Landmarks of Little Africa: Black History in the South Village
In honor of the incredible strides made in preserving the South Village over the past two decades, Village Preservation has named December “South Village Month” in honor of our kicking off and finishing off our ten-year landmarking campaign in the last month of the year. The three historic district designations and half dozen individual landmark designations we secured in the South Village between December 2006 and December 2016, covering about 750 buildings, has been the greatest expansion of landmark protections in the neighborhood since 1969.

In order to celebrate this special neighborhood south of Washington Square and West 4th Street, we’re looking at sites in the area and their connection to the deep and rich African American history of the neighborhood.
From the late 19th to the early years of the 20th century, the area around Minetta Lane, Minetta Street, and Minetta Place was referred to as “Little Africa”, and was the center of a an African American community which was the center of Black life not only in Greenwich Village but in New York. The neighborhood within a neighborhood included several streets in the South Village, including Amity Street (now West 3rd Street), Bleecker Street, Laurens Street (now LaGuardia Place), MacDougal Street, Thompson Street, and Sullivan Street. The Black population in this area was recorded to be upwards of 5,000, and included notable figures such as Henry Highland Garnet.
While a few of the adults in these households were born in New York and other northern states, the census records show that as early as 1880 most were migrants from the south, especially from Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, and other Atlantic states. These African Americans moved north to New York decades before the larger and more well known “Great Migration” of Blacks from South to north in the early twentieth century. In New York, many Black migrants were relegated to a limited number of menial jobs -– men as waiters and porters, and women overwhelmingly as laundresses and dressmakers. Most black families lived in buildings inhabited entirely by other Black families, although neighboring buildings might be entirely inhabited by white residents.
Little Africa was a cultural hub for New York’s Black community of the time, with banks, schools, churches, and theaters that were run by and open to residents of color. Here are some examples.
African Free School No. 3, 120 West 3rd Street

No. 120 West 3rd Street (formerly 120 Amity Street) was the location of African Free School No. 3, one of seven schools dedicated to the education of the children of free and enslaved Black students in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. African Free School No. 1 was the very first school for Black students in America. The African Free School Institution was founded in 1787 by members of the New York Manumission Society, an organization devoted to the full abolition of African slavery.

At the time of the African Free School’s creation, many Black residents in the city were still slaves. The institution’s mission was to empower young Black people and educate them on something other than slavery, a bold proposition for the time. In 1785, the Society worked to pass a New York State law prohibiting the sale of slaves imported into the state. This preceded the national law prohibiting the slave trade, passed in 1808. The 1783 New York law also lessened restrictions on the manumission of enslaved Africans. In New York, a gradual emancipation law was passed in 1799, which provided that children of enslaved mothers would be born free. However, long periods of indentured servitude were required: 28 years for men and 25 for women. Those already enslaved were finally granted their freedom statewide in New York in 1827.
The first African Free School, a one-room schoolhouse located in lower Manhattan, was established in 1794 and held about 40 students. Here, the children of both free and enslaved Blacks were taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography. Boys were also taught astronomy, a skill required of seamen, and girls were taught sewing and knitting. After a fire destroyed the original building, a second school was opened in 1815 and held 500 students. African Free School No. 2, located on Mulberry Street, was the alma mater of abolitionist and educator Henry Highland Garnet. African Free School No. 3 was established on 19th Street near Sixth Avenue; however, after objections from white residents in the area, it was relocated to 120 Amity Street (now known as 120 West 3rd Street). By 1834 the seven existing African Free Schools, with enrollment surpassing a thousand students, had been absorbed into the public school system.
The Freedmen’s Savings and Trust Co., Bleecker and LaGuardia (first location), 185 Bleecker Street (second location)


On March 3, 1865, The Freedmen’s Savings and Trust Company, commonly referred to as The Freedmen’s Bank, was created by the United States Congress to aid freedmen in their transition from slavery to freedom. During the bank’s existence, 37 branches were opened in 17 states and the District of Columbia. After opening in a building at the southwest corner of Bleecker Street and LaGuardia Place (then referred to as Laurens Street) in August 1866, the bank moved into a pair of no longer extant row houses at 183-185 Bleecker Street (the address is now 185 Bleecker Street).
During the Civil War, small banks had been established across the South to serve Black soldiers and runaway slaves working at Union garrisons. However, many of the deposit records were lost, preventing freedmen from recovering their deposits. Deposits also went unclaimed when Black troops who were killed in combat had not listed a next-of-kin, or when their next-of-kin could not be located.

The Freedmen’s Bank was created by John W. Alvord, a Congregational Minister, and A.M. Sperry, an abolitionist, to eliminate bank mismanagement and bring all deposits belonging to African Americans under central control. Deposits could only be made by or on behalf of former slaves or their descendants and received up to 7% interest. Unclaimed accounts were pooled together to fund education for the children of ex-slaves. By 1874, fraud and economic instability had taken its toll on the bank.
Frederick Douglass, who had been elected president of the bank in 1874, donated tens of thousands of dollars of his own money in an attempt to revive the failing bank. Despite his efforts, the bank closed on June 29, 1874, leaving many African Americans cynical about the banking industry. After the bank failed, Congress established a program that made depositors eligible for up to 62% of what they were owed; however, many never received even that much. Depositors and their descendants fought for decades for the money they were owed and for the government to assume some responsibility, but they were never compensated.
John Mercer Langston, one of the bank’s Black trustees, wrote in his 1894 autobiography, “Perhaps the failure of no institution in the country … has ever wrought larger disappointment and more disastrous results to those interested in its creation.”
St. Benedict the Moor Church, 210 Bleecker Street

St. Benedict the Moor was the first Church for Black Roman Catholics in the North, dedicated on November 18th, 1883 at 210 Bleecker Street. St. Benedict the Moor Church opened in a Greek Revival structure that had been built in 1836 for the First Unitarian Universalist Church. The opening of St. Benedict the Moor was funded by the Irish-American Pastor of the nearby St. Joseph’s Church, who left $5,000 in his will to fund a church for practicing Black Catholics. The Pastor, named Father Thomas Farrell, funded the development of this church as a form of reparations.
On the day of the Church’s dedication, the surrounding streets were packed with people eager to see the newly dedicated structure. Tickets were required for the dedication Mass, and the seats inside were filled. Many who did not get tickets waited outside for the Mass to end, at which point the church opened for the public to explore.
The Black population of Little Africa began to decline at the end of the 1800s, as many European immigrants, especially those of Italian heritage, began to move in. Many of the area’s Black residents began to relocate uptown, and St. Benedict the Moor followed a similar path. It closed its doors in 1898 and moved to 342 West 53rd Street. The church’s building at 210 Bleecker Street then became home to Our Lady of Pompeii, a parish that primarily served the area’s Italian population.
The Church’s building at 210 Bleecker Street, along with many other remnants of Little Africa, was destroyed with the extension of Sixth Avenue in the 1920s. The location of the church, which had been at the corner of Bleecker and Downing Streets, was lost with the extension of Sixth Avenue since the streets no longer met at a right angle. Our Lady of Pompeii soon moved to a new building at 25 Carmine Street, where it remains to this day.
To learn more about these and other landmarks of the South Village, check out our Civil Rights Map, highlighting significant civil rights and social justice sites.