There were Negro freemen on Manhattan Island before the Revolutionary War. New York never was a station in the abolitionist underground.
The race was represented by only a few scattered thousands at the beginning of the present century. The heavy influx began shortly thereafter in a drive by industry seeking cheap labor.
Agents were sent to the South to recruit whole train-loads of black people to throw into unskilled work against the Irish, Italians and others who were already becoming troublesome to the industrial moguls with demands for higher wages. The pay spurned as too low by the whites looked big to the cotton pickers and ditch diggers of Dixie.
The Negro population grew rapidly. So did the spirit of resentment and hatred which surrounded them everywhere, despite the Northern fiction of race equality.
Not only were the Negroes driven together for protection against a powerful prejudice which kept their lives miserable and unsafe, but they found themselves caught in a ring, welded by small and big owners of real estate, which literally caged them in.
The net result has been the most congested ghetto on the American continent—Harlem.
In the tiny area of Harlem there is now a population of around 650,000—approximately that of the full census of Pittsburgh or San Francisco proper.