ARTWORK

Above: Detail of US History (forgotten), oil painting collage on canvas.

Below detail: Venus Degentium (Diaspora Venus), collage of paper maps.

Who knew there is an African Burial Ground National Monument in Lower Manhattan? Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1993 and a National Monument in 2006 by President George W. Bush, the site is New York’s earliest known African-American “cemetery”. 

An estimated 15,000 people, most of whom were enslaved, but some free, were buried there during the late 17th and 18thcenturies. Excavation of this five to six acres site show it still contains the remains of more than 419 Africans or African Americans who were buried there. In 1991 excavators for a new federal office building in Manhattan unearthed the remains of more than 400 Africans stacked in wooden boxes sixteen to twenty-eight feet below street level.

Before being known as New York, the 17th-century Dutch settlement at the southern tip of Manhattan Island was known as New Amsterdam. Slavery was introduced in New Amsterdam (what we now know as New York City) by the Dutch West India Company in New Netherland. The first slaves were brought to New Amsterdam in about 1626, with the arrival of Paul D’Angola, Simon Congo, Lewis Guinea, Jan Guinea, Ascento Angola, and six other men. (Their names denote their country of origin.) Two years later, three female Angolan slaves arrived. After the arrival of these two groups of enslaved Africans, slavery would continue in what would become New York City for the next two hundred years. 

Some of the Africans who were imported as slaves were able to petition the ruling Dutch administration to gain freedom or “half-freedom” during the time of Dutch rule. In 1643, Paul D’Angola and his companions petitioned the Dutch West India Company in request of their freedom and were granted their freedom along with the acquisition of land on which to build their own houses and farm. By the mid-17th century, the farms of free blacks covered 130 acres where Washington Square Park is now located.

The first slave auction in New York City took place in 1655 at Pearl Street and Wall Street (then located on the East River).

The English seized New Amsterdam in 1664 and renamed the fledgling settlement New York, after the Duke of York. The city’s new English administration changed the rules governing slavery in the colony, making slavery more restrictive than those of the Dutch. The English rescinded many of the former rights and protections of enslaved residents, such as the prohibition against arbitrary physical punishment.

In 1697 Trinity Church gained control of the burial grounds in the city and passed an ordinance excluding blacks from the right to be buried in churchyards, and barring Africans from interment within the city limits. Through much of the 18thcentury, the African burying ground was moved beyond the northern boundary of the city, which was just beyond what is today Chambers Street.

As the city’s population increased, so did the number of residents who owned slaves. According to The Hidden History of Slavery in New York, in 1703, 42% of New York’s households had slaves, much more than Philadelphia and Boston combined.

By the American Revolutionary War, African slaves constituted nearly a quarter of the population of colonial New York City. This was the second-largest number of enslaved Africans in the nation after Charleston, South Carolina. The unfree labor and forced labor of Africans and African Americans was an integral to the development of colonial and federal New York City, in Charleston and in United States history.

During the Revolutionary War, the British occupied and maintained control of New York City. In August of 1783, acting upon orders, Sir Guy Carelton, the last British Army and Royal Navy commander in the former British North America, informed the President of the Confederation Congress that he was proceeding with the subsequent withdrawal of refugees, liberated slaves, and military personnel as fast as possible. Included in this evacuation were over 3,000 Black Loyalists, men of African descent who had escaped the enslavement by Patriot masters (who rejected British rule). The Black Loyalists served on the Loyalist side (supporting continued British rule) during the American Revolution and in return were promised their freedom by the British. 

The British evacuated some 3,000 Black Loyalists from New York to newly established Birchtown, in British North America, Nova Scotia, as free people of color. These evacuees became the first settlement of Black Nova Scotians and Black Canadians. Each had their names individually listed in the Book of Negroes and were given certificates of freedom signed by order of British Brigadier General Samuel Birch. Recorded in 1783, the 150-page Book of Negroes is the only document to have recorded Black Canadians in a large, detailed scope of work. [The British version is held in The National Archives in Kew, London. Nova Scotia Museum Halifax. The American version is held by NARA / the US National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C.] Other Black Loyalists were transported to settlements in several islands in the West Indies and some to London. Some freedmen later migrated from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone, West Africa.

Evacuation Day on November 25th, 1783 marks the Peace of Paris having been signed and the last of the British Army departing from New York City. The British created detailed records to document the freed people who they resettled in Nova Scotia, along with other Loyalists. According to the Treaty of Paris (1783), the US argued for the return of all property, including slaves, but the British had promised these men their freedom during the war in exchange for joining the British cause, and refused to return them to the US.

Unfortunately this diagram of the 'Brookes' slave ship was not distributed in the colonies / the United States, but served as a very useful Abolitionist tool in England and the rest of the United Kingdom. By April 1787 this lithograph was probably the most widely copied, distributed and powerful image used by the abolitionist campaigners. Appearing in newspapers, pamphlets, books and even posters in coffee houses and pubs, it depicts the ship loaded to its full capacity - 454 people crammed into the hold. The 'Brookes' sailed the passage from Liverpool via the Gold Coast in Africa to Jamaica in the West Indies.

Thomas Clarkson commented in his History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade (1808) that the 'print seemed to make an instantaneous impression of horror upon all who saw it, and was therefore instrumental, in consequence of the wide circulation given it in England and the rest of the U.K., in serving the cause of the injured Africans'. An image had rarely been used as a propaganda tool in this way before.

