Citigroup now acknowledges that its predecessor banks may have indirectly profited from slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Connections with slavery include a 19th century bank president who promoted the Cuban sugar trade, the relationship between the Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company, one of Citigroup’s predecessor banks, and Alabama cotton planters, and Lehman Brothers, which merged with Citibank in 1998 and in the 1850s traded in cotton. [Read more…] about Citigroup Acknowledges it ‘Indirectly’ Profited from Slavery – Maybe
Did George Washington Burn New York City?
August 27, 1776, British troops under General William Howe attacked American forces commanded by George Washington in the Battle of Brooklyn. Assailed from three sides, Washington and the main body of the Americans escaped across the East River to Manhattan and then fled north, ultimately crossing the Hudson River, then known as the North River, to New Jersey.
If Washington and his troops had been captured either in Brooklyn or Manhattan, the American Revolution would likely have ended soon after it began. [Read more…] about Did George Washington Burn New York City?
A United Nations Exhibit Sheds Light On Dutch Colonial Slavery
The exhibit “Slavery: Ten True Stories of Dutch Colonial Slavery from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam” will be displayed in the lobby of the United Nations in New York City from February 27 through March 30, 2023.
The exhibition explores ten true personal stories centered on wooden foot stocks known as a “tronco” (Portuguese for tree trunk) that were used to constrain enslaved people by clamping their ankles. The foot stocks represent the more than one million people who forced to work in Dutch colonies on sugar plantations and in mines and harbors in Brazil, Suriname, the Caribbean, South Africa, and Asia. [Read more…] about A United Nations Exhibit Sheds Light On Dutch Colonial Slavery
The Two Alexander Macombs: A Slaveholder & A Duplicitous Negotiator
Alexander Macomb, the elder, (1748–1831) was a fur trader, land and currency speculator, and slaveholder who supported the British during the American Revolution and provided the occupying British army with trade goods. [Read more…] about The Two Alexander Macombs: A Slaveholder & A Duplicitous Negotiator
US, NYS Continues To Honor Slavers, Racists, Traitors and Scoundrels
In 2023, the United States Military Academy will remove 13 Confederate symbols on its West Point campus. They include a portrait of Robert E. Lee dressed in a Confederate uniform, a stone bust of Lee, who was superintendent of West Point before the Civil War, and a bronze plaque with an image of a hooded figure and the words “Ku Klux Klan.”
Art displayed in the United States Capitol building in Washington, DC, still includes images of 141 enslavers and 13 Confederates who went to war against the country. A study by the Washington Post found that more than one-third of the statues and portraits in the Capitol building honor enslavers or Confederates and at least six more honor possible enslavers where evidence is disputed. [Read more…] about US, NYS Continues To Honor Slavers, Racists, Traitors and Scoundrels
Sandra Adickes: New York City Teacher and Civil Rights Activist
On June 25, 1964, The New York Times reported that thirty New York City public school teachers, most of them women, young, and white, would travel to rural Mississippi to teach African American children in 10th, 11th, and 12th grades for six weeks. While in Mississippi the teachers would live in the homes of Black families and join the families on Sundays in “Negro churches.”
On June 30, 1964, at the end of the school year, eight New York City teachers boarded a bus bound for Memphis, Tennessee where they would receive training before continuing on to Mississippi. Another 23 New York City teachers were expected to join them. [Read more…] about Sandra Adickes: New York City Teacher and Civil Rights Activist
Ferguson Brothers Lynchings on Long Island: A Civil Rights Catalyst
In a book dedicated to Wilfred Ferguson, the son of Charles Ferguson, teacher and historian Christopher Verga resurrects the story of two Roosevelt, New York brothers killed by a Freeport police officer in 1946.
Verga opens The Ferguson Brothers Lynchings on Long Island: A Civil Rights Catalyst (History Press, 2022) with an account of the long history of racism on Long Island and in the Freeport area including Ku Klux Klan activity. The background to the 1946 killings takes up the first third of the book. The book is well researched and referenced with extended quotes from official court documents and newspaper accounts. [Read more…] about Ferguson Brothers Lynchings on Long Island: A Civil Rights Catalyst
NY-CT Border Disputes & The Kidnapping of Freedom-Seeker Peter John Lee
If you’ve driven on U.S. 684 or Byram Road in Greenwich, CT you see signs notifying you that you are crisscrossing back and forth between New York and Connecticut. The border has been a sore point since the British colonies were founded in the 17th century.
