A picture of Minetta Street from Wikimedia. An important street in what was once Little Africa.
Anyone visiting the area surrounding the intersection of Minetta Street and Minetta Lane would find a scene repeated all throughout Greenwich Village; quaint residential buildings, sites where legendary artists once stood for over half a second, restaurants aimed at tourists, and (of course) white people. However, was once known as Little Africa and, by some less friendly towards people of color, as “Coon Town.” This was due the large numbers of Africans Americans and Black people residing within this area in Greenwich Village. From the 1880s to the very early 1900s this area was the most well known Black neighborhood in New York. However, this would soon end as with the mass exodus of people of color from the neighborhood.
The Church of Our Lady of Pompeii at 240 Bleecker Street was known as St. Benedict the Moor’s. An abolitionist Priest, Father Thomas Farrell, who collected money in an attempt to create a parish where Black parishioners could attend mass without being harassed by Catholics of other ethnicities. The parish was created only after his death with the money that he raised. In 1883, the Church of St. Benedict the Moor, a church open specifically for Greenwich Village’s Black Catholics was opened with the money Farrell raised. However in 1898, St. Benedict the Moor closes down and moved to west Manhattan to an area known as “The Tenderloins.”
St. Benedict’s wasn’t the only Black church that was founded in Little Africa and eventually moved elsewhere. Abyssinian Baptist Church had been founded in 1808, in part by Ethiopian immigrants who named it after their homeland, Ethiopia which was also called Abyssinia. On 1856 Abyssinian Baptist Church, the oldest Baptist church in the State of New York, settled at 166 Waverley place in Greenwich Village. However, it too eventually moved further uptown into west Midtown and eventually Harlem.
The reasons for this move lie in the changing living situation that Blacks in Little Africa faced. Mary S. Sacks in her book,Before Harlem: the Black experience in New York City before World War I, states:
