Marcy S. Sacks.Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City before World War I.:Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City before World War I.(Politics and Culture in Modern America.)

Abstract

Recent scholarship on black urbanization has moved from the Great Migration to postwar deindustrialization, but this book looks back to the formative stage between the 1880s and 1910s. As the federal government retreated from Reconstruction, black southerners moved north and west, especially as the more liberal states passed equal protection legislation. Migrants weighed factors of white violence and Jim Crow, and the potential for prosperity and pleasure. Also, in this pre–World War I phase, the so-called “talented tenth” migration sought dignity and education in traditionally black urban destinations. According to Marcy S. Sacks, whatever their expectations, in New York City most “black people labored in unskilled jobs, and many lived in poverty” (p. 5). They continuously moved in the metropolis to escape violence or harassment, settling above 125th Street, “nearly the only area in which black Manhattanites could easily reside” (p. 85). Seth Scheiner's pioneering monograph on the same topic, Negro Mecca: A History of the Negro in New York City, 1865–1920 (1965), consciously departed from the orthodoxy of “reading works that look at the Negro only in relation to white society” (p. vii). While Sacks focuses on the “internal workings of urban black populations,” she also analyzes the response of white New Yorkers to the newcomers, what she sees as a kind of racism “subtler than in the South” (p. 32).