I have very mixed feelings about the 400th anniversary of the arrival of African slaves, my ancestors, to Jamestown, Virginia. It is because I know well American history, and it is because while a visiting scholar at James Madison University in Virginia earlier this year, I decided to make my first trip to Jamestown. I know what I had been taught from grade through high school about this momentous date. I barely was taught anything else about slavery, how my ancestors had been stolen from Africa, stripped of their names, languages, cultures, identities.   But I knew, minimally, they were not “indentured servants,” as there was never a choice to not be a slave. I knew that from 1619 to 1865, 246 long and soul-stripping years, they were beaten, raped, terrorized, reduced to human property, and killed as they, these profoundly wounded persons, literally built the economic infrastructure of America for free. As I walked through that Jamestown settlement, I could feel the energy of those first slaves. I struggled to read the history the way it was told in parts, as if slavery was not so bad. Yes it was so bad, as we still deal with the legacy of it in America. Many of the founding fathers were slave owners even as they were declaring all were created equal. Several of the early presidents of the United States participated in slavery. Much of what slaves were taught continue to trigger Blacks, from divisive conflicts around skin color, to our diets, born of necessity and desperation on those plantations, which wreak havoc on our health. 1619 means, to me, the mental brainwashing and physical and spiritual devastation of an entire race of people, and that truism undermined the morality of America right from the very beginning; and we are paying the price for it in this 21st century when we see so many trafficking in the same kind of hatred, violence, and fear-mongering that was levied against my ancestors back then. What we need in America, what has not happened, is an honest national conversation on race that tells the entire truth about the legacy of slavery, while also acknowledging that, per Dr. Ivan Van Sertima’s landmark book They Came Before Columbus, the history of this part of the world does not and did not begin with European history, that Black people and other people of color have been in these many spaces and places all along. What we need in America at schools, public and private, and from educators of every background, are lessons which do not whitewash slavery, which do not ask Black children, when discussing slavery, to be slaves. What we need in America is a steady gaze in the mirror, accepting that inseparable of any talk about history, about democracy, from 1619 to the Civil War to Dr. King to Black Lives Matter, is the story of those who were brought here as slaves, and how that painful legacy of white supremacist thinking and behavior remains a nasty open sore on the American democracy. I did not think about any of this until I got to college, because in spite of being a straight-A student K through 12, 1619 and what it wrought was watered down—nor were we ever taught the Civil Rights Movement and its efforts to right the wrongs, ever. As a result I grew up as dutifully self-hating as a Black slave on those plantations. It was not just me; it was most Blacks in my community. It was not until I got to that college, Rutgers University in my home state of New Jersey, and began to truly study American history through a different lens—my lens—that it blew me away what slavery had done to us.   I cried reading slave narratives and historical texts. I cried as I imagined what it must have felt like to be un-free for one’s entire life. I cried at how ashamed I had been for so long of Africa, of how I had swallowed whole the distorted and racist images of that motherland from whence my people had come. And yes I cried that day earlier this year when I walked the grounds of Jamestown wondering to myself how any people enslaved could still manage to worship God; to build and create numerous inventions; to put forth songs and sounds that are the foundation for much of American music; to be so patriotic that we have fought in virtually every American war, even as we were being denied our own freedoms; and to be so humanly resilient that we have bounced back time and again, even as what began in 1619 birthed, for many of us, including my single mother and me, generations of poverty and hand-me-down depression and traumas we can never seem to escape. This is why there have been calls for reparations from we descendants of African slaves across decades and eras. There has never been a true and consistent repairing of the human damage done—So, if 1619 should mean anything now, it should mean it is past time to pause, to be equally comfortable and uncomfortable in our American skins, as we face this tragic history, and ourselves, once and for all. Otherwise it is just another celebration, another anniversary, that will fade away like the haunting cries of those packed at the bottom of those slave ships so long ago.       

Kevin Powell is a civil and human rights activist, and author of 13 books including his autobiography, The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy’s Journey into Manhood. An upcoming book will be a biography of Tupac Shakur, the global pop culture and hip-hop icon. You can email Kevin: kevin@kevinpowell.net

[1] How Slavery Shaped America's Oldest And Most Elite Colleges

NPR Staff

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/09/17/223420533/how-slavery-shaped-americas-oldest-and-most-elite-colleges

Books:

Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America, 2007, Sylviane A. Diouf, Oxford University Press.

On Juneteenth, Annette Gordon-Reed, 2021

Thomas Jefferson & Sally Hemings, Annette Gordon Reed, 2008

The Hemings of Monticello: An American Family, Annette Gordon-Reed, 1997

Barracooon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo", 2018, Zora Neale Hurston, Subject: Biography of the last known survivor of the Atlantic slave trade

The Underground Railroad, 2016, Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel

Caste: The origins of our Discontents, 2020, Isabel Wilkerson

Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities, 2013, Craig Steven Wilder

Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, 2010, Fred Wilderson

Afropessimism, 2020, Fred Wilderson

A People's History of the United States, 1980, Howard Zinn

Articles:

'Built by my family': America's grand buildings built by slaves

Reuters/The Wider Image, 2 September, 2019, By Makini Brice

https://widerimage.reuters.com/story/built-by-my-family-americas-grand-buildings-built-by-slaves

The Hidden History of Slavery in New York, The Nation, 2 November, 2008

TV, Videos and Websites:

The Underground Railroad, TV Series, 2021-, TV-Mature Audiences 

100 Amazing Facts About the Negro, PBS Public Broadcast S

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/how-many-slaves-landed-in-the-us/

https://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/campaignforabolition/abolition.html

www.britannica.com

Databases:

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 1525 - 1866, edited by professors David Eltis and David Richardson; most comprehensive analysis of shipping records over the course of the slave trade.