A black man living in Harlem slightly more than 100 years ago was as inconceivable as an East German crossing the Berlin Wall. Philip Payton, a young, impoverished, black former janitor virtually unknown today, changed all that and led the black community into Harlem and a new status in New York and America.

Now that Barack Obama is President of the United States and David Patterson is governor of New York State, it is hard to imagine that at the turn of the last century blacks in New York were tightly restricted in where they could live and work. In fact very few New Yorkers, black or white, know that it was a young black realtor named Phillip Payton who broke down these barriers, opened Harlem to settlement by blacks, and that the result of his efforts would be to facilitate the creation of black organizations that would ultimately defeat segregation and racial discrimination throughout the U.S. and even help overthrow colonialism in Africa.

In the 19th century, the black community in New York City was relatively small and mostly restricted to certain slum areas. Although there had been some blacks living in New York City from the 1600s and slavery had been abolished in New York State in 1827, most American blacks lived in the South. The position of those who lived in the city was largely marginal, particularly after many fled Manhattan to Brooklyn — mostly to Weeksville in Bedford Stuyvesant — as a result of the Irish-led draft riots during the Civil War. However, after the hopes for racial equality from Reconstruction governments in the South faded and Jim Crow policies of segregation were reimposed in the 1880s and 1890s, more and more blacks began to trickle up from the South into the city seeking better opportunities. Many of these new arrivals congregated in established black enclaves in the West 50s in Hell’s Kitchen.where they lived in dilapidated housing in close proximity to the poor Irish in what was considered one of the worst slums in the city. Ironically blacks in such neighborhoods were known to have to pay more than whites for rent and were considered to be highly reliable tenants.

In 1900, the uneasy coexistence between blacks and poor Irish in Hell’s Kitchen came apart when a black man named Arthur Harris stabbed an Irish patrolman named Robert Thorpe, who allegedly sought to arrest his wife for prostitution. Thorpe, who was a popular young policeman with significant ties to the neighborhood, died of his wounds, and after the funeral Irish street gangs organized attacks on blacks throughout the neighborhood resulting in significant injuries and a number of deaths The police, who were almost exclusively Irish, reportedly did not make any efforts to stop the violence. Later black leaders protested to the city. Although the police commissioner deplored the violence, nothing was done to punish the perpetrators. After this incident, the black leadership knew it had to find some other place for the community to move, but the question was where. Although there was in theory no legal restriction on blacks living in any area, in practice landlords would not rent to them in most established white neighborhoods — and there were no laws against such discrimination.

It was around this time that Payton, a recent high school graduate from Westfield, Mass., arrived in New York City. Although Payton had worked with his father as a barber, he was unable to find a job in this or any other field and thus became a janitor in a real estate office serving black tenants. In this position Payton presumably observed that the amounts blacks paid for slum housing were not that much less than the amounts whites were paying for much better housing in nicer neighborhoods, and that the tensions between blacks and Irish in Hell’s Kitchen made this a less than ideal neighborhood for blacks to live. Payton in 1902 attended a meeting sponsored by Booker T. Washington’s National Negro Business League in which there were seminars on how to run a business and the importance of blacks running their own businesses. Following these principles, Payton struck off on his own and announced that he was forming a real estate management company specializing in managing black tenants for landlords. Unfortunately he did not have any tenants to manage at first, and soon was broke and about to be evicted from his apartment. He was thus at this time a rather unlikely figure to lead the black community out of the slums of Hell’s Kitchen and change the course of New York history.

However, luck for Payton and New York’s black community would soon change. Because Payton sometimes lacked the five cents necessary to pay for a subway, he would walk around the city and observe various neighborhoods. One such neighborhood was Harlem, which was rapidly growing as a luxury residential community. With the expansion in the city’s population because of open immigration and the anticipated opening of the IRT subway, there was a belief that Harlem would be one of the city’s most elite neighborhoods and builders were rushing to put up brownstones there. Harlem was initially a Dutch and then German farming community that excluded Jewish and Italian immigrants, but by the 1880s and 1890s, wealthy members of these immigrant groups had been able to overcome thee restrictions and buy into the area. In fact, by 1900 Harlem was the second-largest Jewish community in New York, after the lower East Side, and the fourth-largest Jewish community in the nation. It was known as the area of New York that was home to the wealthier Jews such as Richard Rogers or the Lewisohns. Notwithstanding this growth, beginning in 1904 there was a recession in New York’s real estate market and it became clear that at least for the moment the north part of Harlem (around 135th Street and north) was overbuilt. According to Payton, one landlord was having a fight with another and threatened to rent his building to blacks. He thus contacted Payton and leased him his building. Under a standard arrangement Payton released the property to black tenants from the Hell’s Kitchen area for 10 percent more than his lease. As the rents they were paying for apartments in this luxury building in Harlem were only slightly higher than those in the slums of Hell’s Kitchen, the new black tenants were presumably delighted to be there and the landlord had a fully rented apartment building in a difficult market. As a result of Payton’s success with this initial building other landlords immediately approached him, and soon he had four or five other buildings in the same area under management with black tenants on the same arrangement. The penniless young janitor from a year before was now becoming an established realtor.

