A Moment in the Sun

A Moment in the Sun dispels the pernicious narrative that in New York City, slavery was followed by a hundred years of poverty and destitution.

Dispelling the persistent narrative that abject poverty followed the end of slavery in New York City, acclaimed historian Shane White finally sets the historical record straight. A Moment in the Sun, a revisionist and immersive retelling of antebellum Manhattan, depicts a long-forgotten, nineteenth-century era when ordinary Black men and women, now free, “stood a brief moment in the sun” (W. E. B. Du Bois), ushering in a roughly half-century period when New York City bulged and thrummed with Black creativity and achievement nearly a hundred years before the storied Harlem Renaissance.

Culling a narrative from thousands of fragmentary sources gathered over three decades of research, White conjures the distant world of these Black New Yorkers, from the streets where dandies flaunted their signature style to a rollicking dance cellar on a Friday night in the Five Points neighborhood. “In a city still rife with racism and violence,” White writes, “ordinary African New Yorkers—among them oystermen, petty entrepreneurs, fortune-tellers, and ‘confidence men’—brought into being a free urban Black culture.” Along the way, White introduces us to a notable parade of characters who helped transform Gotham into a booming urban metropolis, among them Thomas Downing, the “Oyster King of New York”; Mary Thompson, who ran a cookshop out of her cellar; and Cato Alexander, whose tavern provided cocktails and carriage races to a diverse clientele.

As these people, languages, and cultures mixed in the so-called amalgamated city, racial tensions heightened and often exploded, but this friction helped facilitate a cultural melding that was extensive. To a startling degree, White reveals the myriad ways this first attempt at integration in New York City actually worked.

A triumph of historical reclamation, A Moment in the Sun paints a pointillist portrait of this time in New York history, one that presents an entirely different story that was waiting to emerge from the archive. And in bringing to vivid life these Black New Yorkers and their eponymous moment in the sun, this shimmering history preserves their memory and, in the words of Caleb Gayle, “takes us into the experiment in freedom whose possibilities could have and should have lasted generations.”