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

by Clint Smith

The land we were standing on was the oldest part of New York City, originally founded by the Dutch as New Amsterdam in 1624. When the Dutch arrived, they were met by the Lenape Native Americans, an Algonquian-speaking people who had lived on the land since 10,000 BC. Originally, it is said, their interactions were friendly, but their relations deteriorated as tensions over land increased. Two years later, the Dutch West India Company “purchased” the island of Manhattan from the Lenape for a price of sixty guilders’ worth of goods, equivalent today to about a thousand dollars. Damaras held up a copy of the earliest known reference to the purchase, a letter from 1626 reporting the news to the Dutch government. The original contract did not survive, but it may have meant something quite different to the Lenape than it did to the Dutch. “You see, this idea or this concept of owning land or resources—that was a European concept. Owning land to the Native Americans was like owning water or the moon or the stars, and in fact, there wasn’t a word for [land] ownership in their Algonquian language.” The first enslaved people to arrive in New York were eleven African men brought to the shores of New Amsterdam in 1626. They were tasked with clearing the land, building homes and roads, and generally helping to lay the infrastructural groundwork of the early Dutch settlement. It’s likely that some of the wood they cut from trees in lower Manhattan was used to build ships that eventually...