Slavery in New York? For many New Yorkers, accustomed to associating slavery with Southern plantations, the fact that slavery existed in our city is a shocking surprise.
Yet for much of the 17th and 18th centuries, New York boasted the largest urban slave population in mainland North America. Enslaved people made up one-fifth the population. They built the wall at Wall Street, and cleared the way for Harlem and Route 1. Census figures showed slaves in the state until 1850.
Lower Manhattan City Council Member Chris Marte was just a kid in elementary school in 2006 when the New York Historical Society put on “Slavery in New York,” the groundbreaking exhibit documenting the role of enslaved African Americans in building New York City and State.
It blew his mind.
Fast forward some twenty-plus years after the exhibit, to when the grown-up Marte met Jacob Morris, the ebullient and persevering visionary pushing to create the New York City Freedom Trail. Morris, who heads the Harlem Historical Society and who contributed to the 2006 exhibit, has long been eager to spread the stories not only of slavery in New York, but of New Yorkers’ heroic role in slavery’s abolition.
Morris for hours regaled Marte with history stories. “I gave him a copy of the proposed Freedom Trail map,” Morris recalled. “He was, like, ‘wow.’”
The Freedom Trail came to Morris in a dream, as a way to tell the stories of slavery and abolition in New York.
In an interview with The Village Star-Revue, he observed that Boston has its Freedom Trail, following the freedom of the American Republic from England. And Philadelphia has its trail tracing the birth of the U.S. Constitution.
New York City deserves its own Freedom Trail, Morris declared, celebrating “the struggle for freedom from chattel slavery. New York City’s role was immense and it’s something to be proud of.”
In September, Morris’ vision came closer to reality, when Council Member Marte, working alongside Queens Council Member Dr. Nantasha Williams, secured the City Council’s passage, 49-0, of legislation aimed to create both citywide and Lower Manhattan Freedom Trails, “walkable tours which mark and commemorate historical sites in New York City that are associated with the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad.”
The law establishes a task force of public officials, scholars and others to conduct at least two public meetings and to submit a report of recommendations within one year of convening.
For Council Member Marte, the law launches an exciting opportunity to tell history from a people’s perspective. Writing on Instagram, he observed: “Historic figures like Hamilton or structures like the Brooklyn Bridge suck up a lot of attention when people think of our city’s history. But what’s noteworthy about the Underground Railroad is that it wasn’t an achievement of a particular individual or tied to a singular place. It was a network of resistance, a grassroots movement to liberate people, and a decentralized success relying on people whose names will never be known and locations that are still being uncovered.”
As part of the legislative push, Marte’s office did a fancy mock-up of Morris’ Lower Manhattan Freedom Trail map. Among the sites:
- The “Land of the Blacks,” Minetta Lane and beyond. When the Dutch first settled New Amsterdam, they gave limited freedom and property rights to Africans, whom they encouraged, starting in 1643, to set up farms in an area extending north from the wall of Wall Street through
- Tribeca and the Village. As Morris noted, these Black farms were a “buffer zone” to protect the Dutch from attacks by the Lenape, the indigenous people the Dutch displaced: “If the Indians attacked, they’d have to go through the Blacks first.”
- Slave market, Wall Street and Water Street. Established by local law, the slave market was in operation from 1711 to 1762.
- The African Burial Ground, 290 Broadway. The African Burial Ground National Monument, which includes a visitor center and an outdoor memorial run by the National Parks Service, commemorates the earliest and largest African burial ground in the United States. About 15,000 free and enslaved Blacks were buried over six acres from the mid-1630s to 1735. Morris recalled how easily the site could have been destroyed during federal construction there in 1991. A construction worker, “troubled” that “the bulldozers are crunching up these bones” placed a 2 am call to the Public Historian at the Schomberg Library, he said, spurring immediate archeological and commemorative efforts.
- 199 Chambers Street. This former dock site—which Morris successfully re-named Frederick Douglass Landing—is where famous fugitive slave and orator Frederick Douglass landed upon his escape from slavery in 1838.
- David Ruggles’ boarding house and anti-slavery reading room, 36 and 76 Lispenard Street. The fearless Ruggles, the first Black bookseller and printer, anticipated Malcolm X in his “by any means necessary” attitude toward abolition and the rescuing of fugitive slaves. A founder of the Committee of Vigilance in 1835, he led Black and white radical abolitionists to establish a network of safe houses, and take direct action, even boarding ships to liberate captive Blacks.
- 122 Pearl Street, once the location of the store of Arthur Tappan, attacked by pro-slavery rioters in 1834, in a seven-day melee known as the “Tappan riot.” Arthur and his brother Lewis were anti-slavery activists who financially underwrote the national abolition movement; Southern newspapers offered bounties for their assassination.
- Park Row and Chatham Street. At this junction, Black school teacher Elizabeth Jennings was thrown off a trolley car by a white conductor in 1854—spurring her successful lawsuit to desegregate local transit more than a hundred years before Rosa Parks.
Beyond Lower Manhattan, there is a rich citywide history to be mined by the task force. Brooklyn in particular was an abolitionist hotbed.
Council Member Marte noted that the Underground Railroad was early mass organizing, and “mass organizing will always be a threat to entrenched power.” He expressed hope that New Yorkers exposed to “this hidden history” can apply “its lessons to modern day struggles.”
