaurants, barbershops, and grocery stores and became the largest landlord in Harlem. He provided many followers with work, shelter, and food during the Great Depression. But as the nation recovered, the popularity of the Peace Mission Movement declined. Father Divine died in 1965.

          The focus of some religious movements on racial consciousness and pride was a powerful magnet to the southerners in search of new identities. Noble Drew Ali, originally Timothy Drew from North Carolina, organized the Moorish Science Temple of America in 1913 in Newark, New Jersey, and had followers in New York. Drew proclaimed himself a prophet ordained by Allah and mixed some Islamic tenets into his teachings.

          Besides the Nation of Islam established in 1931 in Detroit and led since 1934 by Elijah Poole, a migrant from Georgia who became Elijah Muhammad, black Muslim converts also followed Shaikh Daoud Ahmed Faisal—said to be the son of a Moroccan father and a Jamaican mother—who founded the Islamic Mission to America for the Propagation of Islam and Defense of the Faith and the Faithful at his home at 143 State Street in Brooklyn in 1939, bringing immigrant and African-American Muslims together.

          In 1918, Wentworth Arthur Matthew and eight other men founded The Commandment Keepers: Church of the Living God, a denomination of black Hebrews. The Commandment Keepers believed they were the descendants of the ancient Hebrews, who they thought were black people. Their place of worship was a two-story frame building at 87 West 128th Street, on the corner of Lenox Avenue. Bishop Arthur Matthew later changed the name to the Falashas of America, following the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie in Ethiopia. The denomination associated itself with Jewish traditions as observed by the Ethiopian Hebrew rabbinate.

          Bishop Charles M. Grace led another new religious movement. Known as Sweet Daddy Grace, he was born in the Cape Verde Islands, off Senegal, and had migrated in 1904 to Massachusetts like thousands of Cape Verdeans who worked in the cranberry bogs and textile mills. Bishop Grace founded the United House of Prayer for All People, a Pentecostal church. An early black owner of Harlem real estate, he purchased a building at 555 Edgecombe Avenue and sponsored a line of commercial products that included Daddy Grace soap, tea, coffee, and cookies. He also organized a home-buying association, an insurance company, and a burial society.

The New Negro Renaissance

          The 1920s saw the emergence of the New Negro Renaissance, later called the Harlem Renaissance. It took some of its inspiration from the lives and struggles of the newcomers to the North and reflected the racial consciousness, pride, and sense of freedom that people felt in the urban North. Tapping into the vibrant black culture of the South—including its dialect, customs, and mannerisms—and its African roots, British Romanticism, and American experimentalism, writers and artists claimed the right to represent themselves and their community and produced important works that deeply influenced the major artistic and literary forms later associated with African-American life and culture.

          In 1918, responding to the racial hatred sweeping the country, Claude McKay had written a sonnet, “If We Must Die,” published in Liberator magazine. Later he was hired as associate editor. His poetry collection Harlem Shadows is regarded as the first major book of the New Negro Renaissance. His critically acclaimed novel Home to Harlem, published in 1928, became the first best-selling novel by a black writer.

          Another landmark of the Harlem Renaissance was the publication in June 1921 in the Crisis of the poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes. Arriving from Missouri, he had spent a year at Columbia University before holding a series of odd jobs and traveling to Europe and Africa. Poet, playwright, essayist, and author of short stories, Hughes was one of the most prolific and influential writers of the Renaissance.

          Poet, novelist, and playwright Countee Cullen—an NYU and Harvard graduate—won numerous literary prizes as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship, NAACP Spingarn Medal, and first prize from the prestigious Harmon Foundation. Nella Larsen, the daughter of a Danish mother and a St. Croix father, wrote two novels, Quicksand and Passing, while holding the job of librarian at the 135th Street branch of The New York Public Library.

          The year 1925 was particularly fruitful. Survey Graphic, a white publication, devoted its March issue to “contemporary Negro life.” Edited by Alain Locke, it sold out two printings (more than forty-two thousand copies) and became the magazine’s most widely read issue. Focusing on Harlem’s vibrant culture, it offered contributions by Du Bois, Arthur Schomburg, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen.

          Alain Locke, the editor later that year of the anthology The New Negro, stressed that the many talents and emerging voices of the Renaissance would lead to economic, cultural, and political progress for blacks in the United States and worldwide. In May, the National Urban League published the first issue of Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, edited by Charles S. Johnson.

          Zora Neale Hurston, one of a number of celebrated women of the Renaissance, had studied anthropology at Barnard College and turned her research into literary works like Mules and Men, Tell My Horse, and Their Eyes Were Watching God. She created the term “Negrotarians” for whites who supported the New Negro movement: people like Carl Van Vechten, whose novel Nigger Heaven became popular among whites but got an angry reception in Harlem, where he divided the intelligentsia.

          When Jean Toomer’s Cane was published in 1926, avant-garde critics hailed the work as a literary landmark. Charles S. Johnson noted that Toomer had “the most astonishingly brilliant beginning of any Negro writer.” Marketed as a Negro writer by publishers but recorded as white in the 1930 federal census, Toomer imagined “a new race in America” and declared himself a member.

          The Harlem Renaissance literary movement was “heavily gay flavored,” to quote scholars Robert Reid-Pharr and Justin Rogers Cooper, and “black gay men assumed important positions in American cultural and intellectual life, a primacy they have maintained ever since.” As the noted,

          Socialite hostess A’Leilia Walker [Madam C. J. Walker’s daughter] surrounded herself with gay men whose work she promoted, and Carl Van Vechten, a gay white man, helped sponsor the movement’s artistic products. Countee Cullen, Alain Locke, Wallace Thurman, Lawrence Brown, Claude McKay, and Richard Bruce Nugent were gay or bisexual men who were some of the brightest lights of the Harlem Renaissance. Specifically, Nugent published the first explicit piece of black gay literature, “Smoke Lilies and Jade” (1926), a short story published in the short-lived Harlem Renaissance journal Fire. Claude McKay’s novel Home to Harlem (1928) features a scene in a recognizably gay bar. Colin Palmer, ed. Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History.

          An important figure during the Renaissance was collector and bibliophile Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. Through the efforts of the National Urban League, the Carnegie Corporation provided a grant of ten thousand dollars for The New York Public Library to acquire Schomburg’s collection. On May 19, 1926, his more than ten thousand books, manuscripts, newspapers, and assorted items of African and African Diaspora history and culture were delivered to the New York Public Library and processed for later transfer to the 135th Street Branch. In 1927 the Arthur A. Schomburg Collection was officially opened at the branch’s Negro Division. It was the largest and most comprehensive library of black-related materials in the nation. In 1932 Schomburg was appointed curator of the Negro Division, a position he held until his death in 1938.

          A dozen black theater companies operated during the Harlem Renaissance. After Anita Bush sold the Anita Bush Players Company to the Lafayette Theater, it became a black-owned stock company offering nonstereotypical roles and playing Broadway shows for black audiences. The 2,000-seat Lafayette Theater, at Seventh Avenue and 132nd Street (now a rental building and church complex), was home to the Lafayette Players. As a writer of the Works Progress Administration stated, “The Negro actor found himself free from a great many restraints and taboo that had cramped him for many years. This sense of freedom manifested itself in efforts covering a wide field. Efforts that ran the range from burlesque to opera. … The Lafayette Players group was the medium which carried Negro actors to a fresh start in their theatrical history.” One of their main successes was Shakespeare’s Macbeth with an all-black cast.

          Race movies by blacks for black audiences flourished during the 1920s and the early ’30s. They explored racial themes and featured stories of uplift. Oscar Micheaux was considered the first major African-American filmmaker and producer. He made thirty-two films between 1919 and 1936 (forty-four in all), including Harlem after Midnight in 1934, and often used actors from the Lafayette Theater.

          Harlem-based (and white-owned) Reol Motion Pictures Corporation was founded in 1921 by Robert Levy, manager of the Lafayette Theater. It released nine films and two documentaries on black themes with Lafayette Players. In 1921, it filmed The Sport of the Gods, based on Paul Laurence Dunbar’s novel. Way Down South, by Langston Hughes and Clarence Muse, was the first Hollywood film with a script by black writers

          The Harlem Renaissance spawned a fascination for all things black, and Broadway could not get enough. With a story by comedians Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles and music by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, the black musical comedy Shuffle Along was a huge success. Chocolate Dandies by Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake, and Lew Payton was at the Colonial Theatre. The cast included Josephine Baker.

          In 1927 Porgy by white playwrights DuBose and Dorothy Heward opened on Broadway featuring an all-black cast; and in 1933, Hall Johnson’s Run Little Chillun was the first production of a black folk opera written by a black composer. Its cast had more than two hundred singers and actors. On December 21, 1934, Kykunkor, an African dance operetta by Asadata Dafora, opened on Broadway. Dafora, a native of Sierra Leone, had studied voice in Milan and taught dance in Germany before forming his world-renowned dance company.

          As scholar Maryemma Graham summed up, “While the New Negro Renaissance was not a single phenomenon or located in a single location, it had its most visible expression in Harlem. It is considered by many as the ‘golden age’ of black art because of the level of cultural production that was achieved. Its role as a catalyst for great art within the period and beyond cannot be overestimated.”

          Giving the movement a historical and political perspective, David Levering Lewis, for his part, concluded in When Harlem Was in Vogue, that the Harlem Renaissance was “an elitist response on the part of a tiny group of mostly second-generation, college-educated, and generally affluent Afro-Americans—a response, first to the increasingly raw racism of the times, second, to the frightening Black Zionism of the Garveyites, and, finally, to the remote, but no less frightening, appeal of Marxism.”

Harlem Life

          A keen observer of the Harlem scene, journalist and author Roi Ottley, wrote in his best-selling and award-winning New World A-Coming, “everywhere there seemed to be gaiety, good feeling, and the sound of jazz, ushering in an era of incredible doings. The rhythm of life seemed to beat to the clink of glasses and the thump of drums. From the windows of countless apartments, silhouetted figures rocked and rolled to mellow music.” Jazz and blues were in full swing with brilliant performers like Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Ethel Waters, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, and Ma Rainey.

          Harlem was moving to the music of Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson and to Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” the first blues recording to sell more than one million copies. Harry H. Pace, formerly W. C. Handy’s partner at the Pace and Handy Music Company, operated his Pace Phonograph Corporation from offices at 257 West 138th Street. One of its directors was W. E. B. Du Bois.

          The nightlife was swinging, but it was very much segregated. The Cotton Club—formerly named Club Deluxe, when owned by heavyweight champion Jack Johnson—at 644 Lenox Avenue and 142nd Street (now the site of a housing project) was the property of white mobster Owen “Owney” Madden. It excluded black customers, although all the performers were black. Connie’s Inn, at 2221 Seventh Avenue and 131st Street (next door to the Lafayette Theater), also maintained a whites-only policy. Its owner was white bootlegger Connie Immerman.

          The Ubangi Club—housed next to the Lafayette Theater –opened in 1934 on the location of the former Harlem Club. It attracted racially mixed crowds and a large gay audience. Its main attraction was blues singer and pianist Gladys Bentley, a lesbian who performed in a white tuxedo with a chorus of men in drag. The Clam House on 133rd Street—where Bentley also performed—was another famous queer establishment in a neighborhood that in the 1930s counted quite a few.

          The Exclusive Club (a café, cabaret, and pool room), known as Barron’s for its owner, Barron Wilkins, moved from the Tenderloin to Seventh Avenue and 134th Street and opened in 1915. It was black-owned but catered only to whites and very light-skinned blacks. The Alhambra Theatre on Seventh Avenue at 126th Street offered movies and live entertainment. For dance events, blacks and whites were separated by an alternate-night policy.

          The nine hundred-seat Renaissance Theater at the corner of 138th Street and Seventh Avenue (today a derelict structure) was built in 1921 by the Caribbean immigrants William H. Roach and Joseph H. Sweeney from Montserrat and Cleophus Charity from Antigua, followers of Marcus Garvey and his entrepreneurship philosophy. Two years later, they added a casino and a ballroom at 137th Street. The block-long complex, known as the Renaissance Ballroom and Casino or the Renaissance Theater and Casino, showed films; held award ceremonies, meetings, and banquets; and offered live musical performances. An added attraction was basketball. In 1923, Brooklyn’s best-known black team, the Spartan Five, relocated to Harlem and was renamed the New York Renaissance Big Five (known as the Rens) for the complex where they played before the dance. The Rens were regarded as one of America’s best professional teams.

