New York City: slavery capital of the North!
Preliminary thoughts on the architecture of race, space, and ghosts in the Cannibal Nation.
History is integral to our understanding of the present and the future. Knowing the real history of the US is crucial to understanding everything that’s happening all around us. Likewise, as New Yorkers, to understand more honestly how our city came to be requires letting go of such optimistic notions that change has occurred. The remnants of the first stages of slavery are both hidden and visible today. Some lay just below the surface, while others tower around us. It is a legacy perpetuated and codified into our political, legal, and financial infrastructure. Real estate, private property, and public spaces get turned over to reproduce and restructure the status quo: white supremacy and the slave economy. New York City is what it is because of slavery. It is still feeding and running on Black flesh and social death.
Often we are conditioned by a redacted history of our city and country, which contributes to a more white-washed, mainstream, liberal perspective that leaves much to be desired. Even today, writers who cite accounts that were once kept from public knowledge will conclude with the typical summation that, although much still needs to change about our city and country, “we have come so far.” Such conclusions are far too generous and, in fact, just incorrect. Aesthetic changes and upgrades to white supremacy do not change the system of white supremacy — not least when such a clear connection remains from the 1600s until today, a connection that has fostered the ghosts of the not-so-distant past. Nevertheless, it allows those ghosts to mold our present onward into the future if there is any possibility of a future that can truly break from our colonial origins.
The all too common liberal-minded content of “Yes our past was racist, but look where we are now!” does not provide a useful lens through which to understand where we stand in the geography of history, and that will not be used here. To move forward toward actual material progress, we must fully accept often-told lies and difficult truths. Both North and South were aligned politically, socially, and economically — and still are today in the United States. Of course, many other details and events contribute to the appearance and actual being of complexity in the inter-Mason-Dixon line relationship, however, I argue here that while many aspects of that detailed history are true, the result remained: both North and South united around slavery and white supremacy. Slavery and New York City have been linked since its beginnings.
Slavery begets slavery and wealth begets wealth; The architecture that makes up the urban environment of New York City’s physical space has been shaped by the desires and imperatives of our century’s old culture of modernity, founded on colonialism, slavery, and anti-Blackness. These characteristics, along the way, became ghosts and haunt our present. Maybe then, a hauntological framework — a way of looking at and analyzing the persistence or return to different aspects of our cultural and social past — better suits this investigation into New York City, its history, and its current form.
If we are to understand any chance of a radically different future as being futile then this might help us understand why slavery and anti-Blackness persist so strongly today; it would be useful to start applying race to hauntological thought. Given that neoliberalism is one of many social and economic forms that exist within the system of white supremacy, it is important to pay attention to what some white thinkers reveal about our race — whether they frame it in racial terms or not. US chattel slavery is the main organizing principle of US history and culture, which can and should be viewed through a perspective of ‘haunting’ and ‘nostalgia’ if we are to have a better grasp of why the culture and its productions manifest the way they do.
The architecture of race and space in New York City creates a closed circuit of police surveillance and illegitimate occupation and intensifies financial exclusion and containment of Black American communities. Public spaces, architecture, physical structures, and racialized boundaries are shaped by the specters of the original colony and the enslaved people who built it all. Gotham City is a haunted city, and the United States is a haunted nation, stuck in a repeating loop of never changing.
Blackness in its various forms is an intrinsic characteristic of New York City and the United States; sadly, this is also true for the social, political, and economic systems of US chattel slavery. Without the influence and inventions stolen and borrowed from Africans and ‘African Americans,’ there would be no such thing as the United States as we know it — not least our culture. While the origins of slavery and New York City are told, rightfully so, from the bottom up (Lower Manhattan followed by Northern expansion), there is also the history of Black labor and bondage (to varying degrees) that was happening at the same time up in what is now known as Yonkers and The Bronx and even further north. The histories that developed on both ends of the land area now known as the ‘five boroughs’ are connected.
One day in the middle of the twentieth century, Bill Finger and Bob Kane met at Poe Park in the Bronx and created Batman. Today, Gotham City is synonymous with the Big Apple because of the general aesthetic of the comic city of Gotham and the overwhelming presence of crime, poverty, and inequality compounded by rampant corruption in the police force and the politicians who run the city. Although these white men may not have considered any presence of Blackness when they created the ‘dark knight,’ the undeniable connection between the two can be read through a lens of race and US History. “De Certeau claims that places are ‘haunted by many different spirits, spirits one can “invoke” or not’, for “haunted places are the only ones people can live in” ’ (Edensor 2005:829). As we know, there is no way to properly look at and assess our current city without fully accepting the strong and unbroken line between our colonial origins and our current state today. The connection manifests a material and ethereal existence woven through every atom of our being so profoundly that most of us remain unaware of how much race and space mold all that we create.
To those with the slightest bit of awareness, it should come as no surprise that this alternate New York City (Gotham) and its caped savior were created on the land that Edgar Allen Poe owned. Poe — his life, work, and land — were not disconnected from the history of US chattel slavery, nor are they today.
Race and the economy of slavery were no mystery to Poe. In one of his lesser-known poetic works, ‘Hop-Frog’ (1849), he wrote:
“The chains are for the purpose of increasing the confusion by their jangling. You are supposed to have escaped, en masse, from your keepers. Your majesty cannot conceive the effect produced, at a masquerade, by eight chained ourang-outangs, imagined to be real ones by most of the company; and rushing in with savage cries, among the crowd of delicately and gorgeously habited men and women. The contrast is inimitable!”
