Fantastic Harlem Renaissance Claude Mckay Signed Book African American Rare

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Seller: memorabilia111 ✉️ (808) 100%, Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan, US, Ships to: US, Item: 176277816078 FANTASTIC HARLEM RENAISSANCE CLAUDE MCKAY SIGNED BOOK AFRICAN AMERICAN RARE. [publisher: Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York] First Edition First edition, first printing. Bound in publisher's original gray marble-affect paper-covered boards over blue cloth spine with title label; lacking the dust jacket. Near Fine , light discoloration to spine and bottom edge of rear board, rubbing to bottom edge  signed by the author Max   Love + Affection                Claude A scarce book of poetry from the Jamaican-born writer and seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance.  Claude McKay, born Festus Claudius McKay in Sunny Ville, Jamaica in 1889, was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a prominent literary movement of the 1920s. His work ranged from vernacular verse celebrating peasant life in Jamaica to poems that protested racial and economic inequities. His philosophically ambitious fiction, including tales of Black life in both Jamaica and America, addresses instinctual/intellectual duality, which McKay found central to the Black individual’s efforts to cope in a racist society. He is the author of The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose (1973), The Dialectic Poetry of Claude McKay (1972), Selected Poems (1953), Harlem Shadows (1922), Constab Ballads (1912), and Songs of Jamaica (1912), among many other books of poetry and prose.

Born in Jamaica, McKay first travelled to the United States to attend college, and encountered W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk which stimulated McKay's interest in political involvement. He moved to New York City in 1914 and in 1919 he wrote "If We Must Die", one of his best known works, a widely reprinted sonnet responding to the wave of white-on-black race riots and lynchings following the conclusion of the First World War. A poet from the first, he also wrote five novels and a novella: Home to Harlem (1928), a best-seller that won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature; Banjo (1929); Banana Bottom (1933); Romance in Marseille (written in 1933, published in 2020), a novella, Harlem Glory (written in 1938-1940, published in 1990), and in 1941 a novel, Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem, which remained unpublished until 2017.[2] Besides these novels and four published collections of poetry, McKay also authored a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932); two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home (1937) and My Green Hills of Jamaica (published posthumously in 1979); and Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940), consisting of eleven essays on the contemporary social and political history of Harlem and Manhattan, concerned especially with political, social and labor organizing. His 1922 poetry collection, Harlem Shadows, was among the first books published during the Harlem Renaissance and his novel Home To Harlem was a watershed contribution to its fiction. His Selected Poems was published posthumously, in 1953. His Complete Poems (2004) includes almost ninety pages of poetry written between 1923 and the late 1940s, most of it previously unpublished, a crucial addition to his poetic oeuvre. McKay was introduced to British Fabian socialism in his teens by his elder brother and tutor Uriah Theodore, and after moving to the United States in his early 20s encountered the American socialist left in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and through his membership in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) — the only American left-labor organization of the era that was totally open to Negro members (as he comments), continuing the tradition of the populist People's Party of the previous generation. In the course of the teens he became acquainted with the writings of Marx and the programs of a variety of activists. As a co-editor of The Liberator magazine, he came into conflict with its hard-line Leninist doctrinaire editor Mike Gold, a contention which contributed to his leaving the magazine. In 1922–1923 he traveled to the Soviet Union to attend a Congress of the International, there encountering his friend Liberator publisher Max Eastman, a delegate to the Congress. In Russia, McKay was widely feted by the Communist Party. While there, he worked with a Russian writer to produce two books which were published in Russian, The Negroes of America (1923), a critical examination of American black-white racism from a Marxist class-conflict perspective, and Trial By Lynching (1925); translations of these books back into English appeared in 1979 and 1977 respectively; McKay's original English texts are apparently lost. In the Soviet Union McKay eventually concluded that, as he says of a character in Harlem Glory, he "saw what he was shown." Realizing that he was being manipulated and used by the Party apparatus, and responding critically to the authoritarian bent of the Soviet regime, he left for Western Europe in 1923, first for Hamburg, then Paris, then the South of France, Barcelona and Morocco. After his return to Harlem in 1934 he found himself in frequent contention with the Stalinist New York City Communist Party which sought to dominate the left politics and writing community of the decade.[citation needed] His prose masterpiece, A Long Way From Home, was attacked in the New York City press on doctrinaire Stalinist grounds.[citation needed] This conflict is reflected in Harlem: Negro Metropolis and satirized in Amiable With Big Teeth. His sonnet sequence, "The Cycle," published posthumously in the Complete Poems, deals at length with McKay's confrontation with the left political machine of the time. Increasingly ill in the mid-40s, he was rescued from extremely impoverished circumstances by a Catholic Worker friend and installed in a communal living situation; later in the decade he converted to Catholicism.[3] Biography Early life in Jamaica Festus Claudius McKay, known as Claude McKay, was born September 15, 1890 in Nairne Castle near James Hill in upper Clarendon Parish, Jamaica.[4] He referred to his home village as Sunny Ville, a name given to the area by locals.[5] He was the youngest child of Thomas Francis McKay and Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards, well-to-do farmers who had enough property to qualify to vote. He had seven siblings.[6] McKay's parents were active and well-respected members of the Baptist faith. Thomas was a strict, religious man who struggled to develop close relationships with his children due to his serious nature. In contrast, Hannah had a warmth that allowed her to give love freely to all of her children. Thomas was of Ashanti descent, while Hannah traced her ancestry to Madagascar. Claude recounted that his father would often share stories of Ashanti customs with the family.[7] At the age of four, McKay went to school at Mt. Zion Church. Around the age of nine, he was sent to live with his oldest brother, Uriah Theodore, also known as Theo, a teacher, to be given a proper education. His brother was also an amateur journalist.[6] Due to his brother's influence, McKay became an avid reader of classical and British literature, as well as philosophy, science, and theology.[8] In his free time, he would read poems, including Shakespeare. He started writing poetry of his own at the age of 10.[6] As a teenager in 1906, he became apprenticed to a carriage and cabinet maker known as Old Brenda, maintaining his apprenticeship for about two years. During that time, in 1907, McKay met Walter Jekyll, a philosopher and folklorist, who became a mentor and an inspiration for him, who also encouraged him to concentrate on his writing. Jekyll convinced McKay to write in his native dialect, and set some of McKay's verses to music. Jekyll helped McKay publish his first book of poems, Songs of Jamaica, in 1912. They were the first poems published in Jamaican Patois, a dialect of mainly English words and Twi (Ghanaian language) structure. McKay's next volume, Constab Ballads (1912), was based on his experiences of joining the constabulary for a brief period in 1911.[9][10] In the poem "The Tropics in New York", McKay reminisced about the Caribbean.[11] The poem is set in New York and was written while McKay lived there as a laborer. The fruits he sees in New York make the speaker of the poem long for Jamaica, and thus Caribbean fruits are imagined as part of the New York cityscape. The colors of the fruit remind him of the colors and diversity in his native island and "hungry for old familiar ways / a wave of longing through my body wept".[12] First stay in the US McKay left for the US in 1912 to attend Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University). He was shocked by the intense racism he encountered when he arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, where many public facilities were segregated; this inspired him to write more poetry. At Tuskegee, he disliked the "semi-military, machine-like existence" and quickly left to study at Kansas State Agricultural College (now Kansas State University). At Kansas State, he read W. E. B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk, which had a major impact on him and stirred his political involvement. Despite his superior academic performance, in 1914 he decided he did not want to be an agronomist and moved to New York City, where he married his childhood sweetheart Eulalie Imelda Edwards. However, after only six months of marriage, his wife returned to Jamaica, where their daughter Ruth was born. McKay would never meet his daughter.[13] As detailed in the Chronology of Gene Andrew Jarrett's 2007 edition of A Long Way From Home, during this period (1914-1919) McKay first managed a Brooklyn restaurant, which failed, next worked as a waiter at a hotel in Hanover, New Hampshire, then at a Manhattan women's club, and longest and most happily as a waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad. McKay published two poems in 1917 in The Seven Arts under the pseudonym Eli Edwards. In 1918 McKay met Frank Harris, then editor of Pearson's Magazine. His avowal of writerly integrity had a lifelong effect for McKay, as he relates in his memoir, A Long Way From Home. Harris featured four poems and a short prose piece about his biography and poetics, in the September 1918 issue of the magazine, McKay's first prominent appearance in print. In 1919, McKay met Crystal and Max Eastman, publishers of The Liberator magazine, where McKay would serve as co-executive editor until 1922.[14] As co-editor of The Liberator, he published one of his most famous poems, "If We Must Die", during the "Red Summer", a period of intense racial violence against black people in Anglo-American societies. In this period McKay joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).[8] He also became involved with a group of black radicals who were unhappy both with Marcus Garvey's nationalism and the middle-class reformist NAACP. These included other Caribbean writers such as Cyril Briggs, Richard B. Moore, and Wilfred Domingo. They fought for black self-determination within the context of socialist revolution. Together they founded a semi-secret revolutionary organization, the African Blood Brotherhood. Hubert Harrison had asked McKay to write for Garvey's Negro World, but only a few copies of the paper have survived from this period, none of which contain any articles by McKay. In early fall 1919 McKay traveled to London, perhaps prompted by pressure from the Justice Department which was engaged in a nationwide attack on pacifists, socialists and labor organizers (the "Palmer Raids") which especially targeted the IWW.[15] Sojourn in the United Kingdom In London, McKay moved in socialist and literary circles; he frequented two clubs, a soldiers' club in Drury Lane, and the International Socialist Club in Shoreditch. A militant atheist, he also joined the Rationalist Press Association, who had published two of Walter Jekyll's books. It was during this period that his commitment to socialism deepened and he read Marx assiduously. At the International Socialist Club, McKay met Shapurji Saklatvala, A. J. Cook, Guy Aldred, Jack Tanner, Arthur McManus, William Gallacher, Sylvia Pankhurst, and George Lansbury. McKay was soon invited to write for Pankhurst's magazine, Workers' Dreadnought. In April 1920, the Daily Herald, a socialist paper published by George Lansbury, included a racist article written by E. D. Morel. Entitled "Black Scourge in Europe: Sexual Horror Let Loose by France on the Rhine", it insinuated gross hypersexuality in black people in general. Lansbury refused to print McKay's response,[16] so McKay did so in Workers' Dreadnought, writing: Why this obscene maniacal outburst about the sex vitality of black men in a proletarian paper? Rape is rape; the colour of the skin doesn't make it different. Negroes are no more over-sexed than Caucasians; mulatto children in the West Indies and America were not the result of parthenogenesis. If Negro troops had syphilis, they contracted it from the white and yellow races. As for German women, in their economic plight, they were selling themselves to anyone. I do not protest because I happen to be a Negro... I write because I feel that the ultimate result of your propaganda will be further strife and blood-spilling between whites and the many members of my race... who have been dumped down on the English docks since the ending of the European war... Bourbons of the United States will thank you, and the proletarian underworld of London will certainly gloat over the scoop of the Christian-Socialist pacifist Daily Herald.[17] Since January 1920, McKay had been involved with the Workers' Dreadnought and the Workers' Socialist Federation, a Council Communist group active in the East End with a majority of women at all levels of the organization (this was the British Communist Party, not the Soviet International's). He became a paid journalist for the paper. He attended the Communist Unity Conference that established the Communist Party of Great Britain. At this time he also had some of his poetry published in the Cambridge Magazine, edited by C. K. Ogden. When Sylvia Pankhurst was arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act for publishing articles "calculated and likely to cause sedition among His Majesty's forces, in the Navy, and among the civilian population," McKay had his rooms searched. He is likely to have been the author of "The Yellow Peril and the Dockers" attributed to "Leon Lopez", which was one of the articles cited by the government in its case against Workers' Dreadnought.[18] Claude McKay stands in front of draped podium with hands in pockets. Behind him, a series of men sit at cloaked tables chatting. "Mr. McKay speaking in the Throne Room of the Kremlin" printed in The Crisis, December, 1923. Trip to Russia McKay with Grigory Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin in 1923 McKay was invited to Russia during the reconstruction of the country by the Communist Party led by Lenin.[19] In November 1922, in what he referred to as his "Magic Pilgrimage," he traveled to Russia to participate in the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in Petrograd and Moscow, where he encountered Max Eastman who was also a delegate.[20] McKay financed his trip to Russia by repackaging and selling Harlem Shadows, "complete with a signed photograph and an inflated price tag" to members of an NAACP donor list and conserved the funds thus raised by working his way across the Atlantic from New York to Liverpool as a stoker on a freighter. He was greeted in Russia with what one historian characterized as "ecstatic welcome" and "rock-star treatment."[21] Later travels McKay wrote about his travels in Morocco in his 1937 autobiography A Long Way from Home. Before this journey, he went to Paris, where he contracted a severe respiratory infection and required hospitalization. After recovering he continued traveling, and for 11 years ventured around Europe and parts of Northern Africa.[22] During this stint he published three novels, the most notable of which was Home to Harlem, in 1928. Reception to the novel varied. In The Negro Novel in America, Robert Bone wrote that it represented "different ways of rebelling against Western civilization", adding that McKay was not entirely successful in articulating his protagonists. However, other people[specify] thought that the novel provided a detailed portrayal of the underside of black urban life, with its prostitutes and gamblers. He also wrote Banana Bottom during this 11-year span. Here McKay presented a clear depiction[according to whom?] of his principal theme, that black individuals quest for cultural identity in a white society. His final year abroad saw the creation of Gingertown, a collection of 12 short stories. Half of these tales depict his life in Harlem and the others revolve around his time in Jamaica.[23] Later life McKay became an American citizen in 1940.[citation needed] In 1943 McKay started "Cycle Manuscript", a collection of 54 poems, all but four of them sonnets, often with political subjects and often in tones of satiric invective. After the manuscript was rejected by Harper and Dutton, he wrote to his old friend and editor Max Eastman, asking him "to look through" all the poems and to make any needed revisions. Despite Eastman's efforts, McKay's collection was not published during his lifetime. It is included in his posthumous Complete Poems. Its editor William J. Maxwell discusses this manuscript's history in an extended note. In the mid-40s McKay began to associate with Catholic cultural activists and studied Catholic social theory, first in New York City and then in Chicago where he moved in April 1944; he was baptized there in October 1944.[24] Before his conversion, he had written to Max Eastman, about "doing a lot of reading and research, especially on Catholic work among Negroes—Because if and when I take the step I want to be intellectually honest and sincere about it". (McKay to Eastman, June 1, 1944). Five months after his baptism, he wrote Eastman to assure him that "I am not less the fighter." (McKay to Eastman, October 16, 1944, Rpt. in Passion 305).[25] In 1946, advised to seek a better climate for his health, he moved first to Albuquerque and then to San Francisco, before returning to Chicago in 1947. On May 22, 1948, he died from a heart attack in Chicago at the age of 58 and was buried at Calvary Cemetery in Queens, New York.[26] Literary movements and traditions Portrait of McKay in 1920 McKay flourished as a poet during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. During this time, his poems challenged white authority while celebrating Jamaican culture. He also wrote tales about the trials and tribulations of life as a black man in both Jamaica and America. McKay was not secretive about his hatred for racism,[27] and felt that racist people were stupid, shortsighted, and possessed with hatred.[22] In tales such as Home to Harlem (1928), his depictions were initially criticized as a negative portrayal of Harlem and its lower-class citizens by prominent figures such as W. E. B. DuBois, but McKay was later applauded as a literary force in the Harlem Renaissance.[28] Among his works that challenged racial discrimination is the poem "If We Must Die" (1919), a call for his people to fight with determination and courage against those who would murder them.[29][30] McKay divested himself from many aspects and growing prescriptions of modernism. By the beginning of the 20th century, the sonnet form had become an antiquated poetic style, but McKay found it an ideal medium to convey his ideas. Many modernists, however, rejected and criticized his use of the sonnet.[31] Despite their reaction, he persevered and created a significant number of modern sonnets. Having spent time among the artists of Paris in the 1920s, he was intimately acquainted with the dynamics between painters and models and how modernist painters presented African subjects and African culture. In her article "Caribbean Models for Modernism in the Work of Claude McKay and Jean Rhys", Leah Rosenberg writes: "The fascination with African art and its identification with female sexuality was characteristic of modernist and avant-garde primitivism".[32] The inclination to stereotype and caricature the African physical form created, however inadvertently, a form of hegemony reminiscent to McKay of the colonialism he grew up within Jamaica. "Sexuality and black culture," Rosenberg explains, "held a privileged place in modernist and avant-garde art from Picasso to Gertrude Stein". In need of money, McKay posed nude for the Cubist painter André Lhote. Through his experience, McKay saw first-hand how the larger social hegemony between European white supremacy and people of Afro-Caribbean descent could play itself out between the artist and its subject. McKay critically recalled the experience in various ways in many of his most notable works. In doing so, he shone a critical light on a cornerstone of modernism and once again pushed back against a system in which he found himself. Political views and social activism McKay joined the Industrial Workers of the World in autumn 1919 while working in a factory—following his time working as a dining-car waiter on the railways.[8] McKay believed that the Communists in the US had other things on their agenda, which did not include African Americans. Furthermore, he thought that they were using the Negro race to fight their battles. During his visit to the Soviet Union he addressed the Third International in a speech titled "Report on the Negro Question" and argued that America was not fully accepting of the Negro Communists.[33] After this speech, he was asked by the Communist Party in Russia to explore this idea more in the form of a book. He wrote Negry v Amerike in 1923. Originally in Russian, and it was not translated into English until 1979. McKay's political and social views were made clear through his literary works. In his 1929 work, Banjo: a Story Without a Plot, McKay included poignant commentary on the Western prioritization of business over racial justice through the character Ray.[34] Personal life Sexuality McKay was bisexual; he pursued relationships with both men and women throughout his life. He never officially "came out" as it was considered a societal taboo or explicitly state his sexual preference, but over the years he appears to have frequented and enjoyed the "clandestine" homosexual communities of New York as well as relationships of intermediate duration with several women. According to his biographer, Wayne Cooper, Frank and Francine Budgen, whom he knew during his stay in London in 1920 remembered him as "open" about his sexuality and as "not at all effeminate." Several of his poems suggest homosexual sentiments. In others, the gender of the speaker is not identified, which leaves to interpretation the nature of the relationships presented.[35] Some suggest that there was a sexual component to McKay's relationship with his mentor, Walter Jekyll, who was apparently homosexual but there is no evidence one way or the other.[36] In the early 1920s McKay was intermittently involved with the English labor advocate and IWW organizer, poet, and translator Charles Ashleigh.[37] McKay's sexuality is hinted at in some of his literary work. His 1929 novel Banjo: a Story without a Plot, for instance, contains a queer-coded ending. As all the other characters of the ensemble featured in this work make plans to depart, Banjo asks Ray (the two characters most central to the story) to go off separately together. In and of itself, this may not seem to indicate a romantic nature to their future relationship, but as Ray initially considers Banjo's proposal to go off together, he recalls how much joy he associated with the dream of "loafing after their labors long enough to laugh and love and jazz and fight."[34] Last years and death Less than two decades before he died, McKay largely abandoned secular ideologies in favor of Catholicism. He worked with Harlem's Friendship House, a branch of the Catholic interracial apostolate founded in the early 1930s in Toronto, Canada. McKay relocate to Chicago, Illinois, where he joined a Catholic organization as a teacher. McKay developed health problems by the mid-1940s, enduring several illnesses until he died of heart failure in 1948.[citation needed] Works In 1928, McKay published his most famous novel, Home to Harlem, which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature. The novel, which depicted street life in Harlem, would have a major impact on black intellectuals in the Caribbean, West Africa, and Europe.[38] Home to Harlem gained a substantial readership, especially among people who wanted to know more about the intense, sometimes shocking, details of Harlem nightlife. His novel was an attempt to capture the energetic and intense spirit of the "uprooted black vagabonds." In Home to Harlem, McKay looked among the common people for a distinctive black identity.[citation needed] Despite this, the book drew fire from one of McKay's contemporaries, W. E. B. Du Bois. To Du Bois, the novel's frank depictions of sexuality and the nightlife in Harlem only appealed to the "prurient demand[s]" of white readers and publishers looking for portrayals of black "licentiousness." As Du Bois said, "Home to Harlem... for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath."[38] Modern critics now dismiss this criticism from Du Bois, who was more concerned with using art as propaganda in the struggle for African-American political liberation than in the value of art to showcase the truth about the lives of black people.[39] McKay's other novels were Banjo (1929) and Banana Bottom (1933). Banjo includes a portrayal of how the French treated people from its sub-Saharan African colonies and centers on black seamen in Marseilles. Aimé Césaire stated that in Banjo, blacks were described truthfully and without "inhibition or prejudice". Banana Bottom, McKay's third novel, depicts a black individual in search of a cultural identity in a white society. The book discusses the underlying racial and cultural tensions. McKay also authored a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932), two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home (1937) and My Green Hills of Jamaica (published posthumously in 1979), and a non-fiction, socio-historical treatise entitled Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). His Selected Poems (1953) represents his selection and arrangement of 1947, but he was unable to find a publisher for it and it appeared posthumously six years later. According to Amardeep Singh's website, Claude McKay's Early Poetry, it was originally published by Bookman & Associates in 1953 with an introduction by John Dewey and subsequently reprinted by Harcourt Brace with the Dewey introduction replaced by a biographical note by Max Eastman.[40] Legacy In 1977, the government of Jamaica named Claude McKay the national poet and posthumously awarded him the Order of Jamaica for his contribution to literature.[41][42] In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Claude McKay on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.[43] McKay is regarded as the "foremost left-wing black intellectual of his age" and his work heavily influenced a generation of black authors including James Baldwin and Richard Wright.[44] In 2015, a passageway in Marseilles was named after McKay.[45] Claude McKay's poem "If We Must Die" was recited in the film August 28: A Day in the Life of a People, which debuted at the opening of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016.[46][47][48] Awards Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences, Musgrave Medal, 1912,[49] for two volumes of poetry, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. Harmon Foundation Award for distinguished literary achievement, NAACP, 1929, for Harlem Shadows and Home to Harlem. James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild Award, 1937. Order of Jamaica, 1977.[49] Selected works Poetry collections Songs of Jamaica (1912) Constabe Ballads (1912) Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (1920) Harlem Shadows (1922) The Selected Poems of Claude McKay (1953) Complete Poems (2004) Fiction Home to Harlem (1928) Banjo (1929) Banana Bottom (1933) Gingertown (1932) Harlem Glory (1990) – but written 1940 Amiable with Big Teeth (2017) - but composed in 1941[50] Romance in Marseille (2020) - but written around 1933 Non-fiction A Long Way from Home (1937) My Green Hills of Jamaica (1979, written 1946) Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940) The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose, 1912-1948, ed. Wayne F. Cooper (includes selected correspondence and periodical essays) Unknown manuscript A previously unknown manuscript of a 1941 novel by McKay was authenticated in 2012. Entitled Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem, the manuscript was discovered in 2009 by Columbia graduate student Jean-Christophe Cloutier in the Samuel Roth Papers, a previously untouched university archive. The novel centers on the ideas and events that animated Harlem on the cusp of World War II, such as Benito Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia. Professor Cloutier (now at the University of Pennsylvania) and his advisor Professor Brent Hayes Edwards successfully authenticated the manuscript, and have received permission from the McKay estate to publish the novel, a satire set in 1936, with an introduction about how it was found and its provenance verified.[2] It was published in February 2017. A major literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Jamaican-born American poet Claude McKay dedicated his life to writing verse that promoted spiritual freedom and humanitarian social and political values. Tormented by the discriminatory barriers confronting African Americans in the twentieth century, McKay vented his feelings of frustration through poetry and served as a voice for awakening the masses to the devastating effects of racism in a white-dominated society. Although he is best known for his militantly angry poetic style, McKay also dealt with less inflammatory themes: his colorful pastoral scenes of the Jamaican countryside and lyrical ruminations on the beauty of Harlem dancers are especially memorable. A respected philosopher, a celebrant of primitivism, and the author of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction works, McKay produced a vast number of writings that helped lay the foundation for the emergence of modern African American literature. AD Festus Claudius McKay was born in Sunny Ville, Jamaica, on September 15,1889, to Hannah Ann Elizabeth, a woman of warm humanitarian values, and Thomas McKay, a strictly pious Christian and successful landowner. McKay enjoyed a pleasant childhood playing within the mountain villages scattered throughout the Jamaican countryside. At age four, he attended school at Mt. Zion Church where he exhibited a strong interest in history and geography. Placed under the tutelage of his brother U Theo, a free-thinker and lay preacher, McKay was exposed to classical literature, socialist views, and the ideas of natural science and evolutionary naturalism. In his brother’s library, McKay spent long hours reading William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and the biological and philosophical treatises of Thomas Huxley, Ernest Haekel, and Herbert Spencer. Through the guidance and encouragement of U Theo, McKay began to develop skills as a writer and poet. In 1907, McKay’s literary talent attracted the notice of Walter Jekyll, an English gentleman and man of letters who urged McKay to write poetry in the native Jamaican dialect. Although most learned Jamaicans considered peasant dialect a “vulgar tone,” Jekyll awakened McKay to the natural beauty and rhythm of the language. At 23, McKay completed two volumes of dialect poetry: Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. Awarded a gold medal by the Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences in Kingston, these two works contained a number of poems describing the hardships and racial injustices suffered by the Jamaican peasantry, as well as works celebrating the grandeur of “Old England.” AD At A Glance… Born Festus Claudius McKay, September 15, 1889, in Sunny Ville, Jamaica; immigrated to U.S.; became naturalized U.S. citizen, 1940; died of heart disease, May 22, 1948, in Chicago, IL; buried in Calvary Cemetery, Woodside, NY; son of Thomas Francis (a farmer and landowner) and Hannah Ann Elizabeth (a farmer; maiden name, Edwards) McKay; married Imelda Edwards, July 30, 1914 (divorced); children: Ruth Hope. Education: Attended Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, 1912, and Kansas State College, 1912-14. Politics: Independent socialist. Religion: Converted to Catholicism, 1945. Poet, journalist, essayist, fiction writer. Woodworker’s apprentice, Brown’s Town, Jamaica, and constable, Kingston, both c. 1906; worked as a longshoreman, porter, bartender, and waiter, off and on beginning in 1910; first volumes of poetry, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, published in London, 1912; immigrated to United States, 1912; settled in New York City, 1914, and became a restaurateur; business failed; poems published in several journals, 1917-19; traveled to London and worked as a journalist, 1919-20; coeditor of the Liberator, New York City, 1921-22; attended Fourth Congress of the Third Communist International, Moscow, 1922; writer in Europe and North Africa, 1923-34; returned to the United States, February, 1934; took shelter in Catholic Friendship House, 1941; moved to Chicago, 1944. AD Awards: Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences, gold medal, 1912, for two volumes of poetry, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads; Harmon Foundation Award for distinguished literary achievement, NAACP, 1929, for Harlem Shadows and Home to Harlem; James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild Award, 1937. Upon the completion of his “free-thinking” education, McKay aspired to become a “peasant poet,” supporting himself by farming in the Jamaican countryside. In order to prepare himself for the task of advancing Jamaican agriculture, McKay left for the United States in 1912 to study agronomy (field-crop production) at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama. But, disenchanted with Tuskegee’s “machine-like” existence and “semi-military” organization, McKay left after a few months to attend Kansas State College. He tired of his studies after two years, however, and cancelled his plans to become an agronomist. “The demon of poets had got hold of me,” recalled McKay in his autobiography A Long Way from Home. “I became a vagabond—but a vagabond with a purpose. I was determined to find expression in writing.” Became Key Figure In The Harlem Renaissance With funds acquired from an anonymous benefactor, McKay, like thousands of resourceful West Indians, traveled to Harlem in New York City in 1914. Once in Harlem, McKay joined the Negro Renaissance writers’ revolt against white cultural standards by seeking to write works reflecting the life of the black masses. Like the other young Renaissance writers, McKay’s primary aim was to exalt the cultural heritage of people of color and to legitimize the differences inherent in all cultures. McKay claimed in A Long Way from Home that by reading all the great poets he “could feel their race, their class, their roots in the soil.” Thus, he set out to write poetry that would express the uniqueness of the black experience. AD Drawn to the capital of black culture, McKay became impassioned by the jazz music and stage shows featured on Harlem’s 135th Street. After establishing himself as the proprietor of a small restaurant in the black section of mid-Manhattan, McKay married his Jamaican childhood sweetheart, Imelda Edwards, on July 30, 1914. Within a few months, however, McKay faced failure in business and marriage. On her return to Jamaica shortly afterward, Imelda gave birth to McKay’s only child, Ruth Hope, a daughter he would never see. Disillusioned by middle class pursuits and without ambition to resume a formal education, McKay’s rebellious nature led him to return to the writing of poetry. While working as a stevedore, porter, and busboy, McKay divided his time between observing the condition of black workers and writing. In search of an editor, McKay came into contact with Joel Spingarn, literary critic and early founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who recommended McKay to James Oppenheim and Waldo Frank, editors of the avant garde publication Seven Arts. Despite their criticism of McKay’s formal sonnet style, Oppenheim and Frank published two of McKay’s poems, “Harlem Dancer” and “Invocation,” in the December 1917 issue of Seven Arts. That same year, McKay took a job as a dining car waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad, a job that exposed him to the many African American communities located in the cities of the industrial Northeast. In 1918, McKay was introduced to Frank Harris, editor of Pearson’s Magazine, who published five of his poems including “The Lynching.” AD Following the end of the First World War in 1918, McKay, like a great number of black Americans, became disillusioned over the resurgence of racial violence and the indifferent treatment of black veterans in the United States. He had long been aware of racial injustice, but he was deeply disturbed by the bloody race riots of 1919 that swept through major American cities like Chicago. It was at this time that McKay met Max Eastman, a Communist sympathizer and chief editor of a radical publication called the