          Smalls’ Paradise on Seventh Avenue and 135th Street—now the site of the Thurgood Marshall Academy—a high-priced club, catered to blacks and whites and counted several Harlem Renaissance writers among its clientele. Its owner was Edwin Smalls, a descendant of Robert Smalls, the formerly enslaved hero of the Civil War and later U.S. congressman from South Carolina. One of the club’s distinctions was its waiters, who balanced their trays while dancing the Charleston.

          The Savoy Ballroom (demolished in the 1940s) on Lenox Avenue between 140th and 141st streets boasted a dance floor that could accommodate more than three thousand people. It was open to blacks and whites. The Camel Walk, the Shimmy, and the Black Bottom were created there.

          The Apollo Theater on 125th Street was, as reported by a WPA writer,

owned and operated by the Schifman-Brecker Syndicate (who do all of the theatre business that there is to be done in the Black Metropolis) who have a chain that extends as far south as Greensboro N.C. The Lincoln, Renaissance, Odeon, Roosevelt, all movie houses, are under the direction of the Schifman-Brecker Syndicate. And it is the policy of the White owners to install Negro managers, ushers, electricians, porters, etc. It is no wonder that more than two-thirds of Harlem’s black population would vote to the affirmative that all of its theatres are owned by Negroes. The White owners are seldom if ever seen on the premises.

          Madam C. J. Walker, a native of Louisiana, moved to New York in 1916. She had first migrated to Denver, Colorado, in 1906 and launched a career making and marketing beauty products for African-American women. She was the first woman to sell products by mail order, to organize a nationwide membership of door-to-door agents, the “Madam C.J. Walker Hair Culturists Union of America,” and to open her own beauty school. She and her daughter, A’Lelia, established a chain of beauty parlors throughout the United States, South America, and the Caribbean. By 1914, her company had grossed more than a million dollars. Madam C. J. Walker, a philanthropist, supported, notably, the NAACP, and the national Conference on Lynching and offered scholarships to students.

          Casper Holstein, another philanthropist and businessman, emigrated from St. Croix in 1894. He is credited by some with introducing the numbers game—illegal gambling also known as bolito—into Harlem, a scheme he conceived when he worked as a bellhop and porter on Wall Street. Known as the Bolito King, he made a fortune estimated at over $2 million and supported black schools, colleges, and libraries and other causes in the United States, Liberia, and the Caribbean.

          Another famous numbers magnate—also deemed the first numbers banker—was Stephanie St. Clair. Known as Madam St. Clair or Queenie, she was originally from Martinique. St. Clair and her South Carolinian partner Ellsworh “Bumpie” Johnson were central figures of the black underworld. Gambling and other illegal activities, condoned by the police who turned a blind eye, provided job opportunities to some blacks in a city that offered few; but they also created a violent, dangerous environment and robbed working-class people of part of their meager wages.

          In his 1963 essay “My Early Days in Harlem” Langston Hughes captured the neighborhood’s southern, western, and diasporic dimensions:

          Harlem—Southern Harlem—the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida—looking for the Promised Land—dressed in rhythmic words, painted in bright pictures, dancing to jazz…. West Indian Harlem—warm, rambunctious sassy remembering Marcus Garvey, Haitian Harlem, Cuban Harlem, little pockets of tropical dreamed in alien tongues. Magnet Harlem, pulling an Arthur Schomburg from Puerto Rico, pulling an Arna Bontemps all the way from California, … a Charles S. Johnson from Virginia, and A. Philip Randolph from Florida, a Roy Wilkins from Minnesota, an Alta Douglas from Kansas.

          Harlem counted many townhouses and brownstones built for the white middle and upper class. Such were the elegant townhouses on 138th and 139th streets between Seventh and Eighth avenues (now Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and Frederick Douglass avenues). The enclave was a beautiful small oasis that became known as Strivers’ Row in the 1920s. Musicians, actors, and comedians Eubie Blake, Fletcher Henderson, W.C. Handy, Noble Sissle, Bill Bojangles Robinson, and Stepin Fetchit lived there, as did lawyers, dentists, physicians, and other professionals.

          Sugar Hill, a neighborhood of beautiful apartment buildings and row houses rising on Coogan’s Bluff between 145^th and 155^th streets also attracted the elite. W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter White—head of the NAAACP—lived at 409 Edgecombe Avenue, the most exclusive address of the area.  Duke Ellington, painter Aaron Douglas and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall were also residents.  Paul Robeson, Count Basie, Joe Louis, and actor Canada Lee lived a few blocks away, at 555 Edgecombe Avenue.

          A’Lelia Walker lived in an imposing townhouse at 108–110 W. 136th Street (it was torn down and is now the site of the Countee Cullen Library). Designed by black architect Vertner Tandy, her house was frequented by musicians and celebrities. Her salon, known as the Black Tower, was a hallmark of the Harlem Renaissance.

          Other celebrities made their way up to 149th Street when the Dunbar apartments were built at 2588 Seventh Avenue in 1928. John D. Rockfeller, Jr., financed the six buildings that surrounded a courtyard. A black-operated bank, Dunbar National Bank, opened on the grounds. W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Countee Cullen, A. Philip Randolph, Matthew Henson, and Bill Bojangles Robinson were residents. First slated as a cooperative, the complex became rental housing during the Great Depression.

          But generally, there was a lack of correlation between the middle-class housing stock and the new population that was mostly working class, kept by racism in low-paying jobs. To make more profit, landlords divided the stately houses into small apartments. Where one family had previously lived in grandeur, several were squeezed into tiny units. In addition, as the New York Times article “Negro Colony Growing; 150,000 in Harlem Section” (published on July 29, 1923) explained, black tenants paid 5 to 20 and sometimes as much as 50 percent more in rents than the previous white tenants, “who had, probably, the larger income.” A black family, for example, paid $100 a month, while the white family on the other side of the hallway paid $55. Where 100,000 whites had lived, 150,000 black New Yorkers were now cramped, and they often took in lodgers to make ends meet.

          Relegated to menial jobs, exploited by landlords, many Harlemites out of economic necessity resorted to the popular house-rent parties. Charging 15 cents, tenants organized dances and sold food and contraband alcohol in their apartments. The profits helped pay the rent.

The Great Depression and the 1935 Riot

          The financial crash that started on October 24, 1929, and culminated on October 29, known as Black Tuesday, ushered in the Great Depression. In 1930, black New Yorkers numbered 327,700, of whom 69 percent lived in Manhattan. The Depression hit them particularly hard. Their unemployment rate stood as high as 44 percent, more than double the rate of white unemployment. Churches, the National Urban League, and community groups mobilized to help those in need, while the NAACP continued to fight discrimination in employment.

          Some people found work in the federal projects of the Works Progress Administration, founded in 1935, including the work and education programs of the National Youth Administration. By the early 1940s, blacks represented a third of the WPA workforce, although they made up less than 10 percent of the population.

          In the grip of the Depression, Harlemites, as described by Roi Ottley, lived “in unheated railroad flats … with dank, rat-infested toilets, footworn nondescript linoleum, dirty walls ripped and unpainted, and roaches creeping around the floors and woodwork.” Unemployment, discrimination, substandard housing, overcrowding, poverty, and disease led to what he called “slum shock” that culminated in the Harlem Race Riot of 1935.

          On March 19, long-simmering charges of police brutality boiled over when Lino Rivera, a high school student, was arrested for allegedly stealing a pocketknife at the S. H. Kress Five and Dime store on 125th Street. False rumors spread that police had beaten him to death. By nightfall more than ten thousand residents were protesting in the 125th Street main shopping area. About two hundred stores were destroyed, three blacks were killed, thirty received bullet wounds, more than two hundred were injured, and one hundred were arrested. In the end, to assuage the community, Lino Rivera was photographed with Samuel Battle, the first black patrolman in Manhattan, and the fliers were passed around the neighborhood.

          Responding to the incident, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., wrote the first of three articles for the New York Post. He described the unrest as a ‘‘protest against empty stomachs, overcrowded tenements, filthy sanitation, rotten foodstuffs, chiseling landlords and merchants, discrimination in relief, disfranchisement, and against disinterested administration.”

          Following the uprising, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia named a commission chaired by Charles H. Roberts, a prominent Harlem dentist. Countee Cullen and A. Philip Randolph were among its members. Howard University sociologist E. Franklin Frazier directed the studies and surveys on which the commission’s report was based. LaGuardia suppressed the report as inflammatory, but the New York Amsterdam News obtained a copy and published excerpts on July 18, 1936, under the title “Complete Riot Report Bared.”

          The committee’s conclusion was that the riot occurred because of “Jim Crowism” and pervasive “oppression” of African Americans. It called for an end to employment discrimination; for new schools and more teachers in Harlem; for more black staff at city hospitals, especially at Harlem Hospital; and for an end to police brutality. The report concluded, “Lack of confidence in the police and even hostility towards these representatives of the law were evident at every stage of the riot. This attitude of the people of Harlem has been built up over many years of experience with the police in this section.”

          The protest against the entrenched racial discrimination that had plagued black New Yorkers for centuries focused local and national attention on the black plight during the Depression and served as a catalyst for improving African Americans’ access to jobs and welfare services. The Harlem River Houses, one of the first two federally funded housing projects in New York City, was constructed in 1936 from 151st to 153rd streets along the Harlem River Drive. Built to provide housing for working people, the project was an outcome of the riots.

          Despite the fierce fight put up by white residents, Harlem had transformed itself into the “Black Mecca,” but whites still owned most of the numerous businesses that dotted the landscape, with the exception of beauty salons, funeral parlors, shoeshine stands, and a few other establishments. “The saloons were run by the Irish,” wrote Claude McKay in Home to Harlem, “the restaurants by the Greeks, the ice and fruit stands by the Italians, the grocery and haberdashery by the Jews. The only Negro businesses, excepting barber shops, were the churches and the cabarets.”

          In the 1930s, the refusal of white merchants to hire black employees led to numerous picket lines and boycotts organized by the Citizens’ League for Fair Play with the slogan “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work”. Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., led several hundred demonstrators to City Hall, demanding more black doctors and nurses and better health care at Harlem Hospital. The event was Powell Jr.’s inaugural foray as a community leader as he headed the Harlem Citizens’ Committee for More and Better Jobs (formed in 1930 by Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, and other ministers) in its “Jobs for Negroes” movement.

          Believing Powell’s group was Communist influenced, A. Philip Randolph formed the Harlem Jobs Committee. Both groups picketed stores and utility company outlets throughout the city. “Tuesday is ‘black-out night,’” declared Powell in a campaign to force Consolidated Edison to hire black workers. Every Tuesday night, GNYCC supporters turned off their electric lights and lighted two-cent candles, which flickered from many Harlem apartment windows. The campaign climaxed with a “Bill-Payers’ Parade” at Con Ed’s office at 32 West 125th Street. Hundreds of Con Ed customers paid their bills with nickels and dimes. Con Ed reached an agreement with Powell to hire black trainees.

Migrations and New Neighborhoods

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During Reconstruction (1865–77), two migrations gradually changed not only the demographics of the city’s African-American population but also the geographic center of black New York. Increasing numbers of southerners settled in, as did immigrants from the Caribbean; and black New Yorkers’ movement north continued.

          Manhattan’s black population grew from 9,943 to 13,000 between 1865 and 1870, and to 19,500 in 1880. By then, more than four out of ten black New Yorkers were migrants and 36 percent of black New Yorkers were born in the South. The largest increase, 66 percent, came between 1890 and 1910.

          As important as it was, the black migration was dwarfed by the immigration of Europeans, mostly from Ireland, Germany, and Italy. In New York, Irish and Italian immigrants displaced numerous African Americans as domestics, laborers and in skilled positions. Segregation and discrimination became more imbedded. Black New Yorkers found themselves living in a city that continued to bar them from most skilled jobs, segregated them in poor neighborhoods, and forbade them entry to many public places.

