Philip Payton

Harlem Realtor

[Reprinted from Issues & Views Spring 1992]

Philip Payton, whose father was a barber and mother a hairdresser, was born in 1876, in Westfield, Massachusetts. After learning the barber trade, and after an unsuccessful year of study at Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina, Payton headed for New York City, without any certain plans. In New York, he worked as a barber and at various menial jobs, saving what he could. In 1900, he got a job in a real estate office, which paid more than his barbering. It was there that he decided what he wanted to do with his life.

With a partner, he rented a very small, very modest office in Manhattan and opened his first real estate business. It proved a colossal failure, but failure only seemed to whet Payton's appetite to succeed. He tells his story:

The hardships that my wife and I went through before things broke for us would fill a book. If I have gained any success, to my wife belongs the major portion of the credit . . . My customary amount of cash to leave the house with was fifteen cents; five cents to ride downtown, five cents for luncheon and five cents to ride back up town at night . . . I just simply was not making any money. My wife was doing sewing, a day's work or anything else she could get to do to help me along . . . All of my friends discouraged me. All of them told me how I couldn't make it, but none of them, how I could. They tried to convince me that there was no show for a colored man in such a business in New York . . .

I managed to secure charge of another house after a while, and we moved in there. Seemingly, this was the turning point in my business career. Things began to pick up. I began to get charge of more houses. One fine day I made a deal that netted me nearly $1,150. I could hardly believe it true. My wife refused to credit it, until I showed her the checks. From that time things grew better . . . I bought the flat house in which I was living. I bought two more flats and kept them five months when I sold them at a profit of $5,000. I bought another, kept it a month, and made $2,750, another and made $1,500, another and made $2,600, and so on. In all I have owned from time to time nine five-story flats and five private houses, or, in other words, I have had title to $250,000 worth of New York realty.

The organization which "created such a stir," the Afro-American Realty Company, was formed in Harlem by Payton and several other black businessmen, initially to save a number of buildings on West 135th Street, from which dozens of black tenants were to be evicted. The white owners of the buildings planned to replace the tenants with whites. Payton and his partners first attempted to lease the particular buildings. When this failed, they bought two of them outright, which effectively put an end to the attempted evictions. Impressed by his sober and perceptive handling of the matter, the white realtors offered Payton a co-partnership for future undertakings, which he declined.

The whole episode ended on a peaceful business note, and was widely reported in the press as an example of the power and clout of money to achieve positive ends, even where race was an issue. It was cited as an "unexpected and novel method of resisting race prejudice." The dealings were recounted not only locally, but received national coverage as well. The Afro-American Realty Company went on to purchase and develop many other buildings in Harlem, and Payton became respected as a major figure in Harlem realty. Earlier, Payton had joined the throng of those who were drawn to Booker T. Washington's mission for, as he says in his memoirs, it was at a meeting of the National Negro Business League that he conceived the idea for the Afro-American Realty Company.

Copyright 1992 Issues & Views