‘Hop-Frog’ was written at the same time that legal kidnappings and human trafficking of free Black people (and children) in New York City were rampant. It was written during a time when Black Americans were trafficked for profit down south into plantation slavery, while many northern white Americans were illegally and unconstitutionally participating in the continuation of the Atlantic slave trade that had been outlawed in 1808. The Democratic Party — North and South — was working hard together to maintain the system of anti-Black chattel slavery and Jim Crow, which effectively terrorized and economically excluded Black Americans from the economy and citizenship. Poe himself participated in slave trading in the North when he acted “as agent for his aunt” when he facilitated the sale of “her 21-year-old slave, Edwin, to one Henry Ridgeway for $40” (Clayton 1993). The bill of sale reading:
“Know all men by these presents that I, Edgar Allan Poe, agent for Maria Clemm of Baltimore City and County and State of Maryland, for and in consideration of the sum of $40 in hand paid by Henry Ridgway of Baltimore City at or before the sealing and delivery of these presents, the receipt whereof is hereby acknowledged, have granted, bargained and sold and by these presents do grant, bargain and sell unto the said Henry Ridgway . . . a negro man named Edwin, aged 21 years on the first day of March next to serve until he shall arrive at the age of 30 years, no longer.”
What today is about thirty blocks south of Poe’s house became the neighborhood of Morrisania, an area that makes up but a small section of the two-thousand-acre plantation ground belonging to the Morris family. The family’s original five hundred acres was first established on the land originally settled by Jonas Bronck. The “feisty, business savvy, well connected, extremely aristocratic” Lewis family owned the land as far back at the 1670's, the dawning years of British dominance in the New York region (2016)-a family already profiting from sugar and slavery in the West Indies. Lewis Morris moved to the Bronx from the Caribbean when his brother died and took over their land. He was the final owner of the plantation and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Lewis and his brother Richard had also spread their entrepreneurial skills on the other side of the Hudson River, bringing chattel slavery to New Jersey (Geffken 2022).
Poe’s house still stands today on the Grand Concourse and East Kingsbridge Road. The land that became known as The Bronx was also once a land of slavery and plantations; a land where monuments to our colonial past — such as the presence of Poe’s house or the very archaeology of slavery at the Van Courtland Plantation (Bankoff and Winter 2005) in the Bronx’s biggest park — can be found. Poe’s creative and professional existence is just one of many examples of how prevalent anti-Black slavery was in the north and how interwoven this social and economic system was — and why it still is today.”
On any given day you can watch the calm waters of the Hudson River moving both north and south. The two-way flow of the Hudson Estuary is a perfect and subtle metaphor for our city: networks of capital and interest flowed north and south to strengthen and spread the system of chattel slavery (Beckert & Rockman 2016). Slavery grew gradually up along the river that would become known as The Hudson, which led to Dutch settlements as far as upstate. What became known as Yonkers and the Bronx was plantation territory.
Just a short walk inland from the cool waters of the Hudson on one of the Metro Train stops is Getty Square; a former plaza where Africans were actioned and sold after being marched from docked ships. Just a little way up the hill from this burgeoning social center is the Phillipse Manor, home of one of the richest slave-owning families in all of New York. Now sitting at the center of newly built high-end real estate, the process of colonial expansion/Black economic inequality/gentrification, the Phillipse Manor is perfectly situated to exemplify how our city, state, and country are haunted.
The history and current condition of slavery and white supremacy in New York City are also perpetuated and codified into our political, legal, and financial infrastructure. Real estate, private property, and public spaces get turned over to reproduce and restructure the status quo: white supremacy and the slave economy. New York City is what it is because of slavery. It stands today, still feeding and running on Black failure and flesh.
As a city, and a country, it is necessary to understand where we are located in history; an effective way to do this is by learning about revolutionary Black American Freedmen of the past and the fearless work of their descendants today. Those trailblazers who fought tirelessly to protect the lives of the descendants of US chattel slavery, not least in New York City — David Ruggles was one of them. His aggressive activism and fiery publications exposed the Southern allegiance that New York City held and the urgency needed to bring this corrupt system to a halt.
As the uprisings in the spring and summer of 2020 were dying down, I decided to go to lower Manhattan to take in the aftermath and pay homage to David Ruggles and the brave and powerful descendants of US chattel slavery that passed through the city that I call home. The windows of Ruggles’ former home at 36 Lispenard Street were boarded up during the uprising, but it is still there after all these years. This neighborhood was a battleground for abolitionists fighting with David Ruggles, who was trying to keep up with the insidious powers and individuals at work in New York City who were hungry to do anything and everything they could to ensure their financial and social relationship with the Confederacy remained strong.
The land that would eventually become New Amsterdam, and then New York City, was once a far-off and mysterious place — “a slender wilderness island at the edge of the known world” (Shorto 2005). In the 1600s, Europe was sending out its “navies…, adventurer-businessmen to roam the seas…” along with bands of “explorers, entrepreneurs, pirates, prostitutes, and assorted scalawags…who sought riches” on this new land (2). The 1660 map of New Amsterdam illustrates the colony that would become New York City, built on the backs and bodies of enslaved Africans. The bottom tip of Manhattan was where the colony planted its roots, where the wall was built that was meant to protect the Dutch by blocking out the Natives — a very clear to spot on the map and built by enslaved Africans. This wall, the space it originally occupied, then became Wall Street. By 1664, the British had snatched the Dutch colony which would then become New York.
“In the eighteenth century, the British replaced the Dutch as the world’s leading slave traders, and the city’s unfree population steadily expanded. New York merchants became actively involved in the transatlantic slave trade as well as commerce with the plantations of the Caribbean. Slave auctions took place regularly at a market on Wall Street.” — — Eric Foner (2015)
In many places around lower Manhattan symbols of slavery abound. If you go to the crossroads of Pearl and Wall Streets you’ll be standing at the spot of the slave market that helped to build New York City. Facing in this direction you can get a sense of how much of slavery still remains; if one knows how to look, it’s visible everywhere. On the very same roads where the first “stocks” were exchanged, almost 400 years later, you can see the fruits of those transactions, which remain guarded by modern-day slave patrols. The streets downtown do not follow the same grid pattern as the rest of the city; those very same, organically flowing paths were some of the original roads from the colony. In essence, you can still walk those paths today, we are all still walking those same roads when we visit — it is almost as if the acts that laid the foundation of our city, economy, and country, left an indelible impression on the space of lower Manhattan itself.