          Denied work as longshoremen, street cleaners, baggage handlers, cement carriers, and garment workers, African Americans fought back by taking jobs when unions went on strike. They also brought numerous lawsuits against hotels, restaurants, and theaters that denied them service.

          In mid-August 1900, several thousand whites assaulted and brutally beat African Americans after a black man fatally stabbed an undercover white police officer in the Ternderloin district (see “The 1900 Riot” below). As a result, the social, geographic, political, and demographic landscape of black New York changed once again.

          As violence against the black community increased throughout the country, the end of the first decade of the twentieth century saw New Yorkers launch local and national organizations to protect and defend their rights: the Citizens’ Protective League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the National Urban League.

Migrations and Black Neighborhoods

          By 1900, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, New Orleans, and Philadelphia each had larger black populations than New York City’s; and despite a 66 percent increase in ten years, the black community represented only 1.8 percent of the total population of the Five Boroughs (about 66,000 out of 3,437,000). What was new was that for the first time most black New Yorkers were born in the South, especially in Virginia and North Carolina, announcing the upcoming waves of the Great Migration.

          Southerners, just freed from slavery, moved north in droves in hopes of bettering their economic and social conditions. In 1910 Manhattan, only 14,300 African Americans out of 60,500 had been born in the city.

          As was true in all cities except Chicago, females were the majority of the black population. There were 124 women for every 100 men in New York (142 in Atlanta, 126 in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore). One of the reasons for this imbalance was the abundant availability of domestic work and the widespread use of independent laundresses and seamstresses.

          Black New Yorkers were not always sympathetic to the new migrants. Long-time residents, especially in the middle class, were wary of what they saw as the newcomers’ lack of education and their rural ways. In 1880, to demarcate themselves from the newcomers, they founded the Society of the Sons of New York and the Society of the Daughters of New York. The Southerners adopted the same pattern and established state-based organizations as well, such as the Sons and Daughters of South Carolina, the Sons of Virginia, and the Sons of North Carolina.

          Caribbeans had always been a part of the ethnic mix of New York: upwards of 80 percent of the black population of colonial New York had come from the islands. But after the Civil War, Caribbeans started to immigrate voluntarily to the city. Caribbeans owned the vast majority of black businesses in the San Juan Hill area in midtown Manhattan. As early as 1897 businessmen Clarence Robinson and George Joell had founded the Bermuda Benevolent Association in San Juan Hill. The association later purchased a building in Harlem.

          Between 1900 and 1915 more than 51,000 Caribbeans entered the United States, mostly through Ellis Island, then the busiest immigrant inspection gateway in the country. The largest contingent remained in the city. Economic hardship, British colonial rule, and natural disasters represented push factors for emigrants, while a flourishing economy, higher wages, and better employment opportunities in the United States pulled them in. In 1910, the 12,000 Caribbeans living in New York represented 13 percent of the total black population of 92,000. A disproportionately large number went into business.

          The demographic and economic importance of the migrants and immigrants as well as their dynamism and spirit of enterprise can be seen in the number of businesses they operated. A survey done by George E. Haynes for his study The Negro at Work in New York shows that in 1909, out of 330 black business owners in Manhattan whose origin was known (out of 363), 67 percent were Southerners—Virginians, South Carolinians, Georgians and North Carolinians were the leaders–and almost 20 percent Caribbeans. Only eight were born in the City. Immigration from Africa was only a trickle.

          Brooklyn became part of the City of New York in 1898. Its black population at that time was small, just under 20,000. By 1910 it had reached 22,708. Reflecting the migration trends, only 8,800 Brooklynites were born in the borough; 11,180 were born in other states; and 2,500 were foreign born.

          The southern and international migrations were paralleled by another within the city. While most African Americans had lived in Lower Manhattan from the seventeenth century, they now moved to midtown and uptown. By 1870, Five Points’ black population had been reduced by 50 percent. Little Africa in Greenwich Village was disappearing. As the Southern Workman, the organ of the Hampton Institute, noted in 1902, “In former years a large colony occupied the blocks bounded by 3rd, Thompson, Bleecker, Jones and 4th streets and 6th avenue, but gradually they are being driven out and forced uptown by the Italian fruit vendors.” That area became Little Italy.

          At the beginning of the twentieth century, two out of three black New Yorkers lived in Manhattan. The locations of “colored schools” pinpoint some of these black neighborhoods. Downtown schools were located at 135–137 Mulberry Street, 51 Laurens Street in Five Points, and 128 West 17th Street. Uptown counted only one school, at 120th Street and Fourth Avenue. But the school at West 41st Street and Seventh Avenue, and The New York Colored Mission at 137 West 30th Street,  identify another, newer and increasingly important black neighborhood. The vast majority of African Americans, about 25,000, now lived on the west side of Manhattan in two areas known as the Tenderloin and San Juan Hill.

          San Juan Hill was one of the most congested areas in the city, one of its blocks was home  to 6,173 people. Situated between 60th and 64th streets from Tenth to Eleventh avenues, it was predominantly African American and Caribbean.

          To Mary White Ovington—a white activist author of Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York —San Juan Hill was “a bit of Africa, as Negroid in aspect as any district you are likely to visit in the South. A large majority of its residents are Southerners and West Indians. . . . The dwellings . . . are human hives, honeycombed with little rooms thick with human beings. Bedrooms open into air shafts that admit no fresh breezes, only foul air carrying too often the germs of disease.”

          San Juan Hill was a dangerous area, where tensions ran high between the black residents west of Amsterdam Avenue and their Irish neighbors east of it. These frictions exploded into a race riot in July 1905 during which the police killed one black man and arrested and beat scores of others. San Juan Hill remained a black neighborhood until the 1960s, when it was demolished to make place for Lincoln Center.

          The boundaries of the Tenderloin changed over time, but it extended roughly from 20th Street to 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue and Seventh Avenue. Blacks had moved in during the 1870s as white residents who could afford to leave migrated further north to avoid the noise generated by the construction and then the operation of the elevated train. Their apartments were taken over mostly by black southerners who lived in close proximity with Irish immigrants with whom they competed for low-paying, low-skilled jobs. The animosity between the two groups was high.

          Ovington noted the discrimination black renters encountered: “The shelter afforded is poorer than that given the white resident whose dwelling touches the black, the rents are a little higher, and the landlord fails to pay attention to ragged paper, or to a ceiling which scatters plaster flakes upon the floor.”

          The Tenderloin, like San Juan Hill, was New York’s red light district, but part of it was also the heart of the black middle class and a haven for artists and writers, whose presence earned the neighborhood the name of Black Bohemia. West 53rd Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues was where professionals lived in expensive rentals. The street boasted the Colored Men’s YMCA, a variety of small businesses, Mount Olivet Baptist Church, St. Mark’s Methodist Episcopal Church, St. Benedict the Moor Roman Catholic Church, and the offices of major fraternal societies and political clubs.

          The first all-black YMCA established in a northern city was the center of black New York, and two black-owned hotels—the Marshall and the Maceo—were the heart of intellectual, social, and artistic life. The five-story Marshall (127–129 West 53rd), owned by James L. Marshall, was a hotbed of jazz; the first jazz band to appear in New York was organized there by James Europe and Ford Dabney. James Weldon Johnson recalled in his Black Manhattan,

          There gathered the actors, the musicians, the composers, the writers and the better-paid vaudevillians; and there one went to get a close-up of Cole and Johnson, Williams and Walker, Ernest Hogan, Will Marion Cook, Jim Europe, Ada Overton, Abbie Mitchell, Al Johns, Theodore Drury, Will Dixon and Ford Dabney. Paul Laurence Dunbar was often there. A good many white actors and musicians also frequented the Marshall, and it was no unusual thing for some of the biggest Broadway stars to run up there for the evening.

          Benjamin F. Thomas (originally from South Carolina) owned the Maceo Hotel, at 213 W. 53rd. The place had, according to Johnson, “a more staid clientele” than the Marshall. In 1905, members of the Head Hallmen’s Association held their dinner at the Maceo Hotel. They were employed at a variety of New York City hotels.

          But soon black life would be exiled from the Tenderloin. An impetus to the forced migration out of midtown was the demolition in 1910 of many predominantly black blocks to make way for the construction of the Pennsylvania Railroad Station.

Harlem

          Harlem, a mostly white (Irish, Italian, and Jewish) middle-class neighborhood, had undergone many changes. In 1865, the widening of Sixth Avenue north of Central Park to the Harlem River, and the following year the construction and widening of two major roadways—Harlem Lane (St. Nicholas Avenue) and Manhattan Avenue—north of Central Park had made the neighborhood more accessible. In 1873 the Town of Harlem was annexed by New York City. The area located between 110th Street and 145th Street became Ward 12.

          The extension of the elevated trains and the completion of the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) subway system triggered the rapid urbanization of upper Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs. Brownstones and townhouses were built for the wealthy. Harlem then “was a cheerful neighborhood of broad drives, brownstone dwellings, and large apartment houses,” wrote Roi Ottley in New World A-Coming. “The white gentry resided here in suburban aloofness. . . . Lenox Avenue was used for the showing of thorough bred horses, and polo was actually being played on the Polo Grounds.”

          The neighborhood also attracted poor Italian immigrants who settled in the tenement houses between 110th and 125th streets. A few African Americans had lived in Harlem for centuries, but their numbers had been low. As the neighborhood developed and the bourgeoisie settled in, African Americans found job opportunities as domestics and artisans. From 219 in 1850, they were 600 by 1870 and more than 1,000 in 1880.

          But bigger change was on the way. The anticipated extension of the subway line drove a building frenzy that led to rampant speculation. By 1904, when the subway was completed up to 145th Street, Harlem had been overbuilt. The cost of land and houses had reached unsound heights, and the housing market finally collapsed, leaving a large inventory of vacant apartments and houses.

          On June 15, 1904, Massachusetts-born Philip A. Payton, Jr., a real estate agent, founded the Afro-American Realty Company. Selling shares to affluent African Americans, he launched a drive to bring blacks to Harlem. He attributed his first opportunity to a dispute between two white landlords on West 134th Street. “To get even, one of them turned his house over to me to fill with colored tenants. I was successful in renting and managing this house, and after a time I was able to induce other landlords,” he stated.

          An article in the New York Herald, on December 25, 1905, titled “Negroes Move Into Harlem” pointed out, “During the last three years the flats in 134th Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues, that were occupied entirely by white folks, have been captured for occupancy by a Negro population. . . . The cause of the colored influx is inexplicable.”

          Another opportunity for African Americans presented itself when on December 10, 1907, John E. Nail and Henry C. Parker, former salesmen with the Afro-American Realty Company, opened their own firm as Philip Payton’s closed. The new business thrived and was instrumental in moving the 53rd Street YMCA to Harlem.

          Samuel Battle, the first black patrolman of the New York Police Department, recalled Harlem in 1910: “All of Eighth Avenue was Irish, and Seventh Avenue was a mixture of Irish and Jewish. One hundred and Thirty-seventh Street to 140th Street, any place below 133rd St., was Irish, German, and Italian. One thing I shall never forget. The Irish boys on Eighth Avenue wouldn’t let the other races come on Eighth Avenue at all. It was forbidden ground to them. Up here at 142nd Street and Ninth Avenue we had the Canary Island gang, composed of Irish. They were tough boys.”

          The neighborhood was in transition, as Battle, who lived on 136th Street, recalled. “During those early years, it was a transition period, whites to Negroes. There were houses where Italian, Jewish, and Irish lived, but they’d let colored people in if they paid more money. Still the places were deteriorating because they didn’t make the money that they had been making. A lot of people got wealthy as a result.” “The Reminiscences of Samuel J. Battle,” The Oral History Collection of Columbia University.

          A map drawn by George E. Haynes, Columbia University graduate and Professor of Social Science at Fisk University, shows that by 1911, blacks in Harlem were mostly concentrated in six blocks on both sides of Lenox Avenue between 135th and 132nd streets.

          In February 1911, arguing that the black presence devaluated properties from 10 to 20 percent, ninety-one owners (85 percent of the total) on 136th Street filed a covenant in the Hall of Records to put a stop to what they called the “One Hundred and Thirty-fourth Street Black Belt.” They agreed not to sell or rent their properties to any “negro, mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon” or even have them as guests for the next fifteen years. They also agreed not to have more than one male and one female or two females as domestics.

