Stretching from 110th Street to about 151st Street, Harlem began its a special calling to African Americans when T. Thomas Fortune’s New York Age newspaper began publicizing the attraction of Harlem to African Americans, triggering White Flight from 1900-1910. From 1906 to 1910, remaining Blacks in New York City were being driven out of their neighborhoods near what is now Penn Station and Lincoln Center.  African Americans followed the newspaper ads, articles and cheaper rents, moving to Harlem. Furthermore, real estate interests overbuilt and were unable to find sufficient white tenants. Thus, economic necessity made them sell properties in 1910 to the Afro-American Realty Company.

    The Afro-American Realty Company, headed by Phillip A Payton and Charles Anderson and protégés of Booker T. Washington, put his words into action. Payton and Anderson felt that the only way African Americans could make it in America and New York, is if the “race got a bank book.” Harold Cruse notes in the Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, “The operations for the Afro-American Realty Company spearheaded the growth of Black Harlem by either leasing or buying apartment dwellings that could not be rented to Negroes”. As the Afro-American Realty Company bought up sections of Harlem, whites fled, and a wave of Blacks from the south and the Caribbean came to the area, tripling New York’s black population. In fact New York City (Manhattan) became the largest black city in the United States in 1920.

    This population increase, combined with access to patrons of all colors who could support entertainment, arts and literature, fueled the Harlem Renaissance. Harlem was home to the largest number of the Black intellectuals and artists in American history from the 1920s through the 1950s.

    It is home two of the oldest Black churches in America, Mother AME Zion Church and Abyssinian Baptist Church. Marcus Garvey paraded the ideals of Black Nationalism down Lenox Avenue. New York Amsterdam News chronicled the gradual integration of Black life into mainstream from the 20th to the 21st century. Harlem nightclubs and ballrooms are where Duke Ellington, Dizzie Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Chick Webb, Fletcher Henderson and most Jazz artists reached the height of their powers. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and Malcolm X led many Black empowerment rallies on Lenox Avenue.

    In the 1930s, millionaire Madame C.J. Walker opened hair salons and Joe Louis celebrated some of his most famous victories here. Father Divine headquartered his religious empire that helped feed thousands during the Great Depression. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his most famous Stop the Vietnam War speech at the Riverside Church in Harlem. In fact, Harlem was a hotbed for supporters of the modern Civil Rights Movement, at Abyssinian Baptist and Canaan Baptist churches in particular. Sidney Poitier, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee slept at the Harlem YMCA while refining their craft at its theatre.

    During that period Malcolm X, another alum to Garvey’s philosophy, came to the forefront of America’s consciousness. Malcolm X energized the Harlem Mosque for the Nation of Islam, and became the mouthpiece of a new intellectual Black Nationalist Movement. After separating from the Nation of Islam in 1964, Malcolm chose Harlem as the launching pad for his new movement, the Organization for African American Unity before his death in 1965.

    For years the Dance Theatre of Harlem has prepared gifted children for exciting lifestyles in the performing arts. For scholarly pursuits, no other building holds a richer archive of Black history than Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. In such times, jazz musicians and composers such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and many others were well patronized, allowing them to put jazz in finishing school as a major art form in the cultural center of America. Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Zora Neale Hurston kept it real while cultivating minds across America.

    Harlem went through a long period of depression after the riots of April 1968, when most of Black America blew up in the outrage of Dr. King’s assassination. With a lot less business insurance, new business loans, Harlem took it on the chin. Just to get something built in the community and for temporary jobs, many politicians were happy to get federal and state grants to build poor people warehouses (i.e. “Projects”) in Harlem. Many of housing projects where built over historic sites – without even a historic marker. That was the last straw for Harlem’s Black middleclass who migrated to the suburbs or elsewhere in droves. The delicate balance of an economically healthy Harlem fell so far, that you couldn’t find a bookstore here for two decades.