Philip Payton Jr. was a turn of the century real estate agent
famous for outwitting his adversaries,
and posting his red initials to every building under his control.
He enabled generations of black New Yorkers to inhabit prime areas of Manhattan,
with modern homes, nearby parks, and free from racial violence.
Payton was a crusading capitalist,
who believed that the free-market was the key to combating racial segregation.
His approach was "to make the color line costly."
In 1900, the year he entered the real estate business,
blacks were relegated to a handful of overcrowded neighborhoods,
with substandard housing, and plagued by racial violence.
“The fight that I am making has got to be made sooner or later," Payton wrote,
"and I see no better time than now."
One of his first opportunities came in 1905 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side,
when according to one account two property owners got into a dispute on an all-white block.
One of them retaliated by inviting blacks to move in to her two buildings.
Whites fled, resulting in vacant apartments on the block.
Payton saw this as a business opportunity to buy buildings at a discount
and sway more property owners to accept blacks as tenants:
Why would landlords "keep their apartments empty thereby losing much money in rent,"
he later wrote, "when there is an applicant for it,
and no other objection can be raised to him
other than that he has a black face?"
So he and a team of investors
started leasing and buying up properties on West 99th street at a discount,
one after another.
Eventually, every building on the block was renting to blacks.
“The very prejudice which has heretofore worked against us
can be turned and used to our profit,” Payton wrote.
Located in a prime area of Manhattan that bordered Central Park,
West 99th and 98th Streets became home to a black community that thrived until the mid-1950s,
when the government bulldozed these two blocks to make way for a slum clearance project.
A hundred and thirteen years after Payton first de-segregated West 99th Street,
the former residents of this community still hold annual reunions,
honoring the neighborhood where they were born and raised.
Payton's use of market forces to combat segregation
had an even bigger impact a couple miles uptown.
Known as the father of Harlem, more than any other figure, he was responsible for the formation
of what would become the cultural capital of Black America.
It all started on West 135th Street, when, according to one account,
another dispute between two building owners made it possible for blacks to start moving in.
But in this case, bigoted white real estate interests weren't going to give in without a fight.
Enter the Hudson Realty Company,
with a board of directors that at one time included
the co-founder of Bloomingdales department store,
a former U.S. Ambassador, and his older brother.
The company wanted to restore racial purity on the block,
and in 1904 it purchased four all-black buildings, ordering everyone living there to get out.
So Payton and his investors hit back.
They got title to two buildings a few doors down
and this time told the white people living there to move out.
Then they invited the dispossessed black tenants from up the block to take their place.
Hudson Realty offered to buy Payton out, but he refused,
so the company gave up and pulled out altogether.
Within a few years, black tenants inhabited almost every building on West 135th.
"Race prejudice is a luxury," Payton wrote,
"and like all luxuries can be made very expensive in New York City."
But as Harlem's black community grew,
white property owners tried to contain it by forming real estate associations
governed by racial covenants that restricted landlords from selling or renting to blacks.
Again Payton struck back,
this time by reminding landlords that participating in racial covenants
meant foregoing potential income,
because blacks typically paid more in rent.
As he wrote in a 1908 ad,
“If that Colored Tenement of yours is not paying you better than anything else you own,
SOMETHING IS WRONG."
With landlords choosing profit over prejudice, over time, the racial covenants unraveled.
In 1912, building owner Reginald Schenck told the New York Times
that he rented his brownstone on 130th Street to blacks
because "I can get more from negroes than from white tenants."
The same year, Anna Lieb sold her building on 136th
to a black family in violation of the racial covenant
on the grounds that she had "a right to sell to any person she saw fit."
In 1913, a widowed landlord on 137th was sued by her next door neighbor
for welcoming blacks to her building.
Before the judge could issue a injunction, the neighbor dropped the case and joined her.
A hundred years since Payton's death, there are no monuments honoring him,
or even a plaque on his former home.
Yet black Harlem might not exist if it weren't this visionary realtor
who saw that in a free market bigots can be forced to pay a price for their prejudice
by making the color line costly.