Philadelphia welcomed them. But not all residents are ready for ‘Africatown.’

PHILADELPHIA - Sheriff Haeda Raa left Liberia to escape a violent tribal initiation ritual, reaching Central America by plane and, finally, the U.S. border with Mexico by bus and on foot late last year.

U.S. immigration officials held him for five days. He didn’t know where he’d go if he was released. He had no family or friends to turn to for guidance. But he did get a word of advice from a fellow detainee.

“Go to Philadelphia,” Raa, 48, recalled him saying. “We have a community there.”

A year later, Raa has settled into Southwest Philadelphia, a sprawling neighborhood of rowhouses and shops that has become an epicenter of the nation’s surging population of African immigrants.

While New York City remains the top destination, several thousand have also settled in Philadelphia, where an effort is underway to rebrand one pocket of the city as “Africatown.” Looking to New York’s Little Italy or Chinatown in Los Angeles, community organizers here want to make a 50-square-block area into a showcase for African food and culture - offering a home away from home for immigrants, and a window into Africa for everyone.

“This is the American story, and has always been the American story,” said Voffee Jabateh, executive director of the African Cultural Alliance of North America, which is leading the charge to turn Southwest Philadelphia into Africatown. “The Irish came. The Italians came. The Germans came. The Polish came, and now the new wave of immigrants are Africans.”

But mirroring the broader nationwide debate over immigration, tensions have erupted as the demographics of Southwest Philadelphia rapidly change. Some longtime residents, including some Black Americans, say they adamantly oppose naming their neighborhood for another continent.

“This is not Africa,” said Terri Powell, 69, who is Black and has lived in the area for three decades. “They moved into this area. But Africatown? No, this is Southwest Philadelphia, and we were here first.”

The debate over Africatown comes as Donald Trump’s election sparks concern among immigrant communities over who will and won’t be allowed to stay. The former president used incendiary language about Black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean during his campaign, and vowed to carry out the largest deportation effort in U.S. history.

But the backers of Africatown say they aren’t halting their plans to establish roots in America, confident that Trump won’t be able to remove most immigrants, especially those who have applied for asylum and are waiting for their cases to make their way through the court system.

“America has rules,” Jabateh said. “Mr. Trump will have a big fight on his hands to get them out.”

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Philadelphia has been a destination for immigrants from Africa for decades. Some of the earliest arrivals were young adults who came to study at the city’s universities in the 1960s. Waves of immigrants fleeing war, political instability and economic hardship have followed almost every decade since.

For many of those newcomers, Southwest Philadelphia became home.

The area stretches from the city’s airport on the south to some of its most prestigious universities on the north. It was once home to White ethnic European and later Vietnamese immigrants, but both groups were gone by the 1990s, leaving behind abandoned houses and vacant storefronts.

Africans arriving from places like Senegal and Liberia saw an opportunity.

“They were buying and renting houses that would have otherwise sat empty,” said Donna M. Henry, executive director of the Southwest Community Development Corporation. “They helped the neighborhood be somewhat stable in its housing, where other parts of the city really bottomed out.”

The increase in African immigrants in Philadelphia is emblematic of a larger jump nationwide. A Washington Post analysis of immigration court data found that nearly 77,000 migrants from Africa entered the United States in 2023 alone, up from about 11,000 in 2022 and about 3,900 in 2021. During the first 10 months of this year, over 22,000 arrived.

Unrest in Africa, stricter asylum policies in Europe and easier access via smartphone to information about the 10,000-mile journey to the United States all helped fuel the increase. More recently, the flow has declined as the Biden administration restricts access to asylum.

“Everybody’s story is different, and the immigrants’ story of migration is completely different for each person,” said Madusu Jabateh Sumaoro, president of the Liberian Mandingo Association of Pennsylvania. “But the majority of what I hear from them is economic hardship. Most of them just want a better, safer life.”

The rise in African immigrants in the United States has especially strained cities like New York, where more than 40,000 have settled since 2014. Some have instead tried their luck in places like Philadelphia, where nonprofit groups and individual families have worked to house people. African immigrants are also settling in other, less traditional destination cities, the Post data shows. Columbus, Ohio; Newark; Houston; Chicago; and Austin are all now home to at least 1,000 recent African immigrants.

As word spread of a burgeoning Africatown in Philadelphia, more people arrived. Aside from more-affordable housing, the city also has a reputation for welcoming LGBTQ immigrants fleeing discrimination in their home countries.

“There is no fear here,” said Abraham Kaeta, a Liberian American community activist who works with immigrants. “There is only hope.”

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On Woodland Avenue, the neighborhood’s main artery, it’s common to see women balancing boxes of groceries on their heads. Flags representing all 54 countries in Africa hang from streetlamps. Stores are crammed with residents buying cow skin, smoked fish, cassava leaves and other African staples.

