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.