| Chapter 1: | Health Conditions in Harlem in the Early Years of Black Urbanization |
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real estate companies and three major black religious organizations—Bethel African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion, and St. Phillips Church—were at the forefront of the movement, purchasing property to relocate their congregations to the area.
Though native black New Yorkers established black Harlem, the arrival of Southern migrants was the most important factor in the exponential growth of Harlem's black population. Between 1917 and 1919, the continuous stream of Southern migrants who had been moving to the North since Reconstruction turned into a deluge. African Americans were fleeing the threat of lynching, the loss of agricultural jobs resulting from mechanization and the boll weevil, poverty, and Jim Crow. Looking for economic opportunity, education for their children, physical mobility, and the franchise they had been denied in the South, black artisans and unskilled laborers arrived in Northern cities like Chicago; Detroit; Philadelphia; Cincinnati; Cleveland; Newark; New Jersey; and New York City. Between 1910 and 1920, Chicago's black population increased from 44,103 to 109,458—a growth of 148.2 percent. The black population in Cleveland, Ohio, increased from 8,448 to 34,451—a growth of 307.8 percent. New York City's population, already possessing a large African American base, grew over 60 percent to 152,467 blacks from 1910 to 1920.3
Like the movement of Southern-born blacks to Harlem, the movement of West Indians to the area involved a series of push and pull factors. Labor displacements throughout the Caribbean encouraged groups to move to Northern cities in the United States to work in industries requiring workers, especially during World War I.4 There were few government restrictions on West Indian immigration in the second decade of the twentieth century, and this, along with cheap and easy transportation, allowed Caribbean-born blacks, primarily from the English-speaking Caribbean, to migrate to New York City.5