Many of the black newcomers who came couldn't get mortgages, so most ended up as renters, not homeowners.
Some observers, however, argue that today's black newcomers to Harlem are seen as much different from their predecessors.
He pointed to problems in 1993 integrating a housing project in nearby Vidor, for decades an all-white town, where an avowed white supremacist threatened the first black residents, and teen-agers dressed in sheets confronted black newcomers.
Or are you simply making the rent higher?" Dr. Dodson, of the Schomburg Center, summed up the new, wary assessment of black newcomers another way: "They did not come here to slum".
He said the city's political bosses — mostly white Italian men at the time — had used measures like the literacy test and English-only ballots to hold on to their power and keep a growing number of Puerto Rican and black newcomers from voting for minority candidates.
A Tradition of Amity Black entrepreneurs like Ms. Abraham may encounter hostility, but in the opinion of Kevin McGruder, a Harlemite who is a co-owner of Harlemade, a Harlem-centric gift shop on Malcolm X Boulevard, black residents are generally more accepting of the black newcomers than of white ones.
Felicia Kline, president of the Seattle Urban League Young Professionals (but a resident of Renton, a suburb), said that when black newcomers asked her for advice on where to live, their questions were about affordability and traffic, "not about 'Oh, I need to be around black people.' " Some neighborhoods rich with ethnic cultural history have been gentrified or overrun with condominiums.
But while the town has resources to deal with the problem — it owns scores of farms — critics say its leaders are reluctant to build homes for fear of losing control of City Hall, especially with the arrival of black newcomers unlikely to vote for them.
And while in some neighborhoods departing Jews have been replaced by Asian, Hispanic and black newcomers, in others they have been replaced by Orthodox families, who have more children and cluster in compact communities so they do not have to drive to the synagogue on the Sabbath.
