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

by Clint Smith

During parts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were more enslaved Black people in New York City than in any other urban area across North America. Enslaved workers made up more than a quarter of the city’s labor force. As the city grew, so did the number of enslaved people. As the American Revolution began, about a sixth of New York’s population was of African descent, and almost all of them were enslaved. In the early days of the Dutch settlement, write historians Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris in their anthology Slavery in New York, the norms governing slavery were different than they were in later iterations of the institution. There was a racial hierarchy in place, but how people moved within this hierarchy varied. For example, many enslaved people were paid for their work. And some enslaved people who were not compensated for their labor petitioned the Dutch West India Company for what they deemed their monetary due. Some Black people were freed by Dutch authorities and given land between New Amsterdam, in the southernmost part of Manhattan, and the rest of the island. This land, however, was not given out of benevolence but to create a buffer zone between the white settlers and the Native Americans who lived farther north, as tensions between the two were on the rise. As a result, by the middle of the seventeenth century, free Black people made up a third of New Amsterdam’s total Black population. Many of these free Black people participated in the s...