          Nevertheless, black institutions moved in or were soon established in the area. In 1911 Saint Philip’s Episcopal Church, which had migrated in 1886 from Center Street to 25th Street, moved once again, this time to a new building at 214 West 134th Street, designed by the black New York architects, Vertner Tandy and George Foster, Jr. Active supporters of the migration to Harlem, St. Philip’s pastor Rev. Hutchens C. Bishop and parishioner John Nail engineered a deal worth over a million dollars, including land for the new church and for apartment buildings to be rented to black households. In 1914 St. James Presbyterian Church relocated from West 55th Street to West 137th Street; and the Libya Hotel opened at 149 West 139th Street.

          White residents fought hard against the changing demographics. They formed several organizations to defend their neighborhood against the “black invasion” and the “black plague.” They offered discounts to white renters, refused to sell property to blacks, or evicted them from rentals. The Harlem Home News warned, “Wake up and get busy before it is too late to repel the black hordes that stand ready to destroy business in the very heart of Harlem.”

          Despite these efforts, Harlem was about to become the center of black life not only locally but also nationally, and for a time the cultural capital of the black world.

The 1900 Riot

          On August 13, 1900, at 2:00 a.m., during a heat wave that had tempers flaring, Arthur Harris, a twenty-two-year-old migrant from Virginia, got into a fight with Robert Thorpe, a white plainclothes police officer who was trying to arrest Harris’s common-law wife, May Enoch, for soliciting (although she was just waiting for Harris) at the corner of 41st Street and Eighth Avenue in the Tenderloin district. Fearing for his life, Harris stabbed Thorpe and then fled to Washington, D.C. Thorpe died the following day.

          On August 15, rioting erupted in the Tenderloin and rapidly spread as black men and women were attacked where they worked or were pulled out of streetcars. Scores of white policemen were reported to have taken part in the attacks, but a grand jury later refused to indict any of them. Houses were looted and burned. Among the many injured was poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. African Americans still fearing for their lives armed themselves. In the Tenderloin, 145 guns and ammunition were sold. The riot lasted until August 16 when a thunderstorm dispersed the mobs. Scattered clashes continued for over a month.

          On September 12, 3,500 people gathered for a meeting at Carnegie Hall in support of the newly formed Citizens’ Protective League, which claimed five thousand members. The league had been organized at St. Mark’s Church on West 53rd Street. It demanded the removal of all officers involved in the riot. Seventy-nine people submitted affidavits about the violence they had sustained; the league published them in the booklet Story of the Riot.

          “I was clubbed by three officers. The officers led the crowd, and did not interfere when others were beating me,” one man testified. “They made no attempt to disperse the crowd. I did nothing whatever to justify this brutal assault upon me by the police.” One woman stated, “About two o’clock A.M. I heard shooting in the street, and in a short while after I saw two police officers dragging a colored man from 341 West 36th Street, who had on no clothing except a gauze undershirt. The officers were clubbing the colored man, and the man was begging them not to club him, as he had done nothing. The only answer he got was more blows and a reply from one of the officers as follows: ‘Shut up, you black son of a b—-, or I’ll kill you.’”

          Arthur Harris was arrested in October in Washington. Condemned to hard labor for life, he died in 1908.

          James Weldon Johnson reflected that the riot “was a brutish orgy, which, if it was not incited by the police, was, to say the least, abetted by them. But this fourth of the great New York riots involving the Negro was really symptomatic of a national condition. The status of the Negro as a citizen had been steadily declining for twenty-five years; and at the opening of the twentieth century his civil state was, in some respects, worse than at the close of the Civil War.”

          On December 22, a Harper’s Weekly editorial noted the profound hostility that confronted African Americans in the city,

          The Negro is not a newcomer in New York. He has been here for two centuries and a half . . . but even during the time of bondage his condition was not much worse than now. . . . The strangest thing about this strange problem is that so many native Americans should feel hostile—not actively hostile, but in sympathy with the lawless Negro-baiters. I heard many native Americans, even New Englanders say after the riot that they would have been glad if many of the Negroes had been killed.

National Organizations

          Responding to antiblack violence throughout the country and aiming to assist migrants as they moved north, two major national organizations dedicated to the defense of African Americans’ rights and to the promotion of their welfare were born in New York in the first decade of the twentieth century.

          In the wake of the August 1908 race riot of Springfield, Illinois—Abraham Lincoln’s hometown—that left seven blacks dead and vast destruction of property, Mary White Ovington organized a small meeting in her San Juan Hill apartment with Socialists William English Walling and Henry Moskowitz. “It was then,” she wrote, “that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was born. It was born in a little room of a New York apartment.”

          Sixty people responded to Ovington, Walling, and Moskowitz’s call for a meeting to discuss racial justice. Seven were African Americans, including W. E. B. Du Bois, cofounder in 1905 of the civil rights organization Niagara Movement; journalist and civil rights leader Ida B. Wells-Barnett; and Mary Church Terrell, active in civil rights and women’s suffrage. From its downtown office at 20 Vesey Street, the NAACP addressed issues such as lynching and the destruction of black communities. Du Bois, a member of the board of directors, was the director of publicity and research and the editor of its monthly journal, The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, whose first issue was published in November 1910.

          The interracial National League on Urban Conditions among Negroes (National Urban League) was founded in New York City in September 1910. It consolidated three organizations: the Committee on Urban Conditions among Negroes, the Committee for Improving the Industrial Condition of Negroes in New York, and the National League for the Protection of Colored Women. George Edmund Haynes, a cofounder of the National Urban League, became its first executive director. In 1912, Haynes was the first African American awarded a PhD by Columbia University. His doctoral dissertation was, appropriately, “The Negro at Work in New York City.” The League helped Southern migrants in housing, education, employment, and health and opened chapters in the various northern cities where they had settled.

Culture and Entertainment

          New York was the birthplace, infamously, of the genre called “coon songs” that depicted stereotypically violent, philandering, shiftless, and impudent urban black men; and promiscuous, money-hungry women (as opposed to the rural blacks of minstrel songs). Black performer Ernest Hogan created the genre with his 1890 hit “All Coons Look Alike to Me.” These songs enjoyed tremendous success among white New Yorkers and informed their distorted vision of the black men and women in their midst. As scholar Marcy S. Sacks observed in Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City before World War I, these songs “legitimized latent (and explicit) denunciations of the black urban migration, affecting black New Yorkers’ everyday struggles to meet the challenges of city life.”

          A Trip to Coontown by Bob Cole—the first full-length musical comedy written, produced, directed, and performed by blacks—opened on April 4, 1898, at the Third Avenue Theater, and later toured the country for three years. According to scholar Krystyn R. Moon’s article “Forgotten Manuscripts: A Trip to Coontown,” Cole “played to and against stereotypes of African Americans.” For example, the song ‘The Wedding of the Chinee and the Coon’, “was more than a comedic ditty that perpetuated African American and Chinese immigrant stereotypes. To address interracial marriage in a period when African American men were lynched for merely looking at European American women, [the song is] a bold political statement that celebrates a future where interracial marriage is commonplace.”

          The most popular black actors of the times were Bert Williams, born in Antigua, and George Walker. This multitalented and internationally renowned team, who formed their own company with their wives, had numerous hits, including In Dahomey (1902), and Bandana Land and In Abyssinia (1908). Williams and Walker are credited with having turned the Cake Walk into an international sensation. Starting in 1910, Williams pursued a solo career with the Ziegfeld Follies. He was at the time the country’s most successful black comedian.

          An important development on the musical scene in 1911 was the organization by James Reese Europe of the Clef Club, which served as a booking office for African-American musicians. Europe, born in Mobile, Alabama, had moved to New York in 1903. In 1912 he organized a concert at Carnegie Hall featuring an orchestra of 125 of New York’s distinguished black musicians presenting works by black composers. The following year, on February 12, 1913, a ”Concert of Negro Music“ was held at Carnegie Hall in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. It featured the Clef Club Orchestra conducted by Europe.

          In 1909, the Lincoln Theater opened at 56–58 West 135th Street. Owned by the Cuban businesswoman Maria Downs and managed by African American Eugene “Frenchy” Elmore, it was the first to cater to a mixed audience. Increasing its capacity to 850 seats in 1915, the theater offered vaudeville shows, movies, and plays. The Anita Bush Players opened The Girl at the Fort in November 1915 before moving—as Elmore also did—to the Lafayette Theater over Bush’s refusal to change the name of her company to the Lincoln Players. Over the years, Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Florence Mills, Ma Rainey, Fletcher Henderson, and many other celebrities appeared at the Lincoln—now the Metropolitan AME Church.

          An emerging figure of the times was Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. Born in Puerto Rico in 1874, he had migrated to New York City in 1891 at age seventeen. He was involved in the independence movements of Puerto Rico and Cuba before turning his attention to the African American community. In 1911, he cofounded the Negro Society for Historical Research, designed to collect information and conduct research into the history and culture of black people worldwide. In 1914, Schomburg was elected to the American Negro Academy, whose objective was the promotion of education, science, literature, and art. An avid collector, he amassed a collection of books, pamphlets, manuscripts and art and became an important player during the Harlem Renaissance.

          In October 1913, the Emancipation Proclamation Commission—entirely made up of black men—of the State of New York presented a ten-day national exhibition at the 12th Regiment Armory in Manhattan. A panorama of black history from Africa to emancipation, it attracted more than thirty thousand visitors. W. E. B. Du Bois, chairman of the committee on exhibits, asked sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller to create a statue. Her eight-foot-high Spirit of Emancipation featured the standing figures of determined and dignified African Americans.

Slavery and Freedom

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The beginning of black history in the place that became New York City dates to May or June 1613 when Juan (Jan) Rodriguez, a free sailor from Hispaniola (in what is today the Dominican Republic) who worked for a Dutch fur trading company, was left on Manhattan Island—following a dispute, according to some sources—to trade with Native Americans. He had eighty hatchets, knives, a musket, and a sword. Multilingual, cosmopolitan, socially and commercially savvy, Rodriguez became an interpreter with the Rockaway Indians, married into the nation, and helped establish a trade agreement with them. He became the first nonindigenous permanent resident of Manhattan and remained the only one until 1621, when the Dutch West India Company built a settlement on the Hudson River and began introducing African labor.

          The Africans’ legal status was not uniform during this early period. Some were free, others were half-free, and still others were enslaved, however all frequently enjoyed some of the same rights as white residents. Some owned property, bore arms, and engaged in the same commerce, both legal and extralegal, as whites. But beginning in 1655, however, colonial authorities transformed New Amsterdam into a slave trading port and increased restrictions on the African residents.

          The English won control of New Amsterdam in 1664 and renamed it New York. Within a few years, the town was positioned as a major outpost in the British colonial empire. It developed elaborate slave codes designed to control and restrict the behavior of enslaved men and women and to strip free blacks of the rights and property they had held, however tenuously, under Dutch rule. The slave revolt of 1712 and the so-called Negro plot of 1741 put New Yorkers on notice that the seeds of rebellion had been sown in their midst.

          By the turn of the eighteenth century, enslaved and free black New Yorkers had become sufficiently familiar with the laws to both openly break them and try using them to advance their own interests and causes. They waged constant struggles, individually and collectively, against the constraints on their lives. They founded some of the earliest African-American churches, schools, and publications in the country. Black New Yorkers also established and ran successful businesses, created Underground Railroad stations, assisted and defended runaways, and helped organize and run antislavery and abolitionist societies. They established the first African-American theater and invented new genres of music and dance.

          But the vicious 1863 Draft Riots, during which African Americans were beaten, maimed, lynched, hanged, and burned and had their property destroyed, exposed the brutal reality of black life in New York.

The Dutch Years

          In 1626, eleven Africans were brought to New Amsterdam, the capital of the colony of New Netherland (which stretched from southern Massachusetts to Delaware). Originally from Congo, Angola, and the island of São Tomé, they were Paulo d’Angola, Simon Congo, Anthony Portuguese, Jan Francisco, Little [Kleyne] Manuel, Big [Groot] Manuel, Manuel de Gerrit de Reus, Garcia d’Angola, Peter Santomee, Little Anthony, and Jan de Fort Orange. Most historians give 1626 for their arrival, but it has also been conjectured that the men could have been part of the crew of a pirated Portuguese ship brought to New Amsterdam on the Bruynvis in 1627. Three women were brought in two years later.

