In 1947, former Army Captain Joseph R. Dorsey and two other African-American veterans sued to obtain apartments in the new, whites-only Stuyvesant Town housing project on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Although their lawsuit was not successful, their case symbolized a new era in civil rights activism in New York City, which had become the world’s largest African-American urban community. 

Following World War II, African-American New Yorkers and their allies mobilized against a range of discriminatory policies and practices, including exclusion by employers and banks, segregation of public schools, and controversial uses of force by police. While school segregation was officially outlawed after 1954, activists argued that the city tolerated inferior schools in Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville, and other neighborhoods populated primarily by people of color, and they created the NAACP Schools Workshop to pressure the city to integrate public schools. The whites-only Stuyvesant Town housing project, which was ultimately integrated, comprised one of many campaigns against housing discrimination. 

By the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act, New York had had passed anti-discrimination laws in employment and housing, and activists had staged an enormous school boycott protesting segregated schools. Yet racial discrimination remained, and that year, rioting broke out in Harlem after a white policeman fatally shot African-American teenager James Powell. Activists have continued to mobilize in response to police conduct in communities of color, as well as against city schools and housing that remain divided along racial lines.