Home >  Term: Harlem, New York City
Harlem, New York City

Area of northern Manhattan to the Harlem River, variously defined—depending on the shifting racial and ethnic composition, and the resulting perception of desirability—as having boundaries of 110th Street or 96th Street, 5th Avenue or the East River on the east, and Morningside Drive or the Hudson River on the west. Although home to early Dutch settlers in the seventeenth century Irish squatters in the nineteenth, and Jewish and Italian migrants from the Lower East Side in the early twentieth, Harlem has been most powerfully identified as the heart of New York City’s African American community. It is best known as the center of the renaissance of African American culture and politics in the 1920s and 1930s, to which it gave its name. In the postwar period, Harlem became firmly entrenched as a predominantly poor African American neighborhood, which has nonetheless produced important political figures such as Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Malcolm X and David Dinkins, the first African American mayor of New York City. East or Spanish Harlem has also become a Latino center of culture and political power.

0 0

Creator

  • Aaron J
  • (Manila, Philippines)

  •  (Gold) 1311 points
  • 100% positive feedback
© 2024 CSOFT International, Ltd.