Masses. In Eastman, McKay found a literary mentor and personal confidant who remained one of his closest lifelong friends. McKay’s association with Eastman helped strengthen his radical political views and establish him as a member of New York’s postwar Greenwich Village literary scene. Poetic Genius And Political Visionary In reaction to the wave of racial violence and the U.S. government’s suppressive actions against domestic radicalism during the “Red Scare” of 1919, McKay wrote the powerful poem “If We Must Die.” Published in the July edition of the Liberator, the successor of the Masses, “If We Must Die” is a bitter yet profound poem calling for a universal movement against oppression—one that embodied such a passionately human message that British statesman and author Winston Churchill quoted from it in a speech he gave during World War II. AD Though it was criticized by conservative African Americans, “If We Must Die” appeared in black newspapers across the country, earning him national recognition as one of America’s most talented new black poetic voices. But the poem also attracted the attention of the U.S. State Department’s committee investigating African American radicals. The State Department’s attempt to label the poem as radical, antidemocratic propaganda put a great deal of pressure upon McKay who, since quitting the railroad job earlier that year, had joined the revolutionary organization known as the Industrial Workers of the World. But not long afterward, McKay received an opportunity to travel to Europe at the expense of two English admirers of his poetry. Bound for London in late 1919, McKay continued his involvement in radical politics. Upon joining the International Club, McKay became exposed to various European radical intellectuals and the serious study of Marxist ideology, which calls for the achievement of a classless society. For the year he remained in England, McKay worked as journalist for Workers’ Dreadnought, a Communist weekly publication edited by Sylvia Pankhurst. “In a real sense McKay completed in London the political self-education he had begun in the United States,” wrote historian Wayne F. Cooper in Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance—A Biography. But once in England, as Cooper pointed out, all of McKay’s romantic thoughts of the grandeur of British culture quickly waned: he became a disillusioned witness to the racial inequities faced by foreign-born blacks and the left-wing apathy toward the plight of the nationalist movements in Ireland, India, and other countries under colonial rule. AD After returning to New York in the winter of 1921, McKay was able to earn a steady income by taking a job as the assistant editor of the Liberator. In Harlem, McKay met with a circle of black socialists including Hubert Harrison and members of the African Blood Brotherhood led by Cyril Briggs and Richard B. Moore. At this time McKay also befriended intellectuals like writer James Weldon Johnson—then executive secretary of the NAACP—who hailed his work as “too powerful to be confined to the circle of race.” In the spring of 1922, while McKay continued his editing job at the Liberator, a collection of poems titled Harlem Shadows was published as his first American book. A work containing seventy poems, all of which had been written since McKay’s arrival in the United States in 1912, Harlem Shadows emerged as a great critical success that marked a major turning point in his literary career. A Pilgrimage To The West Troubled by disputes over race and political ideology among the Liberator’s staff members, McKay left the magazine in June of 1922. The author had grown weary of the racist conditions in the United States and became committed to a global political and social outlook. Although not a member of the Communist party, McKay decided to travel to Soviet Russia to observe the “grand experiment” of communism. He joined the millions of workers, writers, and intellectuals who, as he wrote in A Long Way from Home, became fascinated by “the Russian thunder rolling around the world.” With funds raised by friends and colleagues, McKay traveled to Liverpool, England, and then Berlin, where he secured a visa to enter the Soviet Union. Arriving in Moscow early in November 1922, McKay was stirred by the “semi-oriental” splendor of Russian culture and the vibrant character of Moscow, which he described as a “bright Byzantine fair.” AD In Moscow, McKay was allowed to attend the meeting of the Fourth Congress of the Third Communist International, or Comintern. One of the few blacks among the delegation, McKay spoke out against racial oppression and the American Communist party’s stance on maintaining an underground organization in the United States. His presence influenced the Soviets to create a Negro Commission intended to address the black struggle against racism. During his six-month stay, McKay found that his color and physical features made him a celebrity among the Russian people. On one occasion, for example, a joyful crowd of Russian peasants and soldiers carried McKay through the streets of Moscow on their shoulders. In May of 1923, McKay left Russia and set out on a new career as an expatriate novelist. After a brief stay in Germany, he traveled to Paris where he fell ill with influenza in December. Despite his colorful experience with the Russian people, McKay’s trip to the Soviet Union did little to arouse his earlier interest in communism. As a true artist, McKay found communism too disciplined and confining to his aesthetic outlook. Determined to become a novelist, McKay left Paris in January of 1924 for the French Mediterranean coastal seaport of Marseilles. AD During time spent in nearby Toulon in 1925, McKay completed his first novel, titled Color Scheme, which was never published. Destitute and with no hope of publishing his novel, McKay wrote a series of short stories describing Negro life in Harlem. Eventually McKay expanded one of the stories into the novel Home to Harlem, a work dealing with a black soldier’s return to New York following World War I. A landmark of black literature, Home to Harlem appeared in 1928 and emerged as one of the first bestsellers of African American literature. However, several leading black intellectuals, including W. E. B. Du Bois, admonished McKay for producing an exploitative work of fiction that depicted black characters as lowly, unrestrained, and primitively passionate. According to Du Bois, Home to Harlem plays upon deeply entrenched, ill-conceived, stereotypical images of people of color—the very images that many black critics had worked so many years to erase—and therefore exacerbated the racist conditions plaguing African Americans in a white-dominated society. By late 1928, McKay had journeyed to Morocco, where be became acquainted with the Moorish culture of cities like Casablanca, Fez, and Marakesh. While in North Africa, McKay worked on his second novel, Banjo, which was published in 1929. The story of Negro vagabond sailor/musician “Banjo,” also known as Lincoln Agrippa Daily, Banjo, like its predecessor, describes a black man’s struggle within white society and his search for the true meaning of human existence. AD Over the next four years, McKay resided for brief periods in Germany, Spain, and North Africa. In 1932 he published a book of twelve poems under the title Gingertown. The next year, the novel Banana Bottom —about an educated black Jamaican women’s attempt to return to the peasant culture of her youth—emerged as McKay’s last and most critically acclaimed work of long fiction. Banana Bottom is said to exemplify the maturity and refinement of McKay’s use of theme and form, but like Gingertown, the book failed to sell and left McKay further in debt to his publisher. After living as a peasant poet in a small rented cottage in Tangiers, McKay decided to return to the United States. Without assurance of employment, McKay sailed for New York on February 1, 1934. Home To Harlem Arriving in New York after a twelve-year hiatus, McKay faced many obstacles amid the economic crisis of the Great Depression. As the Harlem Renaissance literary scene fell into decline during the early 1930s, African American writers found they no longer were given the attention and prestige they once received in the white market place. Plagued by health problems and the effects of poverty, McKay also experienced the pain of loneliness and isolation. In 1936 he published his autobiography A Long Way from Home, in which he stresses the need for blacks to develop cultural and economic solidarity in order to take their place in a new socialist universal order. McKay’s last book, Harlem: Negro Metropolis, published in 1940, was written from the research gathered during his employment at the Federal Writers Project, a government relief program designed to offer jobs to unemployed writers. AD As the next decade progressed, McKay’s health steadily worsened. Stricken with dropsy and utterly destitute, he sought refuge in the Catholic Friendship House. Upon the invitation of Bishop Bernard Sheil, McKay moved to Chicago in 1944, where he joined the Catholic Church a year later. In Catholicism, McKay found physical and spiritual shelter and a universal theology that he believed could counter the forces of communism and fascism. Near the end of his life, McKay completed a memoir of his childhood, My Green Hills of Jamaica, which remained unpublished until 1981. In reference to the book, McKay related in a letter to Max Eastman, “I do not want to go sour on humanity, even after living in this awful land of the U.S.A. I still like to think of people as I did as a boy in Jamaica.” Despite his disillusionment and years of alienation, McKay never lost the faith that somewhere in human beings there exists a hidden spiritual force, one that had been left in the shadows of totalitarian regimes, capitalist exploitation, and colonial domination. For McKay, art was never a means of escape, but a way to confront the world and to expose the true nature of the human spirit. His poetry connects the black artist’s struggle with the struggles of all humanity. An elder member of the Harlem Renaissance, McKay led the way for the emergence of a modern African American literary tradition that includes such writers as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. McKay’s work is representative of the black artist’s struggle to gain recognition in the Western world. Like so many other artistic geniuses who lived their lives as outsiders, McKay remained the peasant poet in the modern age, a poetic visionary devoted to awakening the minds and spirits of all humanity. AD Selected Writings Poetry volumes Songs of Jamaica, Aston W. Gardner, 1912. Constab Ballads, Watts, 1912. Spring in New Hampshire, Grant Richards, 1920. Harlem Shadows, introduction by Max Eastman, Harcourt, 1922. Novels Home to Harlem, Harper, 1928. Banjo: A Story without a Plot, Harper, 1929. Banana Bottom, Harper, 1933. Other Negry v Amerike (nonfiction), Russian-language version published in Moscow, 1923, re-translated into English and published as The Negroes in America, Kennikat, 1977. AD Gingertown (short stories), Harper, 1932. A Long Way from Home (autobiography), Lee Furman, 1937. Harlem: Negro Metropolis (nonfiction), E. P. Dutton, 1940. My Green Hills of Jamaica (memoir), 1981. Collections Selected Poems of Claude McKay, introduction by John Dewey, biographical note by Max Eastman, Bookman, 1953. The Dialectic Poetry of Claude McKay, edited by Wayne F. Cooper, Books for Libraries Press, 1972. The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose, 1912-1948, edited by Wayne F. Cooper, Schocken, 1973. Contributor to periodicals, including Workers’ Dreadnought, Negro World, Catholic Worker, Seven Arts (under pseudonym Eli Edwards), New York Herald Tribune Books, Phylon, Pearson’s Magazine, Liberator, and others. AD Sources Books Black Literature Criticism, Gale, 1992, pp. 1375-1401. Bone, Robert A., The Negro Novel in America, Yale University Press, 1954. Cooper, Wayne F., Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance—A Biography, Louisiana State University Press, 1987. Cruse, Harold, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: From Its Origin to the Present, Morrow, 1967. Du Bois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk, 1903, reprinted, Penguin, 1982. Fullwinder, S. P., The Mood and Mind of Black America: 20th Century Thought, Dorsey Press, 1969. Gayle, Addison, Jr., Claude McKay: The Black Poet at War, Broadside Press, 1972. Around age fourteen, McKay returned to his parents’ home and began to prepare for the exam to become an elementary school teacher. However, after receiving a scholarship for trade school, he moved to Browns Town to prepare for certification as a wheelwright. At eighteen, he returned home, disheartened and “convinced that he would never be any good at a trade” (Tillery, 6). Less than six months after his return home, his mother died. McKay wrote, “The only one I loved was gone” (Cooper, 26). Devastated by her death, McKay left for Kingston, where, after working in a match factory briefly, he joined Jamaica’s constabulary (Tillery, 7) in June of 1911 (Cooper, 29). McKay in his constable’s uniform The Jamaican constabulary was an island-wide police force. Men enlisted for five years and received military and civil instruction. The constables carried only batons and handcuffs, but could be issued handguns in an emergency situation. While working as a constable, McKay continued writing dialect poetry and visiting his mentor Jekyll. Cooper claims, “Although it was never explicitly stated, the evidence suggests that Jekyll was homosexual” (Cooper, 30). Evidence indicates that McKay’s primary orientation was homosexual, although he had sexual relations with women as well. Cooper posits, “A homoerotic component most likely underlay the relationship Claude developed with Jekyll” (Cooper, 30), while Tillery claims, “It is entirely possible that McKay’s feelings for Jekyll were simply those of a student for an admired mentor” (Tillery, 12). McKay disliked the constabulary, and wrote a volume of dialect poetry titled Constab Ballads to express his feelings. He “respectfully and gratefully dedicated” this volume to Lieutenant-Coloneal A.E. Kershaw, the Inspector-General of the constabulary, and Inspector W.E. Clark, under whom McKay served (McKay, Constab Ballads, 6). With Jekyll’s help, he left the constabulary after serving only seventeen months (James, 45) and returned home to Clarendon parish in 1911 (Tillery, 8). His two volumes of dialect poetry, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, were both published in 1912 (Cooper, Preface to The Dialect Poetry of Claude McKay). In the spring of 1912, McKay left Jamaica to study agronomy at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, claiming “Jamaica was too small for high achievment” (Tillery, 19-20). Both Jekyll and McKay’s friend T.H. MacDermot were against this move. MacDermot warned, “Claude, we hate to see you go because you will be changed, terribly changed by America” (Cooper, 5 From at least the beginnings of the eighteenth-century abolition movement, black people in Britain urged political change locally, throughout the empire, and in the United States—a presence and intellectual contribution that is too often overlooked by historians of the British left. This public critique, pronounced from speaking podiums and in newspapers, identified intersecting oppressions of racism, sexism, and colonialism that manifested on a local and global scale. Jamaican poet Claude McKay arrived in London after the end of World War I, just a few years after the Russian Revolution, a time of political flux and fears. In the face of violent attacks on people of color—black soldiers returning to American cities, and workers arriving from the colonies to British docks—McKay staked a claim for the full humanity of black people in the pages of a weekly newspaper edited by the radical Sylvia Pankhurst. McKay’s writings, facilitated by Pankhurst’s institutional interventions, pushed against dangerous race-baiting of the self-identified British left and articulated an alternate political stance. In The Workers’ Dreadnought, McKay explained the promise of nationalism for mobilizing colonized people; he discussed the symbolic role of white womanhood in perpetuating racism against blacks; and he called out the hypocrisy of white hysteria around the presence of African troops in Germany. He adamantly rejected the widely-circulating logic that color or national origin determined sexual aggression and violence, and drew attention to sexual violence against black women by colonial forces in the Caribbean. McKay articulated a set of political positions in the pages of the Dreadnought which he continued and transmuted in speeches and fiction throughout the decade. McKay’s protest in the pages of Pankhurst’s newspaper places him in a longer history of black British political engagement, denying the racist criminalization of blackness, staking a claim for the humanity of Caribbean and African migrants, and speaking back through the press to challenge and shape public opinion especially amongst the British left. On April 24, 1920, Jamaican poet Claude McKay published a letter to the editor in Sylvia Pankhurst’s London-based newspaper, The Workers’ Dreadnought. The letter addressed the editor of a different paper, however, which McKay discussed in an accompanying note: “Dear Editor: The following letter, replying to E.D. Morel’s article on the black troops in Germany, was sent to the Daily Herald on April 11th, but apparently the Herald refuses a hearing to the other side, which is quite inarticulate.”1 The Daily Herald, edited by George Lansbury, had published an article by Edward Morel, “Black Scourge in Europe: Sexual Horror Let Loose by France on the Rhine.”2 As the headline suggests, Morel’s sensationalist article raises the alarm that French colonial troops from Africa, stationed in Germany after World War I, present a sexual threat for European womanhood. McKay, a Jamaican writer who had recently moved to London after living in the US, wrote against Morel’s racist claims about black sexuality without adhering to conservative mores or denying his sexuality. He wrote, “I, a full-blooded Negro, can control my sexual proclivities when I care to, and I am endowed with my full share of the primitive passion.” He continued, “Besides, I know hundreds of negroes of the Americas and Africa who can do likewise.” In the pages of The Workers’ Dreadnought, McKay challenged the Herald, and, more broadly, the culture of the British Left, to reject its beliefs about the “primitive” Africans. A photo of the letter to the editor that is discussed in the article. Shows the headline, "A Black Man Replies," and the date April 24, 1920, and a bit of text before being cut off. The font appears old-fashioned and a little faded.Claude McKay, “A Black Man Replies,” Workers’ Dreadnought, 24 April 1920. “Why all this obscene, maniacal outburst about the sex vitality of black men in a proletarian paper?” McKay asks of the Herald. McKay calls out the hypocrisy of the socialist paper and suggests that even liberal and conservative papers are more responsible in reporting colonial conflicts. “If you are really consistent in thinking that you can do something to help the white and black peoples to a better understanding of each other, there is much you might learn from Liberal and Conservative organs like The Nation, The New Statesman and the Edinburgh Review,” McKay chides. As Robert Reinders remarked, “If this article had been written by an American racialist and had appeared in a Klan journal it might have little intrinsic historic interest. But the Herald was the leading left-wing daily in Britain, ‘at the height of its power’; and the editor, George Lansbury, was a figure of national importance.”3 Morel’s protected status in Lansbury’s publication, shielded from McKay’s criticism, suggests that the mainstream British Left was uninterested in making space for black men. Instead, McKay found a place in a different proletarian paper to publish his reply to Morel’s vitriol. In fact, according to Barbara Winslow, The Workers’ Dreadnought was “the only British socialist newspaper that had black correspondents.”4 McKay’s publication in Sylvia Pankhurst’s East London newspaper highlights the importance and singularity of the space she created on the British left for publishing dissenting opinions. The arrival of the SS Empire Windrush to London in 1948 tends to be held as the beginning marker of black Britain, when Caribbean postwar migration began en masse and significantly changed the racial makeup of the small island nation. However, black intellectuals were participating in and protesting British culture for decades before the Windrush arrived. This expanded view of black British history is apparent in books like Black Edwardians, Black Victorians/Black Victoriana, From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain, and others.5 McKay’s moment at Pankhurst’s newspaper comprises a lesser-known intervention in black British literature and culture. McKay used the platform of Pankhurst’s leftist weekly newspaper to argue against racist beliefs about black sexuality and the mythology of white womanhood. McKay’s intervention takes part in a long tradition of black writers in Britain protesting the criminalization of blackness. (Pankhurst also finds a place in a wider history of British antiracism, as a white woman committed to fighting racism and imperialism with access to a printing press.6) Lansbury was an established, esteemed member of the British Left and Pankhurst was no stranger to demanding the British Left be more accountable—to women, to revolutionary, anti-Parliamentarian politics, and to people of color. This led to Pankhurst and Lansbury’s complicated working relationship—though Lansbury supplied the Dreadnought with funds for things like paper, Pankhurst did not shy from disagreeing with him publicly. While there were times she apparently suppressed some criticism of Lansbury, in this case, she promoted McKay’s protest, published under the headline “A Black Man Replies.”7 Sylvia Pankhurst had already been writing against race prejudice prior to McKay’s arrival in the pages of The Workers’ Dreadnought. She responded to attacks on black and brown sailors that arrived at the docks nearby the paper’s East London offices. In 1919, in East London as well as in other port cities in England, the Caribbean, and across the United States, race riots erupted as white people attacked men of color arriving as workers or as veterans after the first World War.8 Just as Morel believed the Senegalese soldiers in Germany would ruin European women, white British residents in the dock areas were motivated by beliefs in the sexual threat black men posed for white women. In Pankhurst’s East London neighborhood, there were multiple racially motivated attacks against men of color who arrived on the docks. One Dreadnought article from June 1919, “Stabbing Negroes in the London Dock Area,” countered that sailors of color were victims of colonialism and capitalism, exploited to fight wars and work on behalf of white capitalists.9 Therefore, the Dreadnought argued, white working class men should forge solidarity with, rather than violently attack, the sailors. Pankhurst’s paper puts forth an editorial position that consistently argues for the inclusion of people of color in the category of worker, oppressed by colonial and capitalist systems. Circuits of transatlantic radical publications brought McKay into the orbit of Pankhurst’s newspaper. Pankhurst published McKay’s poem “If We Must Die,” on September 6th, 1919 before McKay even arrived in England. The poem, which is almost certainly his most famous poem, is a response to the race riots which set off as black soldiers returned to US cities. The introduction in the Dreadnought declared, “We take from the NY Liberator . . . these poems by Claude McKay.”10 The headline advertised the author’s race: “A Negro Poet.” McKay’s poem must have resonated with Pankhurst’s local experience of the race riots in East London. When East London and Chicago erupted in race riots, McKay and Pankhurst each took a public stand against the racist violence. McKay lived in England from 1919 to 1920. McKay had grown up in Jamaica, and spent several years in the United States, most recently in New York, where he worked at Max and Crystal Eastman’s radical newspaper The Liberator. The Grays, American siblings with aspirations of founding a utopian society, sponsored his trip from New York to England.11 Arriving with letters of introduction for George Bernard Shaw and C.K. Ogden, and joining the communities of the International Club and a club for colored soldiers, McKay entered London’s literary, socialist, and diasporic worlds.12 McKay had grown up in Jamaica at a time when British reformers and socialists were taking refuge there.13 Walter Jekyll, a white British transplant to Jamaica, mentored him and encouraged him to write poetry that incorporated Jamaican dialect, which McKay did in his first book of poems, Songs of Jamaica.14 McKay also met Sydney Olivier, the socialist Jamaican governor at the turn of the twentieth century, through Jekyll.15 These older British men, involved with socialism and reform movements in England, were of the same generation and intellectual community as Pankhurst’s parents, who were involved in socialist politics in Manchester during her youth. McKay and Pankhurst shared an intellectual background, not only through imperial literature and history curricula, but also in their political influences. Joshua Gosciak’s work on McKay’s queer and political relationships with these British men in Jamaica and England suggests an important intellectual through-line that also connects McKay and Pankhurst, and the British suffrage and socialist politics for which she stood.16 Pankhurst and McKay were similarly influenced by nineteenth century reform movements that aimed to transform language, aesthetics, and the world. Pankhurst had grown up in the socialist politics of Manchester, and moved to London as an art student, where she joined her mother Emmeline and sister Christabel and their militant organization the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU).17 At the outset of World War I Sylvia Pankhurst split from the WSPU, when the organization aligned itself with the state’s war efforts in a bargain to get women the vote. Pankhurst, opposed to the war, and increasingly interested in class issues, founded the East London Federation for Suffragettes (ELFS). The ELFS founded the Woman’s Dreadnought, a weekly newspaper whose name invoked the type of war ship. Within a few years, the group transformed to be the Workers’ Suffrage Federation, in 1916, and after the Russian Revolution, in 1918, to the Workers’ Socialist Federation. The title of the newspaper changed as well, to the Workers’ Dreadnought, a newspaper that published international news from a revolutionary, far-left editorial standpoint. East London, where Pankhurst had lived for six years by 1920, was a diverse, working-class area, full of immigrants, with large Jewish, Irish, and Chinese populations.18 Its docks brought sailors from around the world, including the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Pankhurst’s paper embraced its location in the East End, imagining the area’s socialist future. One 1919 article on peace parties in the town of Bow reported, “The people in the poor, little streets of Bow have begun by organising children’s parties: some day they will organise the Soviets.”19 Pankhurst was an outspoken figure on and fearless critic of the British left. During the year McKay was at the Dreadnought, Pankhurst would break with Lenin and the Communist International over whether British communism should engage in parliamentarian politics. Lenin, and the newly endorsed British Communist Party, believed they should engage with Parliament. Pankhurst did not, falling further to the Left on this question. She traveled to the Soviet Union and lobbied that the position of the official British representatives to the congress should not be adopted as the Communist line.20 After her return, she exchanged letters with Lenin, which she published in her newspaper, arguing over the place of Parliamentary engagement in communist politics. Ironic, as Morag Schiach points out, that someone who worked so hard toward gaining the vote for women and working men would turn entirely away from parliamentary politics.21 Pankhurst was thrown out of the party, and her newspaper, which had been an official organ of communism in Britain, lost that distinction. Even in the memoir A Long Way from Home, in which he distanced himself from so much of his socialist and political activities of the 1920s, McKay vouched for Pankhurst’s commitment to anticolonial causes. He recalled, “she was always jabbing her hat pin into the hinds of the smug and slack labor leaders. Her weekly might have been called the Dread Wasp. And wherever imperialism got drunk and went wild among native peoples, the Pankhurst paper would be on the job.”22 Even in retrospect, at a cynical distance, McKay cannot dismiss Pankhurst’s energetic commitment to anti-colonial, activist, outsider journalism. In his articles for the Dreadnought, McKay lays out a political project that he grappled with throughout the decade. Ideas he published in the Dreadnought resurfaced in his 1922 comments to the fourth congress of the Third Communist International, and in his fictional representations of black diasporic politics in the 1928 novel Banjo.23 In his first article for the Dreadnought, “Socialism and the Negro,” published in January 1920, McKay, a Jamaican in the metropole, a product of the empire, argues to the British Left that they ought to align themselves with anticolonial movements, just as he would again in April, in his letter to the editor. In “Socialism and the Negro,” he argues that British socialists should support anti-colonial nationalist movements.24 Noting his own interest in the Garvey movement, he wrote, “for subject peoples, at least, Nationalism is the open door to Communism.” He proposes anti-colonialism, including anti-colonial nationalism, as a most important socialist effort, and criticizes the blindness of white British socialists to this strategy, commenting: Some English Communists have remarked to me that they have no real sympathy for the Irish and Indian movement because it is nationalistic. But, to-day, the British Empire is the greatest obstacle to International Socialism, and any of its subjugated parts succeeding in breaking away from it would be helping the cause of World Communism.25 Famously, McKay makes a very similar argument a couple of years later during the Communist International’s congress in the Soviet Union. In 1922, his foundational speech “On the Negro Question” resulted in the Communist International’s Black Nation Thesis, and a series of actions in the US South (where the Black Belt, and the site of this “nation within a nation” was to be located) through the first half of the 1930s.26 The Communist International adopted the strategy of minority nationalism to foster communism. In his 1920 article, as in his 1922 speech, McKay identifies the US South as a potential site to target for organizing. The Dreadnought had an international range and had published reports from the Easter Rising in 1916 Dublin, as well as other accounts of anti-colonial sentiment from Ireland, India, and beyond. Indeed, an article on agricultural workers in Argentina followed McKay’s “Socialism and the Negro.” In the same issue, two of McKay’s poems appeared on a page of the Dreadnought following the article “The Colour Bar: A Cry from South Africa.” Pankhurst’s newspaper was also exceptional among left British publications for its inclusion of black writers and attention to African and African-diasporic viewpoints. So, when April arrived, and the Daily Herald published Morel’s “Black Scourge in Europe,” the Dreadnought was a natural venue for McKay’s response, especially after Lansbury had refused to publish it. McKay already had a relationship with the Dreadnought, and had already challenged the British Left to be more accountable to colonial subjects in its pages. McKay recalls in his 1937 memoir A Long Way from Home that he began writing for the Workers’ Dreadnought after the publication of his letter to the editor of the Daily Herald—which turns out to be a misremembering, but a suggestive misremembering. In fact, McKay had been writing for the Workers’ Dreadnought for several months prior to the letter’s publication in April 1920. As Wayne Cooper and Robert Reinders report in their article on McKay’s time in London, “A Black Briton Returns,” “McKay’s account may be somewhat awry.”27 His 1937 version of the story suggests the power of the letter to the editor as a form of entry. Awry though the account may be, the version in the memoir suggests that the letter to the editor comprises a striking gesture—an interruption, a turning point—and a compelling narrative of arrival. A letter to the editor is a public intervention. It allows readers to enter the pages of the newspaper, voice their views, and join a conversation. The letter to the editor section affords an opportunity for readers to appear in print—a distinctly modern media phenomenon, as printing technologies became less expensive, and more common. Walter Benjamin identified this moment as comprising a fundamental shift in the relationship of reader and writer—“it began with the space set aside for ‘letters to the editor’ in the daily press,” he writes, until any European could find somewhere to print their thoughts.28 “Thus,” Benjamin concludes, “the distinction between author and public is about to lose its axiomatic character.” This example of a black Briton writing back to the white British mainstream left offers an important addendum to Benjamin’s observation. (Today, the use of social media to challenge and influence mainstream news cycles offers a parallel change—a forum like Twitter offers amplification of more diverse voices with the loss of the ‘axiomatic character’ of twentieth-century journalism.) With the explosion of print in the twentieth-century, those people historically excluded from the world of letters—women, colonial subjects, black and brown people—increasingly find space to dissent. The letter to the editor also does work for the paper in which it appears, of course. At a later moment of racialized moral panic in Britain, the authors of Policing the Crisis analyzed letters to the editor about the 1972 Handsworth mugging case.29 The authors of the chapter argue that the “principal function” of letters to the editors “is to help the press organize and orchestrate the debate about public questions.”30 McKay’s thwarted attempt to print his letter in the Herald demonstrates this selection on the part of the Herald. As the authors of Policing the Crisis note, letters to the editor “are not an unstructured exchange but a highly structured one.”31 The Dreadnought constructed its own community of news sources and subscribers, hailed especially in the ads and letters of its pages. Occasionally, the news stories themselves would also invoke the networks of activists, where Pankhurst played a prominent role, placing the readers in a direct line to German Communist and founder of International Women’s Day, Clara Zetkin, or Lenin, or the Finnish Communist Party, for instance. In others, the pages appealed to readers to subscribe, to share their papers and encourage others to read, to hang posters in news agencies. Directly below McKay’s letter to the editor, a notice announces “In order to save expense to Comrades, both in town and country, who cannot obtain the Dreadnought from a neighbouring newsagent, we have decided to reduce the rates for future subscriptions.”32 Just as Benedict Anderson identified newspapers as crucial technology to create imagined community, we can see how the Dreadnought conjured its community of readers “in town and country.”33 And that community of readers was familiar with columns that challenged mainstream socialism. Though overwhelmingly the paper covered the presence of African troops according to white supremacist beliefs, the Daily Herald did publish an exchange of letters to the editor between Morel and a man who protested Morel’s claims. The letter of protest was lodged by Norman Leys, who explains he’s lived “for 17 years in tropical Africa, for the last three of them in company with black troops.”34 Leys protests Morel’s claims about African sexuality: “it is untrue that sexual passion is stronger in Africans than in Europeans. And it is untrue that sexual connection between an African male and European female is injurious to a European female.” Leys argues that the belief that sexual passion is stronger in Africans is “one of the great sources of race hatred” and “should never be repeated by any honest man or honest newspaper.”35 Morel writes to respond a few days later, dimissing Leys’ charge, stating that the question of “whether sexual passion is stronger in the African” is one “upon which it is possible to hold different views without flinging about charges of dishonesty.” He concludes by flaunting his credentials, among “those who have been defending the African peoples against race exploitation and race prejudice for more years than Dr. Leyds [sic] has spent in East Africa.”36 McKay’s letter to the editor was printed for the readers of the Dreadnought but made its appeal much more widely. He calls for British socialists to be more accountable to victims of empire. In his complaint to the Daily Herald, McKay questions the political commitments of a socialist paper that circulates such racist vitriol. He argues: The stopping of French exploitation and use of the North African conscripts (not mercenaries, as your well-informed correspondent insists they are) against the Germans is clearly a matter upon which the French Socialists should