Wyandach New York

[UberEatsDriver]

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.

Well the Coli posters are dumb cause the West Indian parade started in Harlem many decades before West Indians came here in droves.

Good read btw. Thanks

 

[RicanFury]

havent been to crimedyach since i was a kid...that shyt was live out there lol some really beautiful areas of LI are slums it is what it is breh

 

[-G$-]

had a bunch of friends there growing up, sections of wyandanch were zoned for my high school. it was def a rough area but not as bad as other areas like hempstead.

i used to buy mad cheap brick weed there in early/mid 90's. like elbows the size of pillows you literally had to steam to loosen up so you could bag it to flip lol. also all the gas stations sold beer w no id when we were like 14, 15 yo. damn, bringing back some memories.

 

[RegB]

Some black folks were also migrant workers that eventually stayed. You'll find blacks communities in weird places like Bellport, Greenport, and Bridgehampton. LI was a big farming community. I remember when there were farms all over when I was a kid.

That louis fife guy started Gordon Heights. For the longest I could never figure out why there were folks out in Coram. For southerners, Suffolk County reminded them of home. Complete with racism.

I didn't know the hamptons had black folks living there like that..

 

[P90]

I haven’t passed through there in decades but it was not safe to say the least.

Where Rakim Allah hail from.

 

[Neuromancer]

I've been there, home of the God MC. I went there when I worked for an early pediatric literacy organization that serviced low income neighborhoods. Pretty hood and mostly dead end from what I recall.

 

[newworldafro]

I used to stay summers out in North Babylon with and was able to ride my bike to wyandanch. They had dirt roads on some streets out there. Extremely country and the dudes was grimey. They had some good ball players though.

Long Island is so cut off from the boroughs that it developed it’s own style. Mix of country and city shyt.

I remember riding to some lake and going cat fishing.

Catfish in Long Island, N.Y.