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Harlem, New York
3 articles on Harlem, New York
Harlem
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
The black presence in New York City dates back to the earliest years of Dutch colonization in the early seventeenth century. Over the generations, as the population of Manhattan increased in size, the once relatively scattered black population gradually became more concentrated within fewer geographic regions of the city. The 1800s witnessed the beginning of an uptown march, as the black population that had been centered in the working-class district of Five Points on the lower tip of the island early in the century faced residential pressures, leading it to shift its hub into modern-day Greenwich Village, then to an area known as the Tenderloin situated approximately between Twentieth and Fortieth streets. Though racial prejudice limited their housing options, black New Yorkers in the nineteenth century nevertheless lived in fairly heterogeneous working-class communities alongside ethnic whites. ...
Read full articleHarlem Riots
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
[This entry contains three subentries, on the riots of 1935, 1943, and 1967.]The riot that occurred in Harlem, New York, on 19–20 March 1935 can be perceived as part of the tradition of African American protest against numerous economic, political, and social impediments that resulted from institutionalized racism. Unlike earlier uprisings, the Harlem outbreak was not merely racially motivated—the stores attacked were not solely white-owned, but also African American. The rioting represented a fight for equity and was a prototype for other riots that later erupted in Harlem and other U.S. cities.Both immediate and long-term factors accounted for the outbreak in Harlem, a neighborhood that in the 1920s had been the center of African American literary and artistic creativity, a cultural era known as the Harlem Renaissance. ...
Read full articleHarlem, New York
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 1867 Includes: BibliographyPolitical and cultural center of black America in the twentieth century, best known as the major site of the literary and artistic renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. As slaves of the Dutch West India Company, Africans built the first wagon road into Harlem in the seventeenth century, and for the next two centuries, African slaves worked the Dutch, and then English, farms in Harlem. In 1790, during an early census, 115 slaves were listed for the Harlem Division, which accounted for about one-third the population of the area.But the evolution of Harlem into the political and cultural capital of black America is a twentieth-century phenomenon. Once a wealthy suburb of New York City, Harlem real estate soared in value at the turn of the century, only to collapse beneath excessive speculation in ...
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