Standing at this spot facing south, if you turn to face left you will see the East River, the very same port where slave ships would dock and unload their human cargo. Africans were marched up to this spot at Pearl and Wall Street to be sold. Facing south you can see the winding roads that, after sold, enslaved Africans were sent down to the southern port — where you now catch the Staten Island ferry — to be shipped, along with foodstuff to the Caribbean.
While many of our buildings are monuments to slavery, they are “financial icons” (Soules 2021) of capitalist worship and ritualistic practice as well. Take for instance the building at 74 Wall Street at the intersection of this former open-air slave market. Not only do these streets hold the spiritual essence of the past, but we can see how the ghosts of those financial interactions have continued to inform and shape the social, political, and economic systems that created all that stands at that spot today — even the architecture.
Nautical symbols decorate the outer stone facade of the structure “including ships, mermaids, and sea horses”; designs that symbolized the building’s initial purpose as the Seaman’s Bank for Savings (1829–1926), a financial institution “founded as a means to encourage savings amongst mariners which eventually collapsed in 1990 and was taken over by Chase Bank (Rosen 2021). Although an initial, seemingly innocuous description, one must remember how much maritime activity, at the time of its founding, was primarily engaged in the slave trade as it had been for centuries prior — slavery was the primary and foundational wealth generator of New York City and the resulting United States. Such carvings record and enshrine memories as ghosts that continue to shape our present.
When the concession to end the African slave trade on January 1, 1808, went into effect, it intended to create a powerful domestic market in human beings made slaves that were born and bred in the United States — a “slave-breeding industry” (Sublette 2016). Not only did chattel slavery become stronger and more efficient domestically, but the United States remained covertly, illegally, and unconstitutionally involved with the African slave trade until the 1860s, working collectively with other white slaver nations such as Spain and Portugal.
“The United States was deeply involved in the illegal slave trade. Despite the 1807 ban (which went into effect in 1808), American slave traders continued to smuggle several thousand Africans to U.S. shores. When this flow largely dried up in the 1820s, Americans became deeply involved in the much larger trades to Brazil and Cuba, as shipowners and captains worked closely with traffickers in the major organization centers, Rio de Janeiro and Havana. Around two-thirds of all captives arriving in Brazil and Cuba in the 1830s and 1840s came aboard American-built vessels — over half a million men, women, and children in total.” —(Harris 2020)
While some white Americans were focused on the domestic trade, others were deeply invested in maintaining the slave economy internationally. New York City was the center of this unconstitutional traffic until the last slave ships sailed out. Surplus privateering boats were going up for sale after the War of 1812, with many used to transport Africans alongside other common goods. Active slave traders from oversees were gladly welcomed, “incorporating American ports into their operations for the first time in a generation” with “New York and New Orleans now being key nodes in a new slaving nexus that stretched from Ouidah and Cabinda in Africa to Havana and Matanzas in Cuba.”
“No American city was more closely tied to this trade than New York City” (Harris 2020:3–6).
New York City started to grow into the metropolis of today by the 1830s; this growth was made possible by profits from southern slavery, a city of extreme wealth or extreme poverty. As the African slave trade was beginning to rupture in major slave colonies like Brazil, International slave traders, such as the Portuguese Company, set up shop in lower Manhattan in the early 1850s. Young and successful traders such as Manoel Cunha Reis and José da Silva Maia scrambled to the United States to avoid the loss of their wealth and success. They made their new home in New York City, already well-known as the port of interest for those looking to participate in and perpetuate this illegal trade. The Portuguese Company would eventually incorporate Baltimore, Boston, New Orleans, and other American ports into their network (7). Upwards of three million Africans were forced on board US and international ships and enslaved from 1800 to 1850.
Due to undisturbed systemic anti-Blackness and reliance on labor specifically from chattel slavery, Wall Street, the Democratic Party, and other powerful institutions in the city made sure slavery continued both domestically and internationally. Much of downtown Manhattan was an interlocking web of slavers who were creating the wealth that had already started turning New York City into what it is today.
The United State — and the North — was such an immense and powerful player in this illegal trade that other white slaver nations, with the permission of the US, flew the American flag on their ships to avoid being stopped and searched as per agreements which were made with the British government who was allegedly against any African slavery from continuing. White Americans were consuming the immense forests at their disposal which led to a seemingly endless supply of lumber, leading to a “golden age” of shipbuilding; “yards from Maryland to Maine produced record numbers of brigs, barks, and shooners,” many of which included “the famed Baltimore Clipper,” which would become the name of several hockey leagues in Maryland. These boats “were especially fast, attractive to traffickers” who were looking for smaller, less noticeable boats like the previously used flotillas to not be spotted off the coast of Africa (2020).
As this illegal trade ramped up, it was New York City in the early mid-1800s was the center for various international, criminal traders to set up shop and carry out a trade that was gradually becoming illegal globally. Slavery is so undeniably important to white American culture, that those very same Baltimore-built clipper ships would later be the namesake of several professional Ice Hockey teams since the 1950s. Due to the untouched anti-Blackness and reliance on labor specifically from chattel slavery, Wall Street, the Democratic Party, and other powerful institutions in the city made sure slavery continued, both domestically and internationally. Much of downtown Manhattan was an interlocking web of slavers who were creating the wealth that had already started turning New York City into what it is today.
