Six on History: Black History is Every Month
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1) NYC TORE DOWN A “NEGRO CONEY ISLAND” TWO WEEKS BEFORE OPENING DAY,
Dozier worked with architect Nina Cooke John to bring the amusement park dubbed “Negro Coney Island” to life in their exhibit. Through her photography, archival photos, and a film that includes speculative monologues from the park’s creator and important Black cultural producers of the Harlem Renaissance, Dozier pieced together a previously erased part of history. John’s architectural renderings of the architect’s plans enhance the reimagined park.
When Riley completed the amusement park, the jail was still in operation. Some feared that prisoners would use rowboats supplied by the amusement park to escape. This, along with the potter’s field on the northern tip of the island, were used as reasons to destroy the park. The park would then become a potter’s field on the southern tip of the island.
It is for this reason that Dozier uses a research technique called critical tabulation. This technique acknowledges that there are many truths to be uncovered and defined by those doing historical work. These researchers strive to fill in the blanks archives leave and correct the mistakes records allow.
“The erasure of [Negro Coney Island], both in tearing down the architectural structure and erasing a lot of [Riley’s] narrative, speaks to the ways in which, systems, and policy undergrid a way of exhausting Black emancipation,” Dozier said. “We often look at emancipation on the level of the spectacular out in the streets, going up against the oppositional force like the police or something. But we rarely will look at how the courts will literally just wear you down, and that’s what I see in Solomon Riley because he ultimately died from a heart attack while he was in his early 50s.”
Not only did the courts tear down Riley — he then fell into history’s oblivion. When Dozier began research about Riley, she only had his realtor license number and some immigration documents. Without a photo of this realtor giant or his birth certificate, Dozier pieced together his life.
“He was essential in renting out spaces and turning Harlem from an exclusively white neighborhood to that melting pot that enables individuals like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jimmy Daniels to go there and create this creative insurgency,” Dozier said. “It was purely through the boring elements of just renting and leasing out buildings.”
Riley’s relentless efforts to document his life through the press allowed Dozier to find information about him and his amusement park. After combing through the New York Times‘ archives, Dozier had enough keywords to tackle the archives of papers like the New Amsterdam News and the Negro World. Riley’s offhanded comment quoted in an article even allowed her to discover that “Negro Coney Island” had ten buildings.
By doing this research and creating an exhibit with architect Nina Cooke John, Dozier is animating lost history. A film written and produced by Dozier gives bodies, speech, and dialect to these figures lost to history. Even though these actors lack information about the figures they are playing, Dozier’s research allows them to give these figures, such as Riley, life. Hailing from Louisiana, Dozier and her family have rituals in which they bring figures to life in the same way.
“There’s a common ritual where you just give an ancestor a body,” Dozier said. “So you imagine an ancestor from the past and you try to embody that. It’s already a kind of broken ritual because you don’t need to know their name, you don’t need know to all the details. But by just giving the body, giving a face to some kind of ghost, in that way you’re bringing them within the present.”
Now, unclaimed bodies lay on the land where “Negro Coney Island” once stood. Without anyone to claim them, these bodies also find space in the present through Dozier’s exhibit. Many of these bodies belong to those who died from HIV/AIDS or experienced a state of homelessness. Many of these individuals did not have enough money to purchase health insurance or have a proper funeral.
“Negro Coney Island is trying to see what could have opened up that space,” Dozier said. “It really opens up that space as a kind of oasis for even the undead as well. The undead and the dead in that it kind of restores some type of peace to all of the things we don’t know about a racialized people in the world.”
See the exhibit “Cities of the Dead” at The Shed and join us for our next installment of Lost New York: Amusement Parks.
"Historians once considered Black participation in the American Revolution to be marginal, however, over the past five decades, numerous books and articles on this subject have dispelled that idea. Black participation in the American Revolution is now an integral part of the story of American freedom. However, the experiences of Black women who fled slavery during the American Revolution have largely gone unexamined. A part of the reason why is because historians had previously ignored the experiences of Black women during slavery. This began to change with the publication of Deborah Gray White’s book Ar’n’t I a Woman in 1985. However, even with this publication the consensus in the scholarship was that Black women did not flee bondage because of family ties and responsibilities. In essence, their positions as mothers and wives prevented them from escaping slavery. However, motherhood often served as a catalyst for attempted escape during the American Revolution, a time when chaos of war and the break-down of authority made escape possible for Black women in the North and South. Enslaved women had as much incentive to run away as did men, and perhaps even more since they were abused physically, sexually, and psychologically.