In the 1680s Bedford and Rye were shifted from Connecticut to New York leading to a local taxpayers revolt. In 1857, a report by the New York State Senate noted, “Along the whole distance the greatest uncertainty existed, and a distrust and want of confidence in all the supposed lines.” The border was not finally clarified until 1879. [Read more…] about NY-CT Border Disputes & The Kidnapping of Freedom-Seeker Peter John Lee
The 1883 Civil Rights Cases, the 14th Amendment, and Jim Crow New York
The United States Supreme Court is now poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. In a draft opinion, Justice Samuel Alito described the 1973 7-2 Court decision as an over-extended application of the federal government’s 14th Amendment responsibility to protect the right of citizens to due process and equal protection of the law. He argued “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.”
The Supreme Court took a similar position on the 14th Amendment in the 1883 Civil Rights Cases when an earlier conservative majority declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional, effectively ending the post-Civil War Reconstruction era and ushering in 100 years of state and local Jim Crow segregation laws.
In the Civil Rights Cases, the Supreme Court consolidated four challenged to the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act. One of the cases, U.S. v. Singleton, involved the refusal by a New York theater to admit an African American patron who had purchased a ticket. [Read more…] about The 1883 Civil Rights Cases, the 14th Amendment, and Jim Crow New York
Documents Reveal Sojourner Truth’s Battle to Free Her Son from Slavery
In February 2022, the New York State Archives announced that archivists had uncovered court records detailing the 1828 legal battle by Sojourner Truth to secure her enslaved son Peter’s freedom. According to archivist Jim Folts, this case was the first time in United States history that a Black woman successfully sued a White man for a family member’s freedom.
After passage of the New York State Gradual Emancipation Act in 1799, some slaveholders illegally sold enslaved Africans to Southern planters for the expanding cotton industry. When Sojourner Truth, then known as Isabella Van Wagenen, escaped from enslavement in 1826, her former “owner,” John J. Dumont of New Paltz, Ulster County, NY, sold her five-year old son Peter to Eleazer Gedney who planned to take the boy with him to England.
When this plan fell through, Eleazer Gedney sold Peter to his brother, Solomon Gedney, who resold Peter to their sister’s husband, a man named Fowler, who was a wealthy Alabama planter. [Read more…] about Documents Reveal Sojourner Truth’s Battle to Free Her Son from Slavery
Slave-holding New York State Congressional Representatives: A Complete List
According to a Washington Post report in the early years of the American republic over 1,700 Congressional representatives, Senators and Congressmen owned enslaved people. Despite a very clear conflict of interest they voted on the laws governing the country and the enslaved population. Some Representatives served in Congress long after slavery was finally abolished in New York State.
Five of the first seven U.S. Presidents were definitely slaveholders and at least five other later Presidents had family connections to slavery. Five of the Supreme Court Justices who ruled that African Americans had no citizenship rights under the Constitution in the 1857 Dred Scott decision were slaveholders. [Read more…] about Slave-holding New York State Congressional Representatives: A Complete List
Manhattan Street Names Tied to Slavery Listed from A to Z
There is a nationwide movement to reconsider the names of places and teams and to stop honoring racists and racist symbols. The Cleveland Indians will soon be no more; the baseball team will be known as the Cleveland Guardians. The Washington Redskins are now the Washington Football Team while a new name is being considered.
A bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a slave trader, a Confederate general responsible for atrocities committed against African American troops serving in the United States army, and a founder of the terrorist Ku Klux Klan, was finally removed from the state capitol building in Nashville, Tennessee. [Read more…] about Manhattan Street Names Tied to Slavery Listed from A to Z
How New York’s Suburbs Got So Segregated
Why is the population of Massapequa in New York’s Nassau County 98% percent white? Why do almost no Black families live in suburban Levittown, New York? Are we looking at free choices by families or underlying housing patterns that reflect the impact of past and current racist practices?
