A Moment in the Sun

A Moment in the Sun dispels the pernicious narrative that in New York City, slavery was followed by a hundred years of poverty and destitution.

Dispelling the persistent narrative that abject poverty followed the end of slavery in New York City, acclaimed historian Shane White finally sets the historical record straight. A Moment in the Sun, a revisionist and immersive retelling of antebellum Manhattan, depicts a long-forgotten, nineteenth-century era when ordinary Black men and women, now free, “stood a brief moment in the sun” (W. E. B. Du Bois), ushering in a roughly half-century period when New York City bulged and thrummed with Black creativity and achievement nearly a hundred years before the storied Harlem Renaissance.

Culling a narrative from thousands of fragmentary sources gathered over three decades of research, White conjures the distant world of these Black New Yorkers, from the streets where dandies flaunted their signature style to a rollicking dance cellar on a Friday night in the Five Points neighborhood. “In a city still rife with racism and violence,” White writes, “ordinary African New Yorkers—among them oystermen, petty entrepreneurs, fortune-tellers, and ‘confidence men’—brought into being a free urban Black culture.”

A triumph of historical reclamation, A Moment in the Sun paints a pointillist portrait of this time in New York history, one that presents an entirely different story that was waiting to emerge from the archive. And in bringing to vivid life these Black New Yorkers and their eponymous moment in the sun, this shimmering history preserves their memory and, in the words of Caleb Gayle, “takes us into the experiment in freedom whose possibilities could have and should have lasted generations.”

"Shane White has devoted more than half of his life studying this great city, and the result has been truly great history. A Moment in the Sun is a landmark contribution, the product of a rare historian attentive to the texture of everyday life, the adventures of everyday people, and the mingling of cultures that made Manhattan the greatest urban island in the world. This is one of those books that should never go out of print."—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk