When some 19th New Yorkers said "Harlem", they meant
almost all of Manhattan above 86th Street. Toward the end of the
century, however, a group of citizens in upper Manhattan want, perhaps, to
62.
______ shape a closer and more precise sense of community designated
a section that they wished to have known as Harlem. The chosen area was
the Harlem which Blacks were moving in the first decades of the
63. ______ new century as they left
their old settlements on the middle and lower blocks of the West
Side. As the community became predominantly Black, the very
word "Harlem" seemed to lose its old mean. At times it was easy to forget
64. ______ that "Harlem" was
originally the Dutch name "Harlem", the
65. ______ community
it described had been founded by people from Holland, and that for most of
its three centuries-it was first settled in the sixteen hundreds-it had been
preoccupied by White New Yorkers.
66. ______ "Harlem" became synonymous to Black
life and Black style in
67. ______ Manhattan. Blacks living there used the
word as though they had coined it on themselves-not only to designate their
area of residence 68.
______ but to express their sense of the various qualities of its life
and atmosphere. As the years passed, "Harlem" asserted an even larger
69. ______ meaning.
In the words of Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., the pastor of the Abyssinian
Baptist Church, Harlem "became the symbol of liberty and the Promised Land to
Negroes everywhere". By 1919, Harlem’s population had grown by
several thousand. It had received its share of wartime migration from the
South, the Caribbean, and parts of colonial Africa. Some of the new
arrivals merely lived in Harlem; it was New York they had come to, looking
70. ______ for
jobs and for all the other legendary opportunities of life in the city. To
others who migrated to Harlem, New York was merely the city in which they
found themselves: Harlem was exactly what they
71. ______ wished to
be.