New York City has long been home to the largest African American population of any city in the United States, and the world's largest Black population of any city outside Africa, by a significant margin. As of the 2010 census, the number of African Americans residing in New York City was over 2 million. The highest concentration of African Americans are in Brooklyn, Harlem, Queens, and The Bronx. New York City is also home to the highest number of immigrants from the Caribbean.
Since the earlier part of the 19th century, there has been a large presence of African Americans in New York City. Early Black communities were created after the state's final abolition of slavery in 1827. The metropolis quickly became home to one of the most sizable populations of emancipated African Americans. But Black men in New York did not receive voting rights equal to white men until the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment of the US Constitution in 1870. New York City and other northern cities saw a sharp rise in their Black populations in the wake of Jim Crow in the South. In the early 1900s, many African Americans moved to Harlem, due to a number of factors, including many Black migrants relocating from the South to the North in what came to be known as the Great Migration.
New York City's Black population changed again in the 21st century. Between 2000 and 2020, many Black families left the city primarily due to the city having the highest cost of living in the nation. Many blacks leaving New York City have moved to cities in the U.S. South, including Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, Columbia, Jacksonville, Little Rock, Memphis, Orlando, New Orleans, Tampa, Jackson, Raleigh, Fort Worth, and San Antonio. In 2026, Mayor Zohran Mamdani spoke about the 200,000 Black residents that left New York City in the previous two decades as a "reversal of the Great Migration.”
Demographics According to the 2010 census, New York City had the largest population of Black residents of any U.S. city, with over 2 million within the city's boundaries, although this number has decreased since 2000. New York City recorded the third largest Black population decline among American cities from 2000 - 2020, registering a loss of nearly 200,000 Black residents (roughly 9% of the 2000 Black population). The driving factor for this outmigration appears to be the increasing cost of living in New York, particularly for families. Black families leaving New York are frequently drawn to places where job growth and housing is more plentiful.
The Black community consists of immigrants and their descendants from Africa and the Caribbean as well as native-born African Americans. Many of the city's Black residents live in Brooklyn, Queens, Harlem, and The Bronx. Several of the city's neighborhoods are historical birthplaces of urban Black culture in America, among them, the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford–Stuyvesant and Manhattan's Harlem and various sections of Eastern Queens and The Bronx. Bedford-Stuyvesant is considered to have the highest concentration of Black residents in the United States. New York City has the largest population of Black immigrants (at 686,814) and descendants of immigrants from the Caribbean (especially from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Guyana, Belize, Grenada, and Haiti), Latin America (Afro-Latinos), and of sub-Saharan Africans. In recent decades, as Afro-Caribbean and West Indian populations in the city have shrunk, immigration from the African continent has become the primary driver of Black population growth in New York City.
The racial and ethnic makeup of Black neighborhoods in New York is also changing. From 2000 to 2010, the Black share of all residents in the average majority Black New York City neighborhood declined by 3.7 percentage points, while the share of Other (+2.4), Hispanic (+1.7), and Asian (+0.4) residents all grew, suggesting that while Black neighborhoods are becoming more diverse, they may also be losing their quintessentially Black character. As of 2010, Black-majority neighborhoods in New York continue to see higher poverty rates and lower household incomes than their white majority counterparts, but exhibit lower poverty rates and higher household incomes than Asian or Hispanic majority neighborhoods, bucking national trends. Much of this can be attributed to the unique makeup of Black New Yorkers, with New York's substantial foreign-born Black population - which tends to be wealthier than US-born Blacks - making it a relative outlier compared to other major US cities.
Voting rights For many years, New York denied universal suffrage to its Black residents. In the Constitution of New York, ratified in 1777, voting was restricted to free men, white or Black, who met the property qualifications. The updates made at the Constitutional Convention of 1821 eliminated the property requirement for white men and expanded their franchise but made an even more stringent property requirement for Black men, effectively disfranchising them. Only after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution in 1870 did Black men receive the same right to vote as white men. In the 1880s, Sarah J.S. Tompkins Garnet founded the Equal Suffrage League in Brooklyn, advocating for the right for Black women to vote. In November 1917, New York passed a suffrage amendment extending the right to vote to women in New York, three years before the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified.
History
Under Dutch and British rule In 1626, the Dutch West India Company transported 11 abducted Africans from Angola, Sao Tome, and Congo to the Dutch settlement in New Amsterdam, in what has been acknowledged to be the beginning of the institution of slavery in New York. From that point on, the city became a critical hub of the transatlantic slave trade which would continue for centuries.