The architecture of race and space in New York City creates a closed circuit of police surveillance, illegitimate occupation and containment of Black communities, and financialized exclusion. Public space, architecture, physical structures, and racialized spaces are shaped by the ghosts of the original colony and the enslaved people who built it all.
In the last handful of years, strong activism in the United States and around the globe has ignited and has been focused on removing the statues of colonizers and slave traders in their respective countries or ‘former’ colonies. In New York City, and the North in general, we have our statues dedicated to the Confederacy; tucked away inside Brooklyn’s Fort Hamilton Army Base there are two streets named after slaveholding Confederate Generals, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, and Bronx Community College who proudly sports a bust of Lee; all of which were brought to the North by none other than the Daughters of the Confederacy. White women have long been the right hand of the patriarchal system of white supremacy, and this is their legacy. New York City welcomed these women and their Southern symbols with open arms — but given the long history of chattel slavery and business relationships with the South, this should be no shock. However, it does trouble the narrative imagination that has been crafted and spread about the “free north.”
Statues are not the only monuments to slavery and white supremacy in New York City and the North. From corporate buildings built on top of enslaved burial grounds such as the Ted Weiss Federal Building at 290 Broadway, medical institutions that once stole fresh bodies of enslaved people from those graveyards to use their bodies for dissection (Wilder 2013); bodies that helped build those institutions and practices that are so revered today. From 1894 to 2018, the statue of J. Marion Simms, the “father of modern gynecology” lived in both Bryant Park and then Central Park. Simms was a physician who tortured enslaved women by subjecting them to medical procedures with no anesthesia. From this Black suffering and death — just like the country itself — was built an entire medical industry. We celebrate international contributors to the project of whiteness, such as Christopher Columbus, a rapist slaver, colonizer, and genocidal maniac, one that former Democrat Governor Cuomo defended and lauded as an important figure for Italian Americans; his statue stands at the center of the Columbus Street circle at the lower west corner of Central Park. We have one of Philip Schuyler in Albany, NY, an owner of 17 slaves and a General in the Revolutionary War — who fought to protect slavery in the US. Not to mention a new addition to Penn Station was named in honor of Daniel Moynihan, the man who contributed to the ideological and systemic dehumanization and economic exclusion of African Americans for generations.
When it was built in 1763, the old Rhinelander Sugar House in New York City was the largest sugar refinery in the colony. A century later, it became what is now the headquarters of the New York City Police Department. From a warehouse that held and processed sugar — cultivated by enslaved people — to the headquarters of the modern-day slave patrols who hunt, capture, and funnel Black bodies into prisons for the financial accumulation of the holders of capital, some who own the prison plantations, and pay the salaries of those who tend to the cages.
On February 12, 1793, President George Washington signed the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it legal for white citizens to hunt and kidnap African Americans in public and sell them to southern plantations, falsely accusing and charging them with being “runaways.” The city Recorder at the time was well known for his abusive use of the Fugitive Slave Act. That man was Richard Riker, a member of the Democratic Party. As the city’s recorder, he presided over these cases and would issue paperwork to expedite the removal of kidnapped African American children and traffic them down south into chattel slavery. Riker took bribes from bounty hunters for his complicity.
David Ruggles used his publications to expose the “kidnapping club” made up of Riker, the police, and other city political figures. Riker also happened to own a piece of land that floats in the water off Manhattan’s northeastern edge. That land was recycled and transformed and is known today as Rikers Island, the site of one of New York City’s most violent jails. One which houses the hunted and trafficked bodies of Black males. This bloated and out-of-control “correctional” facility cages Black males at the highest rate, 53%, according to nyc.gov — bodies and lives that have always translated into profit for white Americans of authority and everyday citizens. Even with the relentless work of David Ruggles and white abolitionists, the legacy of those political participants in the system of white supremacy handed down this anti-Black system generation after generation.
Today, New York City still operates along the path of our colonial origins. With each administration — Republican and Democrat alike — rampant racial abuse, including rape and murder of African Americans at the hand of the NYPD, has continued unabated with the help of Daniel Moynihan’s “Broken Windows” theory. The resulting “stop-and-frisk” Black Code program was supported by Mayors Giuliani, Bloomberg, De Blasio, and now Eric Adams. During each of their terms, all of our anti-Black Democrat Mayors and their families dwell in the former summer home of Archibald Gracie; a once “international shipping magnate…[and] merchant prince” whose “son and grandson left the city to become cotton brokers in Mobile, Alabama” (Farrow, et al. 2005).
New York City is a haunted city, stuck in a repeating loop of never changing. Each generation of political administrations uses recycled policies to keep this profit model intact. The Democratic party supported the increase in the hunting of Black Americans into southern slavery and then industrialized the process with incarceration in jails and prisons, north and south. Such political agendas have led to such an overpopulation of the Riker’s Island facility that an extension needed to be created to house them — a floating jail was constructed. The Vernon C. Bain Center, aptly known as “the boat,” became the newest plantation holding in 1992, leading some to advocate having “equated it to a slave ship” (Santana 2022), exemplifying an evident business model that has been in use for centuries.
NYCHA buildings speckle every borough, many named after slave owners and other pillars of white supremacy, such as William L. Marcy whose name is memorialized in the Brooklyn housing projects made famous by Shawn ‘Jay-Z’ Carter. Marcy, a member of the Democratic Party, wore various professional hats in his life — one being the Governor of New York City from 1833 to 1838. Given that the Democratic Party came into existence as, and still is, the pro-slavery party, it is fitting that Governor Marcy played such an involved role in upholding that economic and social system in the North. His efforts to do so, like many other proponents of slavery at the time (both North and South), extended beyond the borders of the United States in efforts to overpower the rampant abolitionist activism fighting to end our ‘peculiar institution’ (Horne 2014). Marcy oversaw the 1854 Ostend Manifesto, a document drafted as part of the efforts of territorial expansion.
