Black New Yorkers' Struggle for Liberation (1865-1918)
Channel: Samuel Finesurrey, Ph.D.
Date: 2021-03-23

This episode begins with Lincoln's death exacerbating the trauma faced by African Americans in the U.S. South. Dependent on congressional action, rights were secured through the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and the sending of Northern troops to occupy the South. For a time the lives of black southerners improved, however, with the end of Reconstruction white supremacy was reinstalled through violence.

By the 1910s Jim Crow was in full swing with confederate statues popping up throughout the South to honor the "Lost Cause". The violence grew more widespread after black troops returned from World War I as decorated heroes having just fought to "make the world safe for democracy." Attempts to exert their rights in the country that they fought for led to violent reprisals from whites in the North and the South. While Harlem was both segregated and discriminatory towards blacks, for many African-Americans, the home of the Harlem Hellfighters, became a haven from the struggles blacks faced elsewhere in the nation.

The ingenuity of black businessmen like Philip A. Payton, and the flight of blacks from the terrorism in the U.S. South created the context for Harlem to become a majority black neighborhood and a cultural capital from which black art and organizing could be nurtured.