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"There is a nationwide movement to reconsider the names of places and teams and to stop honoring racists and racist symbols. The Cleveland Indians will soon be no more; the baseball team will be known as the Cleveland Guardians. The Washington Redskins are now the Washington Football Team while a new name is being considered. A bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a slave trader, a Confederate general responsible for atrocities committed against African American troops serving in the United States army, and a founder of the terrorist Ku Klux Klan, was finally removed from the state capitol building in Nashville, Tennessee. Senator Elizabeth Warren has introduced the Reconciliation in Place Names Act to create a special advisory committee to investigate and propose changes to offensive place names. There remain thousands of towns, lakes, streams, creeks and mountains in the United States with racist names.
In New York City, Eric Adams, the Democratic Party candidate for Mayor, pledges to rename streets and buildings named after slave-owners. The name of a Bronx Park was recently changed from Mullaly to Foster. John Mullaly was indicted during the Civil War for inciting a draft riot that led to the murder of African Americans on the streets of Manhattan. The Reverend Wendell Foster was a Bronx community activist who campaigned to have the park restored.
The following Manhattan streets are named for slaveholders and slave traders:
Bayard Street in present day Chinatown is named after Nicholas Bayard, a nephew of Peter Stuyvesant, and an early mayor of British New York. Bayard was convicted of complicity with the pirate William Kidd but escaped punishment. Nicholas and his son owned and operated sugar mills processing slave-produced commodities in the city and owned stakes in at least eight slave trading ships. Bayard is listed as holding against his will the accused enslaved African Phaeton in records of the 1741 slave rebellion plot.
Beekman Street and Place near City Hall Park are named after Willem Beeckman (William Beekman), a colonial mayor of New York City and a major landowner. A number of sources list the Beekman’s as slaveholders and slave traders. Nearby William Street is also named after Beeckman.
Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village is named after writer Anthony Bleecker. Bleecker is listed as a slaveholder in records of the Trinity Church.
Bogardus Place in northern Manhattan is named after the Bogardus family that owned a large farm in the area of Manhattan by Fort Tryon Park. They are listed as slaveholders in the 1810 census.
Broome Street in SOHO is named after New York City merchant John Broome who lived by Hanover Square near South Street Seaport. Broome is listed as a slaveholder in the 1790 census. Burling Slip at South Street Seaport is named after the Burling family, 18th century merchants and slave traders.
Catherine Lane, Catherine Slip, and Catherine Street near present day Chinatown are named after Catherine De Peyster Rutgers. The De Peyster and Rutgers family are listed as slaveholders in records of the 1741 slave rebellion plot.
Chambers Street north of City Hall is named after John Chambers, a lawyer and judge, who is listed in records of the 1741 slave rebellion plot as having an enslaved African man named Cuba. He was also listed as a slaveholder in Trinity Church records.
Charlton Street in west SOHO is named after Dr. John Charlton, a British doctor who served as President of the New York Medical Society. He was listed as a slaveholder in the 1800 census and Trinity Church records.
Clarkson Street in Greenwich Village is named after Matthew Clarkson, a Revolutionary War soldier who later supported abolition while serving in the state legislature. The Clarkson family was listed as slaveholders in a number of 18th century sources and Matthew Clarkson is listed as a slaveholder in the 1800 census.
Clinton Street on the Lower East Side is named after Revolutionary War General George Clinton who became the first post-war Governor of New York and Vice-President of the United States in 1804. He is listed as a slaveholder in the 1790s in a number of different sources.
Coenties Slip in the Wall Street area is named after Conraet Ten Eyck who is listed in records of the 1741 slave rebellion plot as the enslaver of an African man named Dick who was transported to the sugar fields of Barbados.
Cortlandt Street in the Wall Street area and Cortlandt Alley in Chinatown are named after the Van Cortlandt family. Documentary sources including wills shows that the Van Cortlandt family were slave traders and one of the largest slaveholders in colonial New York.
Cuylers Alley is named after Henry Cuyler. His family owned a sugar warehouse near the African Burial Ground. He was a documented slave trader.