          This first group of Africans worked for the Dutch West India Company and was housed at the Saw Mill, in a camp referred to as Quartier van de Swarten (Quarters of the Blacks). It was located along the East River in the vicinity of 75th Street.

          On February 25, 1644, eighteen years after their arrival, the men, who had petitioned the local Dutch authorities for their freedom—arguing that they had worked long enough and could hardly support their families—were liberated under what became known as “half-freedom”. Each one received land on the condition that he deliver one “Fat hog” and twenty-two and a half bushels of corn, wheat, peas, or beans to the Dutch West India Company every year. The Africans also had to serve the Company on request, but would get paid. Failure to comply with these requirements meant reenslavement. The newly freed men’s wives were also emancipated, but the manumission document stated that “their children at present born or yet to be born, shall be bound and obligated to serve the Honorable West India Company as Slaves.”

          From 1643 to 1716, approximately thirty land grants were owned by free black men and women. The Africans’ plots—from one to twenty acres—were located a mile from New Amsterdam, beyond the palisades that surrounded the town. Their collective 300 acres stretched from the Bowery Road near the Collect Pond, also called Fresh Water Pond (the town’s main source of drinking water, in the vicinity of today’s Canal Street), to Fifth Avenue and 34th Street. Manuel de Gerrit received much of today’s Washington Square Park, while Paulo d’Angola’s land stretched from Minetta Lane to Thompson Street. By the 1640s, what was known as “the land of the blacks”—a kind of black frontier—partially covered what today are Chinatown, Little Italy, SoHo, NoHo, Greenwich Village, and Union Square, north to 34^th Street. (The last grant was owned by Francisco Bastien, whose family sold the property at 34th Street following the 1712 law that prohibited blacks from leaving real estate to their descendants.)

          Authorities hoped that these properties, located in the unsettled area north of New Amsterdam, would serve as a buffer zone between the village and Native American settlements.

          During the Dutch period, village merchants were more interested in trading than in farming, and therefore a plantation economy did not emerge. Enslaved men and women cleared land, cut timber, made palisades and lime, and built houses, roads, and the fort of New Amsterdam. Enslaved men were also sent to retrieve runaways and were enrolled in the fight against Native Americans, as Peter Stuyvesant emphasized in a 1660 letter when he asked for “Negroes” from Curacao. “They ought to be stout and strong fellows fit for immediate employment on this fortress [Fort Amsterdam] and other works; also, if required, in war against the wild barbarians, either to pursue them when retreating, or else to carry some of the soldiers’ baggage.” Enslaved women mostly worked as domestics.

          When the New Amsterdam Town Council approved construction of a city wall, Africans built it with logs “twelve feet long, eighteen inches in circumference, sharpened at the upper end” from river to river across Manhattan. This wall gave its name to the contemporary Wall Street. After Haarlem—named for a city in Holland—was settled in 1658, Africans built the road that linked it to New Amsterdam. They and their descendants not only created the infrastructure of the new colony but also contributed to feeding its inhabitants by cultivating the six farms (bouwerys in Dutch) established in 1625.

          In 1636, minister Everardus Bogardus requested a teacher from Holland “to train the youth of the Dutch and the Blacks in the knowledge of Jesus Christ.” A school was opened (to boys only). The institution is today known as Collegiate School. Some of the black children became farmers or learned crafts like carpentry, sail making, and metalworking. Lucas Peters, son of freedman Pieter Santomee, established himself as a barber surgeon (doctor).

          When Dutch rule ended in October 1664, New Amsterdam counted 375 people of African origin or descent. Seventy-five were free.

The Slave Trade

          In May 1646, Africans transported on the Tamandare from the present state of Pernambuco in Brazil (then occupied by the Dutch) were sold in New Amsterdam in what appears to be the first slave sale in the town. The first people to be brought in directly from Africa followed them in the summer of 1655. The Witte Paardt (White Horse) had embarked 455 people at Loango (Congo). Only 391 survived the ordeal of the ocean crossing. They were sold away, without benefit for the colony, and the Director General and Council of New Netherland complained “that the negroes lately arrived here from the Bight of Guinea … have been transported and carried hence without the Hon’ble Company or the inhabitants of this province having derived any revenue or benefit therefrom.” To remedy this situation, “the Director General and Council have resolved and concluded that there shall be paid] at the general treasury 10 per cent of the] value or purchase money of the negroes who shall be carried away or exported [from here elsewhere beyond the jurisdiction of New Netherland.” (Edmund B. O’ Callaghan, Voyages of the Slavers St John & Arms of Amsterdam.)

          New Amsterdam wanted to make money from the selling of Africans to other colonies, but it also wanted to keep as many as possible for its own development. In a letter dated March 9, 1660, to Governor Peter Stuyvesant, the directors of the Dutch West India Company gave their blessings to the slave trade from the Caribbean that the people of New Amsterdam wanted to engage in,

As to the trade in slaves or negroes, in which the inhabitants there would like to engage in Curacao [a Dutch colony and important slave trade center], it is open to them, as to other traders, but not at a lower price, because the Company would be too great a loser. As however the importation of negroes would greatly benefit the cultivation of the soil and we are very anxious for its promotion, because the welfare of the country mostly depends on it, we have agreed and resolved to make a trial with a number of negroes, whom we shall send to you by the first ship or ships from Curacao. You must sell these at public auction to the highest bidder, on condition that they are not to be carried off from there, but employed in cultivating the soil. (Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New York, vol. XIV)

          Ships also continued to arrive directly from Africa and Africans could be paid for in beaver pelts, wheat, rye, peas, or salted beef and pork . The Wapen van Amsterdam embarked 354 people in the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar in 1663; and on August 15, 1664, just before the colony passed into British hands, a group of West Central Africans landed in New Amsterdam. The Gideon had embarked 421 people at Loango, but only 348 had made it to Curacao. From there 300 continued the voyage, and 291—154 men and 137 women—landed in New Amsterdam, the last Africans brought by the Dutch.

          Under British rule, New York became a more aggressive actor in the transatlantic slave trade. The Duke of York (the future King James II)—for whom the city and the colony were renamed—was a major shareholder of the Royal African Company, the British firm that held the monopoly in the British slave trade. He granted port privileges to ships engaged in the slave trade, and encouraged New York residents to become more actively involved in it.

          Whereas in the early years 70 percent of the captives came from the Caribbean, 70 percent now arrived directly from Africa, introduced by the Royal African Company. For example, the Wolf had arrived on May 10, 1751, from the Gold Coast (Ghana) after 112 days at sea, with seventy-three people on board. The New York Gazette of May 13 advertised their sale: “To be sold at publick Vendue, on Friday the 17^th Instant, at 10 o’clock in the Morning, at the Meal Market, A NUMBER of Likely Negro Slaves, lately imported in the Sloop Wolf, directly from Africa. Those that are not disposed of on that Day, will be sold at publick Vendue the Friday following.”

          In all it is estimated that the slave trade from Africa brought to New York 8,208 people—out of 9,575 who had embarked. Not all remained in the colony; many were sold to the South and the Caribbean. About 53 percent of the Africans arrived between 1701 and 1770 in 76 documented voyages. Of the close to 4,000 whose origins are known, 1,271 arrived from Madagascar (between 1676 and 1700), 998 from Congo (1655–75), 757 from Senegambia (1751–70), 504 from the Gold Coast (1751–70), 239 from Sierra Leone (1751–70), and 217 from nonidentified areas of the continent. Africans brought from the Caribbean during the British period came overwhelmingly from Jamaica—an estimated 900—and Antigua (about 334).

          To respond to the city’s demand, an official slave market opened in 1711 on a pier located at Wall Street and the East River. Slave auctions were also held at other markets in lower Manhattan, including the Merchant’s Coffee House, the Fly Market, and Proctor’s Vendue House.

           In 1788, New York State made it illegal to sell slaves introduced after 1785 and declared all such people free. A year earlier, the United States Constitution, in its Article 1, section 9, had stipulated, “The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.” Following the text to the letter, on March 3, 1807, President Thomas Jefferson signed into law a bill approved by Congress the day before “to prohibit the importation of slaves into any port or place within the jurisdiction of the United States.” The act was to take effect on January 1, 1808.

           On December 2, 1807, a large crowd of black New Yorkers met at the African Free School and decided to celebrate January 1, 1808, with “demonstrations of gratitude and thanksgiving.” On that day, Peter Williams, Jr., delivered the keynote address, “An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade.” (Born in New Jersey to a mother from the island of St. Kitts and a veteran of the Revolutionary War, the young man went on to organize St. Philip’s African Church in Harlem in 1818.) James Varick delivered his “Sermon of Thanksgiving on the Occasion of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade” at the African Church, later the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. (He became the first bishop of the Church in 1822.) Parade marchers carried antislavery signs that read “Am I not a man and a brother?” These annual commemorations went on until 1815.

           But by midcentury, New York City had come to dominate the illegal international slave trade to the American South, Brazil, and Cuba. With the help of lawyers established on Pearl Street, Portuguese slave dealers organized operations to West Central Africa. Along the South Street seaport, outfitters purchased shackles. As the New York Journal of Commerce observed in 1857, “Few of our readers are aware of the extent to which this infernal traffic is carried on, by vessels clearing from New York, and in close alliance with our legitimate trade; and that down-town merchants of wealth and respectability are extensively engaged in buying and selling African Negroes.”

           The Continental Monthly stressed the financial and political importance of the slave trade in January 1862: “The number of persons engaged in the slave-trade, and the amount of capital embarked in it exceed our powers of calculation. The city of New York has been until of late the principal port of the world for this infamous commerce. . . . Slave dealers added largely to the wealth of our commercial metropolis; they contributed liberally to the treasuries of political organizations, and their bank accounts were largely depleted to carry elections in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut.”

           Only one man was ever executed for illegal slave trading after the passage of a law in 1820 that made it an act of piracy punishable by death. On February 21, 1862, Captain Nathaniel Gordon was hanged at the Tombs Prison in lower Manhattan. His ship, the Erie, had been apprehended carrying eight hundred men, women, and children from Congo, aged six months to forty years. The survivors were resettled in Liberia.

Slavery under the British

           Enslaved men, women, and children were mostly held privately and worked as domestics, carpenters, coopers, shoemakers, tailors, blacksmiths, butchers, dockworkers, and laborers. At the turn of the eighteenth century, merchants held 38 percent of the enslaved population, and shipmasters, 11 percent. By 1730, 42 percent of the population owned slaves, a higher percentage than in any other city in the country except Charleston, South Carolina. New York benefited directly from the labor of its enslaved population—which ranged between 15 and 20 percent of the total—and indirectly thanks to the southern cotton shipped through its port and the banks that did business with the South.

           During the colonial period, slavery laws became more stringent. Manumission and land ownership were tightly restricted. In 1674, a law specified that “no Negro slave who becomes a Christian after being bought shall be [set] at liberty.” Enslaved or free, black New Yorkers’ movements and activities were extremely limited. For example, driving a cart or loading goods at some places was forbidden to all black men, whether free or enslaved, by measures taken in 1683 and 1686. Blacks freed after 1712 could not own real estate. By 1716, with the sale of a fifteen-acre farm located where the Empire State Building stands today, the “Negro frontier” disappeared.

           Most Acts concerned the prevention of conspiracies and revolts. Resistance, some of it in the form of running away, forming maroon communities, and organizing revolts, was a constant feature of slavery, whether in New York or in any slave society. In 1679 the Common Council passed a law that established a large fine for harboring fugitives. Free blacks risked their freedom if they harbored a runaway for more than twenty-four hours. Runaways and maroons were a constant worry for the white residents. Farmers in Harlem complained in 1690 about a “band of Negroes, who have run away from their masters at New York and commit depredations on the inhabitants of the said village.”

           The “Act for the Regulation of Slaves” of November 27, 1702, reduced the number of enslaved people allowed to congregate from four to three. Owners were allowed “to punish their slaves for their crimes at discretion, not extending to life or member.” In 1706, Lord Cornbury, the governor of New York and New Jersey, issued a proclamation in Brooklyn: “Whereas I am informed that several negroes in Kings County have assembled themselves in a riotous manner, which if not prevented may prove of ill consequence . . . [you are instructed] to fire on them, kill, or destroy them, if they cannot otherwise be taken.”

