Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [789]
In 1869 blacks demanded an “equal right to labor with all other classes of our fellow citizens,” calling the exclusion policy “strong evidence of the power which the spirit of slavery and caste still holds over the mind of our white fellow citizens.” The sole positive response came from Section 1 of the IWA, the only white citywide labor group that actively promoted the organization of black workers—one reason the National Colored Labor Convention sent a delegate to the 1870 Paris Congress of the First International.
Excluded from the mechanical trades—a machinist with Admiral Farragut found he couldn’t get a job in the city—blacks remained sequestered in the laboring and service sectors as longshoremen, laundresses, sailors, waiters, barbers, cooks, servants, coachmen, or porters or in a handful of skilled crafts jobs. Excluded from the unions, laborers, longshoremen, and artisans gathered in the New York African Society for Mutual Relief, founded in 1808 and still going strong, while black caterers, coachmen, barbers, and seamen formed their own organizations.
Despite the generally dismal circumstances, the city’s shrunken black community began to regenerate itself. At war’s end there were but 14,804 African-Americans in New York and Brooklyn combined, five thousand fewer than in 1840, and they constituted a scant 1.4 percent of the total population. The populace grew 26.7 percent between 1865 and 1870 and jumped by another 53.6 percent over the next decade, partly through natural increase and partly via the flow of immigrant freedmen who began to trickle north, primarily from Virginia.
Internal migration was more dramatic. In the 1860s and 1870s, though some blacks still lived in Greenwich Village, like “sardines in a box in rickety-old houses,” many more had migrated to enclaves in Hell’s Kitchen. These were among the meanest areas in the city but were within walking distance of such longshore and service jobs as remained open to them. Churches relocated accordingly. St. Mark’s Methodist Episcopal and Bethel African Methodist Episcopal moved uptown. New congregations opened as well, like Mount Olivet Baptist, which appealed particularly to southern newcomers. Philanthropists followed too. The Quakers’ New York Colored Mission settled on West 30th Street to seek the “religious, moral and social elevation of the Colored People”; it offered Sunday school, Bible classes, aid for the sick and underfed, and a nursery school to get children out of apartments “while laundry work was carried on.”
Brooklyn had been attracting blacks since the draft riots, though here too numbers remained small. In 1870, out of a total Brooklyn population of approximately 420,000, roughly fifty-six hundred were African Americans, and they were scattered across widely separated communities. The Fort Greene Park area, south and east of the Navy Yard, and the stretch along Atlantic Avenue to the western border of Bedford both witnessed black development in these years. The black enclave at Weeksville-Carrville still hosted 650 in 1875, though much of the area was destroyed when Eastern Parkway and other streets were cut through the area, and it soon lost its African-American character.
HAVING FUN
New York’s working people divided along racial and ethnic lines at play as well as at work and in their residential quarters, in part because so many leisure-time activities were themselves