Delancey Street is a major Lower East Side cross street starting at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge. It is named after State Supreme Court Judge James de Lancey. De Lancey is listed as the enslaver of African men Antonio, and Othello who were accused of participation in the 1741 slave rebellion plot. Antonio was convicted and transported to the sugar plantations of Barbados. Othello was hanged in what is now Foley Square. Oliver Street is named after his brother, Oliver de Lancey.
Depeyster Street at South Street Seaport is named after Abraham de Peyster, a wealthy merchant and mayor from 1691-1695. De Peyster, a slave trader, personally enslaved between 9 and 13 Africans according to different sources. There is a statue of de Peyster in Thomas Paine Park near the Supreme Court building.
Desbrosses Street in west SOHO is named after Elias Desbrosses, colonial era founder, treasurer, and President of the New York City Chamber of Commerce and active in the trade with the West Indies. In a 1771 run-away slave ad notes his involvement in the sale of an enslaved African named Brit. His descendants are listed as slaveholders in the 1790 census. James Street is named after a member of the Desbrosses family.
Duane Street runs right by the African Burial Ground National Monument in the City Hall area. It is named after James Duane, the first mayor of New York after the British evacuation. He was a founder of the New York Manumission Society, but is named as a slaveholder in Trinity Church records. His father Anthony was listed as a slaveholder in records of the 1741 slave rebellion plot.
Dyckman Street on the border of Washington Heights and Inwood is named after the Dyckman family that still owned a large part of northern Manhattan from the colonial era through the Civil War. The Dyckman farmhouse is still at 204th Street and Broadway. Prior to the end of slavery in New York State, the Dyckman family held in bondage at least seven people. Jacobus Place is named after one of the Dyckmans.
Edgar Street, south of Trinity Church, is named after William Edgar who ran a shipping company and owned warehouses. He is listed as holding enslaved Africans on the 1790-1820 census reports.
Gracie Square by the mayor’s residence on the Upper East Side is named after merchant and banker Archibald Gracie who is listed as owning enslaved Africans in documents from the first decade of the 19th century.
Hamilton Place and Terrace are located near the City College of New York and are named after Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton’s name appears on bills of sale for enslaved Africans from the 1780s and 1790s. His will lists the value of of his “servants.”
Henry Street, Rutgers Street, and Rutgers Slip on the Lower East Side are named after Henry Rutgers. Rutgers’ ownership of enslaved Africans is documented in a number of sources including his will.
Hester Street in present day Chinatown is named for Hester Leisler Rynders, daughter of Governor Jacob Leisler and wife of Barnet Rynders. Records show that Hester owned enslaved Africans and Barnet Rynders was involved in the slave trade.
Houston Street, the major east-west thoroughfare in downtown Manhattan is named after William Houstoun, a Georgia delegate to the Continental Congress. Houstoun was married to the daughter of Nicholas Bayard and was a planter and slaveholder.
Jackson Street in the Lower East Side by the East River is named after President Andrew Jackson, a slaveholder who committed genocidal acts against Native Americans.
Jay Street in Tribeca is named after John Jay, Supreme Court Justice and New York State Governor. Although Jay was a founder of the manumission society and signed into law the gradual emancipation act, he was a slaveholder.
Jefferson Street, located in present day Chinatown. Jefferson Market Library is in Greenwich Village. They are named after President Thomas Jefferson, who held enslaved people on his Monticello plantation.
Jumel Place, Jumel Terrace and Jumel Mansion are located in Washington Heights and named after wine merchant Stephen Jumel who immigrated to New York City in 1795 during the Haitian slave rebellion when his coffee plantation in Haiti where he held enslaved Africans was liberated in the revolt.
Lenox Avenue, co-named Malcolm X Boulevard, and Lenox Terrace, were named after Robert Lenox. A merchant and real estate investor listed as a slaveholder on a number of documents.
