Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [681]
Work opportunities had continued to contract. In 1852 the newly formed Longshoreman’s United Benevolent Society announced its intention to reserve waterfront jobs to its own (overwhelmingly Irish) membership and to “such white laborers as they see fit to permit upon the premises.” By 1855 few blacks worked the docks, apart from occasional strikebreaking stints under the protection of city police. It was much the same with other unskilled positions. As the African Repository reported in 1851, “the influx of white laborers has expelled the Negro almost en masse from the exercise of the ordinary branches of labor. You no longer see him work upon buildings, and rarely is he allowed to drive a cart of public conveyance. White men will not work with him.”
For black women domestic service remained an option, though in 1855 only 3 percent of the city’s servants were African Americans, and many of these worked either for the very rich or in brothels, as laundresses, charwomen, and maids. Black men did hold on to jobs as waiters in the dining rooms and kitchens of the great hotels and restaurants and, indeed, organized a union that won higher wages. Other remaining possibilities included laboring for Brooklyn and Queens farmers, going to sea, and working in skiffs for white oystermen (as did the Sandy Grounders) culling mollusks with iron rakes.
Despite—and in response to—these handicaps, a semiautonomous African-American community flourished, organized around black churches. Methodists remained numerically dominant. Mother Zion’s new 1840 edifice was perhaps the largest blackowned Protestant house of worship in the world, and AMEZ churches formed the nuclei of communities at Weeksville, Sandy Ground (near Crabtree Avenue), and Flushing (still extant in a downtown parking lot).
Presbyterians, fewer in number, were extremely influential, thanks in part to the dynamic series of leaders who succeeded Sam Cornish as pastor of the First Colored Presbyterian Church. The Rev. Theodore Wright stayed nineteen years and transformed a struggling institution into a formidable establishment, and when he died in 1847, the community held a mammoth funeral march. Under the Rev. James W. C. Pennington—an escaped slave who had worked as a blacksmith, taught himself to read and write, and became a teacher and minister—the church changed its name to Shiloh Presbyterian and moved to a building at Prince and Marion that could hold sixteen hundred.
Pennington was followed by Henry Highland Garnet, whose family had also escaped to New York from a Maryland plantation. Garnet’s father, a shoemaker, became an important member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and sent his son to the African Free School #i, until financial straits forced the youth to sea in 1829 as a cabin boy. While Henry was away, a relative of Garnet’s master came to their home determined to seize them all. His father and mother jumped from an upper-story window and escaped. His sister was caught and taken before the city recorder but with the help of white abolitionists was able to prove herself a resident of the city. Henry returned to find the family home abandoned, the furniture destroyed or stolen, and his father still in hiding. Enraged, he bought a huge knife and dashed up and down Broadway hunting for slavecatchers, until his friends spirited him out of town to save his life. Garnet became a militant abolitionist and pursued a ministerial career under the wing of Theodore Wright. After holding pastorates upstate and winning acclaim for an incendiary address at the 1843 National Negro Convention in which he urged armed uprising on southern bondsmen, Garnet assumed Wright’s old pulpit in 1855.
In the meantime, Charles B. Ray, another blacksmith turned clergyman, had established the tiny Bethesda