Moment in the Sun

More than a century before the Harlem Renaissance, a wave of Black artistic and intellectual activity swept through Manhattan. Ordinary Black men and women, now free, “stood a brief moment in the sun” (W. E. B. Du Bois)—before the city, and the nation, succumbed to civil war. Culling from thousands of fragmentary sources, celebrated historian Shane White conjures the forgotten world of these nineteenth-century Black New Yorkers, from the streets where dandies flaunted their signature style to the cellars where fortunetellers and confidence men turned their tricks. Along the way, White introduces us to the people who helped transform Gotham into a booming urban metropolis, among them Thomas Downing, the “Oyster King of New York,” and Cato Alexander, whose eponymous tavern dispensed cocktails and carriage races to a diverse clientele. As people and cultures mixed in the “amalgamated city,” racial tensions heightened and often exploded. Yet to a startling degree, White shows, this first attempt at integration worked.