“I told him of the Fugitive Slave Law, and asked him if he did not know that New York was a city of kidnappers.” — Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Like many Democratic Party political agendas today, the Manifesto was alleged to be in the interest of Cuba’s sovereignty but was just interested in annexing more land to extend the life of slavery. It was that very public criticism that eventually led to the Manifesto’s retraction (Tinsely 2019). Also during his terms as Governor, Marcy facilitated the legal kidnapping of African Americans off the streets of New York City for merely being accused of escaping slavery. Marcy granted right to New York Police Officer Tobias Boudinot and Daniel D. Nash — and, therefore, the rest of the police force — who became central players in what became a city-wide human trafficking operation for Northern Profits.
At the same time that New York City was becoming the towering Metropolis that we know today, Black American Freedmen and activist, David Ruggles was living and fighting the good fight in the streets of Gotham. The city’s growth was made possible by profits from southern slavery and Black social death. Historian Graham Russel Gao Hodges (2010) wrote:
“In addition to his service as the key conductor of the Underground Railroad in New York City in the 1830s, Ruggles was a tireless, fiery, pioneering journalist, penning hundreds of letters to abolitionist newspapers, authoring and publishing five pamphlets, and editing the first African American magazine, the Mirror of Liberty. He opened the first black bookstore and reading room in New York City and published his pamphlet in 1834, the first time a black New Yorker had his own imprint — all achievements that illuminate the autonomy blacks found in the world of print. Ruggles built upon these firsts with a burst of antislavery activism that captured the enthusiasm of his peers. He was among the first black antislavery agents.”
Ruggles’ “fiery” publications would not only help to organize and mobilize the abolitionist community in New York City, but they would inevitably set a precedent for the future independent Black press. Ruggles’ work was necessary at the time, and it still speaks to the work many of us are doing today. He was critical in targeting, identifying, and putting city officials on blast daily. Ruggles exposed a not-so-covert operation in the dark of night and the streets during the day.
New York City police officers and a web of other city officials were actively involved in kidnapping free African Americans off the streets and trafficking them to southern plantations, many never to be seen again. Ruggles labeled this collection of officials as the “kidnapping Club.” This political web consisted of not only the police but also Judges who would work to quickly falsify charges, claiming these innocent people were “escaped slaves.” Ruggles’ publications had no shortage of reports of missing or abducted children, men and women. Ruggles not only exposed this insidious operation but also exposed the individuals involved. He called out the specific names of the police officers such as Isiah Rynders, Captain of the U.S. Marshalls, and Officers Daniel D. Nash and Tobias Boudinot.
David Ruggles acted quite fearlessly to save the lives of runaway enslaved people. His publications spread information about the insidious practices that were happening around Manhattan. They cautioned African Americans of danger and also signaled white abolitionists amid a growing pro-slavery metropolis.
Historian Jonathan Daniel Wells (2020) explains that:
“The forces arrayed against the city’s Black community were seemingly insurmountable. African Americans were up against a pervasive racism that suffused the city’s Democratic Party and its political machine based in Tammany Hall, a police force that violated Black civil rights at every turn, Wall Street financiers who cared far more about increasing trade with the cotton South than they did about the enslaved families picking the crop, and a legal system that at best proved indifferent to the claims of Black folks. New York was a perilous place for Black people despite a small cadre of dedicated activists (like the indomitable David Ruggles) working tirelessly for the abolition of slavery. And perhaps worst of all, the federal government made it easy to ignore the calls for protecting Black civil rights. After all, the recapture and arrest of runaways was enshrined in the nation’s founding document, explicitly requiring northern communities to return those with the audacity to flee slavery. Conservative Democrats running the Tammany Hall political machine were more than happy to comply with the law…”
Given how many Black Americans — largely males — sit in local jails in New York City we can see an organized and strategically executed business model still operating today.
The notion that the North was the land of freedom, in hindsight, was very much the liberal propaganda of the time; Black Americans were ‘free’ in word and little in action. While they were able to walk freely through the streets of New York City, and other northern cities, they were not protected in law or in practice from being kidnapped by local police and other white supremacists — including the involvement of the politicians in power at the time. In fact, “[m]ost censuses in colonial New York did not even count free [B]lacks separately from slaves” (Foner 2015). When fits of sociopathic white rage erupted — for various reasons that still regularly occur in the same fashion today — Black Americans were not protected from being falsely accused of sexual assault or other crimes, not protected from being lynched for those false accusations, nor were their children safe from sexual predation or kidnapping as well. Not to mention any of the physical, emotional, or psychological trauma resulting from living under such conditions. Just like the liberals of today, Black American self-determination, access to the rights of citizenship, or protections from white terrorism largely exist in words, not actions — not least from any legal protections codified and institutionalized by Democrats, read: the cannibalization of the George Floyd and the useless and symbolic ‘anti-Lynching Act’ which has worked to charged or convict any of the murders of Black Americans by police or other citizens since it has been passed with a Democratic majority in power.
