African Americans in New York City

African-Americans constitute one of the longer-running ethnic presences in New York City. The majority of the African-American population largely claims descent from West and Central Africa by way of importation to the American South (and a rarer presence of those descended from slaves imported directly to New York City), with smaller portions of the population claiming Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latin American and more recent African nation-states.

Population

125th Street in Harlem, an African and African American cultural center.

According to the 2010 Census, New York City had the largest population of self-defined black residents of any U.S. city, with over 2 million within the city's boundaries, although this number has decreased since 2000.^[1] New York City had more black people than did the entire state of California until the 1980 Census. The black population consists of immigrants and their descendants from Africa and the Caribbean as well as native-born African-Americans. Many of the city's black residents live in Brooklyn and The Bronx. Several of the city's neighborhoods are historical birthplaces of urban black culture in America, among them the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford–Stuyvesant and Manhattan's Harlem and various sections of Eastern Queens and The Bronx. Bedford-Stuyvesant is considered to have the highest concentration of black residents in the United States. New York City has the largest population of black immigrants (at 686,814) and descendants of immigrants from the Caribbean (especially from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Guyana, Belize, Grenada, and Haiti), and of sub-Saharan Africans. In a news item of April 3, 2006, however, the New York Times noted that for the first time since the American Civil War, the recorded African American population was declining, because of emigration to other regions, a declining African American birthrate in New York, and decreased immigration of blacks from the Caribbean and Africa.^[2]

In 2005, the median income among black households in Queens was almost $52,000 a year, surpassing that of white households.^[3]

History

Slavery

After abolition

Following the final abolition of slavery in New York in 1827, New York City emerged as one of the largest pre-Civil War metropolitan concentrations of free African-Americans, and many institutions were established to advance the community in the antebellum period. It was the site of the first African-American periodical journal, Freedom's Journal, which lasted for two years and renamed the The Rights of All for a third year before fading to obsolescence; the newspaper served as both a powerful voice for the abolition lobby in the United States as well as a voice of information for the African population of New York City and other metropolitan areas. The African Dorcas Association was also established to provide educational and clothing aid to Black youth in the city.

However, New York residents were less willing to give blacks equal voting rights. By the constitution of 1777, voting was restricted to free men who could satisfy certain property requirements for value of real estate. This property requirement disfranchised poor men among both blacks and whites. The reformed Constitution of 1821 conditioned suffrage for black men by maintaining the property requirement, which most could not meet, so effectively disfranchised them. The same constitution eliminated the property requirement for white men and expanded their franchise.^[4] No women yet had the vote in New York. "As late as 1869, a majority of the state's voters cast ballots in favor of retaining property qualifications that kept New York's polls closed to many blacks. African-American men did not obtain equal voting rights in New York until ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870."^[4]

The emancipated African-Americans established communities in the New York City area, including Seneca Village in what is now Central Park of Manhattan and Sandy Ground on Staten Island, and Weeksville in Brooklyn. These communities were among the earliest

The city was a nerve center for the abolitionist movement in the United States.

The Civil War

The New York City draft riots of 1863 had a deep impact upon African-Americans in the city. At least 120 people were killed in the violence, with eleven African-American men being lynched by Irish immigrants over the course of five days and fifty buildings in predominantly-African areas being burned to the ground. It resulted in the mass migration of African-Americans from Manhattan to Brooklyn, and was followed by the asserting of power in the city by the growing white working class which had resented the draft for the Union Army and held racist sentiments against African-Americans. However, the draft was instituted and the white elite collaborated with black community leaders in supporting relief for the black survivors of the riots as well as for African-Americans who were drafted in the Union Army.

Harlem and Great Migration

The violent rise of Jim Crow in the Deep and Upper South led to the mass migration of African Americans, including ex-slaves and their free-born children, from those regions to northern metropolitan areas, including New York City. Their mass arrival coincided with the transition of the center of African-American power and demography in the city from other districts of the city to Harlem.

The tipping point occurred on June 15, 1904 when up-and-coming real estate entrepreneur Philip A. Payton, Jr. established the Afro-American Realty Company, which began to aggressively buy and lease houses in the ethnically-mixed but predominantly-white Harlem following the housing crashes of 1904 and 1905. In addition to an influx of long-time African-American residents from other neighborhoods, ^[5] the Tenderloin, San Juan Hill (now the site of Lincoln Center), Minetta Lane in Greenwich Village and Hell's Kitchen in the west 40s and 50s.^[6][7] The move to northern Manhattan was driven in part by fears that anti-black riots such as those that had occurred in the Tenderloin in 1900^[8] and in San Juan Hill in 1905^[9] might recur. In addition, a number of tenements that had been occupied by blacks in the west 30s were destroyed at this time to make way for the construction of the original Penn Station.

Caribbean immigration

Accomplishments

• Adam Clayton Powell Jr. - first person of African-American descent to be elected from New York to Congress
• David Dinkins - first African-American mayor of New York City (1990)
• Dr. James McCune Smith - First formally trained African-American Medical Doctor (
• Willie Overton - First African-American police officer in present-day New York City (1891)
• Samuel J. Battle - First African-American police officer in the New York Police Department following consolidation of the boroughs (1911). Also the NYPD's first African-American sergeant (1926), lieutenant (1935), and parole commissioner (1941).
• Wesley Augustus Williams - first African-American officer in the New York Fire Department
• Todd Duncan - first African-American member of the New York City Opera
• William Grant Still's Troubled Island as performed by the New York City Opera - first black-composed opera to be performed by a major U.S. company
• Arthur Mitchell - First African-American male dancer in a major ballet company: (New York City Ballet); also first African-American principal dancer of a major ballet company (NYCB), 1956
• First African-American fire commissioner of a major U.S. City: Robert O. Lowery of the New York City Fire Department

References