Payton was particularly delighted some months later when an organization called the Hudson Realty Company offered to buy out his leases at what to him seemed to be an exorbitantly high price, providing him with more money than he had ever seen. He was soon less excited, however, when he heard that the Hudson Realty Company was evicting all the black tenants that Payton had brought to Harlem and seeking to have all landowners in Harlem place covenants in their deeds prohibiting their properties from being rented or sold to blacks. At this point Payton presumably could have taken his profit and gone away, but he apparently had bigger things in mind. He formed an entity called the Afro-American Realty Company and with ten backers, including some evicted tenants, he purchased from a firm called Kassel and Goldberg a number of buildings right opposite the buildings he had sold, and promptly began evicting the white tenants in those buildings to make way for the black tenants being evicted from his old buildings. If Payton’s bringing blacks into Harlem had not already attracted enough attention, his standing up to the attempts of white landlords to throw them out created a sensation. A New York Times article of December 8, 1904 entitled “Race War Breaks Out In Harlem Real Estate” gave wide publicity to Payton’s efforts which undoubtedly placed both the established black business leadership in the city, most of which was very conservative and affiliated with Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee machine, and the Jewish community in Harlem in an awkward position. While the black leadership in the city had strongly advocated moving out of the slums of Hell’s Kitchen, most of that leadership had come up from the post-Reconstruction South where direct confrontations with white authority had been violently suppressed. In fact Booker T. Washington’s strategy of self-help and accommodation with segregationist white authorities was being criticized by such black writers as WEB Dubois for in effect condoning white racism and turning a blind eye to the diminition of black rights throughout the South. Here Payton, a virtually unknown 27-year-old who had attended Washington’s National Negro Business League meetings and claimed to be following his self-help principles, was now directly confronting the white establishment in one of New York’s most elite suburbs to improve housing conditions for blacks in a way the established leadership might never have dared. Payton sought help from that leadership urging that the time had come for the black community to take a stand against the racially discriminatory barriers that kept them locked in Hell’s Kitchen, and that the place to do it was Harlem. The fact that the Hudson Realty Company soon sold back to Payton at a loss the buildings it had previously purchased from him significantly added to his reputation. Soon Payton’s Afro-American Realty Company, with a board of directors consisting of many of New York’s leading black businessmen (most of whom were affiliated with the New York chapter of Booker T. Washington’s National Negro Business Leagues), issued a prospectus urging investments from all blacks who wished to do something about the race problem.

From the point of view of the Jewish community, Payton’s efforts to move blacks into Harlem created a particularly ticklish situation. On one hand, as most Jews were well aware, some 20 years earlier discriminatory covenants had been used to try to keep them out of Harlem, and particularly to the numerous recently arrived Russian Jews, the similarity between the treatment of blacks in the Hell’s Kitchen riots and the pogroms that they had fled in Russia was obvious. On the other hand, many Jews, particularly the German Jews who had just moved into Harlem, wanted to fit in with their white neighbors and worried that an influx of black tenants would ultimately devalue the property in which they had invested. In order for efforts to keep blacks out of Harlem to be successful they would have to have the unified support of the white community. This did not happen, as apparently there were landlords like Abraham Kassel and Isaac Goldberg who even in the face of the concerted efforts by groups such as the Hudson Realty Company to enforce restrictions on black settlement were willing to sell to Payton’s Afro-American Realty Company. Whether this was because they believed that the Jews’ interests lay in supporting Payton in his efforts to fight racial prejudice (similar restrictions against Jews were at the time rampant in areas of the Bronx and Queens) or merely because they believed they were financially better off selling their properties at a reasonable price before Harlem became an all-black neighborhood (in what later would be know as a “block bust”) is not clear.

In any event, by 1907 the Afro-American Realty Company, now backed by the full weight of the black business community in New York and apparently operating with the assistance of a number of Jewish real estate agents, owned more than 25 buildings in Harlem with more than a thousand black tenants, and a capitalization of more than one million dollars. This made it one of the largest and most prominent black-owned enterprises in the nation. Hundreds of New York blacks had responded to Payton’s call for an economic solution to the race problem and invested. In his 1907 National Negro Business League’s annual report, Booker T. Washington prominently profiled 31-year-old Payton, who he called one of the leading black businessmen in the nation — quite a change from his status four short years earlier when he was a penniless and almost homeless unemployed janitor.