In 2021, when Bronx Rep. Ritchie Torres came out to criticize the NYC Board of Elections, calling them a “relic of Tammany Hall,” he connected an important piece of New York City history but he left out a few important facts. Torres criticized the Board of Elections for being “deeply dysfunctional and…a reminder that it’s an institution in need of structural reform,” yet he reserves such concerns about the Democratic Party whom he proudly supports even as they increasingly support anti-Black legislation and ignore white violence, such as Jim Crow policing and inequality in housing and labor, in Black communities across the country; such policy is held particularly strong in parts of our city, such as The Bronx — his district. In the end, Torres’ rhetoric about Tammany Hall was only one of his many shallow attempts to perform for his Democrat donors and protect his place in the proverbial King’s court — Torres has no real interest in reforms of any white institutions, not least the one’s who have funded him since he ran for office. Wells (2020) contextualizes this history better: “Closely tied to the repeated cries of amalgamation was the anxiety produced over the competition for jobs, which Tammany Hall, led by ruffians like the infamous rabble-rouser Isaiah Rynders, relentlessly reminded the city’s Irishmen meant conflict with Black workers” (59).
Tammany Hall leveraged their political power by using the desperation of newly arrived Irish Immigrants in New York City. With the relentless efforts of Tammany Hall and the Democratic Party to propagandize the Irish into thinking that the African American population of our city was responsible for their degradation, a strong anti-Black current grew in the 1830s. Not only did he conveniently leave out the Democratic Party’s political involvement and collaboration with Tammany Hall in strengthening our city’s ties to the chattel slave economy in the South, but Torres equally disregards the current lives of the descendants of US chattel slavery — and the Black community in general — in his district in The Bronx; facts which can be seen across his social media accounts as he runs to support various white immigrant groups in New York City and white people abroad while barely saying a word or supporting anything that directly and materially benefits the Black American population that he represents.
1834 became known as “the year of the riots.” This labeling clarifies the increased violence that overtook parts of our city that year; however, it is also important to always remind ourselves that violence — particularly white-led violence (slavery and colonialism) and the relentless acts of revolutionary resistance of enslaved African and African Americans — the Black Freedmen who descend from US chattel slavery, is truly responsible for the formation of our city and country. Between July 4th & 7th, 1834, African Americans gathered at the Chatham Street Chapel to celebrate the anniversary of the end of slavery in New York City seven years prior. There was some misunderstanding with white performers from the Sacred Music Society being booked at the Chapel on the same night. In typical white fashion, this misunderstanding turned into a mob riot that lasted for several days. One consisted of white citizens destroying property, attacking African Americans — their homes, businesses — and other city property.
Jonathan Daniel Wells (2020) explains that: “Marauding mobs made up chiefly of young Irish working-class men set fire to Black businesses and homes, as well as the homes of whites like Arthur and Lewis Tappan who were sympathetic to abolitionism. One Black man’s barbershop on Bayard Street was destroyed, and Black minister Peter Williams saw his home and Episcopalian church burned to the ground. Still, dozens of others across Lower Manhattan were razed as well. Men like Stephen Lane, a twenty-four-year-old mason who lived on Ridge Street a few blocks from the East River, and Abraham Levy, a seventeen-year-old clerk who lived on Water Street, were typical of the white rioters, who terrorized the city’s African Americans for days” (60). Regardless of the imbalance of power between white and Black citizens, the city’s police and news media collectively released reports about “Black crime and violence” — a precursor to the misinformation that guides white America in times of white-led, anti-Black violence.
Today, the Chatham Street Chapel no longer exists. Today, in its place, stands — but of course, a prison. One Police Plaza, a towering, dystopian monument to white supremacy and chattel slavery, where countless Black citizens are warehoused for convict leasing and wealth accumulation for the cannibal nation. Writer Stacy Horn (2013) wrote about this historical event and her attempt to photograph the Chapel’s memorial plaque. Horn said, “The guards who wouldn’t let me walk over and take the picture insisted that they’d worked there for decades and there wasn’t a plaque anywhere about any chapel.”
White Americans and the system of white supremacy need a ‘diverse’ — gay Latino — to speak dishonestly and uncritically regurgitate Democratic Party narratives to not compromise the spectacle (DeBord 1970) that props up the social order, particularly under our current era of late-stage liberalism. Also part of Northern political theatrics was the election and administration of former police officer, Eric Adams as the new Mayor. Following the uprisings in response to the lynching of George Floyd, not only did the Democratic Party avoid creating any material or social change to national white violence against Black Americans, but the election of Adams would ensure no change would occur from local politicians.
The Democratic Party has long relied on minstrelsy and political theater to capture its voter base. Ritchie does this faithfully while doing the bare minimum for American descendants of slavery and the Black community in the Bronx. An environment made to foster criminals and liars has been established within the culture of the NYPD and US police in general, and our city’s politicians (old and new) merely maintain and reinforce Jim Crow and the system of white supremacy here. Like all of our other Democratic Party political figures, Ritchie Torres completely glosses over our city’s history. It can be seen only marginally in their policies, in their scripted speeches, in their superficial and performative liberal acts that have changed next to nothing about the existence of slavery and Jim Crow in the North.
“New York was the most potent pro-slavery and pro-South city north of the Mason-Dixon Line, due in large part to the lucrative trade between Manhattan banks and insurance companies and the slaveholders of the cotton South. The city council, the board of aldermen, the mayor, the police department, the legal system, and other city agencies seldom acted without consulting the business community. Whether Wall Street businessmen joined the Democratic Party or the opposition Whig Party, they agreed almost to a man about one thing: the need to protect the cotton trade with slaveholders that had made them incredibly wealthy. It was a system that rendered both sections of the nation heavily dependent on the continuance of slavery and the constitutional government that had made the trade possible. Merely mentioning the abolition of slavery quickly earned the scorn of those on Wall Street and in the Democratic Party who knew exactly where their wealth came from.”
Slavery begets slavery. Wealth begets wealth. The architecture — resulting from this tightly woven social, political, and economic system — that makes up the physical space that we move and exist through is generated by the imperatives of the slave system today — continuing unabated from centuries ago.
