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When some nineteenth-century New Yorkers said "Harlam" , they meant almost all of Manhattan above Eighty-sixth Street. Toward the end of the century, however, a group of citizens in upper Manhattan- wanting, perhaps, to shape a closer and more precise sense of community-designated 5 a section that they wished to have known as Harlem. The chosen area was the Harlem to which Blacks were moving in the first decades of the new century as they left their old settlements on the middle and lower blocks of the West Side.

10 As the community became predominantly Black, the very work "Harlem" seemed to lose its old meaning. At times, it was easy to forget that "Harlem" was originally the Dutch name "Haarlem" ; that the community it described had been founded by people from Holland; and that for most of its three centuries-it had been occupied by White New Yorkers. 15 "Harlem" became synonymous with Black life and Black style in Manhattan. Blacks living there used the word as though they had coined it themselves- not only to designate their area of residence but to express their sense of the various qualities of its life and atmosphere. As the years passed, "Harlem" assumed an even larger meaning. In the words 20 of Adam Clayton Powell, Sr... the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, Harlem "became the symbol of liberty and the Promised Land to Negroes everywhere". By 1919 Harlem's population has grown by several thousand. It had received its share of wartime migration 24 from the South, the Caribbean, and parts of colonial Africa. Some of the new arrivals merely lived in Harlem : it was New York they had come to, looking for jibs and for all the other legendary opportunities of life in the city. To others who migrated to Harlem, New York was merely the city in which they found themselves; Harlem was exactly 29 where they wished to be.