PAYTON JR., PHILIP A. (27 February 1876–29 August 1917), African American real-estate mogul known as “the father of Harlem.” Payton was born in Westfield, Massachusetts, the second of four children. His parents were a barber and a hairdresser. While he began working in his father’s barbershop at fifteen, his parents had emphasized the importance of education and had high aspirations for all of their children’s careers. His brothers both attended Yale University and his sister received a college degree at a time when it was rare for women of any race to do so.
When Payton was a junior in high school, his father decided he didn’t like the friends his son was spending time with and sent him to Livingstone College, a historically Black Christian school in Salisbury, North Carolina. Payton dropped out after one year and returned to his public high school, from which he also dropped out following a football injury. He never completed his education, much to his parents’ disappointment.
Payton resumed working at the barbershop before deciding at age twenty-three that he would move to New York City and make something of himself. He found a job manning the penny-operated picture machines at a department store. The first time he went home for a visit, he returned to find his job had been given away. He then found work as a barber, and later as a janitor in a real-estate office. It was there that he developed the aspiration to go into real-estate himself.
Payton opened his first real estate office on West 32nd Street in the fall of 1900, less than two years after moving to New York City. He married that same year. The business folded after only a few months when his business partner quit. He tried again on his own with an office further downtown, but struggled to make ends meet. His wife supported them with her work as a seamstress. In search of cheaper rent, they moved to 134th Street.
In the 1880s, Harlem had been rapidly overdeveloped by investors eager to create a new upper-class White neighborhood. However, the pace of construction exceeded demand, leaving a large number of vacant brownstone apartments. Out of desperation, White landlords began renting to Black families.
It was in Harlem, in this economic climate, that Payton’s real-estate business began to take off. He got his first big break as the result of a dispute between two White landlords, one of whom sold Payton a Harlem apartment building with the intention of inviting more Black tenants into the neighborhood and thereby depreciating his rival’s property values. This marked the beginning of a long career in which Payton was able to use racism to his advantage. In 1904, Payton officially incorporated his business and called it the Afro-American Realty Company. Before he turned thirty, Payton’s company controlled twenty buildings in Harlem. He cultivated Black investors and set out to make Harlem a Black neighborhood where people could live free from housing discrimination.
In many ways he succeeded. The population of Harlem turned from majority White to majority Black, and by 1914 one third of New York City’s Black population lived in Harlem. Payton was interviewed by Booker T. Washington and featured in his book on successful Black entrepreneurs. However, Payton also overpromised to his mostly Black investors, who sued successfully in 1906. He was forced to close the business in 1908. His third company, Philip A. Payton Jr. Company, would become the most successful of the three. By 1917, it was worth over a million dollars. Payton died of liver cancer at the age of forty-one, only a month after closing the biggest deal of his career. His reshaping of Harlem would set the stage for the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and change New York City forever.