African Americans constitute one of the longer-running ethnic presences in New York City. The majority of the African American population largely claims descent from West and Central Africa by way of importation to the American South via the Atlantic slave trade (and a rarer presence of those descended from slaves imported directly to New York City), with smaller portions of the population claiming Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latin American, and more recent Sub-Saharan African nations.

According to the 2010 Census, New York City had the largest population of self-defined black residents of any U.S. city, with over 2 million within the citys boundaries, although this number has decreased since 2000.[1] New York City had more black people than did the entire state of California until the 1980 Census. The black population consists of immigrants and their descendants from Africa and the Caribbean as well as native-born African-Americans. Many of the citys black residents live in Brooklyn and The Bronx. Several of the citys neighborhoods are historical birthplaces of urban black culture in America, among them the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford–Stuyvesant and Manhattans Harlem and various sections of Eastern Queens and The Bronx. Bedford-Stuyvesant is considered to have the highest concentration of black residents in the United States. New York City has the largest population of black immigrants (at 686,814) and descendants of immigrants from the Caribbean (especially from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Guyana, Belize, Grenada, and Haiti), and of sub-Saharan Africans. In a news item of April 3, 2006, however, the New York Times noted that for the first time since the American Civil War, the recorded African American population was declining, because of emigration to other regions, a declining African American birthrate in New York, and decreased immigration of blacks from the Caribbean and Africa.[2]

In 2005, the median income among black households in Queens was almost $52,000 a year, surpassing that of