Leonard Street, north of the African Burial Ground National Monument in the City Hall area, is named after Leonard Lispenard. He is listed as an enslaver of Africans in the 1810 census. Thomas Street, two blocks south, is named after his brother and Lispenard Street, just south of Canal Street, is named after his father.
Leroy Street in the West Village is named after merchant Jacob Leroy. Ship documents show he was involved in the slave trade and enslaved Africans.
MacDougal Street and Alley near Washington Square Park are named after ship’s captain Alexander MacDougall who was a founder of the New York branch of the Sons of Liberty. A January 5, 1782 run-away slave ad offers a one guinea reward for a “negro boy named Cudjoe” who escaped from the ship Emanuel and Hercules under the command of Alexander MDougal.
Macombs Place in North Harlem is named after Alexander Macombs, a soldier during the War of 1812. He is listed as a slaveholder on documents from 1790 and 1812. There is also a Macombs Road in the Bronx, a Macombs Dam Park and a Macombs Dam Bridge connecting the Bronx and Manhattan.
Madison Street, located in present day Chinatown, Madison Avenue, a major north-south thoroughfare, and Madison Square are named after President James Madison who was a slaveholder.
Monroe Street, located in present day Chinatown, is named after President James Monroe who was a slaveholder.
Morton Street in the West Village is named after lawyer and soldier Jacob Morton who is listed as a slaveholder on multiple documents.
Mott Street in present day Chinatown is named after Joseph Mott, a prosperous butcher and tavern keeper who is listed as a slaveholder on multiple documents.
Murray Street in Tribeca is named after lawyer Joseph Murray who enslaved an African man named Adam, who was convicted of participation in the 1741 slave rebellion plot and transported to Barbados.
Peck Slip near the South Street Seaport is named after Benjamin Peck, a merchant, kept an African man enslaved. His name is unknown, but he is believed to have committed suicide after being accused of participation in the 1741 slave rebellion plot.
Pell Street in present day Chinatown is named after John Pell, a New York butcher, who his listed as a slaveholder on 1800 and 1810 documents.
Reade Street abuts the African Burial Ground National Monument in the City Hall area. It is named after Joseph Reade, a merchant, was warden at Trinity Church. In a 1732 fugitive slave notice he offers a reward for the return of a “mullatto servant woman” named Sarah.
Rivington Street on the Lower East Side is named for James Rivington, a newspaper publisher, named as a slaveholder on multiple documents from 1770-1790. In 1783, a Mr. Rivington advertised in the Royal Gazette for the return of a “little Negro boy.”
Rose Street near City Hall is named after Captain Joseph Rose, a merchant and distiller, who was listed as a slaveholder in 1790 documents.
Rutherford Place near Union Square is named after Colonel John Rutherford who was listed as a slaveholder in 1790.
Seaman Avenue in Inwood at the northern tip of Manhattan is named after Henry Seaman who is listed as a slaveholder in 1790.
Sickles Street is east of Fort Tryon Park and is named after the Sickels family. A number of members of the family were slaveholders.
Stuyvesant Alley, Place and Oval in the Stuyvesant Town housing development are named after Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch Governor of New Netherland. Stuyvesant was the largest private slaveholder in the Dutch colony.
Tompkins Square in the East Village is named after Daniel D. Tompkins, a New York State Governor and Vice-President of the United States under James Monroe. Tompkins was instrumental in the passage of the law that banned slavery in New York State, but also was listed as a slaveholder in 1800 documents. The Tompkinsville neighborhood of Staten Island is also named for him.
Vandam Street in west SOHO is named after members of the Van Dam family. Rip Van Dam, a British Governor of the New York colony, was a major slave trader and enslaver of one of the Africans suspected of participation in the 1741 slave rebellion plot.
Varick Street runs north-south from Hudson Square in the West Village to the World Trade Center and is named after Revolutionary War Colonel Richard Varick who was Mayor of New York City from 1789 to 1801. Records from the 1741 slave rebellion plot list the Vaarck family as major slaveholders. Varick is listed as a slaveholder on multiple documents between 1787 and 1805.
