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APPENDIX 7
DISTRIBUTION OF NEGRO RESIDENCES IN
SELECTED CITIES
This description of the distribution of Negro residences in selected cities should be
read in connection with the description of residential segregation in Chapter 29,
Section 3.
There have been Negroes in New York for hundreds of years.® At first they tended
to live in close proximity to the homes of the wealthy whites in whose residences they
were employed as servants. This caused them ^o live in little concentrations in several
sections of the city. Some of these nests still persist, but the new migrants to New York
tended to live together in a section which moved northward on Manhattan Island in
the wake of the upper class whites. About 1900 the main Negro center was in the
vicinity of West Fifty-third Street and was no longer a satellite community to that of
the rich whites. It contained “three rather well-appointed hotels” ^ and was as much
an independent community as can be found among any ethnic group in New York
except the Chinese. At the same time, the large Brooklyn Negro community also was
developing. The last and biggest shift was from the middle of Manhattan to Harlem.
Commerce and industry were movii^ uptown, and new residential opportunities opened
to Negroes in Harlem after 1900:
^
Harlem had been overbuilt with large, new-law apartment houses, but rapid trans-
portation to that section was very inadequate—the Lenox Avenue Subway had not yet
been built—and landlords were finding diflaculty in keeping houses on the east side of the
section filled. Residents along and near Seventh Avenue were fairly well served by the
Eighth Avenue Elevated. A colored man, in the real estate business at this time, Philip A.
Payton, approached several of these landlords with the proposition that he would fill their
empty or partially empty houses with steady colored tenants. The suggestion was accepted,
and one or two houses on One Hundred and Thirty-fourth Street east of Lenox Avenue
were taken over. Gradually other houses were filled. The whites paid little attention to
the movement until it began to spread west of Lenox Avenue j
they then took steps to
check it. They proposed through a financial organization, the Hudson Realty Company,
to buy in all properties occupied by colored people and evict the tenants. The Negroes
countered by similar methods. . . .
* This description of the distribution of Negroes in New York is taken largely from the
following two sources:
James Weldon Johnson, “Harlem: the Culture Capital,” in Alain Locke (editor). The
Ne<w Negro (1925), pp. 301-311.
E. Franklin Frazier, “Negro Harlem: An Ecological Study,” American Journal of Soci~
ology (July, 1937), pp. 72-88.
**
James Weldon Johnson, of, cit., p. 302.
X125
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