take united action. But not as you have done.37 McKay agrees that the presence of these colonial conscripts is a problem—but not for the reasons Morel puts forth. This argument resonates with a moment in McKay’s novel Banjo, published at the end of the decade, in 1928. The protagonist, Ray, an African American living in Marseille, had saved a clipping of a letter to the editor. The letter argued that a Senegalese soldier who had committed murder had done so because he had been taken out of his native land: “Transplanté, déraciné, il est devenue un fou sanguinaire” (transplanted, deracinated, he became a bloodthirsty madman). The novel reflects, “it was such an amusing revelation of civilized logic that Ray had preserved it, especially as he was in tacit agreement with the thesis while loathing the manner of its presentation.”38 Similarly, in McKay’s remarks in the Dreadnought, he implicitly agrees that the presence of colonial conscripts is a problem, but totally objects to the reasoning of Morel’s argument. At another point in the novel, Ray recalls that he was in Germany when the French had black troops stationed there: A big campaign of propaganda was on against them, backed by German-Americans, negro-breaking Southerners, and your English liberals and socialists. The odd thing about that propaganda was that it said nothing about the exploitation of primitive and ignorant black conscripts to do the dirty work of one victorious civilization over another, but it was all about the sexuality of Negroes—that strange, big bug forever buzzing in the imagination of white people.39 This remark, like the letter to the editor Ray carries with him, resonates with the opinions McKay put forth earlier in the decade in his own letter to the editor. McKay addressed those “English liberals and socialists” directly in the pages of the Dreadnought. While many of McKay’s political stances shifted during the 1920s, in Banjo, Ray faithfully echoes McKay’s own position from his time in England. McKay reproached the Daily Herald for goading racist violence. He reports he’s been “told in Limehouse,” an East London neighborhood, “by white men, who ought to know, that this summer will see a recrudescence of the outbreaks that occurred last year”—more attacks on people of color on the docks.40 McKay again points out the hypocrisy of the Herald‘s position: “The negro-baiting Bourbons of the United States will thank you, and the proletarian underworld of London will certainly gloat over the scoop of the Christian-Socialist-pacifist Daily Herald.” In the United States, the mythology of white womanhood, and the complicity, participation, and endorsement of white women, underwrote the terror of lynching. In Europe, the same logic was applied to condemn the presence of Senegalese soldiers in the Rhine Valley, and to attack the black and Asian sailors and workers arriving at the docks. In this worldview, white women are sexually pure, without sexual agency, and the protectors of whiteness. As Vron Ware points out in Beyond the Pale, this logic took on special valences in the British colonial context. Ware notes that “English women were seen as the ‘conduits of the essence of the race’” who “symbolized not only the guardians of the race in their reproductive capacity, but they also provided […] a guarantee that British morals and principles were adhered to in the settler community,” citing examples in India, Nigeria, and South Africa.41 Ware notes that “the degree to which white women were protected from the fear of sexual assault was a good indication of the level of security felt by the colonial authorities.”42 Clearly, this logic of fear, protection of white women, and subordination of colonized people that informed colonial policy in the Victorian era also ruled the response to the presence of Senegalese troops in Europe in this moment of insecurity after World War I, which had resulted in the loss of life of so many soldiers, and the increased mobility and visibility of soldiers of color in Europe. Like colonial officers abroad, English culture at home rallied around the purity of white women under threat from black men, in a moment of crisis. Notably, the white women held up in 1920 were working class, impoverished, and often prostitutes. This embrace of the white womanhood of prostitutes comprises a departure from Victorian definitions of whiteness, in which working class women were less white than middle and upper class women who remained in the private realm. Radhika Mohanram explores the ways gender, race, and class came to define whiteness in the Victorian age, particularly noting the Contagious Disease Act of the 1860s, which imprisoned white prostitutes who had contracted venereal diseases, the incidence of which increased significantly when troops returned from India after the Sepoy Rebellion.43 Mohanram concludes, “whiteness was not just about racial differences, but also about the covering over of class differences in the threat of black violence”—an observation that applies even more so to this moment in 1920, when the class and occupation of the women is much less a concern than their race.44 McKay calls out imperial constructions of white womanhood and black sexual aggression, inserting himself into a long history of such protest. Ida B. Wells got run out of the US South at the end of the nineteenth-century when she argued that white women could be engaged in consensual sexual relationships with black men.45 McKay makes a related argument, introducing the possibility that black men have control over their sexual behavior, and are not exceptionally prone to violence or disease. Not only can white women choose and consent to have sex with a black man, but a black man can choose appropriate sexual encounters. Morel spread his message that “you cannot quarter these men upon a European countryside, without their women folk, without subjecting thousands of European women to willing, or unwilling, sexual intercourse with them,” but Pankhurst and McKay refused the rhetoric.46 Revealingly—”willing, or unwilling”—any kind of sexual act between a white woman and black man is equally chilling to Morel. McKay challenged this in an even more straightforward statement in 1922. He wrote in Negroes in America that women have a “duty […] to overturn the malicious assertion that their relations with colored comrades must necessarily be immoral and to show that this is a vile lie and slander.”47 When the Daily Herald published Morel’s article, they called on women to act, but not in the way McKay urges. The Herald ran an announcement stating “We hope all our readers, but especially our women readers, will give close attention to the article by E.D. Morel which we print to-day on another page.”48 Morel’s argument pivoted on white womanhood under siege, and he courted the support of white women’s organizations. One section of his article was titled “Outrage on Womanhood,” in which he spells out the links between women as bearers of whiteness and empire: “The French militarists are perpetrating an abominable outrage upon womanhood, upon the white race, and upon civilization.”49 In Morel’s letter to the editor of April 21, he urges that European women should organize to protest the presence of black troops. Morel argues in his letter that “to drag tens of thousands of primitive Africans, among whom the sexual impulse is of necessity strongly developed, from their homes in West Africa, and to quarter them, without their women folk […] to do this is to subject thousands of white women to sexual intercourse with these men.” Morel states this is “a monstrous outrage upon both races against which the women of Europe should protest on behalf of European womanhood.” And, indeed, women did take up this charge. A few days after Morel’s article, the Daily Herald reported on the several resolutions passed by organizations to protect white women, under the title “Black Troops Terror.”50 The Central Committee of the Women’s Co-operative Guild had passed a resolution urging the British government to influence France to withdraw the Senegalese troops. The Hereford and District Trades and Labour Council lodged their protest “on the ground of morality, the safe-guarding of white women, and the purity of Europeans from the black strain.” In Wales, the Merthyr Independent Labour Party and Merthyr Peace Council planned a national campaign, the Herald reports, in response to Morel’s article. Morel’s widely reprinted pamphlet Horror on the Rhine included an endorsement by Frau Rohl, Socialist Minister of the Reichstag: “We appeal to the women of the world to support us in our protest against the utterly unnatural occupation by coloured troops of German districts along the Rhine.”51 After hearing Morel speak, the Women’s International League passed a resolution affirming, “in the interests of good feeling between all the races of the world and the security of all women to prohibit the importation into Europe for warlike purposes of troops belonging to primitive peoples.”52 White women in Europe became political agents in response to this perceived threat. This mobilization of women’s groups stands in contrast to what took place at the Dreadnought. Sylvia Pankhurst’s anti-racist feminist project and McKay’s conception of white women’s potential role in fighting racism, articulated in an earlier article for the Dreadnought, refuses the foundational belief that white women need to be protected from black men. Pankhurst was not invested in holding up the mythology of white womanhood, with its valences of sexual purity and powerlessness. Like McKay, who had relationships with men, she didn’t subscribe to the sexual mores of her time, and would a few years later proudly have a child with Italian anarchist Silvio Corio without being married. The 1919 Dreadnought article “Stabbing Negroes in the London Dock Area” took aim at paranoia around white women’s sexuality: Are you afraid that a white woman would prefer a black man to you if you met her on equal terms with him? Do you not think you would be better employed in getting conditions made right for yourself and your fellow workers than in stabbing a black man who would probably prefer to bring a black wife over with him if he could afford to do so; and would probably have stayed in Africa if the capitalists had left him and his country alone?53 The line of argument is not as affirming as McKay’s defense of black agency, as it relies on floating the less threatening possibility—probability—that black men would not be interested in white women or being in Europe. Nonetheless, the argument dismisses white women as a pinnacle or ideal, and mocks white anxieties around interracial relations. Pankhurst dispenses with what Hazel Carby later termed “white women […] as the prize objects of the western world.”54 Black women are absent from much of the debate around the presence of African troops in Germany. The alarmist faction that believed the African troops posed a violent, sexual threat occasionally invoked the absence of “their women folk” as reason that the “primitive Africans” were preying on white women.55 In general, the moral panic around African men in Europe neglected to consider black women as agents; rather, they were spectral figures, whose absence enabled the “sexual horror.” The role of black women in this account is entirely passive, simply a population far removed that serves to absorb the sexual activity of black men. As Carby argued in “White Woman Listen!” later in the twentieth century, white feminism failed to account for the experiences of black and brown women under racism and imperialism.56 In contrast, in his letter, McKay highlighted colonial histories in which white soldiers in the West Indies raped black women. McKay invoked European colonial history to challenge assumptions about the moral superiority of white civilization. In fact, in his letter to the editor, McKay dismisses the premise that an entire race could be deemed “degenerate.” McKay takes aim at the logic of white supremacy, writing, rather provocatively, “During my stay in Europe, I have come in contact with many weak and lascivious persons of both sexes, but I do not argue from my experience that the English race is degenerate.” His comments incorporate rhetoric of disease and dirtiness (“I have known some of the finest and cleanest types of men and women among the Anglo-Saxon”), while dispensing with the racialization of these categories. He also rebukes Morel’s accusation that the soldiers are spreading syphilis with a counterargument he ascribes to competent medical experts: “where [syphilis] is known among blacks it has been carried thither by the whites.” McKay had earlier considered how to use the logic of white superiority against itself. In his earlier article “Socialism and the Negro,” McKay argued that white women might be uniquely positioned to fight black oppression because of their special status under white supremacy. In a move that follows Ida B. Wells and anticipates Hazel Carby, McKay identifies the centrality of the myth of white womanhood in anti-black racism. McKay suggests that those opposed to black oppression should manipulate the valorization of white womanhood by sending white women to organize in the U.S. South: Coloured men from the North cannot be sent into the South for propaganda purposes, for they will be lynched. White men from the North will be beaten and, if they don’t leave, they will also be lynched. A like fate awaits coloured women. But the South is boastful of its spirit of chivalry. It believes that it is the divinely-appointed guardian of sacred white womanhood, and it professes to disfranchise, outrage and lynch Negro men and women solely for the protection of white women. It seems then that the only solution to the problem is to get white women to carry the message of socialism to both white and black workers.57 McKay argues that white women can have a particular role in challenging Southern racism. He proposes women as political agents, and, like the militant suffrage movement that Pankhurst took part in, conceives of ways that patriarchal expectations for lovely and refined white women can be used for political gain. He makes this claim while working at a socialist newspaper run by a white woman in East London. Pankhurst’s presence in East London, as editor of a radical newspaper that opposed racism and exploitation, suggests a historical role of white women, other than as symbols of or defenders of white womanhood. McKay publishing to protest the mythology of white womanhood in Pankhurst’s newspaper has significant historical precursors. The pages of woman-edited British newspapers had previously published similar protests from black writers from the Americas. For instance, Catherine Impey’s Anti-Caste received support from Frederick Douglass, who in 1888 sent five dollars in support of her work and told her, “I think, however, that you are more needed in America than in England.”58 The publication declared that Anti-Caste “claims for the darker members of the Human Family everywhere a full and equal share of Protection, Freedom, Equality of Opportunity, and Human Fellowship.”59 When Ida B. Wells came to England, her speaking tour was promoted and documented in the pages of Anti-Caste, and Fraternity, a publication that split from Anti-Caste edited by Celestine Edwards. They published Well’s anti-lynching pamphlet “American Atrocities.” An August 1894 article from Fraternity reported, “if the women of the South were all ‘pure in heart and sound in head’ we should hear of fewer lynchings.”60 These publications, with links to the Quakers and the British abolitionist movement, organized women to advocate on behalf of racial justice, at the same time that Wells pushed them to acknowledge and address the role of white women in perpetuating racial inequality.61 McKay’s time at the Dreadnought came to an abrupt end in October 1920, when Pankhurst was arrested, tried, and served a sentence at Holloway Prison for violating the Defence of Realm Act. The Dreadnought had published “Discontent on the Lower Deck,” an article written by an anonymous British sailor, identified as S. 000 (Gunner), H.M.S. Hunter, that expressed his frustration with the navy. The sailor was a devoted reader of the paper, and McKay had previously arranged copies for distribution on the sailor’s ship.62 In “Discontent on the Lower Deck,” the sailor advocated a class-based, anti-war stance: “Stand by your class. Men of the lower deck: Are you going to see your class go under in the fight with the capitalist brutes who made millions out of your sacrifices during the war?”63 Soon after the article was published, the London police raided the Dreadnought’s office, and prosecuted Pankhurst under the Defence of Realm Act. McKay narrates the police raid in A Long Way from Home. As the office was raided, he smuggled a draft of the incriminating article out of the office, and flushed it down the toilet. (I have always read this reported act in tandem with the drafts of poems Pankhurst wrote on toilet paper while she was imprisoned, which now have a home in an acid free archival box in the British Museum, as examples of diverging fates of the material culture of activism and protest.) McKay, according to his account in the memoir, eluded the attention of the police by playing against their prejudice: “And what are you?” the detective asked. “Nothing, Sir,” I said, with a big black grin. Chuckling, he let me pass. (I learned afterward that he was the ace of Scotland Yard.) I walked out of that building and into another, and entering a water closet I tore up the original article, dropped it in, and pulled the chain.64 McKay strategically effaces his selfhood in the moment, in order to escape scrutiny from the police, dispose of the incriminating article, and save the author from punishment. However, McKay was even more central than he let on in his memoir. A report from November 6, 1920 recorded the charges: The formal charge against Miss Pankhurst was that she did an act calculated and likely to cause sedition amongst His Majesty’s Forces, in the Navy, and among the civilian population, by publishing and causing and procuring to be published in the City of London, a newspaper called the Workers’ Dreadnought, organ of the Communist Party, dated October 16th, 1920, containing articles called “Discontent on the Lower Deck,” “How to get a Labour Government,” “The Datum Line,” and “The Yellow Peril and the Dockers,” contrary to Regulation 42 of the Defence of the Realm Regulations.65 “The Yellow Peril and the Dockers” was written by Leon Lopes. McKay’s biographer Wayne Cooper notes “Leon Lopes” was very likely one of McKay’s pseudonyms.66 “Yellow Peril,” like McKay’s letter to the editor, objects to white men’s physical and verbal attacks on workers of color for their sexual relationships with white women. Like McKay’s letter to the editor and previous coverage of racial attacks perpetrated by white dockworkers, “Yellow Peril” urged white working people to see a common cause with “aliens,” “Jews,” and “Asiatic” workers: “The dockers, instead of being unduly concerned about the presence of their coloured fellow men, who, like themselves, are the victims of Capitalism and Civilization, should turn their attention to the huge stores of wealth along the water front.”67 As Barbara Winslow’s article on Pankhurst suggests, Pankhurst’s testimony during the trial strongly suggests McKay was the author: “Leon Lopez, being a coloured man—who is not a British subject perhaps—felt this keenly, and he put his letter in this paper; and I, as editor, felt he had a right to put it there and point out to the workers that unemployment is caused by deeper things than this.”68 In her testimony at the appeal, Pankhurst argued that “Yellow Peril on the Docks” and “Discontent on the Lower Decks” were not advocating looting or senseless violence, but rather were part of a scientific, rational attempt to transform society.69 Pankhurst cited what she called “standard books” that advocated a message similar to the allegedly incriminating articles, in order to show that if such books were collected in libraries without controversy and were not the object of criminal investigations then neither should her paper be. She juxtaposes her discussion of these Dreadnought articles with writing by William Morris, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and other authors and thinkers who methodically challenged the present society. Pankhurst’s approach was not legally sophisticated (as she and others noted during her own defense), but it was literary. She compiled quotations from other articles in the paper and other books in conventional libraries to show the ideas her newspaper put forth were accepted in other contexts. The newspaper posed a more urgent threat, apparently, in the eyes of the law. The paper continued to publish during Pankhurst’s imprisonment, and for several years afterward. The Dreadnought published the full text of Pankhurst’s appeal in a special issue, and after the issue sold out, in pamphlet form. After Pankhurst was released, she turned her attentions to publishing a literary magazine, which eventually came out in two issues, in 1923 and 1924. Germinal, like the Dreadnought, published writers from all over the world, including India and South Africa, and took on an explicitly internationalist, anticolonial, and antiracist editorial position. In the 1930s, until the end of her life, Pankhurst turned her energy to Ethiopian anti-fascism and self-determination. Pankhurst founded another weekly newspaper, New Times and Ethiopia News, which connected antifascist organizing across Europe and Africa. She dedicated herself to independence in Ethiopia and Eritrea during and after World War II. Eventually, Pankhurst moved to Addis Ababa, where she was buried in 1960.70 Pankhurst was an outstanding figure but not alone among twentieth-century white British women in her participation in antiracist campaigns. In one key moment in the 1930s in Scottsboro, Alabama, nine young men were falsely accused of raping two white women; Ada Wright, mother of two of those accused, traveled to England to raise awareness of the miscarriage of justice happening in Alabama. The international organizing on behalf of Scottsboro engaged white British women like Naomi Mitchison, Vera Brittain, Nancy Cunard, and Lady Kathleen Simon. Cunard published a number of pieces related to Scottsboro in her 1934 anthology Negro, including her own essay “Scottsboro and Other Scottsboros.”71 She also organized a petition and letter writing campaign in Britain that garnered responses from writers including Storm Jameson, Rebecca West, and Hope Mirrlees.72 Even Virginia Woolf, who is not particularly known for her involvement in black diasporic politics, signed a public letter in support of the Scottsboro boys.73 These women worked alongside black British activists, including Jomo Kenyatta (then Johnstone Kenyatta), who served as a joint secretary of the Scottsboro Defence Committee, as well as members of the West African Students’ Union, the Negro Welfare Association, and the International Labour Defence London Coloured Committee. The moment of McKay working at Pankhurst’s newspaper in 1920 constitutes an early twentieth-century example of white British women confronting the violent implications of white womanhood. London, it turned out, was not the place for McKay. McKay’s biographer Wayne Cooper and Robert Reinders’s article on McKay’s time in England reports that McKay left London shortly after Pankhurst’s imprisonment, feeling that the policing in Europe was getting out of hand.74 But perhaps the anxiety was even more personal. The central role of his article in the trial that put Pankhurst in prison may explain more specifically McKay’s anxiety around the police in London, and perhaps also his aversion to publicly claiming Pankhurst more seriously later on (dismissing her movement as “more piquant than serious”).75 Her trial and appeal, and the role of McKay’s reporting in the trial, reveals the perceived threat of the cross-fertilization of antiracism and socialism, as circulated in the pages of the newspaper. McKay went on to the United States, the Soviet Union, Germany, France, and Morocco, later in the decade. He continued to be occupied with the issue that motivated his letter to the editor in the Dreadnought. In 1922, he exchanged letters with Trotsky about the question of black troops in Europe that were “printed in Pravda, Izvestia, and other Moscow newspapers,” and which he included in The Negroes in America, a book first published in Russian translation.76 McKay highlights the importance of radical newspapers in London, describing a club to which he belonged, comprised of soldiers of color from Africa and the Americas. “I was working at that time in London in a communist group. Our group provided the club of Negro soldiers with revolutionary newspapers and literature, which had nothing in common with the daily papers that are steeped in race prejudice.”77 The Dreadnought offered alternative news for people of color in London, a city that McKay identifies, along with New York, as one of the “chief cultural centers of the West where Negroes hold mass meetings and discuss questions which interest them.”78 London would continue to be a cultural center for the African diaspora, with intellectuals including C.L.R. James, George Padmore, Una Marson, and Claudia Jones participating in newspaper projects that offered an alternative to dailies “steeped in race prejudice” in the coming decades. Critics associate McKay with docklands—transnational, liminal spaces from which to articulate black diasporic views of the world, as he did in Banjo.79 His journalism from the docks of East London tends to be set aside (no doubt in part because he later disavowed organized socialist politics, and because Sylvia Pankhurst’s post-suffrage movement remains relatively unexamined). Nonetheless, McKay’s writings in the pages of the Dreadnought illuminate his strategies to refute racist beliefs about black sexuality and white womanhood. The pages of the Dreadnought provided a sympathetic platform to call out British labor leaders on their racism, and to offer black readers alternative analysis. He calls for those who claim to represent workers to be accountable to colonized people of color. McKay’s reply in the pages of the Dreadnought initiates an incisive protest, an instance of the empire writing back. Comrade McKay: Comrades, I feel that I would rather face a lynching stake in civilized America than try to make a speech before the most intellectual and critical audience in the world. I belong to a race of creators but my public speaking has been so bad that I have been told by my own people that I should never try to make speeches, but stick to writing, and laughing. However, when I heard the Negro question was going to be brought up on the floor of the Congress, I felt it would be an eternal shame if I did not say something on behalf of the members of my race. Especially would I be a disgrace to the American Negroes because, since I published a notorious poem in 1919 [“If We Must Die”], I have been pushed forward as one of the spokesmen of Negro radicalism in America to the detriment of my poetical temperament. I feel that my race is honored by this invitation to one of its members to speak at this Fourth Congress of the Third International. My race on this occasion is honored, not because it is different from the white race and the yellow race, but [because it] is especially a race of toilers, hewers of wood and drawers of water, that belongs to the most oppressed, exploited, and suppressed section of the working class of the world. The Third International stands for the emancipation of all the workers of the world, regardless of race or color, and this stand of the Third International is not merely on paper like the Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. It is a real thing. The Negro race in the economic life of the world today occupies a very peculiar position. In every country where the Whites and Blacks must work together the capitalists have set the one against the other. It would seem at the present day that the international bourgeoisie would use the Negro race as their trump card in their fight against the world revolution. Great Britain has her Negro regiments in the colonies and she has demonstrated what she can do with her Negro soldiers by the use that she made of them during the late War. The revolution in England is very far away be1 2 McKay: Speech to the 4th Congress of the Communist International cause of the highly organized exploitation of the subject peoples of the British Empire. In Europe, we find that France had a Negro army of over 300,000 and that to carry out their policy of imperial domination in Europe the French are going to use their Negro minions. In America we have the same situation. The Northern bourgeoisie knows how well the Negro soldiers fought for their own emancipation, although illiterate and untrained, during the Civil War. They also remember how well the Negro soldiers fought in the Spanish-American War under Theodore Roosevelt. They know that in the last war over 400,000 Negroes who were mobilized gave a very good account of themselves, and that, besides fighting for the capitalists, they also put up a very good fight for themselves on returning to America when they fought the white mobs in Chicago, St. Louis and Washington. But more than the fact that the American capitalists are using Negro soldiers in their fight against the interests of labor is the fact that the American capitalists are setting out to mobilize the entire black race of America for the purpose of fighting organized labor. The situation in America today is terrible and fraught with grave dangers. It is much uglier and more terrible than was the condition of the peasants and Jews of Russia under the Tsar. It is so ugly and terrible that very few people in America are willing to face it. The reformist bourgeoisie have been carrying on the battle against discrimination and racial prejudice in America. The Socialists and Communists have fought very shy of it because there is a great element of prejudice among the Socialists and Communists of America. They are not willing to face the Negro question. In associating with the comrades of America I have found demonstrations of prejudice on the various occasions when the White and Black comrades had to get together: and this is the greatest difficulty that the Communists of America have got to overcome-the fact that they first have got to emancipate themselves from the ideas they entertain towards the Negroes before they can be able to reach the Negroes with any kind of radical propaganda. However, regarding the Negroes themselves, I feel that as the subject races of other nations have come to Moscow to learn how to fight against their exploiters, the Negroes will also come to Moscow. In 1918 when the Third International published its Manifesto and included the part referring to the exploited colonies, there were several groups of Negro radicals in America that sent this propaganda out among their people. When in 1920 the American government started to investigate and to suppress radical propaganda among the Negroes, the small radical groups in America retaliated by publishing the fact that the Socialists stood for the emancipation of the Negroes, and that reformist America could do nothing for them. Then, I think, for the first time in American history, the American Negroes found that Karl Marx had been interested in their emancipation and had fought valiantly for it. I shall just read this extract that was taken from Karl Marx’s writing at the time of the Civil War: When an oligarchy of 300,000 slave holders for the first time in the annals of the world, dared to inscribe “Slavery” on the banner of armed revolt, on the very spot where hardly a century ago, the idea of one great democratic republic had first sprung up, whence the first declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth- century, when on that spot the counter-revolution cynically proclaimed property in man to be “the cornerstone of the new edifice” — then the working class of Europe understood at once that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy war of property against labor, and that (its) hopes of the future, even its past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Karl Marx who drafted the above resolution is generally known as the father of Scientific Socialism and also of the epoch-making volume popularly known as the socialist bible, Capital. During the Civil War he was correspondent of the New York Tribune. In the company of Richard McKay: Speech to the 4th Congress of the Communist International 3 Published by 1000 Flowers Publishing, Corvallis, OR, 2005. • Free reproduction permitted. http://www.marxists.org/subject/usa/eam/index.html Transcribed by William Maxwell for the Modern American Poetry website. PDF version published here by permission. For further information on Claude McKay and his role, see Dr. Maxwell’s book, New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Cobden, Charles Bradlaugh, the atheist, and John Bright, he toured England making speeches and so roused up the sentiment of the workers of that country against the Confederacy that Lord Palmerston, [the] Prime Minister, who was about to recognize the South, had to desist. As Marx fought against chattel slavery in 1861, so are present-day socialists, his intellectual descendants, fighting wage slavery. If the Workers Party in America were really a Workers Party that included Negroes it would, for instance, in the South, have to be illegal, and I would inform the American Comrades that there is a branch of the Workers Party in the South, in Richmond, Virginia, that is illegal — illegal because it includes colored members. There we have a very small group of white and colored comrades working together, and the fact that they have laws in Virginia and most of the Southern states discriminating against whites and blacks assembling together means that the Workers Party in the South must be illegal. To get round these laws of Virginia, the comrades have to meet separately, according to color, and about once a month they assemble behind closed doors. This is just an indication of the work that will have to be done in the South. The work among the Negroes of the South will have to be carried on by some legal propaganda organized in the North, because we find at the present time in America that the situation in the Southern States (where nine million out of ten million of the Negro population live), is that even the liberal bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie among the Negroes cannot get their own papers of a reformist propaganda type into the South on account of the laws that there discriminate against them. The fact is that it is really only in the Southern States that there is any real suppression of opinion. No suppression of opinion exists in the Northern states in the way it exists in the South. In the Northern states special laws are made for special occasionsas those against Communists and Socialists during the War — but in the South we find laws that have existed for fifty years, under which the Negroes cannot meet to talk about their grievances. The white people who are interested in their cause cannot go and speak to them. If we send white comrades into the South they are generally ordered out by the Southern oligarchy and if they do not leave they are generally whipped, tarred and feathered; and if we send black comrades into the South they generally won't be able to get out again — they will be lynched and burned at the stake. I hope that as a symbol that the Negroes of the world will not be used by the international bourgeoisie in the final conflicts against the World Revolution, that as a challenge to the international bourgeoisie, who have an understanding of the Negro question, we shall soon see a few Negro soldiers in the finest, bravest, and cleanest fighting forces in the world — the Red Army and Navy of Russia — fighting not only for their own emancipation, but also for the emancipation of all the working class of the whole world. Claude McKay, (born September 15, 1889, Nairne Castle, Jamaica, British West Indies—died May 22, 1948, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.), Jamaican-born poet and novelist whose Home to Harlem (1928) was the most popular novel written by an American black to that time. Before going to the U.S. in 1912, he wrote two volumes of Jamaican dialect verse, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads (1912). After attending Tuskegee Institute (1912) and Kansas State Teachers College (1912–14), McKay went to New York in 1914, where he contributed regularly to The Liberator, then a leading journal of avant-garde politics and art. The shock of American racism turned him from the conservatism of his youth. With the publication of two volumes of poetry, Spring in New Hampshire (1920) and Harlem Shadows (1922), McKay emerged as the first and most militant voice of the Harlem Renaissance. After 1922 McKay lived successively in the Soviet Union, France, Spain, and Morocco. In both Home to Harlem and Banjo (1929), he attempted to capture the vitality and essential health of the uprooted black vagabonds of urban America and Europe. There followed a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932), and another novel, Banana Bottom (1933). In all these works McKay searched among the common folk for a distinctive black identity. Stack of books, pile of books, literature, reading. Hompepage blog 2009, arts and entertainment, history and society. Britannica Quiz Literary Favorites: Fact or Fiction? (Read W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1926 Britannica essay on African American literature.) A Long Way from Home A Long Way from Home After returning to America in 1934, McKay was attacked by the communists for repudiating their dogmas and by liberal whites and