Vermilyea Avenue is near Inwood Park in northern Manhattan and is named after the Vermeille family (also spelled Vermilya). Multiple family members were slaveholders. In 1765, John Vermillye advertised for the return of freedom-seeker Toney, a “Mulatto fellow.”
Washington Mews, Place, and Square in Greenwich Village are named after George Washington, Revolutionary War general and the first President of the United States, who held enslaved Africans on his Mount Vernon, Virginia plantation. Washington Street in near the Hudson River in the West Village.
Watts Street is near the Manhattan entrance to the Holland Tunnel and is named after John Watts, a British colonial official. Watts was a slave trader and slaveholder.
Willett Street is in the Lower East Side near the Manhattan base of the Williamsburg Bridge and is named after New York City sheriff and mayor Marinus Willett. Willett is listed as a slaveholder on documents dated between 1787 and 1800.
Other suspected participants in the slave system:
Arden Street near Inwood Park is named after Jacob Arden who died during the Revolutionary War. His wife was Catherine Beekman. The 1800 New York City Census lists a Jacob Arden, possibly a son, who held four enslaved Africans. The Beekman family were also major slaveholders. The Rutgers family is listed as slaveholders in records of the 1741 slave rebellion plot.
Barclay Street, west of City Hall Park in lower Manhattan is named after Henry Barclay, the rector of Trinity Church from 1746 until he died in 1764. Barclay was married to Mary Rutgers. Their son Thomas Barclay is listed as a slaveholder on the 1800 census.
Nagle Avenue near Inwood Park is named after Jan Nagel, a wealthy landowner in northern Manhattan who partnered with the Dyckmans."
Illustrations, from above: the tombstone of Elias Desbrosses in Trinity Church yard; engraving of colonial New York councilors Nicholas Bayard, Stephanus van Cortlandt, and Frederick Phillipse quieting fears during the 1689 Leisler’s Rebellion in New York City; the statue of Abraham de Peyster was originally in Bowling Green; Wall Street slave auction; and African Burial Ground plaque.
"At the turn of the twentieth century, Henrietta Swan Leavitt — one of the remarkable astronomers known as the Harvard Computers, women who did significant cosmological work long before they could vote — made a discovery that allowed astronomers to calculate the distance between Earth and faraway galaxies for the first time. Her data later became the foundation upon which Edwin Hubble formulated what is now known as Hubble’s Law — the first observational indication that the universe is expanding.
Half a century after the inception of Hubble’s Law, in the late 1970s, engineers began work on an astronomical apparatus more ambitious than any previous human attempt to observe the universe: the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched into orbit in 1990.
One of those early engineers was the father of Pulitzer-winning poet Tracy K. Smith.
At The Universe in Verse, Smith read the final section of her long, beautiful poem “My God, It’s Full of Stars” — a title borrowed from Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey — found in her sublime poetry collection Life on Mars (public library). The poem is Smith’s quest to bring lyrical and cinematic language to, as she herself frames it, “this real mystery, the universe that we belong to, that we’re at home in and yet such strangers of, in a way.” Please enjoy:
MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF STARS (PART 5)
'When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said
They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed
In papery green, the room a clean cold, a bright white.
He’d read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks,
His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Raegan years,
When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled
To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons
Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find.
His face lit up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise
As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending
Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons
For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.
We learned new words for things. The decade changed.
The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed
For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,
The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is —
So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.'
In a stroke of glorious serendipity, the background against which Smith read her poem at The Universe in Verse featured a crisp, stunning image of the Rosetta Galaxy taken by the Hubble Space Telescope a generation after those first imperfect photographs — a feat of science and engineering that would have made her father proud, built, like all progress, on the toilsome trial and error that preceded it, by the pink, exhausted eyes that pushed past the failings."
"The treatment of Haitian refugees at the U.S. border last month — some chased by horseback agents, others huddled by the thousands under a bridge — is tragic. For reasons that are less obvious, it is also ironic. Although Americans’ centuries-long debt to the Haitian people is untaught in our schools and unacknowledged in our public discourse, the indomitable spirit of the Haitian people created the United States we know today.
