When some nineteenth century New Yorkers said "Harlem", they meant almost all of Manhattan above Eighty-sixth Street. Toward the end of the century, however, a group of citizens in upper Manhattan-want perhaps, to shape a closer 1._________ and more precise sense of community—designated a section that they wished to have known as Harlem. The chosen area was the Harlem which Blacks were moving in the first decades of the 2.________ new century as they left their old settlements on the middle and lower blocks of the West Side.
As the community became predominantly Black, the very word "Harlem" seemed to lose its old meaning. At time it was 3.________ easy to forget that "Harlem" was originally the Dutch name "Harlem". the community it described had been founded by 4.________ people from Holland;and that for most of its three centuries—it was first settled in the sixteen hundreds—it had been preoccupied 5.________ by White New Yorkers. "Harlem" became synonymous to 6.________ Black life and Black style in Manhattan. Blacks living there used the word as though they had coined it on themselves—not 7.________ only to designate their area of residence but to express their sense of the various qualities of its life and atmosphere. As the years passed, "Harlem" asserted an even larger meaning. In 8.________ the words of Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, Harlem "became the symbol of liberty and the Promised Land to Negroes everywhere".
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