Entries tagged with “African Americans” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York

The NEH's magazine, Humanities, has a terrific interview this month with one of my favorite historians -- and favorite people -- Jill Lepore. A Harvard prof (and chair of the school's History and Literature program) and award-winning author, Lepore also, along with our friend Caleb Crain, has become a key writer on American history and culture for the New Yorker. And she's an active parent of small children. And she's only a few years on the other side of 40. As Ari over at Edge of the American West asked, "Jealous?"

The whole interview is worth reading, but especially relevant to this site is the bit about her book New York Burning, a gripping read about the city's purported slave revolt of 1741:

HUMANITIES: In New York Burning, you wrote about ... the fires that swept through Manhattan in 1741.

LEPORE: ... Another long-forgotten episode in early American history. It's a little like Salem witchcraft, which everyone knows about, the 1692 witchcraft trials in which twenty people died, except that what happened in New York was a lot worse. Thirteen black men were burned at the stake; seventeen more were hanged. No one was burned at the stake in Salem. That's just a figment of our collective imagination. What happened in New York was also, historically, far more significant. It played a role in how slavery evolved in the North. And it played a role, I think, in how American politics evolved and how Americans came to tolerate partisanship and the two-party system.

I had wanted to write about this episode for my dissertation but decided against it because, while the prosecutors left behind a rich documentary trail (nearly two hundred black men were arrested and interrogated and many of them were brought to trial), the confessions aren't admissible as historical evidence, since they were confessing to avoid being burned to death and, under those circumstances, who wouldn't lie? I couldn't quite figure out how to deal with that evidentiary problem.

Then, in 1991, workers excavating the foundation for a new federal office building in Manhattan came across the African burial ground from the colonial period. And I thought, 'Oh, this will be incredibly loud, noisy, great historical evidence.' Except it wasn't. The burials and the remains were highly controversial, and the reports were not altogether forthcoming about what scholars ought to conclude from the analysis of those remains. But I wrote the book anyway.

HUMANITIES: In The Name of War [her first book, about "King Philip's War"] you showed how New Englanders described their humiliation and their suffering in language identical to how they described the Indians. In this book you showed pre-Revolutionary Americans describing the restraints on their political liberties in terms so drastic that they actually better describe the bondage in which they keep African slaves and the slaves then referred to as Spanish Negroes. There seems to be this kind of very careful, subtle argument about how we take our enemy's attributes and apply them to ourselves when we think we're in a really bad place.

LEPORE: I'm interested in our capacity to justify acts of tremendous, unspeakable cruelty. It's not obvious, at least not to me. And the way I have always tried to puzzle it out is by thinking mainly about language. What, literally, is the vocabulary of justification?

In eighteenth-century New York, a lot of people want to depose the governor. He is a tyrant. What they write about him, what they write about their right to get rid of him, is, to me, as a citizen, quite moving and inspiring. And yet those same people deploy that very same rhetoric to justify enslaving Africans. How do they manage that? How, honestly, is that possible? I don't know that we have ever really reckoned with that, with what Edmund Morgan called the "American paradox," that our democracy rests, at some level, on the idea of enslavement. It doesn't anymore. But that history matters. And I think we'd be stronger for seeing it more clearly.

HUMANITIES: You also make the argument that slavery is somehow crucial to understanding the development of political parties in America. How does slavery help illuminate the development of political parties?

LEPORE: I tried to make that argument, but I'm not sure it worked. The day that New York Burning was published, Hurricane Katrina touched down in New Orleans. I had a new baby, and I was home with him, and found myself glued to the television. Talking heads would come on--news anchors, commentators--and say, while looking at the footage of nobody but black people on the roofs of those houses, as if shocked, as if this had never occurred to them, 'Oh, my God. Race still exists in this country. There still is racism. Oh, my God. New Orleans is segregated!'

I'm trying to convince people that it matters that black men were burned at the stake in New York City in 1741, and people are surprised that black people are marooned on the roofs of New Orleans in 2005? Here I am, trying to make an argument about eighteenth-century politics, attempting to illustrate, with all manner of exhaustive archival research--charts about the census and the tax lists--and close readings of Blackstone's Commentaries and Restoration drama, trying to argue that the constant, ever-present threat of black conspiracy made white political pluralism possible. Because compared to that, having a two-party system was a piece of cake. And I had to go give some goofy book talks, and I'm thinking, at these bookstores, Sheesh, there's just this huge gap between what I'm trying to say and what people kind of need to know or where we can enter the conversation together, and that's my fault, all mine. What am I doing here in 1741? At the level of imagining our national past and wrestling with the consequences of slavery, the wages of slavery, well, that didn't even begin to happen until the last election where there was a genuine national conversation about what slavery has done to American politics.

HUMANITIES: To go back to the eighteenth century for just a second: So the threat or the partly imagined threat of a slave rebellion, it encouraged people to find a more friendly system of opposition, which was the beginnings of the party system?

LEPORE: History doesn't always work that way, neatly. And when it seems like it works that way, usually someone is being facile. But here's what I argued: In New York in the 1730s there was an extraordinary and unprecedented amount of political opposition, including the founding of an opposition political party. In 1735, a printer named John Peter Zenger was tried for sedition, for publishing a newspaper that opposed the policies of the royally appointed governor. Zenger's trial is one of the most thrilling episodes in early American political history, and it nearly tears the colony apart.