Even the capsule version of Haiti’s successful fight to end slavery and for independence at the turn of the 19th century is riveting. C.L.R. James, the late Trinidadian political leader and historian of the Caribbean, wrote six decades ago:
“In August 1791, after two years of the French Revolution and its repercussions in [Hispaniola], the slaves revolted. The struggle lasted for 12 years. The slaves defeated in turn the local whites and the soldiers of the French monarchy, a Spanish invasion, a British expedition of some 60,000 men, and a French expedition of similar size under Bonaparte’s brother-in-law. The defeat of Bonaparte’s expedition in 1803 resulted in the establishment of the Negro state of Haiti which has lasted to this day.”
It’s one of the most remarkable stories of liberation that we have as a species: the largest revolt of enslaved people in human history, and the only one known to have produced a free state. But even this sweeping account understated the extraordinary role that Haiti’s rebellious enslaved played in world history.
Their success in freeing themselves in the face of the stoutest European hostility imaginable ironically made Haiti the first nation to fulfill the most fundamental values of the Enlightenment: freedom from bondage and racial equality for all. These principles were enshrined in Haiti’s first constitution, in 1804, decades before they were embraced by the United States.
And that was just the beginning.
Seeds of greatnessThe Haitians’ defeat of Napoleon forced the French dictator to sell off his vast holdings in continental North America to the young United States. This was done at the fire-sale price of $15 million, and with a stroke added the land that today comprises all or part of 15 states. The Louisiana Purchase transformed the country from a vulnerable, coast-hugging collection of former English colonies to a continental power.
Black Haiti’s defeat of France opened up the Mississippi Valley to large-scale westward migration — by white farmer settlers and by huge numbers of Black people who were enslaved in the Old South after they or their ancestors were shipped there in chains from Africa. Now, in a second great forced migration, these enslaved people were quickly put to backbreaking work growing cotton. On the basis of Black sweat and blood, production of this fiber soared, coming to account for two-thirds of America’s exports at its peak, by the eve of the Civil War.
America rose swiftly on the back of cotton exports produced by the enslaved in the Mississippi Valley, and on a boom in ancillary businesses that profited from it, from northern banking to railroads — all because, on a Caribbean island in 1791, Black people demanded freedom.
The impact of the Haitian Revolution was just as dramatic on the other side of the Atlantic, especially for Britain.
We are accustomed to thinking about Britain’s rise during the Industrial Revolution as a tale of mechanical ingenuity and enterprise. But no less than America’s, that country’s boom was predicated on slavery in the Mississippi Valley.
At a 19th century peak, while 1 in 13 Americans worked to produce cotton, a number that consisted overwhelmingly of the enslaved, 1 in 6 Britons worked in textiles. Make no mistake: Textiles meant cotton, the one indispensable ingredient of the Industrial Revolution. Cotton meant the Mississippi.
A historical ironyThat history may not be front of mind when we see news coverage about Haitian refugees and the U.S. Border Patrol. But it suffuses the imagery and the language whenever Haiti is the topic.
As scarcely anyone with a television or a social media account could have missed, for the first time since the border has become a front-line political issue in this country, refugees were chased last month by Border Patrol agents on horseback, as if they were cattle being herded in a Hollywood western. In the most infamous images, these agents ran down Black men while wielding leather reins that bore a painfully close resemblance to lashes.
The symbolism of Americans corralling Haitian refugees could hardly be more tragic or ironic. Haiti not only bequeathed the world historical events laid out above, but also, with nearly a million enslaved Africans brought to the island after 1680, was one of the premier sites in the development of chattel slavery as an institution in the so-called New World. The word “chattel” directly derives from “cattle” and describes a system in which humans are reduced to bestial property, put to work however their owners deem proper, stripped of all rights — even those associated with parenthood, because the offspring of enchattled people automatically became the property of the parents’ masters.