Under Dutch rule, enslaved people could obtain freedom — with conditions attached. For example, that first group of African men was able to petition the Dutch for freedom; 18 years after their arrival in New Amsterdam, they and their wives were liberated and received a parcel of land. However, their children remained enslaved, and under the terms of their release, "they had to deliver one 'fat hog' and 22.5 bushels of corn, wheat, peas, or beans to the [Dutch West India Company] every year or be re-enslaved."
By 1660, New Amsterdam was the "most important slave port in North America," having trafficked in around 4,000 Africans from Madagascar, Congo, Senegambia and more. Wall Street became a central location for slave trading.
In 1664, the English seized New Amsterdam, renaming it New York — aggressively expanding the slave trade and passing even more restrictive laws, such as the Slave Codes.
In the early 1700s, New York had one of the largest slave populations in the British colonies, amounting to 1 in 5 New Yorkers. Enslaved people in New York were conscripted into a variety of jobs, including dock workers, masons, and domestic workers. Following the 1712 Slave Rebellion, in which 23 enslaved people killed nine white people and injured six more, 70 Black people were arrested and imprisoned; 21 were eventually convicted and executed. Afterwards, even more freedoms were taken away from enslaved people (many of these laws impacted free Black people as well.) By the year 1730, 42% of New Yorkers owned slaves.
Abolition and 19th century life The African Grove theater opened in 1821, featuring a heavily Shakespeare repertory and all-Black casts for largely Black audiences. Founded by William Alexander Brown, a ship steward and free Black man, it is widely considered the first Black theatre in the United States. In 2022, NYU's Tisch School of the Arts named their theater space — which is located at the same place as the original — The African Grove Theatre.
Seneca Village, a settlement founded by free Black Americans, was established in 1825. As many as 225 residents lived in the village, which also had multiple churches, schools, and cemeteries. In 1857, the community was destroyed to make room for Central Park. Emancipated African Americans established communities in Sandy Ground on Staten Island, and Weeksville in Brooklyn. The city was a nerve center for the abolitionist movement in the United States.
Following the full abolition of slavery in New York in 1827, New York City emerged as one of the largest pre-Civil War metropolitan concentrations of free African-Americans, and many institutions were established to advance the community. It was the site of the first African-American periodical journal Freedom's Journal, which lasted for two years and renamed The Rights of All for a third year before fading to obsolescence; the newspaper served as both a powerful voice for the abolition lobby in the United States as well as a voice of information for the African population of New York City and other metropolitan areas. The African Dorcas Association was also established to provide educational and clothing aid to Black youth in the city.
In 1850, the American League of Colored Laborers, the first Black labor union in the United States, was established in New York City.
Harlem and Great Migration
The violent rise of Jim Crow in the Deep and Upper South led to the mass migration of African Americans, including ex-slaves and their free-born children, from those regions to northern metropolitan areas, including New York City. Their mass arrival coincided with the transition of the center of African-American power and demography in the city from other districts of the city to Harlem.
The tipping point occurred on June 15, 1904, when up-and-coming real estate entrepreneur Philip A. Payton, Jr. established the Afro-American Realty Company, which began to aggressively buy and lease houses in the ethnically mixed but predominantly-white Harlem following the housing crashes of 1904 and 1905. In addition to an influx of long-time African-American residents from other neighborhoods,"The Making of Harlem," James Weldon Johnson, The Survey Graphic, March 1925 the Tenderloin, San Juan Hill (now the site of Lincoln Center), Little Africa around Minetta Lane in Greenwich Village and Hell's Kitchen in the west 40s and 50s."Negro Districts in Manhattan", The New York Times, November 17, 1901."Negroes Move Into Harlem", New York Herald, December 24, 1905. The move to northern Manhattan was driven in part by fears that anti-black riots such as those that had occurred in the Tenderloin in 1900Alphonso Pinkney & Roger Woock, Poverty and Politics in Harlem, College & University Press Services, Inc., 1970, p. 26. and in San Juan Hill in 1905"Harlem, the Village That Became a Ghetto", Martin Duberman, in New York, N.Y.: An American Heritage History of the Nation's Greatest City, 1968 might recur. In addition, a number of tenements that had been occupied by blacks in the west 30s were destroyed at this time to make way for the construction of the original Penn Station.
In 1905, U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt appointed Charles William Anderson as Collector of Revenue in New York City.
Caribbean immigration
The Great Depression and demographic shift