           A major revolt occurred in Manhattan on April 6, 1712, when a group of twenty-three Africans said to be Coromantins (from Ghana) and Pawpaws (from Benin) armed with pistols, daggers, clubs, axes, and hatchets set fire to a building on Maiden Lane, on the outskirts of the city. They ambushed the white men who came to put out the blaze, killing nine and wounding six. As the troops marched against them, the Africans hid in the woods. Sentries were posted to prevent their escape, and the militias of New York City and Westchester County searched the island. Seventy men were arrested and six committed suicide. In the end, twenty-one Africans were executed. Thirteen were hanged, one was chained and starved to death, several were burned at the stake, and another was “broken on the wheel” (attached to a wheel, his bones broken with a club, and left to die).

           Following the revolt, more severe legislation was enacted. On December 10, 1712, “An Act for Preventing Suppressing and Punishing the Conspiracy and Insurrection of Negroes and other Slaves” was passed. “Every Negro Indian or other Slave” declared guilty of arson, rape, mutilation of white people or murder of whites as well as “Negro, Indian or Mallatto [mulatto] Slave” was to “suffer the pains of Death in such manner and with such circumstances as the aggravation or enormity of their Crimes . . . shall merit and require.”

           Almost three decades later, what was presented as a “Negro plot” shook New York. In March and April 1741, several buildings had gone up in flames. Mary Burton, a white teenaged indentured servant, claimed that the fires were the result of a conspiracy by blacks led by her employer, white tavern keeper John Hughson. The plan, according to her, was to kill whites, take over the city, and make Hughson king. “Spanish Negroes”, illegally enslaved, and some white workers were also involved.

           More than 150 individuals were arrested. Among them were at least twelve men and women who were Akan (from Ghana.) They bore the names Quack (Kweku), Quamino (Kwabena), Quash (Kwesi), Kajoe alias Africa (Kodjo), Cuffee (Kofi), and Cuba (Akua, a female). In the end, between May and August, thirty blacks and four whites were executed. Eighteen black men, two white men, and two white women were hanged; two black men were gibbeted; fourteen were burned at the stake; and seventy were deported to Hispaniola, Portugal, Suriname, Madeira, Curacao, Newfoundland, and St. Thomas.

           Some scholars dispute the claim that there was any conspiracy; they attribute the panic to white hysteria. But historian Craig S. Wilder finds that “the events of 1741 had a distinctive African pattern. . . . It becomes more likely that it was the persistence of African traditions that allowed the 1741 conspirators to dominate so many people, white and black, and drag Manhattan to the brink of revolution.” For historian Thomas J. Davis, “The murderous events sprang from authentic causes—not simply spurious charges. . . . The source of the tragedy lay in the tangled undergrowth of the society’s self conception where people were directed to see others not as themselves but as greater or lesser, good or evil, depending on their class, color, origin, or religion. A world of prejudice and injustice ensnared the New Yorkers of 1741, and not them alone, in rumors of revolt.”

“The Negros Burial Ground”

           During the British period, a burial ground for Africans was developed on a plot of land about a half mile outside the city between Broadway and Centre Street north of Chambers:

Beyond the commons lay what in the earliest settlement of the town had been appropriated as a burial-place for negroes, slave and free. It was a desolate, inappropriate spot, descending with a gentle declivity towards a ravine which led to the Kalkhook pond. The negroes in the city were, both in the Dutch and English colonial times, a proscribed and detested race, having nothing in common with the whites.

Many of them were Native Africans, imported hither in slave ships, and retaining their native superstitions and burial customs, among which was that of burying by night, with various mummeries and outcries. This custom was finally prohibited by the authorities from its dangerous and exciting tendencies among the blacks. So little seems to have been thought of the race that not even a dedication of their burial-place was made by the church authorities, or any others who  might reasonably be supposed to have an interest in such a matter. The lands were inappropriate, and though within  convenient distance from the city, the locality was unattractive and desolate, so that by permission the slave population were allowed to inter their dead there. (D. T. Valentine, Manual of the Common Council of the City of New York for 1860)

           In 1712, Rev. John Sharpe wrote that the Africans were “buried in the Common by those of their country and complexion without the office, on the contrary the Heathenish rites are performed at the grave by their countrymen, and there is no notice given of their being sick that they may be visited and many other such deficiencys [sic] there are to discourage them.”

           As the enslaved population grew, so did the burial ground, eventually covering five to six acres, or about five city blocks. Even there, harsh legal restrictions applied. No more than twelve persons were permitted in funeral processions or at graveside services, and interment was not allowed at night, the customary time for many African burial rituals. Enslaved blacks were required to have a written pass in order to travel more than a mile away from home. For many, that was about the distance from their lower Manhattan homes to the cemetery located outside of town. No palls or gloves were allowed under penalty of whipping.

           Archaeological excavations have shown that the dead were buried individually, most in wooden coffins, arms folded or placed at the sides and oriented with heads to the west. Bodies—wrapped in shrouds fastened with brass straight pins—were sometimes buried with items such as coins, shells, and beads. Over time, the Burial Ground became densely crowded with coffins stacked three and four deep in some places. Some archaeologists estimate that upwards of twenty thousand men, women, and children were buried at the cemetery.

           In 1803 the Negros Burial Ground was covered over with landfill, up to twenty-five feet deep in some places, to make way for the construction of buildings and a section of Broadway. In 1846 the A. T. Stewart Store, the city’s first department store, opened at 280 Broadway, on the site. Remains unearthed during excavation for the building were dug up and carted off for use as landfill.

           Seeking burial space in 1807, Zion Church (at 158 Church Street) successfully petitioned for a portion of the Potter’s Field at West 4th Street, currently Washington Square Park. The search for a cemetery came after city inspectors discovered Zion had “no burying ground, but inter[red] all their dead in a vault under the church.” According to the inspectors’ report, 750 bodies were buried beneath the church between 1802 and 1807.

           In May 1991, workmen began unearthing human remains from the Negros Burial Ground during the preconstruction phase of a federal office building at 290 Broadway. Following the discovery of fully intact graves in late September, archaeologists recognized the site as the largest and only known urban pre–Revolutionary War cemetery in America. Vigorous protests by African Americans who wanted the construction stopped resulted in a temporary halt to allow the excavation of some remains. Skeletons were taken to Howard University for study.

           Eight beads were discovered at the neck of a baby less than two months old in Burial 226. The beads, originally probably opaque yellow, were made using a distinctive West African technique. Glass is pounded into a powder, placed in clay molds, and fired. After firing, the beads are shaped and smoothed by grinding. The adorning of infants is common in the regions from which captives were taken, and among other things signals that a family and community have claimed the child. This infant was buried in the same grave as a man twenty-five to thirty-five years old. A young child (Burial 254) wore a small silver earring as a pendant around his neck.

           Burial 340 was the grave of a woman with filed teeth whose age was determined to be somewhere between thirty-nine and sixty-five years old, though main indicators suggest she was about fifty. She wore a strand of beads and cowrie shells at her waist. Among the waist beads was one that was barrel-shaped and opaque black (though appearing dark amber under strong light), with a gold foil wave pattern; another one was amber. She also wore a bracelet of tiny alternating yellow and turquoise beads. The glass beads were probably manufactured in Venice. Millions of such beads were traded to Africa during the eighteenth century. A young woman (Burial 25) had suffered extreme violence. Her face was crushed, a wrist was fractured, and a musket ball was lodged in her rib cage.

           Small lumps of rusted iron, originally tacks nailed into the lid of the Burial 332 coffin, formed the initials and age of the deceased. However, the vast majority of the coffins were undecorated, and the only hardware was the nails used to construct them.

           Following the study, the remains were reinterred in a solemn ceremony on October 3 and 4, 2003. The Negros Burial Ground, rebaptized the African Burial Ground, has been designated a New York City Historic District and a National Landmark. Its rediscovery and the struggle to protect and recognize it have prompted an increased awareness of the early history of Africans in America, of the development of distinctive cultural traditions and lifestyles despite much adversity, and of the contributions of the African and African-American community to American history.

Free New Yorkers

           Some enslaved New Yorkers got their freedom through manumission, but for the vast majority, freedom became a reality only in the nineteenth century. In 1799 New York State passed an Act for the gradual abolition of Slavery. It stipulated that “any child born of a slave within this state after the fourth day of July next shall be deemed and adjudged to be born free: Provided nevertheless. That such child shall be the servant of the legal proprietor of his or her mother . . . in the same manner as if such child had been bound to service by the overseers of the poor.”

           All children born after July 4, 1799, had to work for their mother’s owner until males reached the age of twenty-eight, and females the age of twenty-five. Slaveholders were thus assured that they could continue to exploit their workers during their most productive years. People born before that date were to remain enslaved for life. Yet, fearing that they could soon lose their free labor, many slaveholders sold men and women South, while others were kidnapped and traded to the slaveholding states.

           Eighteen years later, the March 31, 1817, Act declared that all enslaved people born before July 4, 1799, would be freed on July 4, 1827. Over ten thousand black New Yorkers were thus granted freedom, although they had to wait to enjoy it. In addition, children born between 1817 and July 4, 1827, were to continue working—they were indentured—for their owners until they turned twenty-one.

           On July 4, 1827, black churches conducted daylong celebrations. The next day, more than two thousand African Americans gathered in the vicinity of St. John’s Park and marched to Zion Church at 158 Church Street, after being urged by members of the New York State legislature to celebrate emancipation on the fifth, since white citizens revered July 4 as the day of national independence.

           Whether free or enslaved before 1827, black New Yorkers faced discrimination, segregation, racism, and the possibility of enslavement in the South. To protect their rights and strengthen their community, they founded and developed numerous organizations and mutual aid societies. The New-York African Society for Mutual Relief was established in 1808 under the leadership of William Hamilton, a free black carpenter reputed to be the son of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton. In 1820, the Society bought a tenement house on Orange (Baxter) Street with money offered by Juliet Toussaint, a former Haitian slave, the wife of Pierre Toussaint. The building served as a relay of the Underground Railroad.

           The New York Union African Society, a benevolent association, was organized and incorporated in 1830. The following year, Henry Highland Garnet, William H. Day, and David Ruggles formed the Garrison Literary and Benevolent Association of New York. Women organized the Abyssinian Benevolent Daughters of Esther Association in 1839.

           The struggle against discrimination and segregation had always been fought in church. In August 1796, a group of African Americans, primarily from the John Street Methodist Church, requested permission to become a separate society of Methodists after holding a series of secret meetings in the home of James Varick at 4 Orange Street. They were dissatisfied with their second-class treatment at John Street. The group organized Zion Church, a leading force in the abolition movement. Zion moved from a rented house on Cross Street to a newly erected edifice on the corner of Church and Leonard Streets in 1800.

           Similarly, in 1808, black members of the First Baptist Church and a group of Ethiopian (Abyssinian) merchants, unwilling to accept segregated seating, founded the Abyssinian Baptist Church on Anthony Street (Worth Street) in Lower Manhattan. Ten years later, blacks who had formed the Free African Church of St. Philip (Episcopalian), separating themselves from Trinity Church, built a wooden church on Centre Street, between Worth and Leonard. It quickly grew and became a center of attacks for its antislavery activities.

           In 1818, blacks who withdrew from Sands Street Church established the African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church (Bridge Street Church), the first black church in Brooklyn. And, in 1841, Haitian former slave Pierre Toussaint offered the first donation, $100, for the construction of a Roman Catholic Church (now St. Vincent de Paul’s on West 23rd Street) in Manhattan for French-speaking people.

           As the community developed and organized, businesses grew. On January 15, 1762, Samuel “Black Sam” Fraunces, a West Indian of mixed French and African descent, opened the Queens Head Tavern at the intersection of Pearl Street and Broad Street. Thomas Downing was the owner of another successful black establishment: Oyster House, a restaurant and catering business he opened in 1820 at Broad and Wall Streets. Andrew Williams, a shoe shiner, purchased three lots of land near West 80th Street and Central Park West in 1825 for $125. This was the origin of the neighborhood known as Seneca Village.

