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Despite New York having fully and formally abolished slavery in 1827,ii slave catchers still roamed the streets looking for fugitive slaves—and even free Black people—to capture and bring back to the South. Slave catchers made little distinction between Black people born free and those who had run away.
Sounds like ICE in 2025. Shameful.
the nineteenth century, Black people lived in fear that at any moment a slave catcher could snatch them or their children up, regardless of status or social position. In the twenty-first century, Black people live in fear that at any moment police will throw them against a wall, or worse, regardless of whether there is any pretense of suspicion other than the color of their skin.
Lord have mercy. It doesn't have to be this way.
Blacks, both free and enslaved, were central to the abolition movement.
The harm done did not end after a person’s funeral but continued after their death. It was not uncommon for local doctors and medical students to illegally exhume bodies from the cemetery to use them for dissections and experiments.
In 2003, after time at the lab at Howard University, the remains from the African Burial Ground were returned to New York City in a grand ceremony. Each of the 419 sets of remains was placed in its own hand-carved coffin made in Ghana. The coffins were split between seven crypts. Each crypt—along with nearly eight thousand handwritten letters “from the living to the African ancestors”—was lowered into the ground and marked with seven burial mounds. The site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1993, and in 2006 it was designated a National Monument by President George W. Bush.
The least that could be done but this is redemptively beautiful.
“Don’t believe anything if it makes you comfortable.”
walked farther into the park for a few minutes until I came across the Great Lawn, a fifty-five-acre clearing where, in the summers, people picnicked, played baseball, watched concerts, threw Frisbees. I thought about how this space only existed because several generations ago hundreds of Black people were violently forced from their homes.
New York was unique in that, like Damaras had shared, it presented itself to me as a place ahead of its time. The pretense of cultural pluralism told a story that was only half true. New York economically benefited from slavery, and the physical history of enslavement—the blood, the bodies, and the buildings constructed by them—was deeply entrenched in the soil of this city.
For most of my life the Statue of Liberty was one of a number of pieces of American iconography that seemed to memorialize an idea that had never materialized. It is a feeling I suspect many Black Americans experience with respect to pieces of history that commemorate an ideal of US history. What is the Declaration of Independence but a parchment of half-truths and contradictions? What is a monument to the American Revolution if it doesn’t say who was kept in chains after it ended?
I brought the numbers up with Eloi, who paused, looking, it seemed, for the right words. “You know that in this small island of Gorée, the slave house where we are is not the only one. During the full period of slavery there were more than twenty houses like this. But this one belonged to the Senegalese state, who purchased this house to better know exactly what’s happened during the slave trade. That’s why, today, the slave house crystallizes all of the slave trade.” He looked at me, head down, eyes peering over his glasses. “It’s a symbol of the slave trade.” I could not tell if Eloi was
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When considering the story of Gorée Island, historical anthropologist François Richard finds it helpful to use a term coined by the renowned sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, calling Gorée a site of “sincere fiction.” According to Richard, the statistical controversy of Gorée Island cannot and should not undermine its place as a site of memory and reckoning.
I couldn’t help but think about whether that symbolism of Gorée was undermined by the inaccuracies that undergirded it. There were still people on Gorée sharing information with tourists as if the data was unimpeachable. In truth, this data has been disputed by scholars for years now. How could this place be a symbol of history but fail to ensure the history that it conveyed was factual?
it is important for European and American scholars to be careful and consider whether there is a responsibility to be deferential to local interpretations. To come into a place one doesn’t have any familial or cultural connection to, and upend the story it has told for decades, is likely to be more harmful than helpful.
He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “History is written by the perpetrators,” he said. And his goal is to be a part of writing something that challenges that.
Perpetrators instead of victors is interesting and thought-provoking reframing.
Slavery took a toll on West Africa’s population; millions of people were stripped from their homelands and sent across the ocean to serve in intergenerational bondage. The profound harm continued during colonialism, with much of the continent stripped of its natural resources instead of its people.
There is a phrase that Hasan believed captured the essence of the entanglement of capitalism, colonialism, and slavery: “White sugar means Black misery.”
Hasan was not opposed to figuring out the logistics of financial compensation, but he emphasized the need for a sort of moral compensation.
What he wants is an apology for what happened, and then to have that apology, that reckoning, inform how economic, cultural, and political decisions are made moving forward.
perhaps the central tension of the Enlightenment is that many of these European thinkers were espousing liberalism, rationalism, and human progress while providing the kindling for slavery and colonialism.
That door could no longer be what I had first imagined, but perhaps it did not need to be. Around 33,000 people were sent from Gorée Island to the New World. Perhaps it matters less whether they did so by walking through a door in this house or if they were marched down to a dock and made to board from there. Perhaps it matters less that millions of people were not sent into bondage from this island but that people from this island were sent into bondage at all.
The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it. This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories.
At some point it is no longer a question of whether we can learn this history but whether we have the collective will to reckon with it.
