In 1902, James Weldon Johnson left his Jacksonville, Florida, home and his steady job as a school principal to settle in New York City. Neither his decision to leave the South nor his choice of destinations came unexpectedly. He had already made a number of trips to New York, the first in 1884 when he was still a boy. From his earliest encounter with Manhattan, Johnson loved the city and its “cosmopolitanism.” “It would not have taken a psychologist to understand that I was born to be a New Yorker,” he admitted in his autobiography. He felt a strong emotional...

When James Weldon Johnson relocated to New York City in 1902, he joined a growing wave of southern black men and women moving to northern cities. The fall of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow legislation in the South helped precipitate a sharp increase in the number of southern black people seeking friendlier environs in the North. While the net migration of blacks from the South amounted to fewer than 70,000 in the 1870s, during the 1880s it increased to 88,000, more than doubled in the 1890s, and jumped to 194,000 in the first decade of the twentieth century....

On the evening of August 12, 1900, Arthur J. Harris left the room he rented from Annie Johnson at 241 West Forty-first Street to buy cigars and pass some time at McBride’s Saloon, located on the corner of Forty-first Street and Eighth Avenue. New York City was in the midst of an excruciating heat wave, and temperatures that day reached higher than ninety degrees. Tenement dwellers poured into the streets and local bars seeking respite from the warmest August on record. Harris, twenty-two years old and a relative newcomer to the city, was among the thousands of young black people...

Of all forms of prejudice evident in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century, few proved more enduring than the color line imposed on the housing market. Until real estate agent Philip Payton opened Harlem to black residents, most black people living in New York City faced near-squalor living conditions. “Hedged in by prejudice,” wrote the New York Times in 1889, blacks occupied the “meanest tenement districts” that had “outgrown their availability for any other class” of tenants.¹ Until the early twentieth century, black people lived within integrated Manhattan neighborhoods. With the passing of each decade, black...

Frederick Challenor left his home in Barbados at the turn of the twentieth century, bound for New York City. Like most immigrants, he expected to find greater opportunities in his adopted home than in the one he had left behind. In 1907, he married Aletha Dowridge, a fellow Barbadian whom he had met in America, and the newlyweds set out to establish a life together in Brooklyn. They welcomed the birth of a daughter, Elise, in 1908. Just about a year later, however, mother and daughter returned to Barbados as Frederick struggled to find a steady job to support his...

The everyday struggle for economic survival wrought havoc on black people individually and collectively. Poverty exacted its toll in the number of lives lost to disease, undernourishment, poor health care, and dangerous jobs. Its price was paid in mental anguish, the separation of children from parents and husbands from wives, and the vulnerability of unsupervised children. With few resources at their disposal and only a limited number of organizations providing services to them, black people endeavored to develop support networks from among strangers and sought creative ways of enduring their hardships. But imminent (or actual) destitution could devastate families despite...

In the face of pressing poverty and deteriorating race relations, black New Yorkers nevertheless found ways to create community within overcrowded tenements and to assert their claim to the city. Despite tremendous mobility even after arrival in the metropolis, black people established roots in the form of fraternal organizations, churches, and benevolent associations. The vanguard of migrants from the South and immigrants from the Caribbean encountered a city that bore little resemblance to their imagination and did a great deal to make their foray into the urban North a failure. But in their common refusal to concede defeat, black people...