“The fight that I’m making has got to be made sooner or later, and I see no better than now.” said Philip Payton Jr. while advocating for blacks and their rental and buying needs. Payton is credited as being the first black real estate agent, and was known as “The Father of Harlem”.
In 1903, he established the Afro-American Realty Company, his mission was to erase the color line in Harlem and make lots of money in the process. Payton was a tactician. He, along with his investors, would purchase buildings that had white tenants and rent out the vacant units to black tenants.
Once the black tenants moved in, the white tenants moved out one by one until all of the tenants in his buildings were black…this was like gentrification in reverse in my opinion since Payton’s tenants were wealthier blacks.
Of course Payton’s mission didn’t go without opposition; he got a lot of it from The Hudson Company. Their tactics were a little more harsh. The Hudson Group was a white owned company that would purchase buildings with black tenants, and then flat out evict them all.
Payton fired back and did the same; playing by their rules, he acquired more buildings with white tenants and evicted them all, then moved all black tenants in. There was a serious real estate war going on, but Payton pretty much got the upper hand on them and that’s how Harlem became the Harlem that we used to know and love.
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