This is a site of the third home of Mother Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church, the founding congregation of the Zion African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, and the first black church in New York City. Zion AME relocated here at the height of the Civil War from prior locations in Lower Manhattan, reflecting the migration of the center of African-American life in New York uptown and into the Village in the 19th century. Zion AME had a profound effect on African-American life and has been a force for abolition and civil rights since the late 18th century; and has been the home to some of the most prominent African-American civil rights leaders, including Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass.

James Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924. He became a celebrated writer and social critic in his lifetime, exploring racial, sexual, and class tensions as a gay African-American man. His residence from 1958 to 1963 was 81 Horatio Street. A historic plaque memorializing his time there was unveiled by Village Preservation on October 7, 2015.

Rev. Joseph Sandford Atwell (1831-1881) was born in Barbados and came to the United States in 1863 during the Civil War. In 1875 he, his wife Cordelia Jennings, and their three sons moved to New York City, and Atwell became the rector of Saint Philip’s Church on Mulberry Street. In 1881, Atwell passed away in his home at 112 Waverly Place.

Ardent abolitionist John Jay II lived at 22 Washington Square North with his family. A lawyer and one of the founders of the Republican Party in New York, Jay spent much of his career defending freedom seekers and promoting abolitionism through his publications and law practice.

Suffragist Sarah Smith Garnet (1831-1911) lived at 175 MacDougal St with her husband, the abolitionist, minister, educator, and orator Henry Highland Garnet at 175 MacDougal Street. In 1892, Garnet participated in establishing the Woman’s Loyal League of New York and Brooklyn with Ida B. Wells, Susan McKinney, Maritcha Lyons, and Victoria Earle Matthews. In July 1904, she spoke at the fourth convention of the National Association of Colored Women in St. Louis, Missouri. Garnet was also elected superintendent of the suffrage department of the organization, which joined forces with the National Council of Women in 1905.

Here at the New School for Social Research (now The New School), in 1948, W.E.B. DuBois, the African-American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, and author, taught the first course in African-American history and culture ever at a university.

According to historian Christopher Moore, the first legally emancipated community of African descendants in North America was found in Lower Manhattan, comprising much of present-day Greenwich Village and the South Village and parts of the Lower East Side and East Village.

M. Antoinette Varick, a longtime manager for the School of the Association for the Benefit of Colored Children and the Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans, was one of the first tenants of 124 Waverly Place.

Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, sparked a fifteen-year campaign spearheaded by Howard Bennett to make his birthday a national holiday - the first ever to honor an African-American. Howard Bennett, who was also African American, was born at 11 Greenwich Ave. (demolished) in 1911, when the last remaining elements of the old “Little Africa” neighborhood was disappearing due to new housing opportunities to the north, competition for housing from waves of European immigrants, and the demolition of much of the neighborhood to make way for the southern extension of Sixth Avenue and the construction of the subway underneath.

Born in 1930, Lorraine Hansberry was a playwright and activist most commonly associated with Chicago, despite attending school and living much of her life in Greenwich Village. In 1953, she married Robert Nemiroff, and they moved to an apartment at 335-337 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. Here she wrote her award-wining play, “A Raisin in the Sun,” the first play written by an African American woman to be performed on Broadway.

Novelist Richard Wright (1908-1960) bought a townhouse for his family at 13 Charles Street in 1945, demolished in the early 1960s to make way for the large apartment building now named 15 Charles Street. Wright’s work largely concerns the treatment of African Americans in the United States. He was one of the first African American authors to protest this treatment through his writing.

The Abyssinian Baptist Church was located here at 166 Waverly Place and had a congregation dating to 1808. The congregation formed when a handful of free blacks withdrew from the First Baptist Church in New York in protest against segregating blacks in what was called a "slave loft." Some of the protesters were natives of Ethiopia, then known as Abyssinia. The church's founding was an affirmation of their African heritage and proudly called attention to the antiquity of Christian traditions in Abyssinia. It was also only the second Black Church in New York City, after Mother Zion AME Church.

On July 9th, 1819, Rose Butler was executed in the Potter’s Field located in what is now Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. Rose, a nineteen-year-old enslaved Black woman, had been convicted of arson. During the trial, Rose admitted to intentionally setting fire to her enslavers' residence and tying a string to the kitchen door to prevent the Morris family from escaping. Rose also said some accomplices aided her, but they were never caught. There were no reported injuries or casualties, the only damage reported was the destruction of two or three kitchen stairs. Rose was nevertheless sentenced to death. She became the last known person to be executed by hanging in Potter’s Field, as demographic changes in the area caused the field and gallows to fall out of favor as a public execution ground.

Opened in 1938 by Barney Josephson, the Cafe Society, located at 1 Sheridan Square, was the first racially integrated nightclub in New York City. Though it was only open for a little over a decade (the building is still standing), its legacy has lived on long since its doors closed in 1949. Cafe Society welcomed some of the biggest talents in jazz history during its operation, including Billie Holiday. Here she first performed "Strange Fruit," an explicit song of protest against lynching and racism.

The Shiloh Presbyterian Church, one of the most vocal and active anti-slavery and pro-civil rights churches, was founded on Rose Street in Lower Manhattan in 1822 as the First Colored Presbyterian Church. The church’s founder was Samuel Cornish, who also founded America’s first black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal. In 1875, the church moved to 140 Sixth Avenue (present-day 450 Sixth Avenue) and was located there until 1879. From 1879-1888 it was located at 167 West 26th Street.