blacks for his criticism of integrationist-oriented civil rights groups. McKay advocated full civil liberties and racial solidarity. In 1940 he became a U.S. citizen; in 1942 he was converted to Roman Catholicism and worked with a Catholic youth organization until his death. He wrote for various magazines and newspapers, including the New Leader and the New York Amsterdam News. He also wrote an autobiography, A Long Way from Home (1937), and a study, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). His Selected Poems (1953) was issued posthumously. Claude McKay was one of the most distinguished poets of his time. He was a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance and wrote three novels: Home to Harlem (1928), a best-seller which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, Banjo (1929), and Banana Bottom (1933). Claude McKay was born in Jamaica on 15th September, 1890. Born Festus Claudius McKay in Sunny Ville, Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, he is the son of Thomas Francis McKay and Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards, farmers. The youngest of eleven children, McKay was sent at an early age to live with his oldest brother, a schoolteacher, so that he could be given the best education available. An avid reader, McKay began to write poetry at the age of ten. In 1906 Claude McKay decided to enter a trade school, but when the school was destroyed by an earthquake he became apprenticed to a carriage and cabinetmaker; a brief period in the constabulary followed. In 1907 McKay came to the attention of Walter Jekyll, an English gentleman residing in Jamaica who became his mentor, encouraging him to write dialect verse. Jekyll later set some of McKay's verse to music. By the time he immigrated to the United States in 1912, McKay had established himself as a poet, publishing two volumes of dialect verse, Songs of Jamaica (1912) and Constab Ballads (1912). McKay was shocked by the intense racism he encountered in when he arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, where many public facilities were segregated. At Tuskegee, he disliked the "semi-military, machinelike existence there" and quickly left to study at Kansas State University. At Kansas State, he read W. E. B. Du Bois' Souls of Black Folk, which had a major impact on him and stirred his political involvement. But despite superior academic performance, in 1914 McKay decided he did not want to be an agronomist and moved to New York, where he married his childhood sweetheart Eulalie Lewars. McKay published two poems in 1917 in Seven Arts under the Alias Eli Edwards while working as a waiter on the railways. In 1919 he met Crystal and Max Eastman, who produced The Liberator (where McKay would serve as Co-Executive Editor until 1922). It was here that he published one of his most famous poems, "If We Must Die", during the "Red Summer", a period of intense racial violence against black people in Anglo-American societies. This was among a page of his poetry which signaled the commencement of his life as a professional writer. In 1922 McKay visited the USSR. Active in the social justice movement, McKay became a Socialist, believing that socialism offered his cause hope. While in Russia McKay attended the fourth congress of the Communist International in Moscow. There, he met many leading Bolsheviks including Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Radek. While in the Soviet Union he compiled his journalistic essays into a book, The Negroes in America, which was not published in the United States until 1979. For a time he was buoyed by the success of his first published novel, Home to Harlem (1928), which was critically acclaimed but engendered controversy for its frank portrayal of the underside of Harlem life. His next novel, Banjo: A Story without a Plot (1929), followed the exploits of an expatriate African-American musician in Marseilles, a locale McKay knew well. This novel and McKay's presence in France influenced Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and other pioneers of the Negritude literary movement that took hold in French West Africa and the West Indies. Banjo did not sell well. Neither did Gingertown (1932), a short story collection, or Banana Bottom (1933). Often identified as McKay's finest novel, Banana Bottom tells the story of Bita Plant, who returns to Jamaica after being educated in England and struggles to form an identity that reconciles the aesthetic values imposed upon her with her appreciation for her native roots. Claude McKay traveled extensively abroad; After visits to London, Berlin and Paris, he settled down in France for a decade. He, however, remained in contact with the expatriate community of American writers. McKay returned to the United States in the early 1930s. After returning to America in 1934, McKay was attacked by the Communists for repudiating their dogmas and by liberal whites and blacks for his criticism of integrationist-oriented civil rights groups. McKay advocated full civil liberties and racial solidarity. In 1940 he became a U.S. citizen; in 1942 he was converted to Roman Catholicism and worked with a Catholic youth organization until his death. McKay's viewpoints and poetic achievements in the earlier part of the twentieth century set the tone for the Harlem Renaissance and gained the deep respect of younger black poets of the time, including Langston Hughes. He died in 1948. Claude McKay, born Festus Claudius McKay in Sunny Ville, Jamaica in 1889, was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a prominent literary movement of the 1920s. His work ranged from vernacular verse celebrating peasant life in Jamaica to poems that protested racial and economic inequities. His philosophically ambitious fiction, including tales of Black life in both Jamaica and America, addresses instinctual/intellectual duality, which McKay found central to the Black individual’s efforts to cope in a racist society. He is the author of The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose (1973), The Dialectic Poetry of Claude McKay (1972), Selected Poems (1953), Harlem Shadows (1922), Constab Ballads (1912), and Songs of Jamaica (1912), among many other books of poetry and prose. The son of peasant farmers, McKay was infused with pride in his African heritage. His early literary interests, though, were in English poetry. Under the tutelage of his brother, schoolteacher Uriah Theophilus McKay, and a neighboring Englishman, Walter Jekyll, McKay studied the British masters—including John Milton, Alexander Pope, and the later Romantics—and European philosophers such as eminent pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, whose works Jekyll was then translating from German into English. It was Jekyll who advised aspiring poet McKay to write verse in Jamaican dialect.   At age 17, McKay departed from Sunny Ville to apprentice as a woodworker in Brown’s Town. But he studied there only briefly before leaving to work as a constable in the Jamaican capital, Kingston. In Kingston he experienced and encountered extensive racism. His native Sunny Ville was predominantly Black, but in substantially white Kingston, Black people were considered inferior and capable of only menial tasks. McKay quickly grew disgusted with the city’s bigoted society, and within one year he returned home to Sunny Ville.   During his brief stays in Brown’s Town and Kingston, McKay continued writing poetry. Once back in Sunny Ville, with Jekyll’s encouragement, he published the verse collections Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads in London in 1912. In these two volumes, McKay portrays opposing aspects of Black life in Jamaica. Songs of Jamaica presents an almost celebratory portrait of peasant life, with poems addressing subjects such as the peaceful death of McKay’s mother and the Black people’s ties to the Jamaican land. Constab Ballads, however, presents a substantially bleaker perspective on the plight of Black Jamaicans and contains several poems explicitly critical of life in urban Kingston. For Songs of Jamaica, McKay received an award and stipend from the Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences. He used the money to finance a trip to America, and in 1912, he arrived in South Carolina. He then traveled to Alabama and enrolled at the Tuskegee Institute, where he studied for approximately two months before transferring to Kansas State College. In 1914 he left school entirely for New York City and worked various menial jobs. As in Kingston, McKay encountered racism in New York City, and this compelled him to continue writing poetry.   In 1917, under the pseudonym Eli Edwards, McKay published two poems in the periodical Seven Arts. Critic Frank Hattis admired his work and included some of McKay’s other poems in Pearson’s Magazine. Among McKay’s most famous poems from this period is “To the White Fiends,” a vitriolic challenge to white oppressors and bigots. A few years later, McKay befriended Max Eastman, communist sympathizer and editor of the magazine Liberator. McKay published more poems in Eastman’s magazine, notably the inspirational “If We Must Die,” which defended Black rights and threatened retaliation for prejudice and abuse. “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,” McKay wrote, “Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” In Black Poets of the United States, Jean Wagner noted that “If We Must Die” transcends specifics of race and is widely prized as an inspiration to persecuted people throughout the world. “Along with the will to resistance of black Americans that it expresses,” Wagner wrote, “it voices also the will of oppressed people of every age who, whatever their race and wherever their region, are fighting with their backs against the wall to win their freedom.” Upon publication of “If We Must Die” McKay commenced two years of travel and work abroad. He spent part of 1919 in Holland and Belgium, then moved to London and worked on the periodical Workers’ Dreadnought. In 1920 he published his third verse collection, Spring in New Hampshire, which was notable for containing “Harlem Shadows,” a poem about the plight of Black sex workers in the degrading urban environment. McKay returned to the United States in 1921 and involved himself in various social causes. The next year he published Harlem Shadows, a collection from previous volumes and periodicals publications. This work contains many of his most acclaimed poems—including “If We Must Die”—and assured his stature as a leading member of the literary movement referred to as the Harlem Renaissance. He redoubled his efforts on behalf of Blacks and laborers: he became involved in the Universal Negro Improvement Association and produced several articles for its publication, Negro World. He also traveled to the Soviet Union, where he had previously visited with Eastman, and attended the Communist Party’s Fourth Congress.   Eventually McKay went to Paris, where he developed a severe respiratory infection and supported himself intermittently by working as an artist’s model. His infection eventually necessitated his hospitalization. After he recovered, he resumed traveling; for the next 11 years he toured Europe and portions of northern Africa. During this period he also published three novels and a short story collection. The first novel, Home to Harlem (1928), perhaps his most recognized title, concerns a Black soldier, Jake, who abruptly abandons his military duties and returns home to Harlem. Jake represents, in rather overt fashion, the instinctual aspect of the individual, and his ability to remain true to his feelings enables him to find happiness with a former sex worker, Felice. Juxtaposed with Jake’s behavior is that of Ray, an aspiring writer burdened with despair. His sense of bleakness derives largely from his intellectualized perspective, and it eventually compels him to leave racist America for his homeland of Haiti.   In The Negro Novel in America, Robert Bone wrote that the predominantly instinctual Jake and the intellectual Ray “represent different ways of rebelling against Western civilization.” The novel also provides a detailed portrait of Black urban life, and McKay was applauded for creating “a work of vivid social realism,” according to Alan L. McLeod in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. However, McKay himself “stressed that he aimed at emotional realism—he wanted to highlight his characters’ feelings rather than their social circumstances,” McLeod continued. Nevertheless, it was his glimpse into the “unsavory aspects of New York black life” that was prized by readers—and condemned by such prominent Black leaders as W.E.B. Du Bois. Home to Harlem—with its sordid, occasionally harrowing scenes of ghetto life—proved extremely popular, and it gained recognition as the first commercially successful novel by a Black writer. McKay quickly followed it with Banjo: A Story without a Plot (1929), a novel about a Black vagabond living in the French port of Marseilles. Like Jake from Home to Harlem, protagonist Banjo embodies the largely instinctual way of living, though he is considerably more enterprising and quick-witted than the earlier character. Ray, the intellectual from Home to Harlem, also appears in Banjo. His plight is that of many struggling artists who are compelled by social circumstances to support themselves with conventional employment. Both Banjo and Ray are perpetually dissatisfied and disturbed by their limited roles in a racist society, and by the end of the novel the men are prepared to depart from Marseilles.   Banjo failed to match the acclaim and commercial success of Home to Harlem, but it confirmed McKay’s reputation as a serious, provocative artist. “It was apparent to critics that McKay’s imagination had been somewhat strained and that the novel was essentially an autobiographical exercise,” McLeod remarked. Commentators have found the autobiographical thread in Home to Harlem and Banjo primarily in the character of Ray, whose peripatetic existence to some extent mirrors the author’s own, as does the character’s admiration for the beauty of young men’s bodies. Patti Cappel Swartz digs for clues to McKay’s sexuality in the author’s fictional works, and points to a dream sequence in Home to Harlem and the fact that “for Ray, the bonds with men will always supersede those with women,” as is shown in the conclusion of Banjo. “Like McKay, Ray is not the marrying kind, but rather the vagabond who must always travel on,” Swartz continued.   In his third novel, Banana Bottom, McKay presented a more incisive exploration of his principal theme, the Black individual’s quest for cultural identity in the face of racism. Banana Bottom recounts the experiences of a Jamaican peasant girl, Bita, who is adopted by white missionaries after being raped. Bita’s new providers try to impose their cultural values on her by introducing her to organized Christianity and the British educational system. Their actions culminate in a horribly bungled attempt to arrange Bita’s marriage to an aspiring minister. The prospective groom is exposed as a sexual aberrant, whereupon Bita flees white society. She eventually marries a drayman, Jubban, and raises their child in an idealized peasant Jamaican environment. “Bita has pride in blackness, is free of hypocrisy, and is independent and discerning in her values,” remarked McLeod. “Praise for Banana Bottom has been unanimous.”   Critics agree that Banana Bottom is McKay’s most skillful delineation of the Black individual’s predicament. Unfortunately, the novel’s thematic worth was largely ignored when the book first appeared in 1933. Positive reviews of the time were related to McKay’s extraordinary evocation of the Jamaican tropics and his mastery of melodrama. In the ensuing years, though, Banana Bottom gained increasing acknowledgement as McKay’s finest fiction. McKay’s other noteworthy fiction publication during his final years abroad was Gingertown (1932), a collection of 12 short stories. Six of the tales are devoted to Harlem life, and they reveal McKay’s preoccupation with Black exploitation. Other tales are set in Jamaica and even in North Africa, McKay’s last home before he returned to the United States in the mid-1930s. Once back in Harlem, he began an autobiographical work, A Long Way from Home (1937), in which he related the challenges he faced as a Black man. The book is considered unreliable as material for his autobiography because, for example, in it McKay denies his membership in the communist party, as McLeod points out. However, A Long Way from Home does state McKay’s long-held belief that Black Americans should unite in the struggle against colonialism, segregation, and oppression.   By the late 1930s, McKay had developed a keen interest in Catholicism. Through Ellen Tarry, who wrote children’s books, he became active in Harlem’s Friendship House. His newfound religious interest, together with his observations and experiences at the Friendship House, inspired his essay collection, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940), which offers an account of the Black community in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s. Like Banjo, Banana Bottom, and Gingertown, Harlem: Negro Metropolis did not initially attract a broad readership. Critic McLeod offers a more recent evaluation of the work, the writing of which was based as much on scholarly inquiry as on personal observation, as McKay was absent from the country for a good deal of the period covered: “The book has been superseded by many more-scholarly studies, yet it retains value as a reexamination of Harlem by one who had established a necessary critical distance.” McKay moved to Chicago and worked as a teacher for a Catholic organization. By the mid-1940s his health had deteriorated. He endured several illnesses throughout his last years and eventually died of heart failure in 1948. McKay has been recognized for his intense commitment to expressing the challenges faced by Black Americans and admired for devoting his art and life to social protest, and his audience continues to expand. McLeod concluded his essay in Dictionary of Literary Biography with the following accolades: “That he was able to capture a universality of sentiment in ‘If We Must Die’ has been fully demonstrated; that he was able to show new directions for the black novel is now acknowledged; and that he is rightly regarded as one of the harbingers of (if not one of the participants in) the Harlem Renaissance is undisputed.” Upper Manhattan is the most northern region of the New York City borough of Manhattan. Its southern boundary has been variously defined, but some of the most common usages are 96th Street, the northern boundary of Central Park (110th Street), 125th Street, or 155th Street.[citation needed] The term Uptown can refer to Upper Manhattan, but is often used more generally for neighborhoods above 59th Street; in the broader definition, Uptown encompasses Upper Manhattan.[1] Upper Manhattan is generally taken to include the neighborhoods of Marble Hill, Inwood, Washington Heights (including Fort George, Sherman Creek and Hudson Heights), Harlem (including Sugar Hill, Hamilton Heights and Manhattanville), East Harlem, Morningside Heights, and Manhattan Valley (in the Upper West Side). The George Washington Bridge connects Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan across the Hudson River to Fort Lee, New Jersey, and is the world's busiest motor vehicle bridge.[2][3] In the late 19th century, the IRT Ninth Avenue Line and other elevated railroads brought people to the previously rustic Upper Manhattan. Until the late 20th century it was less influenced by the gentrification that had taken place in other parts of New York over the previous 30 years. Tourist attractions Like other residential areas, Upper Manhattan is not a major center of tourism in New York City, although many tourist attractions lie within it, such as Grant's Tomb, the Apollo Theater, United Palace, and The Cloisters, Sylvia's Restaurant, the Hamilton Grange, the Morris–Jumel Mansion, Minton's Playhouse, Sugar Hill, Riverside Church, the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, and the Dyckman House, along with Fort Tryon Park, most of Riverside Park, Riverbank State Park, Sakura Park, and other parks. Gallery City College of New York in Hamilton Heights City College of New York in Hamilton Heights   The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park houses the medieval art collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park houses the medieval art collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.   The Little Red Lighthouse under the George Washington Bridge The Little Red Lighthouse under the George Washington Bridge   Inwood Hill Park contains the last remnant of the primeval forest which once covered Manhattan; these caves were used by native Lenape people. Inwood Hill Park contains the last remnant of the primeval forest which once covered Manhattan; these caves were used by native Lenape people. New York, often called New York City[a] or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over 300.46 square miles (778.2 km2), New York City is the most densely populated major city in the United States. The city is more than twice as populous as Los Angeles, the nation's second-largest city, and has a larger population than 38 of the nation's 50 states. New York City is located at the southern tip of the state of New York. The city is the geographical and demographic center of both the Northeast megalopolis and the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the U.S. by both population and urban area. With over 20.1 million people in its metropolitan statistical area and 23.5 million in its combined statistical area as of 2020, New York City is one of the world's most populous megacities.[10] New York City is a global cultural, financial, high-tech,[11] entertainment, glamor,[12] and media center with a significant influence on commerce, health care and life sciences,[13] research, technology, education, politics, tourism, dining, art, fashion, and sports. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York City is an important center for international diplomacy,[14][15] and it is sometimes described as the capital of the world.[16][17] Situated on one of the world's largest natural harbors, New York City comprises five boroughs, each of which is coextensive with a respective county of the state of New York. The five boroughs, which were created in 1898 when local governments were consolidated into a single municipal entity, are: Brooklyn (Kings County), Queens (Queens County), Manhattan (New York County), the Bronx (Bronx County), and Staten Island (Richmond County).[18] As of 2021, the New York metropolitan area is the second largest metropolitan economy in the world with a gross metropolitan product of over $2.4 trillion. If the New York metropolitan area were a sovereign state, it would have the eighth-largest economy in the world. New York City is an established safe haven for global investors.[19] As of 2023, New York City is the most expensive city in the world for expatriates to live.[20] New York City is home to the highest number of billionaires,[21][22] individuals of ultra-high net worth (greater than US$30 million),[23] and millionaires of any city in the world.[24] The city and its metropolitan area are the premier gateway for legal immigration to the United States. As many as 800 languages are spoken in New York,[25] making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world. New York City is home to more than 3.2 million residents born outside the U.S., the largest foreign-born population of any city in the world as of 2016.[26] It is the most visited U.S. city by international visitors.[27] New York City traces its origins to Fort Amsterdam and a trading post founded on the southern tip of Manhattan Island by Dutch colonists in approximately 1624. The settlement was named New Amsterdam (Dutch: Nieuw Amsterdam) in 1626 and was chartered as a city in 1653. The city came under British control in 1664 and was renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, the Duke of York.[28][29] The city was regained by the Dutch in July 1673 and was renamed New Orange for one year and three months; the city has been continuously named New York since November 1674. New York City was the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790,[30] and has been the largest U.S. city since 1790. The Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the U.S. by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is a symbol of the U.S. and its ideals of liberty and peace.[31] In the 21st century, New York City has emerged as a global node of creativity, entrepreneurship,[32] and as a symbol of freedom and cultural diversity.[33] The New York Times has won the most Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and remains the U.S. media's "Newspaper of record".[34] Many districts and monuments in New York City are major landmarks, including three of the world's ten-most visited tourist attractions in 2023.[35] A record 66.6 million tourists visited New York City in 2019. Times Square is the brightly illuminated hub of the Broadway Theater District,[36] one of the world's busiest pedestrian intersections[37] and a major center of the world's entertainment industry.[38] New York's residential and commercial real estate markets are the most expensive in the world.[39][better source needed] Providing continuous 24/7 service and contributing to the nickname The City That Never Sleeps, the New York City Subway is the largest single-operator rapid transit system in the world with 472 passenger rail stations, and Penn Station in Midtown Manhattan is the busiest transportation hub in the Western Hemisphere.[40] The city features over 120 colleges and universities, including some of the world's top universities.[41] Its public urban university system, the City University of New York, is the largest in the nation.[42] Anchored by Wall Street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York City has been called both the world's leading financial and fintech center[43][44] and the most economically powerful city in the world,[45] and is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges by total market capitalization, the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq.[46][47] The Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, part of the Stonewall National Monument, is considered the historic epicenter of LGBTQ+ culture[48] and the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement.[49][50] New York City is the headquarters of the global art market, with numerous art galleries and auction houses collectively hosting half of the world's art auctions; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art is both the largest and second-most-visited art museum in the United States and hosts the globally focused Met Gala haute couture fashion event annually.[51][52] Governors Island in New York Harbor is planned to host a US$1 billion research and education center as a leader in the climate crisis.[53] Etymology See also: Nicknames of New York City In 1664, New York was named in honor of the Duke of York, who would become King James II of England.[54] James's elder brother, King Charles II, appointed the Duke as proprietor of the former territory of New Netherland, including the city of New Amsterdam, when England seized it from Dutch control.[55] History Main article: History of New York City For a chronological guide, see Timeline of New York City. Early history Main article: History of New York City (prehistory–1664) Lenape sites in Lower Manhattan In the pre-Columbian era, the area of present-day New York City was inhabited by Algonquian Native Americans, including the Lenape. Their homeland, known as Lenapehoking, included the present-day areas of Staten Island, Manhattan, the Bronx, the western portion of Long Island (including the areas that would later become the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens), and the Lower Hudson Valley.[56] The first documented visit into New York Harbor by a European was in 1524 by Italian Giovanni da Verrazzano, an explorer from Florence in the service of the French crown.[57] He claimed the area for France and named it Nouvelle Angoulême (New Angoulême).[58] A Spanish expedition, led by the Portuguese captain Estêvão Gomes sailing for Emperor Charles V, arrived in New York Harbor in January 1525 and charted the mouth of the Hudson River, which he named Río de San Antonio ('Saint Anthony's River'). The Padrón Real of 1527, the first scientific map to show the East Coast of North America continuously, was informed by Gomes' expedition and labeled the northeastern United States as Tierra de Esteban Gómez in his honor.[59] In 1609, the English explorer Henry Hudson rediscovered New York Harbor while searching for the Northwest Passage to the Orient for the Dutch East India Company.[60] He proceeded to sail up what the Dutch would name the North River (now the Hudson River), named first by Hudson as the Mauritius after Maurice, Prince of Orange. Hudson's first mate described the harbor as "a very good Harbour for all windes" and the river as "a mile broad" and "full of fish".[61] Hudson sailed roughly 150 miles (240 km) north,[62] past the site of the present-day New York State capital city of Albany, in the belief that it might be an oceanic tributary before the river became too shallow to continue.[61] He made a ten-day exploration of the area and claimed the region for the Dutch East India Company. In 1614, the area between Cape Cod and Delaware Bay was claimed by the Netherlands and called Nieuw-Nederland ('New Netherland'). The first non–Native American inhabitant of what would eventually become New York City was Juan Rodriguez (transliterated to the Dutch language as Jan Rodrigues), a merchant from Santo Domingo. Born in Santo Domingo of Portuguese and African descent, he arrived in Manhattan during the winter of 1613–14, trapping for pelts and trading with the local population as a representative of the Dutch. Broadway, from 159th Street to 218th Street in Upper Manhattan, is named Juan Rodriguez Way in his honor.[63][64] Dutch rule Main articles: New Amsterdam  and  Fort Amsterdam New Amsterdam, centered in what eventually became Lower Manhattan, in 1664, the year England took control and renamed it New York The Castello Plan, a 1660 map of New Amsterdam (the top right corner is roughly north) in Lower Manhattan A permanent European presence near New York Harbor was established in 1624, making New York the 12th-oldest continuously occupied European-established settlement in the continental United States,[65] with the founding of a Dutch fur trading settlement on Governors Island. In 1625, construction was started on a citadel and Fort Amsterdam, later called Nieuw Amsterdam (New Amsterdam), on present-day Manhattan Island.[66][67] The colony of New Amsterdam was centered on what would ultimately become Lower Manhattan. Its area extended from the southern tip of Manhattan to modern-day Wall Street, where a 12-foot (3.7 m) wooden stockade was built in 1653 to protect against Native American and British raids.[68] In 1626, the Dutch colonial Director-General Peter Minuit, acting as charged by the Dutch West India Company, purchased the island of Manhattan from the Canarsie, a small Lenape band,[69] for "the value of 60 guilders"[70] (about $900 in 2018).[71] A frequently told but disproved legend claims that Manhattan was purchased for $24 worth of glass beads.[72][73] Following the purchase, New Amsterdam grew slowly.[29] To attract settlers, the Dutch instituted the patroon system in 1628, whereby wealthy Dutchmen (patroons, or patrons) who brought 50 colonists to New Netherland would be awarded swaths of land, along with local political autonomy and rights to participate in the lucrative fur trade. This program had little success.[74] Since 1621, the Dutch West India Company had operated as a monopoly in New Netherland, on authority granted by the Dutch States General. In 1639–1640, in an effort to bolster economic growth, the Dutch West India Company relinquished its monopoly over the fur trade, leading to growth in the production and trade of food, timber, tobacco, and slaves (particularly with the Dutch West Indies).[29][75] In 1647, Peter Stuyvesant began his tenure as the last Director-General of New Netherland. During his tenure, the population of New Netherland grew from 2,000 to 8,000.[76][77] Stuyvesant has been credited with improving law and order in the colony; however, he also earned a reputation as a despotic leader. He instituted regulations on liquor sales, attempted to assert control over the Dutch Reformed Church, and blocked other religious groups (including Quakers, Jews, and Lutherans) from establishing houses of worship.[78] The Dutch West India Company would eventually attempt to ease tensions between Stuyvesant and residents of New Amsterdam.[79] English rule Main article: History of New York City (1665–1783) The Fall of New Amsterdam by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, part of the Conquest of New Netherland A painting of a ship firing its cannons in a harbor Fort George and New York with British Navy ships of the line c. 1731 In 1664, unable to summon any significant resistance, Stuyvesant surrendered New Amsterdam to English troops, led by Colonel Richard Nicolls, without bloodshed.[78][79] The terms of the surrender permitted Dutch residents to remain in the colony and allowed for religious freedom.[80] In 1667, during negotiations leading to the Treaty of Breda after the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the Dutch decided to keep the nascent plantation colony of what is now Suriname (on the northern South American coast) they had gained from the English; and in return, the English kept New Amsterdam. The fledgling settlement was promptly renamed "New York" after the Duke of York (the future King James II and VII), who would eventually be deposed in the Glorious Revolution.[81] After the founding, the duke gave part of the colony to proprietors George Carteret and John Berkeley. Fort Orange, 150 miles (240 km) north on the Hudson River, was renamed Albany after James's Scottish title.[82] The transfer was confirmed in 1667 by the Treaty of Breda, which concluded the Second Anglo-Dutch War.[83] On August 24, 1673, during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, Dutch captain Anthony Colve seized the colony of New York from the English at the behest of Cornelis Evertsen the Youngest and rechristened it "New Orange" after William III, the Prince of Orange.[84] The Dutch would soon return the island to England under the Treaty of Westminster of November 1674.[85][86] Several intertribal wars among the Native Americans and some epidemics brought on by contact with the Europeans caused sizeable population losses for the Lenape between the years 1660 and 1670.[87] By 1700, the Lenape population had diminished to 200.[88] New York experienced several yellow fever epidemics in the 18th century, losing ten percent of its population to the disease in 1702 alone.[89][90] Province of New York and slavery Slave being burned at the stake in N.Y.C. after the 1741 slave revolt. Thirteen slaves were burned.[91] In the early 18th century, New York grew in importance as a trading port while as a part of the colony of New York.[92] It also became a center of slavery, with 42% of households enslaving Africans by 1730, the highest percentage outside Charleston, South Carolina.[93] Most cases were that of domestic slavery, as a New York household then commonly used one or more slaves as cooks and house keepers. Others were hired out to work at labor. Slavery became integrally tied to New York's economy through the labor of slaves throughout the port, and the banking and shipping industries trading with the American South. During construction in Foley Square in the 1990s, the African Burying Ground was discovered; the cemetery included 10,000 to 20,000 of graves of colonial-era Africans, some enslaved and some free.[94] The 1735 trial and acquittal in Manhattan of John Peter Zenger, who had been accused of seditious libel after criticizing colonial governor William Cosby, helped to establish the freedom of the press in North America.[95] In 1754, Columbia University was founded under charter by King George II as King's College in Lower Manhattan.[96] American Revolution Further information: American Revolution An illustration of the Battle of Long Island, one of the largest battles of the American Revolutionary War, which took place in Brooklyn on August 27, 1776 The Stamp Act Congress met in New York in October 1765, as the Sons of Liberty organization emerged in the city and skirmished over the next ten years with British troops stationed there.[97] The Battle of Long Island, the largest battle of the American Revolutionary War, was fought in August 1776 within the modern-day borough of Brooklyn.[98] After the battle, in which the Americans were defeated, the British made the city their military and political base of operations in North America. The city was a haven for Loyalist refugees and escaped slaves who joined the British lines for freedom newly promised by the Crown for all fighters. As many as 10,000 escaped slaves crowded into the city during the British occupation. When the British forces evacuated at the close of the war in 1783, they transported 3,000 freedmen for resettlement in Nova Scotia.[99] They resettled other freedmen in England and the Caribbean. The only attempt at a peaceful solution to the war took place at the Conference House on Staten Island between American delegates, including Benjamin Franklin, and British general Lord Howe on September 11, 1776. Shortly after the British occupation began, the Great Fire of New York occurred, a large conflagration on the West Side of Lower Manhattan, which destroyed about a quarter of the buildings in the city, including Trinity Church.