A moment in the sun : Black Manhattan before the Civil War / Shane White.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

White, Shane, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African Americans--New York (State)--New York--History.

African Americans.

African Americans--Social conditions--19th century.

Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)--History.

Manhattan (New York, N.Y.).

Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)--Race relations.

african american.

Genre:

African Americans

New York (State)

Informational works.

Physical Description:

xxiii, 383 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Liveright Publishing Corporation, [2026].

Summary:

A Moment in the Sun dispels the pernicious narrative that in New York City, slavery was followed by a hundred years of poverty and destitution.

Historian Shane White dispells the narrative that poverty and destitution followed the end of slavery in New York City. White discusses how freed Black men and women had many creative achievements and focuses on several notable people who helped transform the city's culture. White also reveals how racial tensions helped facilitate cultural integration.

Dispelling the persistent narrative that abject poverty followed the end of slavery in New York City, acclaimed historian Shane White finally sets the historical record straight. A Moment in the Sun, a revisionist and immersive retelling of antebellum Manhattan, depicts a long-forgotten, nineteenth-century era when ordinary Black men and women, now free, "stood a brief moment in the sun" (W. E. B. Du Bois), ushering in a roughly half-century period when New York City bulged and thrummed with Black creativity and achievement nearly a hundred years before the storied Harlem Renaissance. Culling a narrative from thousands of fragmentary sources gathered over three decades of research, White conjures the distant world of these Black New Yorkers, from the streets where dandies flaunted their signature style to a rollicking dance cellar on a Friday night in the Five Points neighborhood. "In a city still rife with racism and violence," White writes, "ordinary African New Yorkers--among them oystermen, petty entrepreneurs, fortune-tellers, and 'confidence men'--brought into being a free urban Black culture." Along the way, White introduces us to a notable parade of characters who helped transform Gotham into a booming urban metropolis, among them Thomas Downing, the "Oyster King of New York"; Mary Thompson, who ran a cookshop out of her cellar; and Cato Alexander, whose tavern provided cocktails and carriage races to a diverse clientele. As these people, languages, and cultures mixed in the so-called amalgamated city, racial tensions heightened and often exploded, but this friction helped facilitate a cultural melding that was extensive. To a startling degree, White reveals the myriad ways this first attempt at integration in New York City actually worked.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 340-361) and index.

Local Notes:

Athenaeum copy: Hagen fund bookplate.

ISBN:

1324095083

9781324095088

OCLC:

1535850596