Running away was a revolutionary act of resistance because it indicates that, despite the punishments and penalties White society put in place to punish runaways, enslaved women as well as men rebelled against slavery through one of the most significant expressions of
Black rage and discontent: running away. The penalties for running away included branding, having one’s ear cut off, having a limb cut off, and being whipped; for men it also included castration. The figures for how many enslaved women escaped bondage are not definitive because not every runaway generated an advertisement. Thomas Jefferson estimated that Virginia lost 30,000 slaves to escape while historian Herbert Aptheker estimated that 100,000 slaves in total escaped bondage during the American Revolution. Of the 100,000 who escaped, 1/3 were fugitive women. While some scholars contend that these figures are inflated, the fact remains that thousands of enslaved people, including women, self-emancipated during the American Revolution. Black women’s resistance matters in the historical discourse on slave resistance because historically resistance has been understood as an experience belonging exclusively to Black men.
How enslaved women ran is just as informative and intriguing as why and where they ran. They did not run haphazardly into the woods, but established creative and subversive escape strategies. Enslaved women disguised themselves as waiting boys and men, faked physical and mental illness, impersonated White women, posed as Black male soldiers, served as spies, and boarded ships headed to northern cities. There were regional variations and similarities in the flight of enslaved women during the Revolution. Women who escaped from South Carolina and Georgia sought to escape to Spanish Florida, where the Spanish provided freedom and refuge for escaped slaves who reached St. Augustine. They also found refuge with British troops following the Southern Campaign of 1779. In Virginia and Maryland, enslaved women sought to reach Philadelphia, which came under the control of British forces in September 1777, as well as other northern destinations. In the northern and New England colonies, women sought to reach British forces during the early campaigns of the war and also endeavored to reach New York city. In each of these regions, fugitive women also sought to pass as free women.
The American Revolution was based on the premise of freedom for the colonies from the control of the British monarchy. The ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness resonated with enslaved women who used the rhetoric of the Revolution to claim their right to freedom. Women heard about these ideals from listening to the conversations of their enslavers as well as through the slave grapevine which carried news from plantation to plantation. The American Revolution brought into sharp focus the paradox of slavery and freedom. African American women contributed mightily to the story of American Independence. They believed in the independence of the individual. They valued in the most fundamental way what Thomas Jefferson and others would identify as inalienable rights.
Women sought refuge with the British because they recognized that their best chances for freedom resided with a British victory. Two proclamations were issued during the war that led to the escape of thousands of enslaved women to the lines of the British. The first was Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation issued in November 1775, and the second was the Philipsburg Proclamation issued in June 1779. Both proclamations promised freedom to slaves who reached the lines of the British and aided the Loyalist cause. Once women reached the lines of the British they served in a number of roles not only as cook and laundresses, but also worked in ordnance; this was especially true when the British occupied Charleston, South Carolina.
During the post-Revolutionary period, women faced significant obstacles to freedom. Article IV, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution provided for the capture and return of runaways. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 gave enforcement power by allowing enslavers to capture and return their runaways. President George Washington used the act to pursue his runaway slave Ona Judge, who escaped in 1796 from the Washington’s home in Philadelphia, which was then the nation’s capital. Ona successfully escaped to New Hampshire where she lived out the remainder of her life until she died in 1848. After several attempts to recapture her, the Washingtons eventually gave up their pursuit.
The Revolutionary War increased marronage as runaways found it advantageous to form communities in the swamps and woods. In maroon societies, which were located in the swamps and deep woods of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Louisiana women found refuge and the freedom to live as mothers and wives. Although they faced challenging and inhospitable circumstances, the freedom to live independently outweighed those circumstances. The largest maroon society was in the Great Dismal Swamp, located between Virginia and North Carolina, but there were others located on Belleisle near Savannah, Georgia, the Lower Mississippi Valley, and Prospect Bluff in Florida.
"Even as Los Angeles and other American cities have become more racially diverse over the last few decades, segregation and the inequities that go along with it have changed little, according to new research from UC Berkeley.
The Los Angeles metropolitan area has seen only slight improvements, the study found, and remains the sixth-most segregated of the 221 metro areas. Some other regions of the state ranked in the study did even worse. The metropolitan regions of Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, Santa Barbara, San Jose, Riverside, Sacramento, Oxnard, Vallejo, San Diego, Modesto, Chico, San Luis Obispo, Bakersfield and San Francisco all saw their segregation numbers worsen, the study found.