[100] Post-Revolutionary War Main article: History of New York City (1784–1854) First inauguration of George Washington in 1789 In 1785, the assembly of the Congress of the Confederation made New York City the national capital shortly after the war. New York was the last capital of the U.S. under the Articles of Confederation and the first capital under the Constitution of the United States. As the U.S. capital, New York City hosted several events of national scope in 1789—the first President of the United States, George Washington, was inaugurated; the first United States Congress and the Supreme Court of the United States each assembled for the first time; and the United States Bill of Rights was drafted, all at Federal Hall on Wall Street.[101] In 1790, for the first time, New York City, surpassed Philadelphia as the nation's largest city. At the end of that year, pursuant to the Residence Act, the national capital was moved to Philadelphia.[102][103] Late 19th century Main article: History of New York City (1855–1897) A painting of a snowy city street with horse-drawn sleds and a 19th-century fire truck under blue sky Broadway, which follows the Native American Wecquaesgeek Trail through Manhattan, in 1840.[104] The Great East River Bridge To connect the cities of New York and Brooklyn, Currier & Ives, 1872 Over the course of the nineteenth century, New York City's population grew from 60,000 to 3.43 million.[105] Under New York State's abolition act of 1799, children of slave mothers were to be eventually liberated but to be held in indentured servitude until their mid-to-late twenties.[106][107] Together with slaves freed by their masters after the Revolutionary War and escaped slaves, a significant free-Black population gradually developed in Manhattan. Under such influential United States founders as Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, the New York Manumission Society worked for abolition and established the African Free School to educate Black children.[108] It was not until 1827 that slavery was completely abolished in the state, and free Blacks struggled afterward with discrimination. New York interracial abolitionist activism continued; among its leaders were graduates of the African Free School. New York city's population jumped from 123,706 in 1820 to 312,710 by 1840, 16,000 of whom were Black.[109][110] In the 19th century, the city was transformed by both commercial and residential development relating to its status as a national and international trading center, as well as by European immigration, respectively.[111] The city adopted the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, which expanded the city street grid to encompass almost all of Manhattan. The 1825 completion of the Erie Canal through central New York connected the Atlantic port to the agricultural markets and commodities of the North American interior via the Hudson River and the Great Lakes.[112] Local politics became dominated by Tammany Hall, a political machine supported by Irish and German immigrants.[113] Several prominent American literary figures lived in New York during the 1830s and 1840s, including William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, John Keese, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Edgar Allan Poe. Public-minded members of the contemporaneous business elite lobbied for the establishment of Central Park, which in 1857 became the first landscaped park in an American city. The Great Irish Famine brought a large influx of Irish immigrants, of whom more than 200,000 were living in New York by 1860, representing upward of one-quarter of the city's population.[114] There was also extensive immigration from the German provinces, where revolutions had disrupted societies, and Germans comprised another 25% of New York's population by 1860.[115][116] American Civil War Main article: New York City in the American Civil War A drawing from The Illustrated London News showing armed rioters clashing with Union Army soldiers during the New York City draft riots in 1863 Democratic Party candidates were consistently elected to local office, increasing the city's ties to the South and its dominant party. In 1861, Mayor Fernando Wood called upon the aldermen to declare independence from Albany and the United States after the South seceded, but his proposal was not acted on.[108] Anger at new military conscription laws during the American Civil War (1861–1865), which spared wealthier men who could afford to pay a $300 (equivalent to $7,130 in 2022) commutation fee to hire a substitute,[117] led to the Draft Riots of 1863, whose most visible participants were ethnic Irish working class.[108] The draft riots deteriorated into attacks on New York's elite, followed by attacks on Black New Yorkers and their property after fierce competition for a decade between Irish immigrants and Black people for work. Rioters burned the Colored Orphan Asylum to the ground, with more than 200 children escaping harm due to efforts of the New York Police Department, which was mainly made up of Irish immigrants.[115] At least 120 people were killed.[118] Eleven Black men were lynched over five days, and the riots forced hundreds of Blacks to flee the city for Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and New Jersey. The Black population in Manhattan fell below 10,000 by 1865, which it had last been in 1820. The White working class had established dominance.[115][118] Violence by longshoremen against Black men was especially fierce in the docks area.[115] It was one of the worst incidents of civil unrest in American history.[119] In 1898, the City of New York was formed with the consolidation of Brooklyn (until then a separate city), the County of New York (which then included parts of the Bronx), the County of Richmond, and the western portion of the County of Queens.[120] The opening of the subway in 1904, first built as separate private systems, helped bind the new city together.[121] Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the city became a world center for industry, commerce, and communication.[122] Early 20th century Main articles: History of New York City (1898–1945) and History of New York City (1946–1977) Manhattan's Little Italy in the Lower East Side, c. 1900 In 1904, the steamship General Slocum caught fire in the East River, killing 1,021 people on board.[123] In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the city's worst industrial disaster, took the lives of 146 garment workers and spurred the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and major improvements in factory safety standards.[124] New York's non-White population was 36,620 in 1890.[125] New York City was a prime destination in the early twentieth century for African Americans during the Great Migration from the American South, and by 1916, New York City had become home to the largest urban African diaspora in North America.[126] The Harlem Renaissance of literary and cultural life flourished during the era of Prohibition.[127] The larger economic boom generated construction of skyscrapers competing in height and creating an identifiable skyline. A man working on a steel girder high about a city skyline. A construction worker atop the Empire State Building during its construction in 1930. The Chrysler Building is visible behind him. New York City became the most populous urbanized area in the world in the early 1920s, overtaking London. The metropolitan area surpassed the 10 million mark in the early 1930s, becoming the first megacity in human history.[128] The Great Depression saw the election of reformer Fiorello La Guardia as mayor and the fall of Tammany Hall after eighty years of political dominance.[129] Returning World War II veterans created a post-war economic boom and the development of large housing tracts in eastern Queens and Nassau County as well as similar suburban areas in New Jersey. New York emerged from the war unscathed as the leading city of the world, with Wall Street leading America's place as the world's dominant economic power. The United Nations headquarters was completed in 1952, solidifying New York's global geopolitical influence, and the rise of abstract expressionism in the city precipitated New York's displacement of Paris as the center of the art world.[130] A two-story building with brick on the first floor, with two arched doorways, and gray stucco on the second floor off of which hang numerous rainbow flags. Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, a designated U.S. National Historic Landmark and National Monument, was the site of the June 1969 Stonewall riots and the cradle of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement.[131][132][133] The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous, violent protests by members of the gay community against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan.[134] They are widely considered to be the single most important event leading to the gay liberation movement[131][135][136][137] and the modern fight for LGBT rights.[138][139] Wayne R. Dynes, author of the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, wrote that drag queens were the only "transgender folks around" during the June 1969 Stonewall riots. The transgender community in New York City played a significant role in fighting for LGBT equality during the period of the Stonewall riots and thereafter.[140] In the 1970s, job losses due to industrial restructuring caused New York City to suffer from economic problems and rising crime rates.[141] Late 20th century to present Main articles: History of New York City (1978–present) and September 11 attacks While a resurgence in the financial industry greatly improved the city's economic health in the 1980s, New York's crime rate continued to increase through that decade and into the beginning of the 1990s.[142] By the mid 1990s, crime rates started to drop dramatically due to revised police strategies, improving economic opportunities, gentrification, and new residents, both American transplants and new immigrants from Asia and Latin America. Important new sectors, such as Silicon Alley, emerged in the city's economy.[143] New York City's population reached all-time highs in the 2000, 2010, and 2020 US censuses. Two tall, gray, rectangular buildings spewing black smoke and flames, particularly from the left of the two. United Airlines Flight 175 hits the South Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, the largest terrorist attack in world history. New York City suffered the bulk of the economic damage and largest loss of human life in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks.[144] Two of the four airliners hijacked that day were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, destroying the towers and killing 2,192 civilians, 343 firefighters, and 71 law enforcement officers. The North Tower became, and remains, the tallest building to ever be destroyed.[145] The area was rebuilt with a new World Trade Center, the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, and other new buildings and infrastructure.[146] The World Trade Center PATH station, which had opened on July 19, 1909, as the Hudson Terminal, was also destroyed in the attacks. A temporary station was built and opened on November 23, 2003. An 800,000-square-foot (74,000 m2) permanent rail station designed by Santiago Calatrava, the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, the city's third-largest hub, was completed in 2016.[147] The new One World Trade Center is the tallest skyscraper in the Western Hemisphere[148] and the seventh-tallest building in the world by pinnacle height, with its spire reaching a symbolic 1,776 feet (541.3 m) in reference to the year of U.S. independence.[149][150][151][152] The Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan began on September 17, 2011, receiving global attention and popularizing the Occupy movement against social and economic inequality worldwide.[153] Manhattan in the aftermath of the Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the worst to strike the city since 1700.[154] New York City was heavily affected by Hurricane Sandy in late October 2012. Sandy's impacts included the flooding of the New York City Subway system, of many suburban communities, and of all road tunnels entering Manhattan except the Lincoln Tunnel. The New York Stock Exchange closed for two consecutive days. Numerous homes and businesses were destroyed by fire, including over 100 homes in Breezy Point, Queens. Large parts of the city and surrounding areas lost electricity for several days. Several thousand people in Midtown Manhattan were evacuated for six days due to a crane collapse at Extell's One57. Bellevue Hospital Center and a few other large hospitals were closed and evacuated. Flooding at 140 West Street and another exchange disrupted voice and data communication in Lower Manhattan. At least 43 people lost their lives in New York City as a result of Sandy, and the economic losses in New York City were estimated to be roughly $19 billion. The disaster spawned long-term efforts towards infrastructural projects to counter climate change and rising seas.[155][156] In March 2020, the first case of COVID-19 in the city was confirmed in Manhattan.[157] The city rapidly replaced Wuhan, China to become the global epicenter of the pandemic during the early phase, before the infection became widespread across the world and the rest of the nation. As of March 2021, New York City had recorded over 30,000 deaths from COVID-19-related complications. Geography Main articles: Geography of New York City and Geography of New York–New Jersey Harbor Estuary Aerial view of the New York City metropolitan area with Manhattan at its center During the Wisconsin glaciation, 75,000 to 11,000 years ago, the New York City area was situated at the edge of a large ice sheet over 2,000 feet (610 m) in depth.[158] The erosive forward movement of the ice (and its subsequent retreat) contributed to the separation of what is now Long Island and Staten Island. That action also left bedrock at a relatively shallow depth, providing a solid foundation for most of Manhattan's skyscrapers.[159] New York City is situated in the northeastern United States, in southeastern New York State, approximately halfway between Washington, D.C. and Boston. The location at the mouth of the Hudson River, which feeds into a naturally sheltered harbor and then into the Atlantic Ocean, has helped the city grow in significance as a trading port. Most of New York City is built on the three islands of Long Island, Manhattan, and Staten Island. The Hudson River flows through the Hudson Valley into New York Bay. Between New York City and Troy, New York, the river is an estuary.[160] The Hudson River separates the city from the U.S. state of New Jersey. The East River—a tidal strait—flows from Long Island Sound and separates the Bronx and Manhattan from Long Island. The Harlem River, another tidal strait between the East and Hudson rivers, separates most of Manhattan from the Bronx. The Bronx River, which flows through the Bronx and Westchester County, is the only entirely freshwater river in the city.[161] The city's land has been altered substantially by human intervention, with considerable land reclamation along the waterfronts since Dutch colonial times; reclamation is most prominent in Lower Manhattan, with developments such as Battery Park City in the 1970s and 1980s.[162] Some of the natural relief in topography has been evened out, especially in Manhattan.[163] The city's total area is 468.484 square miles (1,213.37 km2); 302.643 sq mi (783.84 km2) of the city is land and 165.841 sq mi (429.53 km2) of this is water.[164][165] The highest point in the city is Todt Hill on Staten Island, which, at 409.8 feet (124.9 m) above sea level, is the highest point on the eastern seaboard south of Maine.[166] The summit of the ridge is mostly covered in woodlands as part of the Staten Island Greenbelt.[167] Boroughs Main articles: Boroughs of New York City and Neighborhoods in New York City A map showing five boroughs in different colors.   1. Manhattan   2. Brooklyn   3. Queens   4. The Bronx   5. Staten Island New York City's five boroughsvte Jurisdiction Population Land area Density of population GDP † Borough County Census (2020) square miles square km people/ sq. mile people/ sq. km billions (2012 US$) 2 The Bronx Bronx 1,472,654 42.2 109.3 34,920 13,482 $38.726 Brooklyn Kings 2,736,074 69.4 179.7 39,438 15,227 $92.300 Manhattan New York 1,694,251 22.7 58.8 74,781 28,872 $651.619 Queens Queens 2,405,464 108.7 281.5 22,125 8,542 $88.578 Staten Island Richmond 495,747 57.5 148.9 8,618 3,327 $14.806 City of New York 8,804,190 302.6 783.8 29,095 11,234 $885.958 State of New York 20,215,751 47,126.4 122,056.8 429 166 $1,514.779 † GDP = Gross Domestic Product    Sources:[168][169][170][171] and see individual borough articles. New York City is sometimes referred to collectively as the Five Boroughs.[172] Each borough is coextensive with a respective county of New York State, making New York City one of the U.S. municipalities in multiple counties. There are hundreds of distinct neighborhoods throughout the boroughs, many with a definable history and character. If the boroughs were each independent cities, four of the boroughs (Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, and the Bronx) would be among the ten most populous cities in the United States (Staten Island would be ranked 37th as of 2020); these same boroughs are coterminous with the four most densely populated counties in the United States: New York (Manhattan), Kings (Brooklyn), Bronx, and Queens. Manhattan Lower and Midtown Manhattan photographed by a SkySat satellite in August 2017 Midtown Manhattan, the world's largest central business district Manhattan (New York County) is the geographically smallest and most densely populated borough. It is home to Central Park and most of the city's skyscrapers, and is sometimes locally known as The City.[173] Manhattan's population density of 72,033 people per square mile (27,812/km2) in 2015 makes it the highest of any county in the United States and higher than the density of any individual American city.[174] Manhattan is the cultural, administrative, and financial center of New York City and contains the headquarters of many major multinational corporations, the United Nations headquarters, Wall Street, and a number of important universities. The borough of Manhattan is often described as the financial and cultural center of the world.[175][176] Most of the borough is situated on Manhattan Island, at the mouth of the Hudson River and the East River, and its southern tip, at the confluence of the two rivers, represents the birthplace of New York City itself. Several small islands also compose part of the borough of Manhattan, including Randalls and Wards Islands, and Roosevelt Island in the East River, and Governors Island and Liberty Island to the south in New York Harbor. Manhattan Island is loosely divided into the Lower, Midtown, and Uptown regions. Uptown Manhattan is divided by Central Park into the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side, and above the park is Harlem, bordering the Bronx (Bronx County). Harlem was predominantly occupied by Jewish and Italian Americans in the 19th century until the Great Migration. It was the center of the Harlem Renaissance. The borough of Manhattan also includes a small neighborhood on the mainland, called Marble Hill, which is contiguous with the Bronx. New York City's remaining four boroughs are collectively referred to as the Outer Boroughs. Brooklyn Panorama of Gowanus Canal, as viewed from Union Street Bridge, Gowanus, Brooklyn Brooklyn (Kings County), on the western tip of Long Island, is the city's most populous borough. Brooklyn is known for its cultural, social, and ethnic diversity, an independent art scene, distinct neighborhoods, and a distinctive architectural heritage. Downtown Brooklyn is the largest central core neighborhood in the Outer Boroughs. The borough has a long beachfront shoreline including Coney Island, established in the 1870s as one of the earliest amusement grounds in the U.S.[177] Marine Park and Prospect Park are the two largest parks in Brooklyn.[178] Since 2010, Brooklyn has evolved into a thriving hub of entrepreneurship and high technology startup firms,[179][180] and of postmodern art and design.[180][181] Queens The growing skyline of Long Island City in Queens,[182] facing the East River Queens (Queens County), on Long Island north and east of Brooklyn, is geographically the largest borough, the most ethnically diverse county in the United States,[183] and the most ethnically diverse urban area in the world.[184][185] Historically a collection of small towns and villages founded by the Dutch, the borough has since developed both commercial and residential prominence. Downtown Flushing has become one of the busiest central core neighborhoods in the outer boroughs. Queens is the site of the Citi Field baseball stadium, home of the New York Mets, and hosts the annual U.S. Open tennis tournament at Flushing Meadows–Corona Park. Additionally, two of the three busiest airports serving the New York metropolitan area, John F. Kennedy International Airport and LaGuardia Airport, are in Queens. The third is Newark Liberty International Airport in Newark, New Jersey. The Bronx The Yankee Stadium in the Bronx The Bronx (Bronx County) is both New York City's northernmost borough, and the only one that is mostly on the mainland. It is the location of Yankee Stadium, the baseball park of the New York Yankees, and home to the largest cooperatively-owned housing complex in the United States, Co-op City.[186] It is also home to the Bronx Zoo, the world's largest metropolitan zoo,[187] which spans 265 acres (1.07 km2) and houses more than 6,000 animals.[188] The Bronx is also the birthplace of hip hop music and its associated culture.[189] Pelham Bay Park is the largest park in New York City, at 2,772 acres (1,122 ha).[190] Staten Island St. George, Staten Island Staten Island (Richmond County) is the most suburban in character of the five boroughs. Staten Island is connected to Brooklyn by the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, and to Manhattan by way of the free Staten Island Ferry, a daily commuter ferry that provides unobstructed views of the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and Lower Manhattan. In central Staten Island, the Staten Island Greenbelt spans approximately 2,500 acres (10 km2), including 28 miles (45 km) of walking trails and one of the last undisturbed forests in the city.[191] Designated in 1984 to protect the island's natural lands, the Greenbelt comprises seven city parks. Architecture Further information: Architecture of New York City; List of buildings, sites, and monuments in New York City; List of tallest buildings in New York City; and List of hotels in New York City The Empire State Building has setbacks, Art Deco details, and a spire. It was the world's tallest building from 1931 to 1970. The Chrysler Building, built in 1930, is in the Art Deco style, with ornamental hubcaps and a spire. Landmark 19th-century rowhouses, including brownstones, on tree-lined Kent Street in the Greenpoint Historic District, Brooklyn Modernist and Gothic Revival architecture in Midtown Manhattan New York has architecturally noteworthy buildings in a wide range of styles and from distinct time periods, from the Dutch Colonial Pieter Claesen Wyckoff House in Brooklyn, the oldest section of which dates to 1656, to the modern One World Trade Center, the skyscraper at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan and the most expensive office tower in the world by construction cost.[192] Manhattan's skyline, with its many skyscrapers, is universally recognized, and the city has been home to several of the tallest buildings in the world. As of 2019, New York City had 6,455 high-rise buildings, the third most in the world after Hong Kong and Seoul.[193] Of these, as of 2011, 550 completed structures were at least 330 feet (100 m) high, with more than fifty completed skyscrapers taller than 656 feet (200 m). These include the Woolworth Building, an early example of Gothic Revival architecture in skyscraper design, built with massively scaled Gothic detailing; completed in 1913, for 17 years it was the world's tallest building.[194] The 1916 Zoning Resolution required setbacks in new buildings and restricted towers to a percentage of the lot size, to allow sunlight to reach the streets below.[195] The Art Deco style of the Chrysler Building (1930) and Empire State Building (1931), with their tapered tops and steel spires, reflected the zoning requirements. The buildings have distinctive ornamentation, such as the eagles at the corners of the 61st floor on the Chrysler Building, and are considered some of the finest examples of the Art Deco style.[196] A highly influential example of the International Style in the United States is the Seagram Building (1957), distinctive for its façade using visible bronze-toned I-beams to evoke the building's structure. The Condé Nast Building (2000) is a prominent example of green design in American skyscrapers[197] and has received an award from the American Institute of Architects and AIA New York State for its design. The character of New York's large residential districts is often defined by the elegant brownstone rowhouses and townhouses and shabby tenements that were built during a period of rapid expansion from 1870 to 1930.[198] In contrast, New York City also has neighborhoods that are less densely populated and feature free-standing dwellings. In neighborhoods such as Riverdale (in the Bronx), Ditmas Park (in Brooklyn), and Douglaston (in Queens), large single-family homes are common in various architectural styles such as Tudor Revival and Victorian.[199][200][201] Stone and brick became the city's building materials of choice after the construction of wood-frame houses was limited in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1835.[202] A distinctive feature of many of the city's buildings is the roof-mounted wooden water tower. In the 1800s, the city required their installation on buildings higher than six stories to prevent the need for excessively high water pressures at lower elevations, which could break municipal water pipes.[203] Garden apartments became popular during the 1920s in outlying areas, such as Jackson Heights.[204] According to the United States Geological Survey, an updated analysis of seismic hazard in July 2014 revealed a "slightly lower hazard for tall buildings" in New York City than previously assessed. Scientists estimated this lessened risk based upon a lower likelihood than previously thought of slow shaking near the city, which would be more likely to cause damage to taller structures from an earthquake in the vicinity of the city.[205] Manhattan contained over 500 million square feet of office space as of 2022; the COVID-19 pandemic and hybrid work model have prompted consideration of commercial-to-residential conversion within Midtown Manhattan.[206] Ten mile (16km) Manhattan skyline panorama from 120th Street to the Battery, taken in February 2018 from across the Hudson River in Weehawken, New Jersey Riverside ChurchDeutsche Bank Center220 Central Park SouthCentral Park TowerOne57432 Park Avenue53W53Chrysler BuildingBank of America Tower4 Times SquareThe New York Times BuildingEmpire State BuildingManhattan Westa: 55 Hudson Yards, 14b: 35 Hudson Yards, 14c: 10 Hudson Yards, 14d: 15 Hudson Yards56 Leonard Street8 Spruce StreetWoolworth Building70 Pine StreetFour Seasons Downtown40 Wall Street3 World Trade Center4 World Trade CenterOne World Trade Center Climate Main article: Climate of New York City New York City Climate chart (explanation) J F M A M J J A S O N D   3.6  4028   3.2  4230   4.3  5036   4.1  6246   4  7155   4.5  8064   4.6  8570   4.6  8369   4.3  7662   4.4  6551   3.6  5442   4.4  4434 █ Average max. and min. temperatures in °F █ Precipitation totals in inches Metric conversion Deep snow in Brooklyn during the Blizzard of 2006 Nor'easter Under the Köppen climate classification, using the 0 °C (32 °F) isotherm, New York City features a humid subtropical climate (Cfa), and is thus the northernmost major city on the North American continent with this categorization. The suburbs to the immediate north and west lie in the transitional zone between humid subtropical and humid continental climates (Dfa).[207][208] By the Trewartha classification, the city is defined as having an oceanic climate (Do).[209][210] Annually, the city averages 234 days with at least some sunshine.[211] The city lies in the USDA 7b plant hardiness zone.[212] Winters are chilly and damp, and prevailing wind patterns that blow sea breezes offshore temper the moderating effects of the Atlantic Ocean; yet the Atlantic and the partial shielding from colder air by the Appalachian Mountains keep the city warmer in the winter than inland North American cities at similar or lesser latitudes such as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis. The daily mean temperature in January, the area's coldest month, is 33.3 °F (0.7 °C).[213] Temperatures usually drop to 10 °F (−12 °C) several times per winter,[214] yet can also reach 60 °F (16 °C) for several days even in the coldest winter month. Spring and autumn are unpredictable and can range from cool to warm, although they are usually mild with low humidity. Summers are typically hot and humid, with a daily mean temperature of 77.5 °F (25.3 °C) in July.[213] Nighttime temperatures are often enhanced due to the urban heat island effect. Daytime temperatures exceed 90 °F (32 °C) on average of 17 days each summer and in some years exceed 100 °F (38 °C), although this is a rare achievement, last occurring on July 18, 2012.[215] Similarly, readings of 0 °F (−18 °C) are also extremely rare, last occurring on February 14, 2016.[216] Extreme temperatures have ranged from −15 °F (−26 °C), recorded on February 9, 1934, up to 106 °F (41 °C) on July 9, 1936;[213] the coldest recorded wind chill was −37 °F (−38 °C) on the same day as the all-time record low.[217] The record cold daily maximum was 2 °F (−17 °C) on December 30, 1917, while, conversely, the record warm daily minimum was 87 °F (31 °C), on July 2, 1903.[215] The average water temperature of the nearby Atlantic Ocean ranges from 39.7 °F (4.3 °C) in February to 74.1 °F (23.4 °C) in August.[218] The city receives 49.5 inches (1,260 mm) of precipitation annually, which is relatively evenly spread throughout the year. Average winter snowfall between 1991 and 2020 has been 29.8 inches (76 cm); this varies considerably between years. Hurricanes and tropical storms are rare in the New York area.[219] Hurricane Sandy brought a destructive storm surge to New York City on the evening of October 29, 2012, flooding numerous streets, tunnels, and subway lines in Lower Manhattan and other areas of the city and cutting off electricity in many parts of the city and its suburbs.[220] The storm and its profound impacts have prompted the discussion of constructing seawalls and other coastal barriers around the shorelines of the city and the metropolitan area to minimize the risk of destructive consequences from another such event in the future.[155][156] The coldest month on record is January 1857, with a mean temperature of 19.6 °F (−6.9 °C) whereas the warmest months on record are July 1825 and July 1999, both with a mean temperature of 81.4 °F (27.4 °C).[221] The warmest years on record are 2012 and 2020, both with mean temperatures of 57.1 °F (13.9 °C). The coldest year is 1836, with a mean temperature of 47.3 °F (8.5 °C).[221][222] The driest month on record is June 1949, with 0.02 inches (0.51 mm) of rainfall. The wettest month was August 2011, with 18.95 inches (481 mm) of rainfall. The driest year on record is 1965, with 26.09 inches (663 mm) of rainfall. The wettest year was 1983, with 80.56 inches (2,046 mm) of rainfall.[223] The snowiest month on record is February 2010, with 36.9 inches (94 cm) of snowfall. The snowiest season (Jul–Jun) on record is 1995–1996, with 75.6 inches (192 cm) of snowfall. The least snowy season was 2022–2023, with 2.3 inches (5.8 cm) of snowfall.[224] The earliest seasonal trace of snowfall occurred on October 10, in both 1979 and 1925. The latest seasonal trace of snowfall occurred on May 9, in both 2020 and 1977.[225] vte Climate data for New York (Belvedere Castle, Central Park), 1991–2020 normals,[b] extremes 1869–present[c] Month Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Year Record high °F (°C) 72 (22) 78 (26) 86 (30) 96 (36) 99 (37) 101 (38) 106 (41) 104 (40) 102 (39) 94 (34) 84 (29) 75 (24) 106 (41) Mean maximum °F (°C) 60.4 (15.8) 60.7 (15.9) 70.3 (21.3) 82.9 (28.3) 88.5 (31.4) 92.1 (33.4) 95.7 (35.4) 93.4 (34.1) 89.0 (31.7) 79.7 (26.5) 70.7 (21.5) 62.9 (17.2) 97.0 (36.1) Average high °F (°C) 39.5 (4.2) 42.2 (5.7) 49.9 (9.9) 61.8 (16.6) 71.4 (21.9) 79.7 (26.5) 84.9 (29.4) 83.3 (28.5) 76.2 (24.6) 64.5 (18.1) 54.0 (12.2) 44.3 (6.8) 62.6 (17.0) Daily mean °F (°C) 33.7 (0.9) 35.9 (2.2) 42.8 (6.0) 53.7 (12.1) 63.2 (17.3) 72.0 (22.2) 77.5 (25.3) 76.1 (24.5) 69.2 (20.7) 57.9 (14.4) 48.0 (8.9) 39.1 (3.9) 55.8 (13.2) Average low °F (°C) 27.9 (−2.3) 29.5 (−1.4) 35.8 (2.1) 45.5 (7.5) 55.0 (12.8) 64.4 (18.0) 70.1 (21.2) 68.9 (20.5) 62.3 (16.8) 51.4 (10.8) 42.0 (5.6) 33.8 (1.0) 48.9 (9.4) Mean minimum °F (°C) 9.8 (−12.3) 12.7 (−10.7) 19.7 (−6.8) 32.8 (0.4) 43.9 (6.6) 52.7 (11.5) 61.8 (16.6) 60.3 (15.7) 50.2 (10.1) 38.4 (3.6) 27.7 (−2.4) 18.0 (−7.8) 7.7 (−13.5) Record low °F (°C) −6 (−21) −15 (−26) 3 (−16) 12 (−11) 32 (0) 44 (7) 52 (11) 50 (10) 39 (4) 28 (−2) 5 (−15) −13 (−25) −15 (−26) Average precipitation inches (mm) 3.64 (92) 3.19 (81) 4.29 (109) 4.09 (104) 3.96 (101) 4.54 (115) 4.60 (117) 4.56 (116) 4.31 (109) 4.38 (111) 3.58 (91) 4.38 (111) 49.52 (1,258) Average snowfall inches (cm) 8.8 (22) 10.1 (26) 5.0 (13) 0.4 (1.0) 0.0 (0.0) 0.0 (0.0) 0.0 (0.0) 0.0 (0.0) 0.0 (0.0) 0.1 (0.25) 0.5 (1.3) 4.9 (12) 29.8 (76) Average precipitation days (≥ 0.01 in) 10.8 10.0 11.1 11.4 11.5 11.2 10.5 10.0 8.8 9.5 9.2 11.4 125.4 Average snowy days (≥ 0.1 in) 3.7 3.2 2.0 0.2 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.2 2.1 11.4 Average relative humidity (%) 61.5 60.2 58.5 55.3 62.7 65.2 64.2 66.0 67.8 65.6 64.6 64.1 63.0 Average dew point °F (°C) 18.0 (−7.8) 19.0 (−7.2) 25.9 (−3.4) 34.0 (1.1) 47.3 (8.5) 57.4 (14.1) 61.9 (16.6) 62.1 (16.7) 55.6 (13.1) 44.1 (6.7) 34.0 (1.1) 24.6 (−4.1) 40.3 (4.6) Mean monthly sunshine hours 162.7 163.1 212.5 225.6 256.6 257.3 268.2 268.2 219.3 211.2 151.0 139.0 2,534.7 Percent possible sunshine 54 55 57 57 57 57 59 63 59 61 51 48 57 Average ultraviolet index 2 3 4 6 7 8 8 8 6 4 2 1 5 Source 1: NOAA (relative humidity and sun 1961–1990; dew point 1965–1984)[215][227][211][228] Source 2: Weather Atlas[229] See Climate of New York City for additional climate information from the outer boroughs. Sea temperature data for New York Month Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Year Average sea temperature °F (°C) 41.7 (5.4) 39.7 (4.3) 40.2 (4.5) 45.1 (7.3) 52.5 (11.4) 64.5 (18.1) 72.1 (22.3) 74.1 (23.4) 70.1 (21.2) 63.0 (17.2) 54.3 (12.4) 47.2 (8.4) 55.4 (13.0) Source: Weather Atlas[229] Graphs are temporarily unavailable due to technical issues. See or edit raw graph data. Parks Main article: List of New York City parks A spherical sculpture and several attractions line a park during a World's Fair. Flushing Meadows–Corona Park was used in both the 1939 and 1964 New York World's Fair. The city of New York has a complex park system, with various lands operated by the National Park Service, the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. In its 2018 ParkScore ranking, the Trust for Public Land reported that the park system in New York City was the ninth-best park system among the fifty most populous U.S. cities.[230] ParkScore ranks urban park systems by a formula that analyzes median park size, park acres as percent of city area, the percent of city residents within a half-mile of a park, spending of park services per resident, and the number of playgrounds per 10,000 residents. In 2021, the New York City Council banned the use of synthetic pesticides by city agencies and instead required organic lawn management. The effort was started by teacher Paula Rogovin's kindergarten class at P.S. 290.[231] National parks Main article: National Park Service The Statue of Liberty on Liberty Island in New York Harbor, a global symbol of the United States and its ideals of liberty, freedom, and opportunity[31] Gateway National Recreation Area contains over 26,000 acres (110 km2), most of it in New York City.[232] In Brooklyn and Queens, the park contains over 9,000 acres (36 km2) of salt marsh, wetlands, islands, and water, including most of Jamaica Bay and the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. Also in Queens, the park includes a significant portion of the western Rockaway Peninsula, most notably Jacob Riis Park and Fort Tilden. In Staten Island, it includes Fort Wadsworth, with historic pre-Civil War era Battery Weed and Fort Tompkins, and Great Kills Park, with beaches, trails, and a marina. The Statue of Liberty National Monument and Ellis Island Immigration Museum are managed by the National Park Service and are in both New York and New Jersey. They are joined in the harbor by Governors Island National Monument. Historic sites under federal management on Manhattan Island include Stonewall National Monument; Castle Clinton National Monument; Federal Hall National Memorial; Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site; General Grant National Memorial (Grant's Tomb); African Burial Ground National Monument; and Hamilton Grange National Memorial. Hundreds of properties are listed on the National Register of Historic Places or as a National Historic Landmark. State parks Main article: New York state parks There are seven state parks within the confines of New York City. Some of them include: The Clay Pit Ponds State Park Preserve is a natural area that includes extensive riding trails. Riverbank State Park is a 28-acre (11 ha) facility that rises 69 feet (21 m) over the Hudson River.