One of the most popular stores is Southwest Live Poultry, where customers can choose a chicken, turkey, rabbit, quail or pigeon to be slaughtered for dinner.

The Masjid Ahlus-Sunnah Wal-Jama’ah mosque is another focal point of the community. It is located in an abandoned church and now gets so crowded for Friday prayers that some worshipers cram into overflow rooms, said Mohamed Jomandy, the imam.

“We are running out of space,” said Jomandy, who immigrated to the United States from Liberia about 25 years ago.

But the transformation of Southwest Philadelphia into Africatown is just beginning.

On Chester Avenue, the African Cultural Alliance of North America has started construction on a $23 million community center. Nearby, a former theater is being refurbished as an African marketplace, modeled after Philadelphia’s famous Reading Terminal Market. Community leaders also envision a hotel and a performing arts center.

Philadelphia City Council member Jamie Gauthier (D), who represents part of the area, said she and other city leaders have embraced the Africatown concept, including providing some grant money, though no formal renaming has yet taken place.

“I would say Africatown already exists,” Gauthier said. “For a while now, Southwest Philadelphia has been a place where African and Caribbean migrants have migrated, so all the elements are already there.”

But the reaction of neighborhood residents to the Africatown concept is mixed. The area includes single-family rowhouses, industrial parks and retail corridors serviced by the city’s trolley system. Some residents, like Mark Jones, 57, have gotten to know their African neighbors and concluded they are “good people” who “should have their own part of town.”

“If they can brand downtown as ‘The Gayborhood,’ they can brand this as ‘Africatown,’” said Jones, who is Black, referring to concentrations of LGBTQ residents near downtown Philadelphia. “I think it’s the right thing to do.”

But Jones’s neighbor, 87-year-old Louis Graham, said immigration is changing the character of the neighborhood too rapidly. Graham, who is also Black, said he’s upset that some African immigrants “cut” in front of him when he goes shopping. Other neighbors complain about immigrants double-parking when they go to mosque or not conversing with them because some don’t speak English.

“We was here first and it seems to me some of them come in and want to take over,” Graham said. “Some foreign people have no respect.”

Gauthier acknowledged that the concept of Africatown has led to some community “tensions.” Some native-born Philadelphians who witnessed historical disinvestment in their community now question why so many resources seem to be flowing to African-led initiatives, she said.

“You have newer people come, and there is this perception they are getting things that other people have not,” said Gauthier, whose own mother emigrated from the Caribbean island of St. Vincent. “It can lead to these tensions.”

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Throughout Southwest Philadelphia, however, the African immigrants say they have felt welcomed, comforted and well cared for. Studies show that African immigrants to the United States tend to be more highly educated than other incoming groups or even the U.S. population at large.

“Does America need these very educated migrants?” said Voffee Jabateh, who moved to the United States from Liberia in 1990. “The answer is yes.”

Raa said he was escaping Poro, a men’s secret society in West Africa that conducts ceremonies to bring boys into manhood. He said family members were pressuring him to participate in the ritual, which would have involved carving symbols onto his skin with a knife.

When Raa reached the United States, a fellow detainee gave him the name of a woman in Philadelphia who he said might be able to help. The woman, Fanta Konneh, was a street vendor who sells bananas and mangoes.

Today Raa spends most of his day watching over Konneh’s fruit stand. For him, Philadelphia is a town where “you can work and make it.” He said Trump’s campaign promise to carry out mass deportation is a somewhat distant worry for migrants like himself, who are busy trying to survive.

“Any job I can do, I will do,” Raa said. “I will take a factory job - any job.”

But others are worried. Trump often singled out African immigrants during the campaign.

“A lot of people are coming from jails out of Congo,” he said at a rally in September, repeating a false narrative that authoritarian leaders are freeing criminals so that they can flee to the United States. “They are coming from the Congo. They are coming from Africa. … They are coming from all over the world … and what is happening is we are just destroying the fabric of life in our country.”

Trump won Pennsylvania and captured 11,000 more votes in heavily Democratic Philadelphia than in 2020. But Jabateh does not see that as a rejection of the new arrivals from Africa - or a sign that he should stop his plans to build Africatown. Instead, Jabateh said now is the time to showcase the diversity of Philadelphia, and the nation.

“I am not worried Africatown will stimulate any kind of hate,” he said.

The stakes are high for people such as Sekou Camara, who arrived in Philadelphia this year. Camara, 24, had been an inspector at a seaport in Guinea but said he fled after being arrested for speaking out against “corruption from the highest levels.”

He said that even before the election, African immigrants were “not eating regularly … and not even sleeping regularly.”

Yet Camara’s mood quickly brightened when he spoke about his life so far in Southwest Philadelphia. For the first time in a long time, he said, he feels safe, and he likes being able to find the kinds of food he ate back in Guinea.

“This is almost home,” he said.