The appalling scene at the border offers us a rare opportunity to rethink the shared Western debt to Haiti for its extraordinary role in our history. The refugee crisis is itself a chance for Americans to live up to the ideals of the Haitian Revolution.
‘Poorest nation’As a former longtime foreign correspondent for the New York Times, I know that I have played a role myself, however unwitting, in the journalistic reductionism that has helped erase Haiti’s place in the rise of the West and the expansion of the United States.
I covered the country for four years in the early 1990s, traveling there countless times, and sometimes spending weeks at a time in Haiti during a period of prolonged and severe political turmoil and violence. A phrase that sometimes slipped into my coverage, and appears to this day in other writing about Haiti, served as a kind of code to condense the country’s history into the briefest journalistic shorthand. It also rendered Haiti’s real story invisible, and took Western powers and people off the hook. That phrase was “poorest nation in the Western hemisphere.”
As true as this was in narrowly factual terms, it told us nothing about how Haiti had come to be, about its blood contribution to Western wealth. It silenced the immense gift to American geography that its revolution had made possible. It said nothing about the fierce opposition to Haitian freedom mounted by American founders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, whom we celebrate as avatars of Enlightenment values and democracy.
Both men saw the prospect of Black freedom in Hispaniola as a source of nightmarish horror that would threaten the tranquility and prosperity of white people by undermining slavery in the United States. And while Jefferson spoke of an expansionist America as an “empire of liberty,” even as slavery spread westward, Haiti’s revolutionary leaders took that very same language and enshrined it in their constitution, immediately giving it universal substance.
“It is not circumstantial liberty conceded only to us that we want,” wrote Haiti’s most important revolutionary leader, Toussaint Louverture, who had been formerly enslaved. “It is the absolute acceptance of the principle that no man, whether born red, black or white, can be the property of another.”
The press’ reductionist characterizations of Haiti also whistle past the crippling indemnity, the equivalent of $21 billion, that France imposed on Haiti in 1825, before Paris would recognize the young nation’s independence. And they ignore the history of deep American interference in Haiti’s affairs, including a military occupation, which lasted from 1915 to 1934.
“Poorest nation” indeed. No wonder Americans and Europeans would elide the causes of that poverty.
Fight for freedomI am being tough on my own profession, but teachers of American and world history have done even worse.
In securing freedom for a population of former slaves, Haitians fought “as naked as earthworms,” in Louverture’s famous phrase, successively defeating the three strongest imperial powers of the age: Spain, Britain and France. Those latter two countries sent the two largest naval expeditionary forces in their histories up to that point to try to reimpose slavery on Hispaniola’s Black population in order to control the global supply of sugar. Each was defeated, and the details of this history go as unacknowledged in French and British classrooms today as Haiti’s role in the Louisiana Purchase and the rise of King Cotton do in American ones.
Louverture explained his armies’ successes in language as noble as any that emanated from America’s own Revolution: “We are fighting that liberty — the most precious of all earthly possessions — may not perish.”
As we watch Haitians sacrificing everything to make their way to this country, we should do so not only with more empathy, but also with the understanding that liberty is as integral to their story as it is to our own. What is more, their liberty is a vital part of our own story."
Howard W. French, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author most recently of “Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War,” set to be published Tuesday.
" ... We turn now to look at a pioneering woman in the struggle to guarantee voting rights: Fannie Lou Hamer. She’s the subject of a new book by the acclaimed historian Keisha Blain. Fannie Lou Hamer was the daughter of Mississippi sharecroppers, who became involved in the civil rights movement when she volunteered to attempt to register to vote in 1962. By then, the 45-year-old mother lost her job and continuously risked her life over her civil rights activism.
Despite this and a brutal beating, Fannie Lou Hamer helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the white domination of the Mississippi Democratic Party. In 1964, the party challenged the all-white Mississippi delegation at the Democratic National Convention, with Fannie Lou Hamer as the leader. Her voice, along with others, led to an integrated Mississippi delegation in 1968. This is part of her address at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on August 22nd, 1964, where she testified before the Credentials Committee about her efforts to register to vote.