Six years later, an alleged slave conspiracy brings together these two political parties, who, I argue, heal the political divisions between them by burning black men at the stake. And, I think, like decapitating Philip and putting his head on a pike, this is a constitutive moment for a pluralistic politics. It's as if those executions say, 'You and I, we can disagree. We can disagree--a lot--because we are not beyond the limits of our own politics, we are not Indians on the warpath, we are not black men talking about burning the city down.' It's a dark story, I don't like that story, I sometimes wish the past were prettier, but it's how I read the evidence.

More on the African Burial Ground here.

Previously.

Channel 13 has a new episode of The City Concealed, dealing with the nineteenth-century African American village Weeksville, now swallowed up in Central Brooklyn. By way of prose intro, here's some background from the Weeksville Heritage Center:

In 1838, only eleven years after slavery ended in New York State, free African American James Weeks purchased a modest plot of land from Henry C. Thompson, another free African American. That land in what is now Central Brooklyn became Weeksville, a thriving, self sufficient African American community. Weeksville quickly became a safe haven for southern Blacks fleeing slavery and free northern Blacks fleeing racial hatred and violence, including the deadly Civil War draft riots in lower Manhattan.

Established as a suburban enclave on the outskirts of Brooklyn, by 1850 Weeksville became the second largest known independent African American community in pre-Civil War America. Weeksville was also the only African American community whose residents were distinctive for their urban rather than rural occupations, and the only one that merged into a neighborhood of a major American city after the Civil War. Moreover, Weeksville had a higher rate of African American property ownership than 15 other U.S. cities and more job opportunities than ten other northern cities.

By the 1860s, Weeksville had its own schools, churches, an orphanage, an old age home, a variety of Black-owned businesses and one of the country's first African American newspapers, Freedman's Torchlight. Almost 500 families headed by ministers, doctors, teachers, tradesmen and other self-reliant citizens lived in Weeksville by the 1900s. Its citizens included Alfred Cornish, a member of the 54th Regiment whose story was told in the film Glory; Dr. Susan Smith McKinney-Steward, the first female African American physician in New York State and the third in the nation, Moses P. Cobb, the first African American policeman in Brooklyn's Ninth Ward, and Junius C. Morel, a well-known educator, journalist and activist.

Weeksville covered seven blocks and was a model of African American entrepreneurial success, political freedom and intellectual creativity. Its residents participated in every major national effort against slavery and for equal rights for free people of color, including the black convention movement, voting rights campaigns, the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, resistance to the Draft Riots in New York City; Freedman's schools and African nationalism. According to one historian, Public School 83 in Weeksville became the first public school in the nation to integrate fully its teaching staff.

The community still existed through the 1930s, but by the mid-1950s, Weeksville was all but forgotten, with many of its structures and institutions replaced by new roads and buildings. In the 1960s, Weeksville was only an historical footnote that historian James Hurley and pilot Joseph Haynes set out to research--from the air.

The rest of the historical piece can be found here. And here's the episode from The City Concealed:

The City Concealed: Weeksville from Thirteen.org on Vimeo.

Greetings from upstate, where the 29th Conference on New York State History is underway. In an hour or so I'm presenting a paper called "The City on Stage," which grows out of an undergrad seminar I've taught a few times and will serve as an early run at my contribution to our Cambridge Companion to the Literatures of New York City.

This is my first NYSHA conference, and I'm enjoying myself, even though this remote locale (we're at Skidmore College, where I'm writing from a dorm room that smells like dirty feet) reminds me that I don't miss being at a college with a quad: there's something creepy about the insularity of it all. Which doesn't mean the school hasn't been a wonderful host ...

The conference itself is a nice blend of academics and public historians -- like many such conferences, a little on the grey side, which I actually enjoy. I've met multiple borough historians and some local history association presidents (including one for Randall's Island) with whom I hope to keep contact and rely on as resources for teaching NYC cultural history.

I'll have more to write later about last night's highly enjoyable keynote by Kevin Baker (author of the historical NYC novels Dreamland, Paradise Alley, and Striver's Row). First I wanted to provide a couple links based on one of the more interesting presentations I hit yesterday: on celebrity culture, burlesque troops, and what appears to be a stalker diary written by a young African American woman named Ellen Waite, who had been a hotel worker in Saratoga Springs but moved to the city sometime during the year chronicled in what seems to be a fascinating little diary.

Emma's diary, owned by the New York State Library, has been beautifully digitized and is available online, both in pdf images and as a transcript. A paper by Susan Ingalls Lewis and Morgan Gwenwald of SUNY New Paltz chronicled Emma's growing obsession, once she'd relocated to New York City from upstate, with the British burlesque bombshell Lydia Thompson, who was famous, among other things, not only for her intensely physical stage presence but for horsewhipping a man who'd insulted her husband/manager. (Aside from the paper yesterday, anything I know about Thompson comes from Robert C. Allen's very fun book Horrible Prettiness, on the cultural meanings of burlesque performance in 19c NYC.)


Waite apparently goes, in the diary, from fawning over Thompson on stage to following her around town, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. She ends her year with this:

"Saturday 31. The weather is not settled yet. but it has moderated considerably. my eyes were gratified by a sight of my darling tonight. I shall not have much longer time to look at her. well the old year is about gone into the vast gazes[?] of eternity with the hopes and fears sorrows and disappointments of Millions in its grasp. it has been a year of sorrows and disappointments like many others to me, I wish that the new year might bring brighter prospects and answered petitions to me, and so farewell to 1870."

I count it among small miracles when such documents -- especially from people who would otherwise be confined to anonymity in history's dustbin -- somehow manage to survive.

Later last night, Gwenwald, a librarian at New Paltz, told me about the Lesbian Herstory Archives, a project she's been long affiliated with, located in a Park Slope brownstone. I'll have to add it to our list of NYC resources.