However, there was a recession in New York real estate again in 1908 and Harlem was overbuilt, so the Afro-American Realty Company was soon facing many of the same problems as white landlords in northern Harlem in finding tenants who could pay enough to meet the buildings’ carrying costs. Whether because of Payton’s youthful exuberance in purchasing properties ora decrease in the purchasing power of black tenants, the company was soon overextended and facing default on all its obligations. Payton asked Booker T. Washington to help by seeking assistance from the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who apparently rejected Payton’s pleas on the basis that this was a profit-making and not a charitable organization, and Washington also refused to guarantee the company’s obligations personally. As a result, the Afro-American Realty Company failed, and the many blacks who had invested in it lost all their money. White lenders repossessed its properties, and there were lawsuits accusing Payton of mismanagement and fraud. However, even though the company had failed economically, in a broader sense Payton’s effort had succeeded beyond anything the blacks who backed it could have imagined when it was formed in 1904. The seemingly insurmountable walls that had prevented blacks from moving out of slums like Hell’s Kitchen had been breached and there was no turning back. Payton’s efforts to settle blacks in Harlem were continued by other black realtors, such as John E. Nail, affiliated with wealthier black churches such as St. Philip’s Episcopal Church or Abyssinian Baptist Church. By 1911, when a sign was posted indicating that a critical row of previously all-white houses on 135th Street between Seventh Avenue and Lenox (near today’s Schomburg Library) was being managed by the black realty firm of Nail and Parker, generally known to be affiliated with St. Philip’s Church, (the city’s wealthiest black church) it was clear that all attempts to keep blacks out of Harlem had failed, and that the part of Harlem north of 125th Street at least was likely to become a predominantly black community.

The importance of Payton’s effort in creating Black Harlem to the nation’s black community and to the nation generally cannot be overestimated. In an era of tremendous retrenchment in race relations, in which the Ku Klux Klan was on the rise in the South and blacks were disenfranchised and subject to segreation in schools, housing and employment and lynchings, word spread in black communities around the country that there was one place in America where Jim Crow and white racism had been beaten nd blacks could stand free of racial prejudice — the elite, previously predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Harlem. In the period from 1910 to 1930, the black population of New York City would more than triple and so would the population of Harlem, as many of the nation’s most ambitious and adverturous blacks, in the words of the writer and political leader James Weldon Johnson, took part in the “Great Migration” from the South to Harlem. During the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, the neighborhood would become the unquestioned cultural, intellectual and political capital of Black America. It would be the home to the major black writers and musicians in the country as well as the headquarters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where WEB Dubois, editor of the organization’s publication the Crisis, served as the research director and key spokesman, and Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which sought to foster black enterprise and unite blacks worldwide to throw off white colonial domination in the Caribbean and Africa.

Despite the lawsuits and the stain on his reputation resulting from the failure of the Afro American Realty Company, Payton continued in business as a Harlem realtor operating under the name Philip A. Payton & Co. Although he would never be as prominent as he had been previously, his company apparently had sufficient resources and interest to purchase a full-page advertisement in the first issue of the NAACP’s magazine the Crisis in 1910, and thus lend support to this fledgling interracial organization of blacks, Jews and other whites pledged aggressively to fight prejudice against blacks, based in many respects on the alliances he had forged in his fight to break down barriers in Harlem. He died of cancer in 1917 at the age of 41. Unfortunately he thus did not live to see the flourishing of black culture in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s or the call of Marcus Garvey’s Harlem-based UNIA to create an international movement of blacks to overthrow white colonialism in Africa and the Caribbean, and to create black-owned companies to advance the economic position of blacks through race economics. Notwithstanding the economic failure of early experiments like the Afro-American Realty Company, the UNIA’s call for freedom for blacks in Africa and black control of enterprises in countries where the majority of the population is black would later in the 1950s and 60s form the inspiration for independence movements which from one end of Africa to the other would result in an end to colonial domination. He would also not live to see the successful fight of the NAACP through organizers such as Rosa Parks and Medgar Evers in eliminating legal segregation and discrimination throughout the South and the nation, and the election in New York City and elsewhere of black mayors, governors and a black President of the United States.

Although he is relatively unknown today, Philip Payton and his fight to break down the barriers that kept blacks out of Harlem in the first decade of the 20th century led the way for all these subsequent achievements.

James S. Kaplan is a tax and estate attorney at Herzfeld & Rubin, P.C. in Lower Manhattan. He is a walking tour historian who has given walking tours of Lower Manhattan for more than 25 years. On October 24, he will be giving for the American Museum of Financial History, a walking tour entitled the “Great Crashes of Wall Street” on the history of Wall Street and the economic growth of New York, which he has given annually with Richard M. Warshauer since the crash of 1987. His previous work for Last Exit looked at Thomas Paine’s and Revolutionary War general Horatio Gates’ legacy in New York.

Copyright Last Exit 2009