African Americans in New York City
African Americans in New York City
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African Americans in New York City

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African Americans in New York City

African Americans constitute one of the longer-running ethnic presences in New York City, home to the largest urban African American population, and the world's largest Black population of any city outside Africa, by a significant margin. As of the 2010 census, the number of African Americans residing in New York City was over 2 million. The highest concentration of African Americans are in Brooklyn, Harlem, Queens, and The Bronx. New York City is also home to the highest number of immigrants from the Caribbean.

Since the earlier part of the 19th century, there has been a large presence of African Americans in New York City. Early Black communities were created after the state's final abolition of slavery in 1827. The metropolis quickly became home to one of the most sizeable populations of emancipated African Americans. But Blacks did not receive equal voting rights in New York until the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution in 1870. New York City and other northern cities saw a sharp rise in their Black populations in the wake of Jim Crow in the South. In the early 1900s, many African Americans moved to Harlem, due to a number of factors, including many Black migrants relocating from the South to the North. But the demographic shift would change once again in the 20th century. In 1936, overcrowding in Harlem caused scores of African Americans to leave and move to Bedford-Stuyvesant, which eventually became the second largest Black community in New York City.

New York City's Black population would be altered again in the 21st century. Between 2000 and 2020, many Black families left the city primarily due to the city's high cost of living. Many blacks leaving New York City have moved to cities in the U.S. South, including Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, Jacksonville, Little Rock, Memphis, Orlando, New Orleans, Charleston, Portsmouth, Oklahoma City, West Palm Beach, Missouri City, Peachtree Corners, Tampa, Austin, Sugar Land, Gaithersburg, Wilmington, Durham, Greensboro, Fayetteville, Jackson, Killeen, Birmingham, Huntsville, Nashville, Arlington, Columbia, Raleigh, Richmond, Fort Worth, Greenville, and San Antonio. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of African Americans in New York City declined, due to Blacks having a higher rate of contracting and dying from the virus than other racial groups.

According to the 2010 census, New York City had the largest population of Black residents of any U.S. city, with over 2 million within the city's boundaries, although this number has decreased since 2000, falling below 2 million as of 2020. In fact, New York recorded the third largest Black population decline among American cities from 2000 - 2020, registering a loss of nearly 200,000 Black residents (roughly 9% of the 2000 Black population). The driving factor for this outmigration appears to be the increasing cost of living in New York, particularly for families. Black families leaving New York are frequently drawn to places where job growth and housing is more plentiful.

The Black community 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, Queens, Harlem, 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), Latin America (Afro-Latinos), and of sub-Saharan Africans. In recent decades, as Afro-Caribbean and West Indian populations in the city have shrunk, immigration from the African continent has become the primary driver of Black population growth in New York City.

The racial and ethnic makeup of Black neighborhoods in New York is also changing. From 2000 to 2010, the Black share of all residents in the average majority Black New York City neighborhood declined by 3.7 percentage points, while the share of Other (+2.4), Hispanic (+1.7), and Asian (+0.4) residents all grew, suggesting that while Black neighborhoods are becoming more diverse, they may also be losing their quintessentially Black character. As of 2010, Black majority neighborhoods in New York continue to see higher poverty rates and lower household incomes than their White Majority counterparts, but exhibit lower poverty rates and higher household incomes than Asian or Hispanic Majority neighborhoods, bucking national trends. Much of this can be attributed to the unique makeup of Black New Yorkers, with New York's substantial foreign-born Black population - which tend to be wealthier than US-born Blacks - making it a relative outlier compared to other major US cities.

New York residents denied blacks equal voting rights. By the constitution of 1777, voting was restricted to free men who could satisfy certain property requirements for the 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. The African Grove theater served the community until it was shut down by police. Seneca Village was established in 1825. In 1850, the American League of Colored Laborers, the first black labor union in the United States, was established in New York City.

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 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. "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 the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870."

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