When you stand at the intersection of Wall and Pearl Streets, face East on Wall and you will see the East River, the very same port where slave ships would dock and unload their human cargo. To the West, Wall Street runs directly into Trinity Church. As you move towards this structure of religious imperialism the street is lined with colonial institutions of power, as well as new businesses, all of which represent the past and present condition of inequality, slavery, and white supremacy in our city and country. Before heading west toward the church, if one was to turn right and head north from Wall Street, two blocks away is Maiden Lane; this was the site of a famous act of rebellion by enslaved Africans. An outbreak of fires throughout the colony sent white people into a panic, concluding that they were committed by rebellions against Africans; which was, at least, partially true. One of many acts of arson that would spread across the colony and send white people into a frenzy of paranoia. The abuses and other forms of violence that were US chattel slavery were no less insidious in the North. While enslaved Africans were mostly living in the same homes as their masters, and had the freedom to walk through town alone and socialize with other Africans, white colonists nonetheless maintained their own arm of sadistic white supremacy.
On March 25 1712 a group of Africans enslaved to a working-class baker in the colony, gathered to plot a rebellion to overthrow the colonial white power structure that they lived and suffered within, by plotting to set fire to the home/business of one of their owners.. These Africans' brave and revolutionary acts of rebellion came with the understanding that horrific torture and death would follow if they were caught, but given the conditions that white Europeans dragged them into, this was their only possible chance for true freedom.
On the night of April 6th, 1712 roughly 25–50 Koromantees gathered to carry out the resistance As they set they set fire to the baker's outhouse, a group of the white settlers ran to put it out. Nine of the white colonists were killed and six more were injured before these freedom fighters were able to run into the woods under the cover of night. Governor Robert Hunter commanded the militia here in the colony and from Westchester to comb the woods to look for the African liberators. Militias were made up of everyday working-class white people who were willing to mobilize against enslaved Africans and the freedmen who descended from US chattel slavery to abuse and murder them for attempting to bring liberation to themselves and their people from the brutal and sadistic conditions of white society. The brutal torment and lynching of African people has always been a public spectacle for the entertainment of working-class white people and as an example for any of the enslaved if they had plans to resist; like today when Black men, women, and children are brutalized and murdered in cold blood by Police officers. This type of violence is foundational in white culture. It is ingrained in our white psyches.
More than seventy of these brave rebels were caught the next day. 18 were acquitted and discharged. Twenty were hanged and 3 burned alive. Burnings were deliberately slow, painful deaths and one of these was said to have lasted 8 hours, as you can imagine. Another was broken at the wheel, slowly pulled apart at the limbs. 18th century executions were a public spectacle for white men, women, and children of all ages.
Africans, both innocent and guilty, were rounded up and publicly tortured and/or executed, along with a few white colonists who assisted in the rebellions. In response to these fires, white people mobilized their institutional power and put in place immediate legal surveillance of the enslaved population. Lantern laws were established to make Black colonists visible day or night. An enslaved person was not allowed to walk at night without a small lantern with them so that white people could see if they were standing or gathering with other Africans. Exemplifying the origins of surveillance — in New York City and the United States at large — as being rooted in the ability to observe and control Black people’s movements to keep them from successfully rebelling against their forced degradation. The architecture of race and space in New York City creates a closed circuit of police surveillance.
An immense stone fortress now stands at the site of the former Maiden Lane Revolt; its limestone walls, thick iron bars protruding around and extending passed the windows, and immense metal doors are meant to convey the presence of complete and total power and impenetrability — this is the Federal Reserve building. The towering, seemingly impenetrable fortress is a main artery of white capital where large amounts of the stolen gold and wealth of Africa and other colonies across the globe, entombed behind stone and bars, consolidated for the white power structure, protected by the armed police apparatus of that state power. This is one of the few, true functions of Police Officers, protecting and maintaining the opinions and orders of the white ruling class.
The everyday merchant-class Europeans who were given charters by their imperialist powers came here strictly with private corporate interests to invade and take land that belonged to Indigenous people, willfully and methodically slaughtering them to push forward stealing land. A Government was then installed to build and maintain the infrastructure of white power, protecting the system of slavery and genocide. This consolidated wealth within this fortress is made up of the valuable natural resources that were pirated from African and other indigenous people; wealth from the bodies of enslaved Black men, women, and children who were considered and used as capital; money for mortgage, debt, collateral, and personal wealth. As gold and wealth is kept guarded behind bars, the police apparatus of the state continually feeds African people into jails, making it very clear how desperately white power needs to keep African people from their wealth and resource while still forcing them into slave labor for capitalist production.
Walking further on your right you pass Federal Hall where George Washington gave his inaugural speech. Left of Federal Hall is the Stock Exchange, towering above the street with its Greek columns. Trinity Church sits on Broadway, a street that stretches to the very top of Manhattan Island, one that was dug out by enslaved Black labor. Taking Broadway north you pass various banks such as Chase, well-known now for accepting enslaved people as collateral. There’s City Hall which doubled as a jail when a series of fires broke out in the colony in the early 1700s, whose “jail cells…were crowded with black men…” (Farrow, et al 2006).
Structures like Trinity Church or symbols etched into the sides of towering buildings such as 74 Wall Street are not the only ritualistic, spiritual or religious manifestations of imperial efforts nor spaces of cultural production and worship; as you continue North on Broadway you will also find the immense gothic structure that is the old Woolworth building whose presence and architecture is situated within “a distinctly capitalist operation, whereby the ground is replicated for exponential profit,” at one point being referred to as the “Cathedral of Commerce” (Soules 2021). All of which sits on land that used to be the ground where enslaved Africans were sent to bury their dead. Some of which were ‘discovered’ underneath what stands now as the Ted Weiss Building at 290 Broadway where the African Burial Ground National Monument sits, where protruding mounds line one end of the outer property space, filled with the exhumed bodies that were long laid to rest. Bodies which were only given such ‘respect’ due to the amazing work of Black American activists who found out about the graves which the building’s developers were going to build right over, ‘unbeknownst’ to them.