[233] Marsha P. Johnson State Park is a state park in Brooklyn and Manhattan that borders the East River that was renamed in honor of Marsha P. Johnson.[234] City parks See also: New York City Department of Parks and Recreation The Pond and Midtown Manhattan as seen from Gapstow Bridge in Central Park The Boathouse on the Lullwater in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, almost demolished in 1964 New York City has over 28,000 acres (110 km2) of municipal parkland and 14 miles (23 km) of public beaches.[235] The largest municipal park in the city is Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, with 2,772 acres (1,122 ha).[190][236] Central Park, an 843-acre (3.41 km2)[190] park in middle-upper Manhattan, is the most visited urban park in the United States and one of the most filmed and visited locations in the world, with 40 million visitors in 2013.[237] The park has a wide range of attractions; there are several lakes and ponds, two ice-skating rinks, the Central Park Zoo, the Central Park Conservatory Garden, and the 106-acre (0.43 km2) Jackie Onassis Reservoir.[238] Indoor attractions include Belvedere Castle with its nature center, the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theater, and the historic Carousel. On October 23, 2012, hedge fund manager John A. Paulson announced a $100 million gift to the Central Park Conservancy, the largest ever monetary donation to New York City's park system.[239] Washington Square Park is a prominent landmark in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. The Washington Square Arch at the northern gateway to the park is an iconic symbol of both New York University and Greenwich Village. Prospect Park in Brooklyn has a 90-acre (36 ha) meadow, a lake, and extensive woodlands. Within the park is the historic Battle Pass, prominent in the Battle of Long Island.[240] Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens, with its 897 acres (363 ha) making it the city's fourth largest park,[241] was the setting for the 1939 World's Fair and the 1964 World's Fair[242] and is host to the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center and the annual U.S. Open Tennis Championships tournament.[243] Over a fifth of the Bronx's area, 7,000 acres (28 km2), is dedicated to open space and parks, including Pelham Bay Park, Van Cortlandt Park, the Bronx Zoo, and the New York Botanical Gardens.[244] In Staten Island, the Conference House Park contains the historic Conference House, site of the only attempt of a peaceful resolution to the American Revolution which was conducted in September 1775, attended by Benjamin Franklin representing the Americans and Lord Howe representing the British Crown.[245] The historic Burial Ridge, the largest Native American burial ground within New York City, is within the park.[246] Military installations Brooklyn is home to Fort Hamilton, the U.S. military's only active duty installation within New York City,[247] aside from Coast Guard operations. The facility was established in 1825 on the site of a small battery used during the American Revolution, and it is one of America's longest serving military forts.[248] Today, Fort Hamilton serves as the headquarters of the North Atlantic Division of the United States Army Corps of Engineers and for the New York City Recruiting Battalion. It also houses the 1179th Transportation Brigade, the 722nd Aeromedical Staging Squadron, and a military entrance processing station. Other formerly active military reservations still used for National Guard and military training or reserve operations in the city include Fort Wadsworth in Staten Island and Fort Totten in Queens. Demographics Historical population Year Pop. ±% 1698 4,937 —     1712 5,840 +18.3% 1723 7,248 +24.1% 1737 10,664 +47.1% 1746 11,717 +9.9% 1756 13,046 +11.3% 1771 21,863 +67.6% 1790 49,401 +126.0% 1800 79,216 +60.4% 1810 119,734 +51.1% 1820 152,056 +27.0% 1830 242,278 +59.3% 1840 391,114 +61.4% 1850 696,115 +78.0% 1860 1,174,779 +68.8% 1870 1,478,103 +25.8% 1880 1,911,698 +29.3% 1890 2,507,414 +31.2% 1900 3,437,202 +37.1% 1910 4,766,883 +38.7% 1920 5,620,048 +17.9% 1930 6,930,446 +23.3% 1940 7,454,995 +7.6% 1950 7,891,957 +5.9% 1960 7,781,984 −1.4% 1970 7,894,862 +1.5% 1980 7,071,639 −10.4% 1990 7,322,564 +3.5% 2000 8,008,278 +9.4% 2010 8,175,133 +2.1% 2020 8,804,190 +7.7% Note: Census figures (1790–2010) cover the present area of all five boroughs, before and after the 1898 consolidation. For New York City itself before annexing part of the Bronx in 1874, see Manhattan#Demographics.[249] Source: U.S. Decennial Census;[250] 1698–1771[251] 1790–1890[249][252] 1900–1990[253] 2000–2010[254][255][256] 2010–2020[257] Main articles: Demographics of New York City, New York City ethnic enclaves, and Demographic history of New York City Historical demographics 2020[258] 2010[259] 1990[260] 1970[260] 1940[260] New York City is the most populous city in the United States,[261] with 8,804,190 residents incorporating more immigration into the city than outmigration since the 2010 United States census.[257][262][263] More than twice as many people live in New York City as compared to Los Angeles, the second-most populous U.S. city;[261] and New York has more than three times the population of Chicago, the third-most populous U.S. city. New York City gained more residents between 2010 and 2020 (629,000) than any other U.S. city, and a greater amount than the total sum of the gains over the same decade of the next four largest U.S. cities, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Phoenix, Arizona combined.[264][265] New York City's population is about 44% of New York State's population,[266] and about 39% of the population of the New York metropolitan area.[267] The majority of New York City residents in 2020 (5,141,538, or 58.4%) were living on Long Island, in Brooklyn, or in Queens.[268] The New York City metropolitan statistical area, has the largest foreign-born population of any metropolitan region in the world. The New York region continues to be by far the leading metropolitan gateway for legal immigrants admitted into the United States, substantially exceeding the combined totals of Los Angeles and Miami.[269] Population density In 2020, the city had an estimated population density of 29,302.37 inhabitants per square mile (11,313.71/km2), rendering it the nation's most densely populated of all larger municipalities (those with more than 100,000 residents), with several small cities (of fewer than 100,000) in adjacent Hudson County, New Jersey having greater density, as per the 2010 census.[270] Geographically co-extensive with New York County, the borough of Manhattan's 2017 population density of 72,918 inhabitants per square mile (28,154/km2) makes it the highest of any county in the United States and higher than the density of any individual American city.[271][272][273] The next three densest counties in the United States, placing second through fourth, are also New York boroughs: Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens respectively.[274] Race and ethnicity Further information: African Americans in New York City, Bangladeshis in New York City, Caribbeans in New York City, Chinese in New York City, Dominican Americans in New York City, Filipinos in New York City, Fuzhounese in New York City, Indians in New York City, Irish in New York City, Italians in New York City, Japanese in New York City, Koreans in New York City, Pakistanis in New York City, Puerto Ricans in New York City, Russians in New York City, and Ukrainians in New York City The city's population in 2020 was 30.9% White (non-Hispanic), 28.7% Hispanic or Latino, 20.2% Black or African American (non-Hispanic), 15.6% Asian, and 0.2% Native American (non-Hispanic).[275] A total of 3.4% of the non-Hispanic population identified with more than one race. Throughout its history, New York has been a major port of entry for immigrants into the United States. More than 12 million European immigrants were received at Ellis Island between 1892 and 1954.[276] The term "melting pot" was first coined to describe densely populated immigrant neighborhoods on the Lower East Side. By 1900, Germans were the largest immigrant group, followed by the Irish, Jews, and Italians.[277] In 1940, Whites represented 92% of the city's population.[260] Approximately 37% of the city's population is foreign born, and more than half of all children are born to mothers who are immigrants as of 2013.[278][279] In New York, no single country or region of origin dominates.[278] The ten largest sources of foreign-born individuals in the city as of 2011 were the Dominican Republic, China, Mexico, Guyana, Jamaica, Ecuador, Haiti, India, Russia, and Trinidad and Tobago,[280] while the Bangladeshi-born immigrant population has become one of the fastest growing in the city, counting over 74,000 by 2011.[26][281] Asian Americans in New York City, according to the 2010 census, number more than one million, greater than the combined totals of San Francisco and Los Angeles.[282] New York contains the highest total Asian population of any U.S. city proper.[283] The New York City borough of Queens is home to the state's largest Asian American population and the largest Andean (Colombian, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, and Bolivian) populations in the United States, and is also the most ethnically and linguistically diverse urban area in the world.[284][185] Tens of thousands of asylum seekers from Venezuela have arrived in New York City since 2022.[285] Chinatown, Manhattan Lower Manhattan's Little Italy Koreatown, Midtown Manhattan Upper Manhattan's Spanish Harlem Little Russia, Brooklyn Little India, Queens Little Brazil, Manhattan Little Manila, Queens The Chinese population is the fastest-growing nationality in New York State. Multiple satellites of the original Manhattan's Chinatown—home to the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere,[286] as well as in Brooklyn, and around Flushing, Queens, are thriving as traditionally urban enclaves—while also expanding rapidly eastward into suburban Nassau County[287] on Long Island,[288] as the New York metropolitan region and New York State have become the top destinations for new Chinese immigrants, respectively, and large-scale Chinese immigration continues into New York City and surrounding areas,[269][289][290][291][292][293] with the largest metropolitan Chinese diaspora outside Asia,[26][294] including an estimated 812,410 individuals in 2015.[295] In 2012, 6.3% of New York City was of Chinese ethnicity, with nearly three-fourths living in either Queens or Brooklyn, geographically on Long Island.[296] A community numbering 20,000 Korean-Chinese (Chaoxianzu or Joseonjok) is centered in Flushing, Queens, while New York City is also home to the largest Tibetan population outside China, India, and Nepal, also centered in Queens.[297] Koreans made up 1.2% of the city's population, and Japanese 0.3%. Filipinos were the largest Southeast Asian ethnic group at 0.8%, followed by Vietnamese, who made up 0.2% of New York City's population in 2010. Indians are the largest South Asian group, comprising 2.4% of the city's population, with Bangladeshis and Pakistanis at 0.7% and 0.5%, respectively.[298] Queens is the preferred borough of settlement for Asian Indians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Malaysians,[299][269] and other Southeast Asians;[300] while Brooklyn is receiving large numbers of both West Indian and Asian Indian immigrants, and Manhattan is the favored destination for Japanese. New York City has the largest European and non-Hispanic white population of any American city. At 2.7 million in 2012, New York's non-Hispanic White population is larger than the non-Hispanic White populations of Los Angeles (1.1 million), Chicago (865,000), and Houston (550,000) combined.[301] The non-Hispanic White population was 6.6 million in 1940.[302] The non-Hispanic White population has begun to increase since 2010.[303] The European diaspora residing in the city is very diverse. According to 2012 census estimates, there were roughly 560,000 Italian Americans, 385,000 Irish Americans, 253,000 German Americans, 223,000 Russian Americans, 201,000 Polish Americans, and 137,000 English Americans. Additionally, Greek and French Americans numbered 65,000 each, with those of Hungarian descent estimated at 60,000 people. Ukrainian and Scottish Americans numbered 55,000 and 35,000, respectively. People identifying ancestry from Spain numbered 30,838 total in 2010.[304] People of Norwegian and Swedish descent both stood at about 20,000 each, while people of Czech, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Scotch-Irish, and Welsh descent all numbered between 12,000 and 14,000.[305] Arab Americans number over 160,000 in New York City,[306] with the highest concentration in Brooklyn. Central Asians, primarily Uzbek Americans, are a rapidly growing segment of the city's non-Hispanic White population, enumerating over 30,000, and including more than half of all Central Asian immigrants to the United States,[307] most settling in Queens or Brooklyn. Albanian Americans are most highly concentrated in the Bronx,[308] while Astoria, Queens is the epicenter of American Greek culture as well as the Cypriot community. New York is also home to the highest Jewish population of any city in the world, numbering 1.6 million in 2022, more than Tel Aviv and Jerusalem combined.[309] In the borough of Brooklyn, an estimated 1 in 4 residents is Jewish.[310] The city's Jewish communities are derived from many diverse sects, predominantly from around the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and including a rapidly growing Orthodox Jewish population, also the largest outside Israel.[297] The metropolitan area is also home to 20% of the nation's Indian Americans and at least 20 Little India enclaves, and 15% of all Korean Americans and four Koreatowns;[255] the largest Asian Indian population in the Western Hemisphere; the largest Russian American,[289] Italian American, and African American populations; the largest Dominican American, Puerto Rican American, and South American[289] and second-largest overall Hispanic population in the United States, numbering 4.8 million;[304] and includes multiple established Chinatowns within New York City alone.[311] Ecuador, Colombia, Guyana, Peru, Brazil, and Venezuela are the top source countries from South America for immigrants to the New York City region; the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Haiti, and Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean; Nigeria, Egypt, Ghana, Tanzania, Kenya, and South Africa from Africa; and El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala in Central America.[312] Amidst a resurgence of Puerto Rican migration to New York City, this population had increased to approximately 1.3 million in the metropolitan area as of 2013. Since 2010, Little Australia has emerged and is growing rapidly, representing the Australasian presence in Nolita, Manhattan.[313][314][315][316] In 2011, there were an estimated 20,000 Australian residents of New York City, nearly quadruple the 5,537 in 2005.[317][318] Qantas Airways of Australia and Air New Zealand have been planning for long-haul flights from New York to Sydney and Auckland, which would both rank among the longest non-stop flights in the world.[319] A Little Sri Lanka has developed in the Tompkinsville neighborhood of Staten Island.[320] Le Petit Sénégal, or Little Senegal, is based in Harlem. Richmond Hill, Queens is often thought of as "Little Guyana" for its large Guyanese community,[321] as well as Punjab Avenue (ਪੰਜਾਬ ਐਵੇਨਿਊ), or Little Punjab, for its high concentration of Punjabi people. Little Poland is expanding rapidly in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Sexual orientation and gender identity Main articles: LGBT culture in New York City, Stonewall riots, NYC Pride March, List of largest LGBT events, and List of LGBT people from New York City Further information: New York City Drag March, Queens Liberation Front, Queens Pride Parade, Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, and Same-sex marriage in New York Philippine-born Geena Rocero introducing International Transgender Day of Visibility Caribbean NYC-LGBTQ Equality Project The NYC Dyke March, the world's largest celebration of lesbian pride and culture[322] Spectators at a BDSM street fair in Lower Manhattan NYC Pride March in Manhattan, the world's largest[323][324] The Multicultural Festival at the 2018 Queens Pride Parade New York City has been described as the gay capital of the world and the central node of the LGBTQ+ sociopolitical ecosystem, and is home to one of the world's largest LGBTQ populations and the most prominent.[48] The New York metropolitan area is home to about 570,000 self-identifying gay and bisexual people, the largest in the United States.[325][326] Same-sex sexual activity between consenting adults has been legal in New York since the New York v. Onofre case in 1980 which invalidated the state's sodomy law.[327] Same-sex marriages in New York were legalized on June 24, 2011, and were authorized to take place on July 23, 2011.[328] Brian Silverman, the author of Frommer's New York City from $90 a Day, wrote the city has "one of the world's largest, loudest, and most powerful LGBT communities", and "Gay and lesbian culture is as much a part of New York's basic identity as yellow cabs, high-rise buildings, and Broadway theatre".[329] LGBT travel guide Queer in the World states, "The fabulosity of Gay New York is unrivaled on Earth, and queer culture seeps into every corner of its five boroughs".[330] LGBT advocate and entertainer Madonna stated metaphorically, "Anyways, not only is New York City the best place in the world because of the queer people here. Let me tell you something, if you can make it here, then you must be queer."[331] The annual New York City Pride March (or gay pride parade) proceeds southward down Fifth Avenue and ends at Greenwich Village in Lower Manhattan; the parade is the largest pride parade in the world, attracting tens of thousands of participants and millions of sidewalk spectators each June.[332][323] The annual Queens Pride Parade is held in Jackson Heights and is accompanied by the ensuing Multicultural Parade.[333] Stonewall 50 – WorldPride NYC 2019 was the largest international Pride celebration in history, produced by Heritage of Pride and enhanced through a partnership with the I ❤ NY program's LGBT division, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, with 150,000 participants and five million spectators attending in Manhattan alone.[334] New York City is also home to the largest transgender population in the world, estimated at more than 50,000 in 2018, concentrated in Manhattan and Queens; however, until the June 1969 Stonewall riots, this community had felt marginalized and neglected by the gay community.[333][140] Brooklyn Liberation March, the largest transgender-rights demonstration in LGBTQ history, took place on June 14, 2020, stretching from Grand Army Plaza to Fort Greene, Brooklyn, focused on supporting Black transgender lives, drawing an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 participants.[335][336] Religion Religious affiliation (2014)[337][338] Christian   59% Catholic   33% Protestant   23% Other Christian   3% Unaffiliated   24% Jewish   8% Muslim   4% Hindu   2% Buddhist   1% Other faiths   1% Religious affiliations in New York City The landmark Neo-Gothic Roman Catholic St. Patrick's Cathedral, Midtown Manhattan Central Synagogue, a notable Reform synagogue located at 652 Lexington Avenue The Islamic Cultural Center of New York in Upper Manhattan, the first mosque built in New York City Ganesh Temple in Flushing, Queens, the oldest Hindu temple in the U.S. Christianity Further information: St. Patrick's Cathedral (Midtown Manhattan), Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree, and Christmas in New York Largely as a result of Western European missionary work and colonialism, Christianity is the largest religion (59% adherent) in New York City,[337] which is home to the highest number of churches of any city in the world.[16] Roman Catholicism is the largest Christian denomination (33%), followed by Protestantism (23%), and other Christian denominations (3%). The Roman Catholic population are primarily served by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York and Diocese of Brooklyn. Eastern Catholics are divided into numerous jurisdictions throughout the city. Evangelical Protestantism is the largest branch of Protestantism in the city (9%), followed by Mainline Protestantism (8%), while the converse is usually true for other cities and metropolitan areas.[338] In Evangelicalism, Baptists are the largest group; in Mainline Protestantism, Reformed Protestants compose the largest subset. The majority of historically African American churches are affiliated with the National Baptist Convention (USA) and Progressive National Baptist Convention. The Church of God in Christ is one of the largest predominantly Black Pentecostal denominations in the area. Approximately 1% of the population is Mormon. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America and other Orthodox Christians (mainstream and independent) were the largest Eastern Christian groups. The American Orthodox Catholic Church (initially led by Aftimios Ofiesh) was founded in New York City in 1927. Judaism Main articles: Judaism in New York City, History of the Jews in New York, and Jewish arrival in New Amsterdam Judaism, the second-largest religion practiced in New York City, with approximately 1.6 million adherents as of 2022, represents the largest Jewish community of any city in the world, greater than the combined totals of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.[339][340] Nearly half of the city's Jews live in Brooklyn, which is one-quarter Jewish.[341][342] The ethno-religious population makes up 18.4% of the city and its religious demographic makes up 8%.[343] The first recorded Jewish settler was Jacob Barsimson, who arrived in August 1654 on a passport from the Dutch West India Company.[344] Following the assassination of Alexander II of Russia, for which many blamed "the Jews", the 36 years beginning in 1881 experienced the largest wave of Jewish immigration to the United States.[345] In 2012, the largest Jewish denominations were Orthodox, Haredi, and Conservative Judaism.[346] Reform Jewish communities are prevalent through the area. 770 Eastern Parkway is the headquarters of the international Chabad Lubavitch movement, and is considered an icon, while Congregation Emanu-El of New York in Manhattan is the largest Reform synagogue in the world. Islam Main article: Islam in New York City Islam ranks as the third largest religion in New York City, following Christianity and Judaism, with estimates ranging between 600,000 and 1,000,000 observers of Islam, including 10% of the city's public school children.[347] Given both the size and scale of the city, as well as its relative proxinity and accessibility by air transportation to the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and South Asia, 22.3% of American Muslims live in New York City, with 1.5 million Muslims in the greater New York metropolitan area, representing the largest metropolitan Muslim population in the Western Hemisphere[348]—and the most ethnically diverse Muslim population of any city in the world.[349] Powers Street Mosque in Brooklyn is one of the oldest continuously operating mosques in the U.S., and represents the first Islamic organization in both the city and the state of New York.[350][351] Hinduism and other religious affiliations Further information: Hindu Temple Society of North America Following these three largest religious groups in New York City are Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, and a variety of other religions. As of 2023, 24% of Greater New Yorkers identified with no organized religious affiliation, including 4% Atheist.[352] Wealth and income disparity New York City, like other large cities, has a high degree of income disparity, as indicated by its Gini coefficient of 0.55 as of 2017.[353] In the first quarter of 2014, the average weekly wage in New York County (Manhattan) was $2,749, representing the highest total among large counties in the United States.[354] In 2022, New York City was home to the highest number of billionaires of any city in the world, including former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, with a total of 107.[21] New York also had the highest density of millionaires per capita among major U.S. cities in 2014, at 4.6% of residents.[355] New York City is one of the relatively few American cities levying an income tax (about 3%) on its residents.[356][357][358] As of 2018, there were 78,676 homeless people in New York City.[359] Economy Main article: Economy of New York City Further information: Economy of Long Island and Economy of New York Midtown Manhattan, the world's largest central business district[360] see caption The Financial District of Lower Manhattan New York City is a global hub of business and commerce and an established safe haven for global investors, and is sometimes described as the capital of the world.[361] The term global city was popularized by sociologist Saskia Sassen in her 1991 work, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo.[362] New York is a center for worldwide banking and finance, health care and life sciences,[13] medical technology and research, retailing, world trade, transportation, tourism, real estate, new media, traditional media, advertising, legal services, accountancy, insurance, both musical and prose theater, fashion, and the arts in the United States; while Silicon Alley, metonymous for New York's broad-spectrum high technology sphere, continues to expand. The Port of New York and New Jersey is a major economic engine, benefitting post-Panamax from the expansion of the Panama Canal, and accelerating ahead of California seaports in monthly cargo volumes in 2023.[363][364][365] Many Fortune 500 corporations are headquartered in New York City,[366] as are a large number of multinational corporations. New York City has been ranked first among cities across the globe in attracting capital, business, and tourists.[367][368] New York City's role as the top global center for the advertising industry is metonymously reflected as Madison Avenue.[369] The city's fashion industry provides approximately 180,000 employees with $11 billion in annual wages.[370] The non-profit Partnership for New York City, currently headed by Kathryn Wylde, is the city's pre-eminent private business association, comprising approximately 330 corporate leaders in membership. The fashion industry is based in Midtown Manhattan and is represented by the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CDFA), headquartered in Lower Manhattan. Significant economic sectors also include non-profit institutions, and universities. Manufacturing declined over the 20th century but still accounts for significant employment. particularly in smaller operations. The city's apparel and garment industry, historically centered on the Garment District in Manhattan, peaked in 1950, when more than 323,000 workers were employed in the industry in New York. In 2015, fewer than 23,000 New York City residents were employed in the manufacture of garments, accessories, and finished textiles, although efforts to revive the industry were underway,[371] and the American fashion industry continues to be metonymized as Seventh Avenue.[372] Chocolate is New York City's leading specialty-food export, with up to $234 million worth of exports each year.[373] Godiva, one of the world's largest chocolatiers, is headquartered in Manhattan,[374] and an unofficial chocolate district in Brooklyn is home to several chocolate makers and retailers.[375] Food processing is a $5 billion industry that employs more than 19,000 residents. In 2017, there were 205,592 employer firms in New York City.[259] Of those firms, 64,514 were owned by minorities, and 125,877 were shown to be owned by non-minorities. Veterans owned 5,506 of those firms.[259] View of Midtown Manhattan from New Jersey, taken in September 2021 Wall Street Main article: Wall Street A large flag is stretched over Roman style columns on the front of a large building. The New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street, the world's largest stock exchange per total market capitalization of its listed companies[376][377] New York City's most important economic sector lies in its role as the headquarters for the U.S. financial industry, metonymously known as Wall Street. The city's securities industry continues to form the largest segment of the city's financial sector and is an important economic engine. Many large financial companies are headquartered in New York City, and the city is also home to a burgeoning number of financial startup companies. Lower Manhattan is home to the New York Stock Exchange, at 11 Wall Street, and the Nasdaq, at 165 Broadway, representing the world's largest and second largest stock exchanges, respectively, when measured both by overall average daily trading volume and by total market capitalization of their listed companies in 2013.[376][377] Investment banking fees on Wall Street totaled approximately $40 billion in 2012,[378] while in 2013, senior New York City bank officers who manage risk and compliance functions earned as much as $324,000 annually.[379] In fiscal year 2013–14, Wall Street's securities industry generated 19% of New York State's tax revenue.[380] New York City remains the largest global center for trading in public equity and debt capital markets, driven in part by the size and financial development of the U.S. economy.[381]: 31–32 [382] New York also leads in hedge fund management; private equity; and the monetary volume of mergers and acquisitions. Several investment banks and investment managers headquartered in Manhattan are important participants in other global financial centers.[381]: 34–35  New York is also the principal commercial banking center of the United States.[383] Many of the world's largest media conglomerates are also based in the city. Manhattan contained over 500 million square feet (46.5 million m2) of office space in 2018,[384] making it the largest office market in the United States,[385] while Midtown Manhattan, with 400 million square feet (37.2 million m2) in 2018,[384] is the largest central business district in the world.[386] Tech and biotech Further information: Tech:NYC, Tech companies in New York City, Biotech companies in New York City, and Silicon Alley View from the Empire State Building looking southward (downtown) at the central Flatiron District, the cradle of Silicon Alley, now metonymous for the New York metropolitan region's high tech sector The Cornell Tech at the Roosevelt Island New York is a top-tier global technology hub.[11] Silicon Alley, once a metonym for the sphere encompassing the metropolitan region's high technology industries,[387] is no longer a relevant moniker as the city's tech environment has expanded dramatically both in location and in its scope. New York City's current tech sphere encompasses a universal array of applications involving artificial intelligence, the internet, new media, financial technology (fintech) and cryptocurrency, biotechnology, game design, and other fields within information technology that are supported by its entrepreneurship ecosystem and venture capital investments. Technology-driven startup companies and entrepreneurial employment are growing in New York City and the region. The technology sector has been claiming a greater share of New York City's economy since 2010.[388] Tech:NYC, founded in 2016, is a non-profit organization which represents New York City's technology industry with government, civic institutions, in business, and in the media, and whose primary goals are to further augment New York's substantial tech talent base and to advocate for policies that will nurture tech companies to grow in the city.[389] The biotechnology sector is also growing in New York City, based upon the city's strength in academic scientific research and public and commercial financial support. On December 19, 2011, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced his choice of Cornell University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology to build a $2 billion graduate school of applied sciences called Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island with the goal of transforming New York City into the world's premier technology capital.[390][391] By mid-2014, Accelerator, a biotech investment firm, had raised more than $30 million from investors, including Eli Lilly and Company, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson, for initial funding to create biotechnology startups at the Alexandria Center for Life Science, which encompasses more than 700,000 square feet (65,000 m2) on East 29th Street and promotes collaboration among scientists and entrepreneurs at the center and with nearby academic, medical, and research institutions. The New York City Economic Development Corporation's Early Stage Life Sciences Funding Initiative and venture capital partners, including Celgene, General Electric Ventures, and Eli Lilly, committed a minimum of $100 million to help launch 15 to 20 ventures in life sciences and biotechnology.[392] Real estate Deutsche Bank Center as seen from Central Park West Real estate is a major force in the city's economy, as the total value of all New York City property was assessed at US$1.072 trillion for the 2017 fiscal year, an increase of 10.6% from the previous year, with 89% of the increase coming from market effects.[393] In 2014, Manhattan was home to six of the top ten ZIP codes in the United States by median housing price.[394] Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan commands the highest retail rents in the world, at $3,000 per square foot ($32,000/m2) in 2017.[395] In 2019, the most expensive home sale ever in the United States achieved completion in Manhattan, at a selling price of $238 million, for a 24,000 square feet (2,200 m2) penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park.[396] In 2022, one-bedroom apartments in Manhattan rented at a median monthly price of US$3,600.00, one of the world's highest. New York City real estate is a safe haven for global investors.[19] Tourism Main article: Tourism in New York City Times Square, the hub of the Broadway theater district and a global media center, is one of the world's leading tourist attractions with 50 million tourists annually.[37] The I Love New York logo designed by Milton Glaser in 1977 Tourism is a vital industry for New York City, and NYC & Company represents the city's official bureau of tourism. New York has witnessed a growing combined volume of international and domestic tourists, reflecting over 60 million visitors to the city per year, the world's busiest tourist destination.[16] Approximately 12 million visitors to New York City have been from outside the United States, with the highest numbers from the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, and China. Multiple sources have called New York the most photographed city in the world.[397][398][399] I Love New York (stylized I ❤ NY) is both a logo and a song that are the basis of an advertising campaign and have been used since 1977 to promote tourism in New York City,[400] and later to promote New York State as well. The trademarked logo, owned by New York State Empire State Development,[401] appears in souvenir shops and brochures throughout the city and state, some licensed, many not. The song is the state song of New York. The majority of the most high-profile tourist destinations to the city are situated in Manhattan. These include Times Square; Broadway theater productions; the Empire State Building; the Statue of Liberty; Ellis Island; the United Nations headquarters; the World Trade Center (including the National September 11 Memorial & Museum and One World Trade Center); the art museums along Museum Mile; green spaces such as Central Park, Washington Square Park, the High Line, and the medieval gardens of The Cloisters; the Stonewall Inn; Rockefeller Center; ethnic enclaves including the Manhattan Chinatown, Koreatown, Curry Hill, Harlem, Spanish Harlem, Little Italy, and Little Australia; luxury shopping along Fifth and Madison Avenues; and events such as the Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village; the Brooklyn Bridge (shared with Brooklyn); the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade; the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree; the St. Patrick's Day Parade; seasonal activities such as ice skating in Central Park in the wintertime; the Tribeca Film Festival; and free performances in Central Park at SummerStage.[402] Points of interest have also developed in the city outside Manhattan and have made the outer boroughs tourist destinations in their own right. These include numerous ethnic enclaves; the Unisphere, Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, and Downtown Flushing in Queens; Downtown Brooklyn, Coney Island, Williamsburg, Park Slope, and Prospect Park in Brooklyn; the Bronx Zoo, the New York Botanical Garden, and the Grand Concourse in the Bronx; and the Staten Island Ferry shuttling passengers between Staten Island and the South Ferry Terminal bordering Battery Park in Lower Manhattan, at the historical birthplace of New York City. Media and entertainment Main article: Media in New York City Further information: New Yorkers in journalism Rockefeller Center, one of Manhattan's leading media and entertainment hubs Times Square Studios on Times Square is sometimes called the "Crossroads of the World". New York City has been described as the entertainment[16][403][404] and digital media capital of the world.