One in five New Yorkers was a slave. Slaves built the city, its hulking stone houses, its nail-knocked wooden wharves. They dug the roads, and their own graves, at the Negroes Burying Ground. They carried water for steeping tea and wood for burning. They loaded and unloaded the ships, steps from the slave market. But the liberty to freely speak, write, and publish was not theirs.75