Looking just ahead of the African Burial Ground, one is struck by large, carved, black object sitting in the center of the open plaza encircled by the ‘halls of justice.’ This area was once known as Five Points, and where the area’s fresh reserve, known as ‘Collect Pond’ was located. Originally a Black neighborhood, one that was the target of much negative narratives from the city due to the presence of “dancehalls, bars, gambling house, prostitution,” but most importantly because it was known to be a center for “mixed race clientele.” “In retrospect, the Five Points simply reflected the changing geography of poverty and race within New York City as working-class Irish immigrants moved into and ‘whitened’ previously all-black residential areas” (McNally 2007). Just one block north of the courts is ‘the tombs,’ the central booking jail, the New York City Hall of Detention; a notorious institution where Black citizens are funneled and housed for profit. Lower Manhattan was a battleground for abolitionists who fought with David Ruggles, continually trying to keep up with the insidious powers and individuals at work in New York City.
When you move uptown towards Central Park, you can stand on the grassy area which was once Seneca Village, near west 86th street. All the way to the east side of the park stands the oldest object on the city; the Egyptian obelisk, taken from the African continent and displayed for public consumption on a piece of fabricated recreational space, originally created for the viewing and leisure pleasures of the filthy rich who line the circumference of the park. Both Seneca Village and the Obelisk — like much of Black life and creation across the country — were once site and object of Blackness, then consumed for use by the white cannibal nation.
A week and a half after a white-led insurrection stormed and enter the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6th 2021, Black activist groups were met by aggressive force from the NYPD in Lower Manhattan. Footage was released, even across the corporate-owned mainstream news sources, of some capitol police assisting the insurrection and even taking selfies with the mob — a great example of the class solidarity violence which created the identity of whiteness in the founding of our nation. However, and as usual, the small groups of Black activists were met with different energy. The NYPD was, of course, armed and, according to The New York Times, also had “helmets, batons and zip ties” and were “trying to clear protesters who had gathered on the streets and sidewalks near City Hall.” This show of anti-Black repression happened “between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. in Chambers and Centre Streets’ vicinity, at the spot of the original “Negro burial ground” of the 1600s. It is without any shock that this scene played out over the hallowed ground that once held some of the first bodies of the enslaved who made this metropolis possible; our haunted city is stuck in a loop of never changing — a “lost future” (Fisher); a microcosm of the West.
The NYPD, ordered and directed by former cop and Democrat Eric Adams, continues its Jim Crow/slave patrol-style sweeps of the city on a daily basis to ensure the white nation stays in tact, under the guise of “law and order,” the well-known dog whistle to white supremacy. Eric Adams and his administration attempts public distraction with initiatives while avoiding the issues which feed the inequality and poverty that has been strategically placed and reinforced on the Black communities across the city.
Instead, Adams follows in the footsteps of every other anti-Black Democrat and Republican politician that has presided over our city; the same already-disproven, and once made illegal policies like “stop-and-frisk” has now returned to New York City and is implemented in the poorest and Blackest areas. But Adams is nothing more than a cop who was put in place to further white supremacy under the poorly veiled guise of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ under our current era of late-stage liberalism. Adams is a reflection of the Democratic Party at large, who is currently implementing and legalizing increased surveillance, silencing of free speech and other violations of constitutional rights. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been effectively silent as police around the country continue to abuse and lynch Black people in broad daylight, on camera, our in public space and in their own homes; Biden’s increasingly disturbing incoherence shadowed by Harris’ uncomfortable cackling at every turn are signs of a concerning future; behaviors which are further ‘justified’ by politicians like Ritchie Torrés, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of ‘the squad.’ One can’t help but see the increasing presence of such spectacle (Debord 1967) and simulation (Baudrillard 1981) that we were warned about.
The architecture of race and space in New York City creates a closed circuit of police surveillance, illegitimate occupation and containment of Black communities and financialized exclusion of Back citizens. Public space, architecture, physical structures create and perpetuate racialized spaces and are shaped by the ghosts of the original colony; the enslaved people who built it all and anti-Black systems that determine life. Gotham city is a haunted city, stuck in a repeating loop of never changing. Our haunted city remains stuck in a loop in time of never changing. Hyper-exclusion and hyper-surveillance of Black citizens remains strong and exists simultaneously.
Slavery begets slavery and wealth begets wealth; The architecture that makes up the urban environment of New York City’s physical space has been shaped by the desires and imperatives of our century’s old culture of modernity, founded on colonialism, slavery, and anti-Blackness. Understanding that New York City remains the slavery capital of the North disrupts the false ideas and narratives of the North being — or have been — a place of freedom, liberty, and [everything that the South “is not”]. Within the context of hauntology, Fisher (2009) and Berardi (2011) are concerned with a possible slow cancellation of the future due to the effects of neoliberalism and the accompanying digital technology that facilitates its imperatives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
While our city’s politicians talk up a good game about ‘programs’ designed to target and positively impact homelessness and housing, it has not become even more difficult for citizens to buy homes, have enough money to even rent a one bedroom apartment, nor have basic daily needs met. This happening all in the shadow of the ever-increasing sizes of massive super tall, pencil-thin towers of financial capital that are drastically changing the New York City skyline and reproducing the same hierarchy of inequality, recycled and rebranded under neoliberalism. Slavery begets slavery. Wealth begets wealth. The architecture — resulting from this tightly woven social, political, and economic system — that makes up the physical space that we move and exist through is generated by the imperatives of the slave system today — continuing unabated from centuries ago.
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