Newsday exposed racial channeling by Long Island realtors in an investigation that showed how they steered potential home buyers to particular towns based on their race and ethnicity. [Read more…] about How New York’s Suburbs Got So Segregated
New Book Considers The Last Slave Ships & New York
The city of New York was at the center of the illegal trans-Atlantic slave trade during the 1850s and early 1860 conveying kidnapped and enslaved Africans from the coast of West Africa primarily into Cuba where there was an expanding sugar industry.
In The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage (Yale Univ. Press, 2020), John Harris, a professor of history at Erskine College in South Carolina, estimates that between 1853 and 1867, 474 shipments carrying almost 200,000 men women and children were brought to Cuba. Most of this was brokered by transplanted Brazilians and Portuguese known as the Portuguese Company, who shifted their operation to New York because of the decline of the Angola to Brazil slave trade in the 1850s. Harris argues they were supported by the pro-slavery faction of the city’s Democratic Party and its chief financial institutions. [Read more…] about New Book Considers The Last Slave Ships & New York
NYC Park ‘Spaces’ Recognize African American Contributions, But
A press release from the New York City Parks Department announced “In honor of the 51st anniversary of Black Solidarity Day … 10 park spaces” would be named in “honor of the Black experience in New York City.” This was intended to fulfill a pledge made by the Parks Department “to demonstrate how it stands in solidarity with the Black Community in its fight to combat systemic racism.”
The newly named park spaces recognize national figures like Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Elston Howard, and Ella Fitzgerald who all had New York ties and were local community leaders. Baldwin gets a lawn in Harlem. Langston Hughes gets a playground. Elston Howard, a baseball MVP for the Yankees, gets a baseball field near Yankee Stadium. Ella Fitzgerald gets a playground in Queens. [Read more…] about NYC Park ‘Spaces’ Recognize African American Contributions, But
Reconsidering the Legacy of Alexander Hamilton
A new study by Jessie Serfilippi, a historical interpreter at the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site in Albany, New York, details Alexander Hamilton’s “Hidden History as an Enslaver.”
Philip Schuyler was the father of Eliza Hamilton, Hamilton’s wife, and one of the largest slaveholders in New York State when the new nation was founded. [Read more…] about Reconsidering the Legacy of Alexander Hamilton
Take A Lesson from History, Marshal Kids to Defeat COVID-19
As neighborhoods in New York City and towns in New York State face a COVID-19 resurgence, it’s time to learn a lesson from New York’s past and marshal kids to combat the crisis.
Not only can school children play an important role in convincing adults to wear masks, wash hands, and maintain social distancing, activism will give young people a sense of efficacy during trying times where they feel isolated from friends, teachers, and extended family members. Enlisting our kids helped New York and the country address past crises and can again. [Read more…] about Take A Lesson from History, Marshal Kids to Defeat COVID-19
The 1900 New York City Anti-Black Police Riot
The killing – some would say execution – of George Floyd by a senior Minneapolis police officer (and field trainer) and the militarized police response to Black Lives Matter protests have led to calls for a systematic reevaluation of policing in the United States.
The issues raised by protestors are definitely not new. In 1960, James Baldwin wrote in an Esquire magazine article that the police “represent the force of the white world, and that world’s real intentions are, simply, for that world’s criminal profit and ease, to keep the black man corralled up here, in his place.” [Read more…] about The 1900 New York City Anti-Black Police Riot
Harriet the Movie and the Harriet Tubman of History
I like the movie Harriet, especially the singing, but again, I also liked Wonder Woman, Black Panther, Wolverine, and Dr. Strange (but not Thor, Aquaman, or the Avengers series). Harriet the movie is about a super-hero whose superpower is that God gives her specific directions about what to do (turn left at the river).
Harriet in the movie is based on an important historical figure, but in the end, she is a movie character, not the historic Harriet Tubman. As a movie, two-thumbs up; as history, too many rotten tomatoes. [Read more…] about Harriet the Movie and the Harriet Tubman of History
Reckoning with Our Legacy of Slavery
On Friday October 25, the New York City Commission on Human Rights will commemorate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans at the British Jamestown colony in 1619.
“Reckoning with Our Legacy of Slavery and Charting an Anti-Racist Future” will be at the New York County Surrogate’s Court (31 Chambers Street, New York). There is no charge to attend but you must make a reservation. Email Christelle Onwu at conwu@cchr.nyc.gov by October 22nd, 2019. [Read more…] about Reckoning with Our Legacy of Slavery