How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith

For many, the land was valuable, but the people living on it were not. A July 1856 article in the New-York Daily Times, which would later become the New York Times, referred to the settlement as “Nigger Village.” So in 1855, Mayor Fernando Wood, the same mayor who would later push for New York City to secede from the Union, used the city’s power of eminent domain to make the village city property, clearing out all of the village residents, along with over a thousand other people who had settled in Central Park, including farmers and squatters. Though many residents initially resisted the order, unwilling to give up land and homes they had spent years building for what they considered paltry compensation, the people of Seneca Village were removed by force in the fall of 1857. Another New-York Daily Times article from about a decade later described the scene: “The supremacy of law was upheld by the policemen’s bludgeons, and with many broken heads and ensanguined eyes. Then commenced the laborers of the Park engineers and surveyors.”