The Roots of Structural Racism Project was unveiled this month after several years of investigation, researchers said. Its findings are stark: 81% of U.S. metropolitan regions with at least 200,000 residents were more segregated in 2019 than they were in 1990.
Critically, the study also found that key outcomes for residents in segregated communities — including income, home values and life expectancy — remain worse than those in more integrated areas.
The findings were significant because residential segregation is the undercurrent of “basically every expression of structural racism” in the country, from health disparities to overpolicing, said Stephen Menendian, assistant director of the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley and the study’s lead author.
“The focus of the report is the persistence and extent of racial residential segregation,” he said, “and the harms that flow therefrom.”
The researchers used 1990 as a baseline year for comparison, not because it marked a particular turning point, Menendian said, but because that was when the U.S. Census Bureau started gathering more specific data on the Hispanic and Latino population.
Previous studies of segregation were more focused on the binary of Black people and white people, he said. Introducing additional populations into the data helped form a new and more complete picture.
“That’s what segregation looks like today,” he said. “It’s not about the complete separation of people. It’s about the divergence of the quality of neighborhoods and the composition of neighborhoods across regions.”
And even though Los Angeles has become more diverse over the last three decades, it is barely more integrated today than it was then. The L.A. metropolitan area — which includes Long Beach and Santa Ana, according to the census area used in the data — recorded a 0.01-point improvement on the researchers’ index, meaning it has seen virtually no change in 30 years.
“The decline [in segregation] is basically negligible,” Menendian said. Los Angeles “is essentially as segregated as it was in 1990.”
George Sanchez, a professor of history as well as American studies and ethnicity at USC, said he wasn’t surprised to hear that little has changed in the last three decades.
The historical legacy of segregation in Los Angeles still holds weight in many of today’s housing policies, Sanchez said, and while gentrification may temporarily integrate communities, they are typically resegregated by the new white or wealthy populations in due time.
“If you’ve been here 50 years, it seems like L.A. is amazingly diverse,” he said, “but of course, if you’ve got wealth and the right skin color, you’ve been able to cross over those lines on a very consistent basis. It looks very different when you’re low-income and trying to find a place to live.”
Along with Los Angeles, Stockton and Fresno were the only California areas in the study to see any improvement.
The U.S. metropolitan regions that saw the biggest increase in segregation between 1990 and 2019 included the Fayetteville, Ark., metropolitan region, and the Pennsylvania regions of Reading, Scranton and Allentown, according to the report.
Los Angeles was no utopia in 1990. The L.A. riots — spurred by the acquittal of four police officers in the beating of Rodney King — were on the horizon.
One Times story from 1992 began: “Despite evidence of increased racial tensions across the nation, [B]lack and white Americans still support the concept of a racially mixed society, especially integrated schools, according to a recent study.”
But many of the patterns that persisted then — as well as today — were knit much earlier.
The practice of redlining, which denied home ownership and financial services to residents based on race, began around the 1920s, historian Alison Rose Jefferson said. By the 1930s, the government-sponsored Home Owners’ Loan Corp. had codified redlining practices, creating a domino effect of decline for those who had been marginalized.
“It’s a vicious cycle in terms of what was done to our society during that time period because it allowed for a major level of disinvestment of communities of color and lower-income white communities,” she said, noting that translated into a lack of housing development and new infrastructure, the laying of freeways through neighborhoods and other lasting harms.
There was progress along the way, including the Shelley vs. Kraemer decision of 1948 that made racially restrictive covenants — which barred Black, Latino and other people of color from living in certain homes — unenforceable by law. In 1968, the Fair Housing Act expressly prohibited housing discrimination based on race.
From 1970 to 1980, residential integration in many areas increased significantly, according to the Berkeley report, but progress slowed incrementally in each subsequent decade.
And while many of the patterns of segregation can be traced back to redlining, it is not the only driver. Residential segregation has been “sustained by exclusionary white neighborhoods and cities that make it very difficult for people of color and lower-income people to move in,” Menendian said.
According to the report, the outcomes for residents of those segregated areas can be lasting. Income for Black and Latino residents is higher in more integrated neighborhoods, and poverty rates are significantly lower.