FANNIE LOU HAMER: It was the 31st of August in 1962 that 18 of us traveled 26 miles to the country courthouse in Indianola to try to register to become first-class citizens. We was met in Indianola by policemen, highway patrolmen, and they only allowed two of us in to take the literacy test at the time. After we had taken this test and started back to Ruleville, we was held up by the city police and the state highway patrolmen and carried back to Indianola, where the bus driver was charged that day with driving a bus the wrong color.
After we paid the fine among us, we continued on to Ruleville, and Reverend Jeff Sunny carried me four miles in the rural area, where I had worked as a timekeeper and sharecropper for 18 years. I was met there by my children. They told me the plantation owner was angry because I had gone down, tried to register. After they told me, my husband came and said the plantation owner was raising Cain because I had tried to register. And before he quit talking, the plantation owner came and said, “Fannie Lou, do you know — did Pap tell you what I said?”
And I said, “Yes, sir.”
He said, “Well, I mean that.” Said, “If you don’t go down and withdraw your registration, you will have to leave.” Said, “Then, if you go down and withdraw, then you still might have to go, because we are not ready for that in Mississippi.”
And I addressed him and told him, said, “I didn’t try to register for you. I tried to register for myself.”
"I had to leave that same night."
On the 10th of September, 1962, 16 bullets were fired into the home of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Tucker for me. That same night, two girls were shot in Ruleville, Mississippi. Also, Mr. Joe McDonald’s house was shot in. …
If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hook because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings in America?
AMY GOODMAN: That was Fannie Lou Hamer’s address at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in ’64.
For more, we’re joined by Keisha Blain, award-winning historian, author of the new book, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America.
Professor Blain, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us.
KEISHA BLAIN: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about that moment in time and why you have decided to write a book on Fannie Lou Hamer.
"On a pair of folding tables in the basement of the Public Archaeology Laboratory (PAL) in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, four metal trays display an unusual assemblage of artifacts. Humble ceramic tableware. Iron padlocks. Dominoes carved out of bone. A cut-glass tumbler. A diminutive bottle of French hair tonic. The headless body of a porcelain doll. A Spanish coin. A redware pot with drizzles of blue, black, yellow and green paint frozen in time on its sides.
In 2019, the subcommittee emailed colleagues to gauge interest in researching Snowtown. Over the course of three meetings, a handful of people blossomed first into a group of 30 and now a cohort of more than 100 historians, archivists, archaeologists, teachers, storytellers, artists and community members.
After the American Revolution, Rhode Island experienced rapid population growth driven by the international “Triangle Trade”—of enslaved people, sugar products and spirits—through the port of Providence. The state’s distilleries had a special knack for turning imported sugarcane and molasses from the West Indies into rum, which was traded for enslaved labor. But by the 1830s, as the population surpassed 16,000, the manufacturing of textiles, jewelry and silverware had supplanted the merchant trade as the city’s primary economic driver.
The state’s Gradual Emancipation Act of 1784 had allowed children born to enslaved women to be freed once they reached adulthood. Within decades, a new population of free Black people had emerged, but they, along with indentured servants, Indigenous people, immigrants and impoverished white people, were pushed into marginalized communities. Many of these groups were denied the opportunity to work in the burgeoning manufacturing industry.
Pollution in Providence made conditions even worse. The Great Salt Cove, a tidal estuary that had been significant to local Indigenous tribes, just below the sandy bluff where Snowtown was located, became a dumping ground for sewage and industrial waste. Real estate in the village was undesirable; rents were cheap; and “disreputable” businesses aimed at sailors coming through port—brothels, saloons and dance halls—proliferated.
In 1831, sailors newly arrived from Sweden aboard the steamer Lion started a brawl at a tavern in Olney’s Lane, a neighborhood adjacent to Snowtown that was also home to an assemblage of non-white communities. According to an account in the Rhode Island American and Gazette, the sailors gathered reinforcements and attacked a home occupied by “blacks of a dissolute character.” Two Black men fired on the sailors, slaying one and wounding three. The white mob, shouting “Kill every negro you can!” advanced uphill into Snowtown, where the shooter was believed to had fled.
