Understanding migrational patterns of Black New Yorkers is tough for a lot of Coli posters. Most of them think we came directly from the south and landed where we at. This ofc usually comes from the “AA Gang” whiteboy committee.
Most Blk neighborhoods are a story of upward mobility that plays out sort of like.
Upstate/South > Harlem/Central Manhattan > Bronx > Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island.
That’s to say, most Blacks that aren’t very recent immigrants moved from the city to the outer boroughs which had better living conditions.
Specific to Suffolk County though is a guy named Louis Fife. He was a cac that went to Areas in the Bronx and Brooklyn (the semi-better off Blacks) and offered them very cheap plots of land in Suffolk county.
(Notice he says a lot of the people in Harlem in the 1920s are from the West Indies despite TheColi vehemently denying that any West Indians lived in America prior to 1965)
This set the tone for some of the earliest Black migration to Long Island (there were already historical Black communities there from slavery times but they were small). Wyandanch is one of them, that was also one of those farming communities for Blacks that sprung up in the 1920s.
This isn’t the case for all of Long Island though, as much of the Black areas of Nassau only became Black from 1970 onward (think: white flight). Hempstead, Roosevelt, Uniondale, Baldwin, Inwood.. these are the kinds of areas that the Black people who stayed in the city in the 1920s eventually ended up in as they saw generational mobility. So when you meet a Black person from Hempstead, they’ll often tell you their parents lived in Brooklyn, their grandparents the Bronx, their great great grand Harlem and before that somewhere in the south, upstate or the islands.