           Despite some breakthroughs, black businesspeople faced many obstacles and fought back. In April 1836, a city policy against granting carting licenses to blacks was challenged by William S. Hewlett, a porter living on Pearl Street. Hewlett petitioned to start a business selling books from a cart, but was refused a license on the basis of “public opinion.” Anthony Provost, attempting to start a small business, challenged the policy in 1839. He defiantly loaded his goods on “as good a horse and cart as was to be seen on any dock” and attempted to do his business without a license. Provost was fined following a complaint by a white cart-man.

Education

           Education was high on the community’s agenda. During the British period, the earliest schools and formal instructional programs for enslaved black New Yorkers were established and run by the Church of England’s “Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts,” the missionary arm of England’s Anglican Church. Its secretary noted in 1730 that the society regarded “the instruction and conversion of the Negroes as a principal branch of their care.” Adding that it was “a great reproach to Christians that Negroes in a Christian land should continue as pagan as they had been in Africa.” The society never advocated for abolition and allowed missionaries to own slaves.

           In 1785, two members of Trinity Church (John Jay, first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; and Alexander Hamilton, first Secretary of the U.S. Treasury) founded the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves. Known as the New York Manumission Society, it supported the “gradual abolition of slavery” and established the African Free School in 1787. It instructed from forty to sixty children a year. A state law passed in 1810 required slaveholders to teach enslaved children to read scriptures, and another in 1841 provided that public schools be open to all children.

           In 1820, the African Free School No. 2, a large brick building that could accommodate five hundred students, opened at 135–137 Mulberry Street. Over the years, seven African Free Schools were founded; they merged with the Public School Society in 1834. Among the former students of the African Free School were distinguished men who played an active part in the social, religious, and cultural life and struggles of the black community throughout the nineteenth century.

           Henry Highland Garnet (1815–1882), born in slavery in Maryland, ran away with his parents in 1824. He became a prominent Presbyterian minister, antislavery activist, and orator. Reverend Garnet demanded a boycott of products made by slave labor. In 1843, he delivered a “Call to Rebellion” to the National Negro Convention in Buffalo, New York. The speech called upon free and enslaved blacks to act for themselves to achieve total emancipation. First an opponent and then a proponent of colonization, he was named ambassador to Liberia in 1881 but passed away shortly after his arrival there.

           James McCune Smith (1813–1865) excelled academically at the African Free School. Prohibited from studying at American medical schools, he received a degree in medicine in Scotland. Returning to New York, Dr. Smith began a medical practice, officiated at the Colored Orphan Asylum, and opened a pharmacy on Broadway. He was a member of the Committee of Thirteen that fought against the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, a leading abolitionist, and an essayist who contributed numerous articles to scholarly and popular journals and newspapers. Frederick Douglass listed him as the “single most influence on his life.”

           Peter Williams Ray (1825–1906) followed mentor James McCune Smith into the medical profession. Dr. Ray kept a Brooklyn pharmacy for fifty years at the corner of South Second and Hooper Street in Williamsburg. He was a founder of the Brooklyn College of Pharmacy and served in the Union army as a surgeon.

           Ira Aldridge (1807–1867) was born in New York City and first performed in plays during his training at the African Free School. He later honed his craft at the African Grove Theatre on Bleecker Street. Finding few opportunities to act in the United States, Aldridge went to England and became one of Europe’s most acclaimed Shakespearean actors. He was also hailed for his performances in German and Russian. Aldridge is buried in Lodz, Poland.

           Alexander Crummell (1819–1898) graduated from the African Free School and attended Noyes Academy in New Hampshire with his friend Henry Highland Garnet. A member of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, Crummell sought to become a priest within the Episcopal faith but was denied admission to the General Theological Seminary because of his color. An advocate of Pan-Africanism, Reverend Crummell received a degree in theology from Cambridge University in England.

           Peter Vogelsang, Jr. (1815–1887), was born in New York City, the son of Peter Sr. of St. Croix—active in the emigration movement to Haiti, a founding member of the African Society for Mutual Relief, and the owner of a shipping company—and Maria Miller of New York. Peter Jr. later gained employment as a clerk in Brooklyn. He married Theodocia DeGrasse, the daughter of George DeGrasse—an Indian from Calcutta—and Maria Van Surlay, whose family is believed to have included Dutch and Moroccan ancestors. During the Civil War, Vogelsang became a lieutenant in the all-black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment. The oldest recruit, he distinguished himself heroically in the war.

           Albro Lyons (1814–1896), a businessman and property owner in Brooklyn and Manhattan, operated the Colored Sailors’ Home at 20 Vandewater Street. Lyons’s daughter, Maritcha, described in her memoir how the many functions of their home made it an inconspicuous stopping point for runaway slaves: “Father’s connection with the Underground Railroad brought many strange faces to our house, for it was semi-public and persons could go in and out without attracting special attention.” During the 1863 Draft Riots the Lyons home was attacked and badly damaged.

           George Thomas Downing (1819–1903) was the eldest son of entrepreneur Thomas Downing, owner of Downing’s Oyster House on Broad Street. George founded a literary society at the African Free School with classmates Henry H. Garnett and James M. Smith. After graduating from Hamilton College, he ran his father’s restaurant and allowed its basement to serve as a station or hiding place for freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad. He later opened a branch of his father’s famous oyster house in Newport, Rhode Island.

           Samuel Ringgold Ward (1817–ca.1866) was born into slavery in Maryland, fled as a child fled with his parents in 1820 to New Jersey, and later relocated to New York City. In 1826, Samuel’s parents enrolled him in the African Free School. Later ordained a pastor in the Congregational church in Poughkeepsie, Ward traveled extensively in the North and to England, where he raised awareness and funds for the antislavery movement. Frederick Douglass once remarked, “As an orator and thinker [Ward] was vastly superior to any of us.”

           Patrick Henry Reason (1816–1898) was born in New York as Patrice Rison, the son of parents from Guadeloupe and Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic). Reason’s early interest in art was nurtured at the African Free School. His skill as an artist was recognized at age thirteen, with his well-known drawing of African Free School No. 2. At the age of seventeen Reason “put and bound himself apprentice” to an engraver. An artist and abolitionist, he worked for Harper’s and other New York publishers, although many firms refused to hire him because of his race.

           Other alumni of the African Free School distinguished themselves: founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society Rev. Theodore Wright graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary; abolitionist and newspaper editor John Russwurm from Bowdoin College in Maine; Edward Mitchell from Dartmouth; William Brown and William G. Smith from Columbia; and Edward Jones from Amherst College.

           Black leaders and parents fought for better facilities and instruction in public schools and demanded more black teachers and representation in the governing structures of New York City’s public schools. They also established their own schools.

           In 1833, several black leaders, including Reverends Christopher Rush and Theodore Wright, Thomas Jennings, and Benjamin Hughes, formed the Phoenix Society, which had among its goals to “get the children out to infant, Sabbath, and week schools and induce the adults also to attend school and church on the Sabbath; to help to clothe poor children of color, if they will attend school — the clothes to be loaned, and taken away from them if they neglect their schools, and to impress on the parents the importance of having the children punctual and regular in their attendance at school; to establish circulating libraries, formed in each ward, for the use of people of color, on very moderate pay; to seek out young men of talents and good moral character, that they may be assisted to obtain a liberal education.” The society rented a building and attracted hundreds of people to its lectures. It established the Phoenix High School in 1836. It closed in 1839 but another, the New York Select Academy, opened in the St. Phillip’s Church basement. It too had to close for lack of funds.

           In 1845, the New York State superintendent of schools estimated that eleven thousand black children in the state were of school age (five through fifteen). As most schools did not permit black students, less than 25 percent were receiving an education, most within the African Free School model. To maintain all-white schools, the state legislature authorized local governments to create separate school districts for the education of black children. They were given a status of “separate but equal” with the regular public schools and renamed “Colored Schools.”

           By 1860, 2,377 pupils were enrolled in eight primary “Colored Schools” in the city, while Brooklyn had three segregated schools for about nine hundred black children. Thirteen-year-old Maritcha Lyons—daughter of Albro Lyons—attended Manhattan’s Colored School No. 3 at Broadway and 37th Street. Bigoted public carriage drivers often refused to pick up black adults or children. When this happened, Maritcha walked the entire way, a distance of more than three miles from her family’s home on Vandewater Street in Lower Manhattan.

Civic Struggles

           The preoccupations and struggles of black New Yorkers were reflected in their newspapers. Freedom’s Journal, the first black newspaper in the United States, began publication on March 16, 1827. Edited by Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm, it operated from Zion Church at 152 Church Street. Russwurm, born a slave in Port Antonio, Jamaica, was one of the earliest black graduates of an American college.

           Ten years later, Philip A. Bell began publishing the Weekly Advocate with Cornish as editor. The paper became the Colored American in March 1837 and ceased publication in 1842. In 1838, David Ruggles, a free young man from Connecticut who arrived in New York at seventeen around 1827, launched The Mirror of Liberty, possibly America’s first black magazine; and in1847, Frederick Douglass founded the North Star in Rochester, New York. Thomas Hamilton started publishing the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859.

           Four main issues were at the center of black New Yorkers’ concerns in the early 1800s: African colonization, abolitionism, the fight against the kidnapping of free blacks, and assistance to runaways. On July 4, 1830 speaking against the American Colonization Society (ACS) that advocated emigration to Liberia, Rev. Peter Williams, Jr., charged that its aim was to rid the country of its free black population. Williams accused the society’s supporters of wanting to make conditions so miserable for blacks that they would want to leave. Strong condemnation of the ACS was also heard at the fourth annual National Negro Convention held in Manhattan June 2–13, 1834, presided over by William Hamilton.

           In 1833, the American Anti-Slavery Society, a national movement, had established its headquarters at 143 Nassau Street in New York, long a center of antislavery activism. The society’s president was Arthur Tappan, a wealthy white philanthropist. African Americans Samuel Cornish and Theodore S. Wright were members of the Executive Committee. By 1840 the society counted 250,000 members and 2,000 local chapters.

           As long as slavery existed in the country, free black New Yorkers were not safe. As early as 1808 the state legislature had passed the Act to Prevent the Kidnapping of Free People of Colour, the second of its kind in the nation, and the first in a state where slavery was still legal. However, blacks continued to be abducted by posses known as “blackbirders” and sent to the South, Cuba, and South America. The most famous was Solomon Northup, author of the famous autobiography Twelve Years a Slave. A native of New York State, he was lured to and kidnapped in Washington, D.C., in 1841, enslaved in Louisiana, and freed in 1853.

           To prevent the kidnapping of free blacks and assist runaways from the South, New York black abolitionists organized the New York Committee of Vigilance in 1835. Among its founding members were David Ruggles, Robert Brown, and runaway Thomas van Rensellaer, who noted that black New Yorkers were giving donations to the cause that exceeded anything he had ever seen before.

           The New York Committee of Vigilance reported that it had helped more than six hundred runaways pass through the city to Canada in its first two years. On September 4, 1838, Frederick Washington Bailey, a runaway from Maryland, arrived in lower Manhattan disguised as a sailor. Finding shelter at Ruggles’s house located at 36 Lispenard Street, he awaited the arrival of his fiancée, Anna Murray, a free black woman from Maryland. They were married in a service performed by Rev. James Pennington and resumed Bailey’s freedom journey to Massachusetts, where he changed his name to Frederick Douglass.

           The federal Fugitive Slave Law of September 1850 gave a slave owner or his agent the right to retrieve a fugitive even in the North with the assistance of local authorities. James Hamlet, a runaway living as a free man in the City of Williamsburgh (Brooklyn), was the first person seized under the act. He was returned to Maryland. Fifteen hundred supporters rallied at Zion Church on Leonard Street in Manhattan and raised $800 to buy his freedom. On October 5, several thousand people held a demonstration at City Hall Park to welcome him back to New York, and more than two hundred escorted him to his home in Williamsburgh.

           The Fugitive Slave Law and the fear of kidnappings pushed numerous black New Yorkers into leaving the city. Some migrated to Canada, Liberia, or Haiti; others moved west to California; still others settled in Florence, a black settlement in Oneida County, in upstate New York, on land given by abolitionist Gerrit Smith.

