I: Born of Riots: The Making of San Juan Hill

In late Nineteenth Century New York City, landlords exploited the racism that forced African-Americans to live in restricted areas of the city by charging African-American rents that were as much as fifty percent higher than those charged to whites.

Not only were blacks confined to certain neighborhoods, white harassment and violence kept pushing blacks from one neighborhood to the next. For example, because of racist violence, Blacks fled from lower Manhattan in the middle of the nineteenth century to the "Tenderloin district" in what is today mid-town.

New York Times, April 14, 1889

Harper's Weekly, Dec. 22, 1900

But even the Tenderloin district proved dangerous.  A series of riots occurred in that neighborhood in the  summer of 1900 that many  African-Americans believed happened because the police refused to protect them from white rioters.

 

After this riot and then again after all other race riots in Manhattan in the early twentieth century, African-Americans accused the police of either letting whites assault them or actually instigating the violence.

New York Times, Aug 20, 1900

A century later, we can not know the truth for sure, but the consistency of the charge against the police is striking.

The 1900 riot in the Tenderloin encouraged many African-Americans to move further North to escape the violence directed against them.

Blacks moved in large numbers to a new neighborhood, bounded to the north by 64th street, to the east by Amsterdam Avenue, and to the south, 53rd Street.

New York Times, Aug 27, 1900
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