[405] The city is a prominent location for the American entertainment industry, with many films, television series, books, and other media being set there.[406] As of 2019, New York City was the second-largest center for filmmaking and television production in the United States, producing about 200 feature films annually, employing 130,000 individuals. The filmed entertainment industry has been growing in New York, contributing nearly $9 billion to the New York City economy alone as of 2015.[407] By volume, New York is the world leader in independent film production—one-third of all American independent films are produced there.[408][409] The Association of Independent Commercial Producers is also based in New York.[410] In the first five months of 2014 alone, location filming for television pilots in New York City exceeded the record production levels for all of 2013,[411] with New York surpassing Los Angeles as the top North American city for the same distinction during the 2013–2014 cycle.[412] New York City is the center for the advertising, music, newspaper, digital media, and publishing industries and is also the largest media market in North America.[413] Some of the city's media conglomerates and institutions include Warner Bros. Discovery, the Thomson Reuters Corporation, the Associated Press, Bloomberg L.P., the News Corp, The New York Times Company, NBCUniversal, the Hearst Corporation, AOL, Fox Corporation, and Paramount Global. Seven of the world's top eight global advertising agency networks have their headquarters in New York.[414] Two of the top three record labels' headquarters are in New York: Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group. Universal Music Group also has offices in New York. New media enterprises are contributing an increasingly important component to the city's central role in the media sphere. More than 200 newspapers and 350 consumer magazines have an office in the city,[409] and the publishing industry employs about 25,000 people.[415] Two of the three national daily newspapers with the largest circulations in the United States are published in New York: The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times (NYT). Nicknamed "the Grey Lady", the NYT has won the most Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and is considered the U.S. media's newspaper of record.[34] Tabloid newspapers in the city include the New York Daily News, which was founded in 1919 by Joseph Medill Patterson,[416] and The New York Post, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton.[417] At the local news end of the media spectrum, Patch Media is also headquartered in Manhattan. New York City also has a comprehensive ethnic press, with 270 newspapers and magazines published in more than 40 languages.[418] El Diario La Prensa is New York's largest Spanish-language daily and the oldest in the nation.[419] The New York Amsterdam News, published in Harlem, is a prominent African American newspaper. The Village Voice, historically the largest alternative newspaper in the United States, announced in 2017 that it would cease publication of its print edition and convert to a fully digital venture.[420] The television and radio industry developed in New York and is a significant employer in the city's economy. The three major American broadcast networks are all headquartered in New York: ABC, CBS, and NBC. Many cable networks are based in the city as well, including CNN, MSNBC, MTV, Fox News, HBO, Showtime, Bravo, Food Network, AMC, and Comedy Central. News 12 Networks operated News 12 The Bronx and News 12 Brooklyn. WBAI, with news and information programming, is one of the few socialist radio stations operating in the United States. New York is also a major center for non-commercial educational media. NYC Media is the official public radio, television, and online media network and broadcasting service of New York City,[421] and this network has produced several original Emmy Award-winning shows covering music and culture in city neighborhoods and city government. The oldest public-access television channel in the United States is the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, founded in 1971.[422] WNET is the city's major public television station and a primary source of national Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television programming. WNYC, a public radio station owned by the city until 1997, has the largest public radio audience in the United States.[423] Climate resiliency As an oceanic port city, New York City is vulnerable to the long-term manifestations of global warming and rising seas. Climate change has spawned the development of a significant climate resiliency and environmental sustainability economy in the city. Governors Island is slated to host a US$1 billion research and education center intended to establish New York's role as the global leader in addressing the climate crisis.[424] Education Main article: Education in New York City Butler Library at Columbia University, described as one of the most beautiful college libraries in the United States[425] The Washington Square Arch, an unofficial icon of both New York University and the Greenwich Village neighborhood that surrounds it Fordham University's Keating Hall in the Bronx New York City has the largest educational system of any city in the world.[16] The city's educational infrastructure spans primary education, secondary education, higher education, and research. Primary and secondary education The New York City Public Schools system, managed by the New York City Department of Education, is the largest public school system in the United States, serving about 1.1 million students in more than 1,700 separate primary and secondary schools.[426] The city's public school system includes nine specialized high schools to serve academically and artistically gifted students. The city government pays the Pelham Public Schools to educate a very small, detached section of the Bronx.[427] The New York City Charter School Center assists the setup of new charter schools.[428] There are approximately 900 additional privately run secular and religious schools in the city.[429] Higher education and research More than a million students, the highest number of any city in the United States,[430] are enrolled in New York City's more than 120 higher education institutions, with more than half a million in the City University of New York (CUNY) system alone as of 2020, including both degree and professional programs.[431] According to Academic Ranking of World Universities, New York City has, on average, the best higher education institutions of any global city.[432] The public CUNY system is one of the largest universities in the nation, comprising 25 institutions across all five boroughs: senior colleges, community colleges, and other graduate/professional schools. The public State University of New York (SUNY) system includes campuses in New York City, including SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY Maritime College, and SUNY College of Optometry. New York City is home to such notable private universities as Barnard College, Columbia University, Cooper Union, Fordham University, New York University, New York Institute of Technology, Rockefeller University, and Yeshiva University; several of these universities are ranked among the top universities in the world,[433][434] while some of the world's most prestigious institutions like Princeton University and Yale University remain in the New York metropolitan area. The city also hosts other smaller private colleges and universities, including many religious and special-purpose institutions, such as Pace University, St. John's University, The Juilliard School, Manhattan College, Adelphi University - Manhattan, Mercy College (New York), The College of Mount Saint Vincent, Parsons School of Design, The New School, Pratt Institute, New York Film Academy, The School of Visual Arts, The King's College, Marymount Manhattan College, and Wagner College. Much of the scientific research in the city is done in medicine and the life sciences. In 2019, the New York metropolitan area ranked first on the list of cities and metropolitan areas by share of published articles in life sciences.[435] New York City has the most postgraduate life sciences degrees awarded annually in the United States, and in 2012, 43,523 licensed physicians were practicing in New York City.[436] There are 127 Nobel laureates with roots in local institutions as of 2004.[437] Major biomedical research institutions include Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Rockefeller University, SUNY Downstate Medical Center, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and Weill Cornell Medical College, being joined by the Cornell University/Technion-Israel Institute of Technology venture on Roosevelt Island. The graduates of SUNY Maritime College in the Bronx earned the highest average annual salary of any university graduates in the United States, $144,000 as of 2017.[438] Human resources Public health Main articles: New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation and New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene New York-Presbyterian Hospital, affiliated with Columbia University and Cornell University, is the largest hospital and largest private employer in New York City and one of the world's busiest hospitals.[439] The New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC) operates the public hospitals and outpatient clinics in New York City. A public benefit corporation with As of 2021, HHC is the largest municipal healthcare system in the United States with $10.9 billion in annual revenues,[440] HHC is the largest municipal healthcare system in the United States serving 1.4 million patients, including more than 475,000 uninsured city residents.[441] HHC was created in 1969 by the New York State Legislature as a public benefit corporation (Chapter 1016 of the Laws 1969).[442] HHC operates 11 acute care hospitals, five nursing homes, six diagnostic and treatment centers, and more than 70 community-based primary care sites, serving primarily the poor and working class. HHC's MetroPlus Health Plan is one of the New York area's largest providers of government-sponsored health insurance and is the plan of choice for nearly half a million New Yorkers.[443] HHC's facilities annually provide millions of New Yorkers services interpreted in more than 190 languages.[444] The most well-known hospital in the HHC system is Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the United States. Bellevue is the designated hospital for treatment of the President of the United States and other world leaders if they become sick or injured while in New York City.[445] The president of HHC is Ramanathan Raju, MD, a surgeon and former CEO of the Cook County health system in Illinois.[446] In August 2017, Mayor Bill de Blasio signed legislation outlawing pharmacies from selling cigarettes once their existing licenses to do so expired, beginning in 2018.[447] Public safety Police and law enforcement Main articles: New York City Police Department and Law enforcement in New York City Further information: Police surveillance in New York City and Crime in New York City The New York Police Department (NYPD), the largest police force in the United States NYPD police officers in Brooklyn The New York Police Department (NYPD) has been the largest police force in the United States by a significant margin, with more than 35,000 sworn officers.[448] Members of the NYPD are frequently referred to by politicians, the media, and their own police cars by the nickname, New York's Finest. Crime overall has trended downward in New York City since the 1990s.[449] In 2012, the NYPD came under scrutiny for its use of a stop-and-frisk program,[450][451][452] which has undergone several policy revisions since then. In 2014, New York City had the third-lowest murder rate among the largest U.S. cities,[453] having become significantly safer after a spike in crime in the 1970s through 1990s.[454] Violent crime in New York City decreased more than 75% from 1993 to 2005, and continued decreasing during periods when the nation as a whole saw increases.[455] By 2002, New York City was ranked 197th in crime among the 216 U.S. cities with populations greater than 100,000.[455] In 1992, the city recorded 2,245 murders.[456] In 2005, the homicide rate was at its lowest level since 1966,[457] and in 2009, the city recorded fewer than 461 homicides for the first time ever since crime statistics were first published in 1963.[456] New York City has stricter gun laws than most other cities in the U.S.—a license to own any firearm is required in New York City, and the NY SAFE Act of 2013 banned assault weapons—and New York state had the fifth lowest gun death rate of the fifty states in 2020.[458] New York City recorded 491 murders in 2021.[459] In 2017, 60.1% of violent crime suspects were Black, 29.6% Hispanic, 6.5% White, 3.6% Asian and 0.2% American Indian.[460] Sociologists and criminologists have not reached consensus on the explanation for the dramatic long-term decrease in the city's crime rate. Some attribute the phenomenon to new tactics used by the NYPD,[461] including its use of CompStat and the broken windows theory.[462] Others cite the end of the crack epidemic and demographic changes,[463] including from immigration.[464] Another theory is that widespread exposure to lead pollution from automobile exhaust, which can lower intelligence and increase aggression levels, incited the initial crime wave in the mid-20th century, most acutely affecting heavily trafficked cities like New York. A strong correlation was found demonstrating that violent crime rates in New York and other big cities began to fall after lead was removed from American gasoline in the 1970s.[465] Another theory cited to explain New York City's falling homicide rate is the inverse correlation between the number of murders and the increasingly wet climate in the city.[466] Organized crime has long been associated with New York City, beginning with the Forty Thieves and the Roach Guards in the Five Points neighborhood in the 1820s, followed by the Tongs in the same neighborhood, which ultimately evolved into Chinatown, Manhattan. The 20th century saw a rise in the Mafia, dominated by the Five Families, as well as in gangs, including the Black Spades.[467] The Mafia and gang presence has declined in the city in the 21st century.[468][469] Firefighting Main article: New York City Fire Department The Fire Department of New York (FDNY), the largest municipal fire department in the United States The Fire Department of New York (FDNY) provides fire protection, technical rescue, primary response to biological, chemical, and radioactive hazards, and emergency medical services for the five boroughs of New York City. The FDNY is the largest municipal fire department in the United States and the second largest in the world after the Tokyo Fire Department. The FDNY employs approximately 11,080 uniformed firefighters and more than 3,300 uniformed EMTs and paramedics. The FDNY's motto is New York's Bravest. The fire department faces multifaceted firefighting challenges in many ways unique to New York. In addition to responding to building types that range from wood-frame single family homes to high-rise structures, the FDNY also responds to fires that occur in the New York City Subway.[470] Secluded bridges and tunnels, as well as large parks and wooded areas that can give rise to brush fires, also present challenges. The FDNY is headquartered at 9 MetroTech Center in Downtown Brooklyn,[471] and the FDNY Fire Academy is on the Randalls Island.[472] There are three Bureau of Fire Communications alarm offices which receive and dispatch alarms to appropriate units. One office, at 11 Metrotech Center in Brooklyn, houses Manhattan/Citywide, Brooklyn, and Staten Island Fire Communications; the Bronx and Queens offices are in separate buildings. Public library system The Stephen A. Schwarzman Headquarters Building of the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street The New York Public Library (NYPL), which has the largest collection of any public library system in the United States.[473] Queens is served by the Queens Borough Public Library (QPL), the nation's second-largest public library system, while the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) serves Brooklyn.[473] In 2013, the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library announced that they would merge their technical services departments into a new department called BookOps. This proposed merger anticipated a savings of $2 million for the Brooklyn Public Library and $1.5 million for the New York Public Library. Although not currently part of the merger, it is expected that the Queens Public Library will eventually share some resources with the other city libraries.[474][475] Culture and contemporary life Main article: Culture of New York City Further information: Broadway theatre, LGBT culture in New York City, List of museums and cultural institutions in New York City, Music of New York City, List of nightclubs in New York City, List of LGBT people from New York City, List of people from New York City, New York Fashion Week, and Met Gala New York City has been described as the cultural capital of the world by Manhattan's Baruch College.[476] A book containing a series of essays titled New York, Culture Capital of the World, 1940–1965 has also been published as showcased by the National Library of Australia.[477] In describing New York, author Tom Wolfe said, "Culture just seems to be in the air, like part of the weather."[478] Numerous major American cultural movements began in the city, such as the Harlem Renaissance, which established the African-American literary canon in the United States.[479][480] The city became the center of stand-up comedy in the early 20th century, jazz[481] in the 1940s, abstract expressionism in the 1950s, and the birthplace of hip-hop in the 1970s.[482] The city's punk[483] and hardcore[484] scenes were influential in the 1970s and 1980s. New York has long had a flourishing scene for Jewish American literature. The city is the birthplace of many cultural movements, including the Harlem Renaissance in literature and visual art; abstract expressionism (also known as the New York School) in painting; and hip-hop,[189] punk, salsa, freestyle, Tin Pan Alley, certain forms of jazz, and (along with Philadelphia) disco in music. New York City has been considered the dance capital of the world.[485][486] The city is also frequently the setting for novels, movies (see List of films set in New York City), and television programs. New York Fashion Week is one of the world's preeminent fashion events and is afforded extensive coverage by the media.[487][488] New York has also frequently been ranked the top fashion capital of the world on the annual list compiled by the Global Language Monitor.[489] Pace Midtown Manhattan in January 2020 One of the most common traits attributed to New York City is its fast pace,[490][491] which spawned the term New York minute.[492] Journalist Walt Whitman characterized New York's streets as being traversed by "hurrying, feverish, electric crowds".[491] Resilience New York City's residents are prominently known for their resilience historically, and more recently related to their management of the impacts of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the COVID-19 pandemic.[493][494][495] New York was voted the world's most resilient city in 2021 and 2022 per Time Out's global poll of urban residents.[494] Arts New York City has more than 2,000 arts and cultural organizations and more than 500 art galleries.[496] The city government funds the arts with a larger annual budget than the National Endowment for the Arts.[496] Wealthy business magnates in the 19th century built a network of major cultural institutions, such as Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which have become internationally renowned. The advent of electric lighting led to elaborate theater productions, and in the 1880s, New York City theaters on Broadway and along 42nd Street began featuring a new stage form that became known as the Broadway musical. Strongly influenced by the city's immigrants, productions such as those of Harrigan and Hart, George M. Cohan, and others used song in narratives that often reflected themes of hope and ambition. New York City itself is the subject or background of many plays and musicals. Performing arts Main articles: Broadway theatre and Music of New York City The corner of a lit up plaza with a fountain in the center and the ends of two brightly lit buildings with tall arches on the square. Lincoln Center in Manhattan The Metropolitan Museum of Art, part of Museum Mile, is one of the largest museums in the world.[497] Broadway theatre is one of the premier forms of English-language theatre in the world, named after Broadway, the major thoroughfare that crosses Times Square,[498] also sometimes referred to as "The Great White Way".[499][500][501] Forty-one venues in Midtown Manhattan's Theatre District, each with at least 500 seats, are classified as Broadway theatres. According to The Broadway League, Broadway shows sold approximately $1.27 billion worth of tickets in the 2013–2014 season, an 11.4% increase from $1.139 billion in the 2012–2013 season. Attendance in 2013–2014 stood at 12.21 million, representing a 5.5% increase from the 2012–2013 season's 11.57 million.[502] Performance artists displaying diverse skills are ubiquitous on the streets of Manhattan. Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, anchoring Lincoln Square on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is home to numerous influential arts organizations, including the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera, New York Philharmonic, and New York City Ballet, as well as the Vivian Beaumont Theater, the Juilliard School, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and Alice Tully Hall. The Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute is in Union Square, and Tisch School of the Arts is based at New York University, while Central Park SummerStage presents free music concerts in Central Park.[503] Visual arts Main article: List of museums and cultural institutions in New York City New York City is home to hundreds of cultural institutions and historic sites. Museum Mile is the name for a section of Fifth Avenue running from 82nd to 105th streets on the Upper East Side of Manhattan,[504] in an area sometimes called Upper Carnegie Hill.[505] Nine museums occupy the length of this section of Fifth Avenue, making it one of the densest displays of culture in the world.[506] Its art museums include the Guggenheim, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Neue Galerie New York, and The Africa Center, which opened in late 2012. In addition to other programming, the museums collaborate for the annual Museum Mile Festival, held each year in June, to promote the museums and increase visitation.[507] Many of the world's most lucrative art auctions are held in New York City.[508][509] Cuisine Main articles: Cuisine of New York City, List of restaurants in New York City, and List of Michelin starred restaurants in New York City People crowd around white tents in the foreground next to a red brick wall with arched windows. Above and to the left is a towering stone bridge. Smorgasburg, which opened in 2011 as an open-air food market, is part of the Brooklyn Flea.[510] New York City's food culture includes an array of international cuisines influenced by the city's immigrant history. Central and Eastern European immigrants, especially Jewish immigrants from those regions, brought bagels, cheesecake, hot dogs, knishes, and delicatessens (delis) to the city. Italian immigrants brought New York-style pizza and Italian cuisine into the city, while Jewish immigrants and Irish immigrants brought pastrami[511] and corned beef,[512] respectively. Chinese and other Asian restaurants, sandwich joints, trattorias, diners, and coffeehouses are ubiquitous throughout the city. Some 4,000 mobile food vendors licensed by the city, many immigrant-owned, have made Middle Eastern foods such as falafel and kebabs[513] examples of modern New York street food. The city is home to "nearly one thousand of the finest and most diverse haute cuisine restaurants in the world", according to Michelin.[514] The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene assigns letter grades to the city's restaurants based upon their inspection results.[515] As of 2019, there were 27,043 restaurants in the city, up from 24,865 in 2017.[516] The Queens Night Market in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park attracts more than ten thousand people nightly to sample food from more than 85 countries.[517] Parades The annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, the world's largest parade[518] The annual Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village, the world's largest Halloween parade[519] The ticker-tape parade for the Apollo 11 astronauts on August 13, 1969 The annual Philippine Independence Day Parade, the largest outside the Philippines New York City is well known for its street parades, which celebrate a broad array of themes, including holidays, nationalities, human rights, and major league sports team championship victories. The majority of parades are held in Manhattan. The primary orientation of the annual street parades is typically from north to south, marching along major avenues. The annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is the world's largest parade,[518] beginning alongside Central Park and processing southward to the flagship Macy's Herald Square store;[520] the parade is viewed on telecasts worldwide and draws millions of spectators in person.[518] Other notable parades including the annual New York City St. Patrick's Day Parade in March, the NYC LGBT Pride March in June, the LGBT-inspired Greenwich Village Halloween Parade in October, and numerous parades commemorating the independence days of many nations. Ticker-tape parades celebrating championships won by sports teams as well as other heroic accomplishments march northward along the Canyon of Heroes on Broadway from Bowling Green to City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan. Accent and dialect Main articles: New York City English and New York accent The New York area is home to a distinctive regional accent and speech pattern called the New York dialect, alternatively known as Brooklynese or New Yorkese. It has generally been considered one of the most recognizable accents within American English.[521] The traditional New York area speech pattern is known for its rapid delivery, and its accent is characterized as non-rhotic so that the sound [ɹ] does not appear at the end of a syllable or immediately before a consonant; therefore the pronunciation of the city name as "New Yawk."[522] There is no [ɹ] in words like park [pɑək] or [pɒək] (with vowel backed and diphthongized due to the low-back chain shift), butter [bʌɾə], or here [hiə]. In another feature called the low back chain shift, the [ɔ] vowel sound of words like talk, law, cross, chocolate, and coffee and the often homophonous [ɔr] in core and more are tensed and usually raised more than in General American English. In the most old-fashioned and extreme versions of the New York dialect, the vowel sounds of words like "girl" and of words like "oil" became a diphthong [ɜɪ]. This is often misperceived by speakers of other accents as a reversal of the er and oy sounds, so that girl is pronounced "goil" and oil is pronounced "erl"; this leads to the caricature of New Yorkers saying things like "Joizey" (Jersey), "Toidy-Toid Street" (33rd St.) and "terlet" (toilet).[522] The character Archie Bunker from the 1970s television sitcom All in the Family was an example of this pattern of speech. The classic version of the New York City dialect is generally centered on middle- and working-class New Yorkers. The influx of non-European immigrants in recent decades has led to changes in this distinctive dialect,[522] and the traditional form of this speech pattern is no longer as prevalent among general New Yorkers as it has been in the past.[522] Sports Main article: Sports in the New York metropolitan area Three runners in a race down a street where onlookers are cheering behind barriers. The New York Marathon, held annually in November, is the largest marathon in the world.[523] A tennis stadium pack with fans watching a grass court. The U.S. Open Tennis Championships are held every August and September in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens. A baseball stadium from behind home plate in the evening. Citi Field, also in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, has been home to the New York Mets since 2009. Madison Square Garden in Midtown Manhattan is home to the New York Knicks, New York Rangers, and St. John's Red Storm. New York City is home to the headquarters of the National Football League,[524] Major League Baseball,[525] the National Basketball Association,[526] the National Hockey League,[527] and Major League Soccer.[528] The New York metropolitan area hosts the most sports teams in the first four major North American professional sports leagues with nine, one more than Los Angeles, and has 11 top-level professional sports teams if Major League Soccer is included, also one more than Los Angeles. Participation in professional sports in the city predates all professional leagues. The city has played host to more than 40 major professional teams in the five sports and their respective competing leagues. Four of the ten most expensive stadiums ever built worldwide (MetLife Stadium, the new Yankee Stadium, Madison Square Garden, and Citi Field) are in the New York metropolitan area.[529] Madison Square Garden, its predecessor, the original Yankee Stadium and Ebbets Field, are sporting venues in New York City, the latter two having been commemorated on U.S. postage stamps. New York was the first of eight American cities to have won titles in all four major leagues (MLB, NHL, NFL and NBA), having done so following the Knicks' 1970 title. In 1972, it became the first city to win titles in five sports when the Cosmos won the NASL final. American football The city is represented in the National Football League by the New York Giants and the New York Jets, although both teams play their home games at MetLife Stadium in nearby East Rutherford, New Jersey,[530] which hosted Super Bowl XLVIII in 2014.[531] Baseball New York has been described as the "Capital of Baseball".[532] There have been 35 Major League Baseball World Series and 73 pennants won by New York teams. It is one of only five metro areas to host two Major League Baseball teams, the others being Los Angeles, Chicago, Baltimore–Washington, and until the Athletics depart Oakland, California, the San Francisco Bay Area. Additionally, there have been 14 World Series in which two New York City teams played each other, known as a Subway Series and occurring most recently in 2000. No other metropolitan area has had this happen more than once (Chicago in 1906, St. Louis in 1944, and the San Francisco Bay Area in 1989). The city's two Major League Baseball teams are the New York Mets, who play at Citi Field in Queens,[533] and the New York Yankees, who play at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. These teams compete in six games of interleague play every regular season that has also come to be called the Subway Series. The Yankees have won a record 27 championships,[534] while the Mets have won the World Series twice.[535] The city also was once home to the Brooklyn Dodgers (now the Los Angeles Dodgers), who won the World Series once,[536] and the New York Giants (now the San Francisco Giants), who won the World Series five times. Both teams moved to California in 1958.[537] There is also one Minor League Baseball team in the city, the Mets-affiliated Brooklyn Cyclones,[538] and the city gained a club in the independent Atlantic League when the Staten Island FerryHawks began play in 2022.[539] Basketball The city's National Basketball Association teams are the Brooklyn Nets (previously known as the New York Nets and New Jersey Nets as they moved around the metropolitan area) and the New York Knicks, while the New York Liberty is the city's Women's National Basketball Association team. The first national college-level basketball championship, the National Invitation Tournament, was held in New York in 1938 and remains in the city.[540] The city is well known for its links to basketball, which is played in nearly every park in the city by local youth, many of whom have gone on to play for major college programs and in the NBA. Ice hockey The metropolitan area is home to three National Hockey League teams. The New York Rangers, the traditional representative of the city itself and one of the league's Original Six, play at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan. The New York Islanders, traditionally representing Nassau and Suffolk Counties of Long Island, play in UBS Arena in Elmont, New York, and played in Brooklyn's Barclays Center from 2015 to 2020. The New Jersey Devils play at Prudential Center in nearby Newark, New Jersey and traditionally represent the counties of neighboring New Jersey which are coextensive with the boundaries of the New York metropolitan area and media market. Soccer In soccer, New York City is represented by New York City FC of Major League Soccer, who play their home games at Yankee Stadium[541] and the New York Red Bulls, who play their home games at Red Bull Arena in nearby Harrison, New Jersey.[542] NJ/NY Gotham FC also plays their home games in Red Bull Arena, representing the metropolitan area in the National Women's Soccer League. Historically, the city is known for the New York Cosmos, the highly successful former professional soccer team which was the American home of Pelé. A new version of the New York Cosmos was formed in 2010, and most recently played in the third-division National Independent Soccer Association before going on hiatus in January 2021. New York was a host city for the 1994 FIFA World Cup[543] and will be one of eleven US host cities for the 2026 FIFA World Cup.[544] Tennis and other The annual United States Open Tennis Championships is one of the world's four Grand Slam tennis tournaments and is held at the National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, Queens.[545] The New York City Marathon, which courses through all five boroughs, is the world's largest running marathon,[523] with 51,394 finishers in 2016[546] and 98,247 applicants for the 2017 race.[523] The Millrose Games is an annual track and field meet whose featured event is the Wanamaker Mile. Boxing is also a prominent part of the city's sporting scene, with events like the Amateur Boxing Golden Gloves being held at Madison Square Garden each year.[547] The city is also considered the host of the Belmont Stakes, the last, longest and oldest of horse racing's Triple Crown races, held just over the city's border at Belmont Park on the first or second Sunday of June. The city also hosted the 1932 U.S. Open golf tournament and the 1930 and 1939 PGA Championships, and has been host city for both events several times, most notably for nearby Winged Foot Golf Club. The Gaelic games are played in Riverdale, Bronx at Gaelic Park, home to the New York GAA, the only North American team to compete at the senior inter-county level. International events In terms of hosting multi-sport events, New York City hosted the 1984 Summer Paralympics and the 1998 Goodwill Games. New York City's bid to host the 2012 Summer Olympics was one of five finalists, but lost out to London.[548] Environment Main article: Environmental issues in New York City Two yellow taxis on a narrow street lined with shops. As of 2012, New York City had about 6,000 hybrid taxis in service, the largest number of any city in North America.[549] Environmental issues in New York City are affected by the city's size, density, abundant public transportation infrastructure, and its location at the mouth of the Hudson River. For example, it is one of the country's biggest sources of pollution and has the lowest per-capita greenhouse gas emissions rate and electricity usage. Governors Island is planned to host a US$1 billion research and education center to make New York City the global leader in addressing the climate crisis.[550] Environmental impact reduction New York City has focused on reducing its environmental impact and carbon footprint.[551] Mass transit use in New York City is the highest in the United States. Also, by 2010, the city had 3,715 hybrid taxis and other clean diesel vehicles, representing around 28% of New York's taxi fleet in service, the most of any city in North America.[552] New York City is the host of Climate Week NYC, the largest Climate Week to take place globally and regarded as major annual climate summit. New York's high rate of public transit use, more than 200,000 daily cyclists as of 2014,[553] and many pedestrian commuters make it the most energy-efficient major city in the United States.[554] Walk and bicycle modes of travel account for 21% of all modes for trips in the city; nationally the rate for metro regions is about 8%.[555] In both its 2011 and 2015 rankings, Walk Score named New York City the most walkable large city in the United States,[556][557][558] and in 2018, Stacker ranked New York the most walkable U.S. city.[559] Citibank sponsored the introduction of 10,000 public bicycles for the city's bike-share project in the summer of 2013.[560] New York City's numerical "in-season cycling indicator" of bicycling in the city had hit an all-time high of 437 when measured in 2014.