Black Neighborhoods

           Africans and their descendants had lived in Greenwich Village since the seventeenth century. The area where they were the most numerous was known by the 1850s as “Little Africa.” The Abyssinian Baptist Church was located at 166 Waverly Place, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church at 315 Bleecker Street (it had moved from Five Points in 1850). Also in the Village were Bethel AME Church and the Catholic St. Benedict the Moor Church.

           Little Africa and the Minettas (Minetta Lane and Minetta Street) were presented in the late nineteenth century as derelict, violent, and vice-ridden black enclaves by writers bent on sensationalism. Portrayals of the mixed establishments called “black and tan saloons” were especially negative. Jacob Riis in his How the Other Half Lives wrote of “the commingling of the utterly depraved of both sexes, white and black on such ground” as an abomination full of “all the lawbreakers and all the human wrecks within reach.”

           Jasper Danckaerts and Peter Sluyter described another black neighborhood in Manhattan in 1679:

           We went from the city following the Broadway, over the valley or the fresh water. Upon both sides of this way were many habitations of negroes, mulattoes and whites. These negroes were formerly the proper slaves of the [West India] company, but, in consequence of the frequent changes and conquests of the country, they have obtained their freedom and settled themselves down where they have thought proper, and thus on this road, where they have ground enough to live on with their families. (Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680)

           The Five Points—as it was later known—was situated by Collect Pond, a forty-eight-acre lake that was drained and then covered in 1811. The area was delimited by Orange Street (Baxter Street), Cross Street, Anthony (Worth) Street, and Little Water Street. Like Little Africa, it too was described as seedy, poor, violent, and disease- and crime-ridden. It was, however, home to some of the black middle class, made up of artisans and businesspeople such as businessman Thomas Downing, Rev. Peter Williams, and abolitionists Henry Sipkins and William G. Hamilton.

           The area boasted several abolitionist organizations and black churches. The African Bethlehem Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the First Colored Presbyterian Church, and St. Philip’s African Episcopal Church were located in Five Points, as was the New York African Society for Mutual Relief, founded in 1808, with headquarters at 42 Orange Street. A meeting point, it opened a school and was a stop on the Underground Railroad.

           Starting in the 1820s, sustained Irish immigration into Five Points created tensions. During the antiabolition riots of 1834, which targeted white and black abolitionists and the larger African American community, white mobs looted St. Philip’s Episcopal Church and the African Society for Mutual Relief. About five hundred blacks fled the area.

           The widening of some streets in the 1830s was used to justify the destruction of buildings housing black New Yorkers. In addition, the working-class neighborhood of Five Points was located on prime real estate close to the city’s upper-class enclave and City Hall, and businessmen were eager to acquire and develop the land. Displaced from Five Points by gentrification or violence, many African Americans moved north to the area south of Washington Square—bordered by MacDougal, Thompson, Sullivan, Minetta Lane, and Bleecker Street—before being displaced once more, this time by the incoming Italian immigration of the late 1800s.

           The black presence in Harlem dates back to the 1630s when Africans and African Americans worked in the forests of the northern part of Manhattan. In 1658 Governor Peter Stuyvesant ordered enslaved Africans to build a nine-mile road from lower Manhattan to the city known then as Nieuw Haarlem. In1690, farmers complained about “a band of Negroes” who had ran away, lived in the woods and “committed depredations.” They were actually maroons.

           In 1665, Harlem residents erected the First Reformed Low Dutch Church of Harlem (future Elmendorf Reformed Church) at First Avenue and 127^th Street and a quarter acre of land was reserved for a “Negro Burying Ground.” African Americans were buried there until 1850 but in 1853, the land was offered to the highest bidder and sold for $3,000. The graves of God’s Acre, the white part of the cemetery, were transferred to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. But the remains of Jane Anthony, Herman Canon, Franklin Butler, Margaret Walker and the close to forty people of African descent whose names have been identified were left behind. Over the years, the burial ground was paved over and became the site of a casino, a movie studio and finally a bus depot. In the summer of 2015, 140 bones and bone fragments as well as a skull were recovered.

           Facing discrimination and violence, some black New Yorkers established separate communities with their own businesses, churches, and schools. Seneca Village, which extended from 82nd to 89th streets between Seventh and Eighth avenues—about three miles north of the city limits—was founded in 1825 on five acres of farmland that black New Yorkers bought from the white Whitehead family, following the lead of Andrew Williams, a “boot black” who bought three lots on September 27. Williams was a member of the African Society for Mutual Relief and a trustee of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. On the same day, fellow church trustee Epiphany Davis bought twelve lots.

           Soon after, some people evicted from the black York Hill community—between 79th and 86th streets and Sixth and Seventh avenues—to make place for the Croton reservoir moved into Seneca Village, as did Irish immigrants in the 1840s. The York Hill community built a branch of its African Union Methodist Church in Seneca Village in the 1830s, and in the 1840s, the integrated All Angels’ Church—70 percent of whose parishioners were black—was opened on Broadway and 99th Street. One school, Colored School No. 3, operated from the basement of the African Union Methodist Church.

           In 1850 Seneca Village counted 20 percent of the city’s 71 black landowners—including women—and 10 percent of its 100 eligible voters out of a black population of 12,000. The low number of eligible black voters was due to the more stringent rules for blacks than for whites to qualify to vote. By 1855, Andrew Williams had become a cart-man, an occupation long reserved to white men. Williams and his neighbors represented the black middle class. In 1855, the village had 264 residents (two-thirds of them African Americans), two cemeteries (no record exist of a cemetery at African Union Methodist Church), three churches, and a school. Over thirty years, 589 people had lived in the village.

           When the project to create Central Park gained speed, a campaign to enlist support for the neighborhood’s demolition described it as “rundown and seedy.” Residents fiercely resisted the destruction of their community, but their land was seized through eminent domain with compensation for homeowners that they judged inadequate. They were all evicted, sometimes violently. Seneca Village was razed, and the residents scattered.

           A few predominantly black neighborhoods developed in Brooklyn. In 1838, James Weeks, a former slave from Virginia and a stevedore, bought part of the Lefferts estate and founded an enclave known as Weeksville. With Carrville (one mile away) these predominantly black districts were delimited by Atlantic Avenue, Ralph Avenue, Eastern Parkway, and Albany Avenue. By the 1850s, Weeksville boasted an orphanage, Colored School No. 2 (now P.S. 243), churches, a cemetery, and a home for the aged. Ten years later, the neighborhood had over 500 residents, and its own newspaper, the Freeman’s Torchlight.

           Weeksville and Carrville counted 650 residents in 1875, but these flourishing communities disappeared as black enclaves following the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, which led to intensified urbanization and the opening of streets such as Eastern Parkway that cut through the area. They became part of Bedford Stuyvesant. In Queens, black enclaves were established at Liberty Street (in Flushing) and Green (in Jamaica).

           On Staten Island, several African-American families lived in the mixed enclave of Sandy Ground, known as Little Africa. It was settled by European Americans in the eighteenth century, but African Americans from New York and New Jersey—mostly strawberry farmers—moved in in the 1830s, and black oyster gatherers from the Chesapeake Bay in 1841. By 1880, the community counted about 150 residents.

The War Years

           On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

           Just seven months later, from July 13 to 16, the so-called Draft Riots shook the city. The draft was mandatory for all male citizens between the ages of twenty and thirty-five and all bachelors between twenty and forty-five. The quota for New York was 12,500, and for Brooklyn, then an independent city, 4,600. But a federal law allowed wealthy young men to avoid the draft by paying $300 for substitutes to serve in their places. The poor, the working-class, and the European immigrants, who could not afford the fee, were outraged. They turned their anger on black New Yorkers, blaming them for the war. They also worried that freed men and women would migrate north and compete with them on the labor market.

           Irate mobs, made up mostly of Irish immigrants, went on a rampage. They attacked black men and women on the streets, at the docks, and on streetcars, and destroyed their property and the establishments that catered to them. A crowd of several hundred gathered in front of the Colored Orphan Asylum located since 1842 on Fifth Avenue between 43rd and 44th streets. As the crowd looted and set the building on fire, 233 children were led out a back door. They found shelter at the Twentieth Precinct on 35th Street, where they stayed for three days. They were then sent to the almshouse on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island).

           Many African Americans sought to arm themselves in self-defense. At Manhattan’s Fifth Police Precinct, more than four hundred requested and were issued firearms. Others found protection in the black communities of Flatbush in Queens and Weeksville in Brooklyn. The Christian Recorder reported that in both neighborhoods, black men “armed themselves . . . determined to die defending their homes.”

           William Powell’s Colored Seamen’s Home at 2 Dover Street in Manhattan was “completely rifled of all its furniture, books, and clothing.” The building was badly damaged, and Powell, his family, and boarders were “compelled to escape over the roof for their lives.” Powell’s partner, Albro Lyons, saw his store looted. After having repulsed two attacks on their home, which was finally entirely demolished, Lyons and his family, like many others, fled to Brooklyn. Interestingly, the historically black and mixed Five Points neighborhood remained mostly quiet and no African American was killed in the area.

           Eleven black men were lynched, tortured, mutilated, hung from lampposts, and burned. About one hundred people (mostly blacks) were killed in Manhattan and Brooklyn. A hundred buildings were destroyed. As historian Leslie Harris stated in In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863,

           With these actions white workers enacted their desires to eradicate the working-class black male presence from the city. …The riots gave all these workers license to physically remove blacks not only from worksites, but also from neighborhoods and leisure spaces. The rioters’ actions also indicate the degree to which the sensational journalists and reformers of the 1840s and 1850s had achieved their goals of convincing whites, and particularly the Irish, that interracial socializing and marriage were evil and degrading practices. The riots unequivocally divided white workers from blacks.

           Abolitionist James W. Pennington—a former runaway from Maryland who became a teacher and pastor—deplored the event’s tragic impact on the city’s black population: “The breaking up of families; and business relations just beginning to prosper; the blasting of hopes just dawning; the loss of precious harvest time which will never again return; the feeling of insecurity engendered; the confidence destroyed. … The injury extends to our churches, schools, societies for mutual aid and improvement, as well as to the various branches of industry.”

           The brutal episode changed the demographics of black New York. Many residents left the city altogether, moving to other parts of the state or to New Jersey. The Lyons family ultimately settled in New England. Thousands relocated to other neighborhoods either out of fear or because they were evicted by their landlords or the mobs, or burned out of their homes. From 12,472 in 1860, the black population of New York City decreased to 9,943 in 1865. The migration of well-heeled black families to Brooklyn that had started in the 1850s picked up after the riots.

           Lower Manhattan, where Africans and then African Americans had been living since the early 1600s, lost 29 percent of its black residents. In contrast, Ward 22 (from 40th to 86th streets), comprising the Tenderloin and San Juan Hill, saw an increase of 30 percent in its black population, and Ward 12 (Harlem) an increase of 40 percent. The Colored Orphan Asylum moved to 51st Street and, in 1867, to 143rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem, then a predominantly white area outside the city limits. From then on, Lower Manhattan—which still counted the largest number of African Americans—would lose them steadily as they migrated further north.

           By the end of the year, in December 1863, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton authorized the formation of a black regiment in New York. Organized at Riker’s Island in February 1864, it received its color in the city on March 5, cheered by 100,000 black and white New Yorkers in a display of unity that had little to do with the reality of entrenched racism, discrimination, and segregation that characterized the black experience in the city.

           The 20th United States Colored Infantry (1,325 men) saw action in New Orleans and the Gulf and mustered out in October 1865 after suffering the loss of 283 men, mostly through diseases—as was commonly the case for all units—contracted in the swamps of Louisiana. Two other regiments were recruited in New York State, the 26th (1,230 men—40 deaths, including 21 soldiers killed in action) and the 31st (1,211 men—177 deaths, 35 killed in action) United States Colored Troops. In all, 4,125 black New Yorkers served during the Civil War. Almost 40 percent were born in the state (7 were born in Africa, 5 in Portugal, 2 in India, and 1 in China), and most were laborers, farmers, sailors, waiters, cooks, and barbers.

           When they returned home, they found themselves back in a city where they continued to be segregated and discriminated against.