Specifically, the study found that Black children raised in integrated neighborhoods earn nearly $1,000 more per year as adults than those raised in highly segregated communities of color, and $4,000 more when raised in white neighborhoods.
The numbers are similar for Latino children, who earn $844 more per year as adults when raised in integrated neighborhoods, and $5,000 more when raised in white neighborhoods.
Life expectancy, homeownership, employment and education numbers also improve in integrated neighborhoods.
But the best life outcomes in all categories remain in highly segregated white areas.
Racism and racial segregation are an undeniable part of the fabric of Los Angeles — from the Native land on which the city was founded to the 1871 Chinese Massacre to the beating of Rodney King. The Times in September vowed to examine its own contribution to many of those failures.
In some ways, the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare how little progress has been made. As the coronavirus spread, Black and Latino residents suffered disproportionately from its devastating and deadly toll, in part because of a lifelong and systemic lack of access to primary healthcare.
As the county began its rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine, the same pattern revealed itself. A map of neighborhoods least likely to have received the coveted doses fit pat over a map of predominantly Black and Latino communities, which itself aligned with those historical maps of redlining.
But reversing the legacy of segregation is a slow process, said Paavo Monkkonen, associate professor at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and director of the Latin American Cities Initiative.
“There’s kind of an inertia of urban neighborhoods where people may move a lot, but usually don’t move too far away from where they are,” he said. “It’s a self-perpetuating process, where people are relegated to less attractive parts of the city, and then they’re associated with those parts of the city.”
The Trump administration in 2019 tried to undo some aspects of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, Monkkonen said, and many cities and communities are still working to develop proactive policies around fair housing and development.
Although Monkkonen was optimistic, he said many researchers aren’t convinced that 2020’s reckoning with race will significantly move the needle when it comes to segregation — particularly since the results of the 2020 census were probably skewed by intimidation tactics used against the Latino population, which will make it harder to assess data moving forward.
And while historical patterns are persistent, the reasons that people live where they do are deep and often complex, Jefferson said. Many people live in communities where they feel comfortable, or where they have family, or where they can find housing and jobs.
Los Angeles County today is about 49% Hispanic; 26% white; 15% Asian and 8% Black, according to 2019 census data. Around 2% of the population is categorized as two or more races, and less than 1% as Native American or Islander.
Those numbers are markedly more diverse than 1990, when more than 40% of the county’s residents were white.
And although Los Angeles itself has become more diverse over the years, Jefferson said it is not surprising that the study found segregation in L.A. really hasn’t budged.
“Yes, we are more diverse,” she said, “but we are not necessarily living in more diverse communities.”
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that whenever a Black person does something, it’s usually cool and changes the world. Just look at TikTok. Or “Gen Z slang.” And, oh yeah, pretty much everything else.
Even a simple handshake in the literal hands of Black folks becomes a vessel for flyness, authenticity and cultural solidarity. There’s a reason why people remember (and replicate) Will and Jazz’s iconic handshake more than 25 years after the series finale of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
Plus, who could ever forget the iconic code switch handshake between former President Obama and Kevin Durant back in 2012? The moment lives on forever in my heart on the Obama White House YouTube page and the spoofed “Obama Meet & Greet” sketch on Key & Peele.
But one greeting, in particular, speaks volumes about the time period in which it was created and its origins play a major role in concretizing its place in American history.
Black soldiers serving in Vietnam created the “dap,” which stands for dignity and pride, in the face of “prejudiced commanders or NCOs” as “manifestations of solidarity occurred frequently throughout the military and were an important assertion of social identity for black GIs,” per David Cortwright’s Black GI Resistance During the Vietnam War.
LaMont Hamilton is an interdisciplinary artist who created the Five on the Black Hand Side project, which explored “gestural languages that were born in African American communities” during the ’60s and ’70s. According to Hamilton:
Scholars on the Vietnam War and black Vietnam vets alike note that the dap derived from a pact black soldiers took in order to convey their commitment to looking after one another. Several unfortunate cases of black soldiers reportedly being shot by white soldiers during combat served as the impetus behind this physical act of solidarity.
Different types of “in-group handshakes,” like the dap or Black Power handshake, exist as a marker of identity and support, especially in the face of racism and immediate danger—much like today.
Whether Black folks are out here dapping one another up, nodding, or bumping elbows thanks to the pandemic, at the end of the day, it’s all about acknowledging someone’s humanity in a world that so often strips Black people of theirs. And that’s something we should all have a hand in."