[561] The city government was a petitioner in the landmark Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency Supreme Court case forcing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants. The city is a leader in the construction of energy-efficient green office buildings, including the Hearst Tower among others.[197] Mayor Bill de Blasio has committed to an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions between 2014 and 2050 to reduce the city's contributions to climate change, beginning with a comprehensive "Green Buildings" plan.[551] Water purity and availability Main articles: Food and water in New York City and New York City water supply system The New York City drinking water supply is extracted from the protected Catskill Mountains watershed.[562] As a result of the watershed's integrity and undisturbed natural water filtration system, New York is one of only four major cities in the United States the majority of whose drinking water is pure enough not to require purification through water treatment plants.[563] The city's municipal water system is the largest in the United States, moving over one billion gallons of water per day;[564] a leak in the Delaware aqueduct results in some 20 million gallons a day being lost under the Hudson River.[565] The Croton Watershed north of the city is undergoing construction of a $3.2 billion water purification plant to augment New York City's water supply by an estimated 290 million gallons daily, representing a greater than 20% addition to the city's current availability of water.[566] The ongoing expansion of New York City Water Tunnel No. 3, an integral part of the New York City water supply system, is the largest capital construction project in the city's history,[567] with segments serving Manhattan and the Bronx completed, and with segments serving Brooklyn and Queens planned for construction in 2020.[568] In 2018, New York City announced a $1 billion investment to protect the integrity of its water system and to maintain the purity of its unfiltered water supply.[564] Air quality According to the 2016 World Health Organization Global Urban Ambient Air Pollution Database,[569] the annual average concentration in New York City's air of particulate matter measuring 2.5 micrometers or less (PM2.5) was 7.0 micrograms per cubic meter, or 3.0 micrograms within the recommended limit of the WHO Air Quality Guidelines for the annual mean PM2.5.[570] The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, in partnership with Queens College, conducts the New York Community Air Survey to measure pollutants at about 150 locations.[571] Environmental revitalization Newtown Creek, a 3.5-mile (6-kilometer) a long estuary that forms part of the border between the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, has been designated a Superfund site for environmental clean-up and remediation of the waterway's recreational and economic resources for many communities.[572] One of the most heavily used bodies of water in the Port of New York and New Jersey, it had been one of the most contaminated industrial sites in the country,[573] containing years of discarded toxins, an estimated 30 million US gallons (110,000 m3) of spilled oil, including the Greenpoint oil spill, raw sewage from New York City's sewer system,[573] and other accumulation. Government and politics Main articles: Government of New York City, Politics of New York City, and Elections in New York City Government New York City Hall is the oldest City Hall in the United States that still houses its original governmental functions. New York County Courthouse houses the New York Supreme Court and other governmental offices. Eric Adams, the current and 110th Mayor of New York City New York City has been a metropolitan municipality with a Strong mayor–council form of government[574] since its consolidation in 1898. In New York City, the city government is responsible for public education, correctional institutions, public safety, recreational facilities, sanitation, water supply, and welfare services. The mayor and council members are elected to four-year terms. The City Council is a unicameral body consisting of 51 council members whose districts are defined by geographic population boundaries.[575] Each term for the mayor and council members lasts four years and has a two consecutive-term limit,[576] which is reset after a four-year break. The New York City Administrative Code, the New York City Rules, and the City Record are the code of local laws, compilation of regulations, and official journal, respectively.[577][578] Each borough is coextensive with a judicial district of the state Unified Court System, of which the Criminal Court and the Civil Court are the local courts, while the New York Supreme Court conducts major trials and appeals. Manhattan hosts the First Department of the Supreme Court, Appellate Division while Brooklyn hosts the Second Department. There are also several extrajudicial administrative courts, which are executive agencies and not part of the state Unified Court System. Uniquely among major American cities, New York is divided between, and is host to the main branches of, two different U.S. district courts: the District Court for the Southern District of New York, whose main courthouse is on Foley Square near City Hall in Manhattan and whose jurisdiction includes Manhattan and the Bronx; and the District Court for the Eastern District of New York, whose main courthouse is in Brooklyn and whose jurisdiction includes Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and U.S. Court of International Trade are also based in New York, also on Foley Square in Manhattan. Politics The present mayor is Eric Adams. He was elected in 2021 with 67% of the vote, and assumed office on January 1, 2022. The Democratic Party holds the majority of public offices. As of April 2016, 69% of registered voters in the city are Democrats and 10% are Republicans.[579] New York City has not been carried by a Republican presidential election since President Calvin Coolidge won the five boroughs in 1924. A Republican candidate for statewide office has not won all five boroughs of the city since it was incorporated in 1898. In 2012, Democrat Barack Obama became the first presidential candidate of any party to receive more than 80% of the overall vote in New York City, sweeping all five boroughs. Party platforms center on affordable housing, education, and economic development, and labor politics are of importance in the city. Thirteen out of 26 U.S. congressional districts in the state of New York include portions of New York City.[580] New York City is the most important geographical source of political fundraising in the United States. At least four of the top five ZIP Codes in the nation for political contributions were in Manhattan for the 2004, 2006, and 2008 elections. The top ZIP Code, 10021 on the Upper East Side, generated the most money for the 2004 presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and John Kerry.[581] The city has a strong imbalance of payments with the national and state governments. It receives 83 cents in services for every $1 it sends to the federal government in taxes (or annually sends $11.4 billion more than it receives back). City residents and businesses also sent an additional $4.1 billion in the 2009–2010 fiscal year to the state of New York than the city received in return.[582] Transportation Main article: Transportation in New York City A row of yellow taxis in front of a multi-story ornate stone building with three huge arched windows. New York City is home to the two busiest train stations in the U.S., Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station. New York City's comprehensive transportation system is both complex and extensive. The front end of a subway train, with a red E on a LED display on the top. To the right of the train is a platform with a group of people waiting for their train. The New York City Subway, the world's largest rapid transit system by number of stations Rapid transit Mass transit in New York City, most of which runs 24 hours a day, accounts for one in every three users of mass transit in the United States, and two-thirds of the nation's rail riders live in the New York City metropolitan area.[583][584] Rail The New York City Subway system is the largest rapid transit system in the world when measured by stations in operation, with 472, and by length of routes. Nearly all of New York's subway system is open 24 hours a day, in contrast to the overnight shutdown common to systems in most cities, including Hong Kong,[585][586] London, Paris, Seoul,[587][588] and Tokyo. The New York City Subway is also the busiest metropolitan rail transit system in the Western Hemisphere, with 1.76 billion passenger rides in 2015,[589] while Grand Central Terminal, also referred to as "Grand Central Station", is the world's largest railway station by number of train platforms. Public transport is widely used in New York City. 54.6% of New Yorkers commuted to work in 2005 using mass transit.[590] This is in contrast to the rest of the United States, where 91% of commuters travel in automobiles to their workplace.[591] According to the New York City Comptroller, workers in the New York City area spend an average of 6 hours and 18 minutes getting to work each week, the longest commute time in the nation among large cities.[592] New York is the only U.S. city in which a majority (52%) of households do not have a car; only 22% of Manhattanites own a car.[593] Due to their high usage of mass transit, New Yorkers spend less of their household income on transportation than the national average, saving $19 billion annually on transportation compared to other urban Americans.[594] New York City's commuter rail network is the largest in North America.[583] The rail network, connecting New York City to its suburbs, consists of the Long Island Rail Road, Metro-North Railroad, and New Jersey Transit. The combined systems converge at Grand Central Terminal and Pennsylvania Station and contain more than 250 stations and 20 rail lines.[583] In Queens, the elevated AirTrain people mover system connects 24 hours a day JFK International Airport to the New York City Subway and the Long Island Rail Road; a separate AirTrain system is planned alongside the Grand Central Parkway to connect LaGuardia Airport to these transit systems.[595][596] For inter-city rail, New York City is served by Amtrak, whose busiest station by a significant margin is Pennsylvania Station on the West Side of Manhattan, from which Amtrak provides connections to Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. along the Northeast Corridor, and long-distance train service to other North American cities.[597] The Staten Island Railway rapid transit system solely serves Staten Island, operating 24 hours a day. The Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH train) links Midtown and Lower Manhattan to northeastern New Jersey, primarily Hoboken, Jersey City, and Newark. Like the New York City Subway, the PATH operates 24 hours a day; meaning three of the six rapid transit systems in the world which operate on 24-hour schedules are wholly or partly in New York (the others are a portion of the Chicago "L", the PATCO Speedline serving Philadelphia, and the Copenhagen Metro). Multibillion-dollar heavy rail transit projects under construction in New York City include the Second Avenue Subway, and the East Side Access project.[598] Buses Port Authority Bus Terminal, the world's busiest bus station, at Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street[599] New York City's public bus fleet runs 24/7 and is the largest in North America.[600] The Port Authority Bus Terminal, the main intercity bus terminal of the city, serves 7,000 buses and 200,000 commuters daily, making it the busiest bus station in the world.[599] Air Five jumbo airplanes wait in a line on a runway next to a small body of water. Behind them in the distance is the airport and control tower. John F. Kennedy Airport in Queens, the busiest international airport to the United States with over 12 million inbound and outbound flights as of 2021 New York's airspace is the busiest in the United States and one of the world's busiest air transportation corridors. The three busiest airports in the New York metropolitan area include John F. Kennedy International Airport, Newark Liberty International Airport, and LaGuardia Airport; 130.5 million travelers used these three airports in 2016.[601] JFK and Newark Liberty were the busiest and fourth busiest U.S. gateways for international air passengers, respectively, in 2012; as of 2011, JFK was the busiest airport for international passengers in North America.[602] Plans have advanced to expand passenger volume at a fourth airport, Stewart International Airport near Newburgh, New York, by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.[603] Plans were announced in July 2015 to entirely rebuild LaGuardia Airport in a multibillion-dollar project to replace its aging facilities.[604] Other commercial airports in or serving the New York metropolitan area include Long Island MacArthur Airport, Trenton–Mercer Airport and Westchester County Airport. The primary general aviation airport serving the area is Teterboro Airport. Ferries Staten Island Ferry shuttles commuters between Manhattan and Staten Island. The Staten Island Ferry is the world's busiest ferry route, carrying more than 23 million passengers from July 2015 through June 2016 on the 5.2-mile (8.4 km) route between Staten Island and Lower Manhattan and running 24 hours a day.[605] Other ferry systems shuttle commuters between Manhattan and other locales within the city and the metropolitan area. NYC Ferry, a NYCEDC initiative with routes planned to travel to all five boroughs, was launched in 2017, with second graders choosing the names of the ferries.[606] Meanwhile, Seastreak ferry announced construction of a 600-passenger high-speed luxury ferry in September 2016, to shuttle riders between the Jersey Shore and Manhattan, anticipated to start service in 2017; this would be the largest vessel in its class.[607] Taxis, vehicles for hire, and trams See also: Taxis of New York City Yellow medallion taxicabs are a widely recognized icon of New York City. Other features of the city's transportation infrastructure encompass 13,587 yellow taxicabs;[608] other vehicle for hire companies;[609][610] and the Roosevelt Island Tramway, an aerial tramway that transports commuters between Roosevelt Island and Manhattan Island. Streets and highways 8th Avenue in Manhattan looking north (uptown) Despite New York's heavy reliance on its vast public transit system, streets are a defining feature of the city. The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 greatly influenced the city's physical development. Several of the city's streets and avenues, including Broadway,[611] Wall Street,[612] Madison Avenue,[369] and Seventh Avenue are also used as metonyms for national industries there: the theater, finance, advertising, and fashion organizations, respectively. New York City also has an extensive web of freeways and parkways, which link the city's boroughs to each other and to North Jersey, Westchester County, Long Island, and southwestern Connecticut through various bridges and tunnels. Because these highways serve millions of outer borough and suburban residents who commute into Manhattan, it is quite common for motorists to be stranded for hours in traffic congestion that are a daily occurrence, particularly during rush hour.[613][614] Congestion pricing in New York City will go into effect in 2022 at the earliest.[615][616][617] New York City is also known for its rules regarding turning at red lights. Unlike the rest of the United States, New York State prohibits right or left turns on red in cities with a population greater than one million, to reduce traffic collisions and increase pedestrian safety. In New York City, therefore, all turns at red lights are illegal unless a sign permitting such maneuvers is present.[618] River crossings The George Washington Bridge, connecting Upper Manhattan (background) and Fort Lee, New Jersey across the Hudson River, is the world's busiest motor vehicle bridge.[619][620] New York City is located on one of the world's largest natural harbors, and the boroughs of Manhattan and Staten Island are primarily coterminous with islands of the same names, while Queens and Brooklyn are at the west end of the larger Long Island, and the Bronx is on New York State's mainland. This situation of boroughs separated by water led to the development of an extensive infrastructure of bridges and tunnels. The George Washington Bridge is the world's busiest motor vehicle bridge,[619][620] connecting Manhattan to Bergen County, New Jersey. The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge is the longest suspension bridge in the Americas and one of the world's longest.[621][622] The Brooklyn Bridge is an icon of the city itself. The towers of the Brooklyn Bridge are built of limestone, granite, and Rosendale cement, and their architectural style is neo-Gothic, with characteristic pointed arches above the passageways through the stone towers. This bridge was also the longest suspension bridge in the world from its opening until 1903, and is the first steel-wire suspension bridge. The Queensboro Bridge is an important piece of cantilever architecture. The Manhattan Bridge, opened in 1909, is considered to be the forerunner of modern suspension bridges, and its design served as the model for many of the long-span suspension bridges around the world; the Manhattan Bridge, Throgs Neck Bridge, Triborough Bridge, and Verrazano-Narrows Bridge are all examples of structural expressionism.[623][624] Manhattan Island is linked to New York City's outer boroughs and to New Jersey. The Lincoln Tunnel, which carries 120,000 vehicles a day under the Hudson River between New Jersey and Midtown Manhattan, is the busiest vehicular tunnel in the world.[625] The tunnel was built instead of a bridge to allow unfettered passage of large passenger and cargo ships that sailed through New York Harbor and up the Hudson River to Manhattan's piers. The Holland Tunnel, connecting Lower Manhattan to Jersey City, New Jersey, was the world's first mechanically ventilated vehicular tunnel when it opened in 1927.[626][627] The Queens–Midtown Tunnel, built to relieve congestion on the bridges connecting Manhattan with Queens and Brooklyn, was the largest non-federal project in its time when it was completed in 1940.[628] President Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first person to drive through it.[629] The Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel (officially known as the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel) runs underneath Battery Park and connects the Financial District at the southern tip of Manhattan to Red Hook in Brooklyn. Cycling network Main article: Cycling in New York City Cycling in New York City is associated with mixed cycling conditions that include urban density, relatively flat terrain, congested roadways with stop-and-go traffic, and many pedestrians. The city's large cycling population includes utility cyclists, such as delivery and messenger services; cycling clubs for recreational cyclists; and an increasing number of commuters. Cycling is increasingly popular in New York City; in 2017 there were approximately 450,000 daily bike trips, compared with 170,000 daily bike trips in 2005.[630] As of 2017, New York City had 1,333 miles (2,145 km) of bike lanes, compared to 513 miles (826 km) of bike lanes in 2006.[630] As of 2019, there are 126 miles (203 km) of segregated or "protected" bike lanes citywide.[631] People Main article: List of people from New York City Global outreach Main article: List of sister cities of New York City In 2006, the sister city Program of the City of New York, Inc.[632] was restructured and renamed New York City Global Partners. Through this program, New York City has expanded its international outreach to a network of cities worldwide, promoting the exchange of ideas and innovation between their citizenry and policymakers. New York's historic sister cities are denoted below by the year they joined New York City's partnership network.[633] The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was a New Deal agency created in 1937 to combat rural poverty during the Great Depression in the United States. It succeeded the Resettlement Administration (1935–1937).[1] The FSA is famous for its small but highly influential photography program, 1935–44, that portrayed the challenges of rural poverty. The photographs in the FSA/Office of War Information Photograph Collection form an extensive pictorial record of American life between 1935 and 1944. This U.S. government photography project was headed for most of its existence by Roy Stryker, who guided the effort in a succession of government agencies: the Resettlement Administration (1935–1937), the Farm Security Administration (1937–1942), and the Office of War Information (1942–1944). The collection also includes photographs acquired from other governmental and nongovernmental sources, including the News Bureau at the Offices of Emergency Management (OEM), various branches of the military, and industrial corporations.[2] In total, the black-and-white portion of the collection consists of about 175,000 black-and-white film negatives, encompassing both negatives that were printed for FSA-OWI use and those that were not printed at the time. Color transparencies also made by the FSA/OWI are available in a separate section of the catalog: FSA/OWI Color Photographs.[2] The FSA stressed "rural rehabilitation" efforts to improve the lifestyle of very poor landowning farmers, and a program to purchase submarginal land owned by poor farmers and resettle them in group farms on land more suitable for efficient farming. Reactionary critics, including the Farm Bureau, strongly opposed the FSA as an alleged experiment in collectivizing agriculture—that is, in bringing farmers together to work on large government-owned farms using modern techniques under the supervision of experts. After the Conservative coalition took control of Congress, it transformed the FSA into a program to help poor farmers buy land, and that program continues to operate in the 21st century as the Farmers Home Administration. Origins Walker Evans portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs (1936) Arthur Rothstein photograph "Dust Bowl Cimarron County, Oklahoma" of a farmer and two sons during a dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma (1936) Dorothea Lange photograph of an Arkansas squatter of three years near Bakersfield, California (1935) The projects that were combined in 1935 to form the Resettlement Administration (RA) started in 1933 as an assortment of programs tried out by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. The RA was headed by Rexford Tugwell, an economic advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.[3] However, Tugwell's goal moving 650,000 people into 100,000,000 acres (400,000 km2) of exhausted, worn-out land was unpopular among the majority in Congress.[3] This goal seemed socialistic to some and threatened to deprive powerful farm proprietors of their tenant workforce.[3] The RA was thus left with only enough resources to relocate a few thousand people from 9 million acres (36,000 km2) and build several greenbelt cities,[3] which planners admired as models for a cooperative future that never arrived.[3] The main focus of the RA was to now build relief camps in California for migratory workers, especially refugees from the drought-stricken Dust Bowl of the Southwest.[3] This move was resisted by a large share of Californians, who did not want destitute migrants to settle in their midst.[3] The RA managed to construct 95 camps that gave migrants unaccustomed clean quarters with running water and other amenities,[3] but the 75,000 people who had the benefit of these camps were a small share of those in need and could only stay temporarily.[3] After facing enormous criticism for his poor management of the RA, Tugwell resigned in 1936.[3] On January 1, 1937,[4] with hopes of making the RA more effective, the RA was transferred to the Department of Agriculture through executive order 7530.[4] On July 22, 1937,[5] Congress passed the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act.[5] This law authorized a modest credit program to assist tenant farmers to purchase land,[5] and it was the culmination of a long effort to secure legislation for their benefit.[5] Following the passage of the act, Congress passed the Farm Security Act into law. The Farm Security Act officially transformed the RA into the Farm Security Administration (FSA).[3] The FSA expanded through funds given by the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act.[3] Relief work One of the activities performed by the RA and FSA was the buying out of small farms that were not economically viable, and the setting up of 34 subsistence homestead communities, in which groups of farmers lived together under the guidance of government experts and worked a common area. They were not allowed to purchase their farms for fear that they would fall back into inefficient practices not guided by RA and FSA experts.[6] The Dust Bowl in the Great Plains displaced thousands of tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and laborers, many of whom (known as "Okies" or "Arkies") moved on to California. The FSA operated camps for them, such as Weedpatch Camp as depicted in The Grapes of Wrath. The RA and the FSA gave educational aid to 455,000 farm families during the period 1936-1943. In June, 1936, Roosevelt wrote: "You are right about the farmers who suffer through their own fault... I wish you would have a talk with Tugwell about what he is doing to educate this type of farmer to become self-sustaining. During the past year, his organization has made 104,000 farm families practically self-sustaining by supervision and education along practical lines. That is a pretty good record!"[7] The FSA's primary mission was not to aid farm production or prices. Roosevelt's agricultural policy had, in fact, been to try to decrease agricultural production to increase prices. When production was discouraged, though, the tenant farmers and small holders suffered most by not being able to ship enough to market to pay rents. Many renters wanted money to buy farms, but the Agriculture Department realized there already were too many farmers, and did not have a program for farm purchases. Instead, they used education to help the poor stretch their money further. Congress, however, demanded that the FSA help tenant farmers purchase farms, and purchase loans of $191 million were made, which were eventually repaid. A much larger program was $778 million in loans (at effective rates of about 1% interest) to 950,000 tenant farmers. The goal was to make the farmer more efficient so the loans were used for new machinery, trucks, or animals, or to repay old debts. At all times, the borrower was closely advised by a government agent. Family needs were on the agenda, as the FSA set up a health insurance program and taught farm wives how to cook and raise children. Upward of a third of the amount was never repaid, as the tenants moved to much better opportunities in the cities.[8] The FSA was also one of the authorities administering relief efforts in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico during the Great Depression. Between 1938 and 1945, under the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration, it oversaw the purchase of 590 farms with the intent of distributing land to working and middle-class Puerto Ricans.[9] Modernization The FSA resettlement communities appear in the literature as efforts to ameliorate the wretched condition of southern sharecroppers and tenants, but those evicted to make way for the new settlers are virtually invisible in the historic record. The resettlement projects were part of larger efforts to modernize rural America. The removal of former tenants and their replacement by FSA clients in the lower Mississippi alluvial plain—the Delta—reveals core elements of New Deal modernizing policies. The key concepts that guided the FSA's tenant removals were: the definition of rural poverty as rooted in the problem of tenancy; the belief that economic success entailed particular cultural practices and social forms; and the commitment by those with political power to gain local support. These assumptions undergirded acceptance of racial segregation and the criteria used to select new settlers. Alternatives could only become visible through political or legal action—capacities sharecroppers seldom had. In succeeding decades, though, these modernizing assumptions created conditions for Delta African Americans on resettlement projects to challenge white supremacy.[10] FSA and its contribution to society The documentary photography genre describes photographs that would work as a time capsule for evidence in the future or a certain method that a person can use for a frame of reference. Facts presented in a photograph can speak for themselves after the viewer gets time to analyze it. The motto of the FSA was simply, as Beaumont Newhall insists, "not to inform us, but to move us."[citation needed] Those photographers wanted the government to move and give a hand to the people, as they were completely neglected and overlooked, thus they decided to start taking photographs in a style that we today call "documentary photography." The FSA photography has been influential due to its realist point of view, and because it works as a frame of reference and an educational tool from which later generations could learn. Society has benefited and will benefit from it for more years to come, as this photography can unveil the ambiguous and question the conditions that are taking place.[11] Photography program The RA and FSA are well known for the influence of their photography program, 1935–1944. Photographers and writers were hired to report and document the plight of poor farmers. The Information Division (ID) of the FSA was responsible for providing educational materials and press information to the public. Under Roy Stryker, the ID of the FSA adopted a goal of "introducing America to Americans." Many of the most famous Depression-era photographers were fostered by the FSA project. Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks were three of the most famous FSA alumni.[12] The FSA was also cited in Gordon Parks' autobiographical novel, A Choice of Weapons. The FSA's photography was one of the first large-scale visual documentations of the lives of African-Americans.[13] These images were widely disseminated through the Twelve Million Black Voices collection, published in October 1941, which combined FSA photographs selected by Edwin Rosskam and text by author and poet Richard Wright. Photographers Fifteen photographers (ordered by year of hire) would produce the bulk of work on this project. Their diverse, visual documentation elevated government's mission from the "relocation" tactics of a Resettlement Administration to strategic solutions which would depend on America recognizing rural and already poor Americans, facing death by depression and dust. FSA photographers: Arthur Rothstein (1935), Theodor Jung (1935), Ben Shahn (1935), Walker Evans (1935), Dorothea Lange (1935), Carl Mydans (1935), Russell Lee (1936), Marion Post Wolcott (1936), John Vachon (1936, photo assignments began in 1938), Jack Delano (1940), John Collier (1941), Marjory Collins (1941), Louise Rosskam (1941), Gordon Parks (1942) and Esther Bubley (1942). With America's entry into World War II, FSA would focus on a different kind of relocation as orders were issued for internment of Japanese Americans. FSA photographers would be transferred to the Office of War Information during the last years of the war and completely disbanded at the war's end. Photographers like Howard R. Hollem, Alfred T. Palmer, Arthur Siegel and OWI's Chief of Photographers John Rous were working in OWI before FSA's reorganization there. As a result of both teams coming under one unit name, these other individuals are sometimes associated with RA-FSA's pre-war images of American life. Though collectively credited with thousands of Library of Congress images, military ordered, positive-spin assignments like these four received starting in 1942, should be separately considered from pre-war, depression triggered imagery. FSA photographers were able to take time to study local circumstances and discuss editorial approaches with each other before capturing that first image. Each one talented in her or his own right, equal credit belongs to Roy Stryker who recognized, hired and empowered that talent. John Collier Jr. John Collier Jr.   Jack Delano Jack Delano   Walker Evans Walker Evans   Dorothea Lange Dorothea Lange   Russell Lee Russell Lee   Carl Mydans Carl Mydans   Gordon Parks Gordon Parks   Arthur Rothstein Arthur Rothstein   John Vachon John Vachon   Marion Post Wolcott Marion Post Wolcott These 15 photographers, some shown above, all played a significant role, not only in producing images for this project, but also in molding the resulting images in the final project through conversations held between the group members. The photographers produced images that breathed a humanistic social visual catalyst of the sort found in novels, theatrical productions, and music of the time. Their images are now regarded as a "national treasure" in the United States, which is why this project is regarded as a work of art.[14] Photograph of Chicago's rail yards by Jack Delano, circa 1943 Together with John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (not a government project) and documentary prose (for example Walker Evans and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), the FSA photography project is most responsible for creating the image of the Depression in the United States. Many of the images appeared in popular magazines. The photographers were under instruction from Washington, DC, as to what overall impression the New Deal wanted to portray. Stryker's agenda focused on his faith in social engineering, the poor conditions among tenant cotton farmers, and the very poor conditions among migrant farm workers; above all, he was committed to social reform through New Deal intervention in people's lives. Stryker demanded photographs that "related people to the land and vice versa" because these photographs reinforced the RA's position that poverty could be controlled by "changing land practices." Though Stryker did not dictate to his photographers how they should compose the shots, he did send them lists of desirable themes, for example, "church", "court day", and "barns". Stryker sought photographs of migratory workers that would tell a story about how they lived day-to-day. He asked Dorothea Lange to emphasize cooking, sleeping, praying, and socializing.[15] RA-FSA made 250,000 images of rural poverty. Fewer than half of those images survive and are housed in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. The library has placed all 164,000 developed negatives online.[16] From these, some 77,000 different finished photographic prints were originally made for the press, plus 644 color images, from 1600 negatives. Documentary films The RA also funded two documentary films by Pare Lorentz: The Plow That Broke the Plains, about the creation of the Dust Bowl, and The River, about the importance of the Mississippi River. The films were deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. World War II activities During World War II, the FSA was assigned to work under the purview of the Wartime Civil Control Administration, a subagency of the War Relocation Authority. These agencies were responsible for relocating Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast to Internment camps. The FSA controlled the agricultural part of the evacuation. Starting in March 1942 they were responsible for transferring the farms owned and operated by Japanese Americans to alternate operators. They were given the dual mandate of ensuring fair compensation for Japanese Americans, and for maintaining correct use of the agricultural land. During this period, Lawrence Hewes Jr was the regional director and in charge of these activities.[17] Reformers ousted; Farmers Home Administration After the war started and millions of factory jobs in the cities were unfilled, no need for FSA remained.[citation needed] In late 1942, Roosevelt moved the housing programs to the National Housing Agency, and in 1943, Congress greatly reduced FSA's activities. The photographic unit was subsumed by the Office of War Information for one year, then disbanded. Finally in 1946, all the social reformers had left and FSA was replaced by a new agency, the Farmers Home Administration, which had the goal of helping finance farm purchases by tenants—and especially by war veterans—with no personal oversight by experts. It became part of Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty in the 1960s, with a greatly expanded budget to facilitate loans to low-income rural families and cooperatives, injecting $4.2 billion into rural America.[18] The Great Depression The Great Depression began in August 1929, when the United States economy first went into an economic recession. Although the country spent two months with declining GDP, the effects of a declining economy were not felt until the Wall Street Crash in October 1929, and a major worldwide economic downturn ensued. Although its causes are still uncertain and controversial, the net effect was a sudden and general loss of confidence in the economic future and a reduction in living standards for most ordinary Americans. The market crash highlighted a decade of high unemployment, poverty, low profits for industrial firms, deflation, plunging farm incomes, and lost opportunities for economic growth.[19]
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