Over the course of four days, 18 buildings in Snowtown and Olney’s Lane were damaged or destroyed. Eventually, the state militia, ill-equipped to handle the scene, fired to disperse the mob, killing four.
Though residents rebuilt, by the late 1800s, Snowtown and its Black residents had been displaced by industrial progress. Rhode Island had grown into the wealthiest state per capita. In part as a monument to its prestige, the state commissioned renowned architects McKim, Mead & White, of Pennsylvania Station and New York Public Library renown, to design a massive State House on the bluff above Great Salt Cove. Construction was completed in 1904.
Today, all traces of Snowtown and its sister communities are obscured beneath railroad tracks, a small park commemorating state founder Roger Williams, and the ornate neoclassical capitol and its rolling green lawns.
Still, says Chris Roberts, a Snowtown Project researcher and an assistant professor at Rhode Island School of Design, “If you’re researching slavery in Providence, Snowtown comes up. If you’re looking at the history of women in Providence, Snowtown shows up. If you’re looking into the city as a commercial hub, it comes up. Snowtown is a character in so many different histories of the city.”
Uncovering Snowtown has not been without challenges. For starters, the record is incomplete. Census data, for example, documents the names of heads of households, with only numbers to indicate women and children. “We often have to grapple with these archival silences,” says Jerrad Pacatte, a Snowtown research committee member and a PhD candidate at Rutgers University. “These were people who were not considered worthy of being counted.”
Physical evidence of entrepreneurship, creativity and personal care persist in a collection of about 32,000 artifacts. The artifacts were unearthed, and about 30 percent cataloged, in the early 1980s, when the Federal Railroad Administration undertook rail-improvement projects in the Northeast, including in Providence
According to Heather Olson, the lab manager for PAL and a Snowtown Project researcher, the materials were then archived and shipped to what is now the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission. They remained there for 35 years, largely untouched, save for a few inquiries related to doctoral theses and a small exhibit in 1988; those items subsequently went missing.
Kitchen items are the most common, and they reflect a curious intermingling of status. Alongside unadorned plates and servingware, the collection includes pricey Blue Willow transferware, Chinese porcelain and an 18th-century feldspathic stoneware teapot. Olson says, “I don’t know if these arrived as clean fill from somewhere, if it was something bought secondhand, or if this was something that had been given to the people”—for example, to a domestic servant employed by the city’s wealthy.
If the complex work of the Snowtown Project shines a spotlight on a single truth, it’s that “written history belongs to the winners,” says Joanne Pope Melish, a retired University of Kentucky historian; the author of Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860; and co-chair of the project’s research committee.
“History, and the doing and the telling of history, is a product of the politics of the moment in which the telling of the story is happening and of the moment in which the story took place,” she explains.
White supremacy was alive and well above the Mason-Dixon Line. Newly freed African American people traded the physical oppression of enslavement for the societal oppression of classism and historical effacement. Mentions of Snowtown are infrequent in contemporaneous newspapers. They begin to reemerge only in the 1960s, as the civil rights movement brought the neighborhood back into public consciousness.
This awareness has accelerated over the past decade, in direct response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Modern media retellings of vanished histories have also helped, such as the episode of HBO’s “Watchmen” that dramatized the events of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
Before Tulsa, according to Pope Melish, white mobs attacked northern Black neighborhoods 144 times between 1820 and 1850. While the Oklahoma attack was far deadlier, these assaults present two sides of the same coin. Pope Melish says, “It parallels the impossibility of being a ‘perfect’ enslaved person or free person of color. If you’re poor, you’re disgusting. If you’re successful, you’re uppity. Both cause hostility.”
Traci Picard, a public historian who co-chairs the Snowtown Project research team, has been working to unearth personal histories. She has sifted through thousands of seemingly mundane materials, including writs and warrants—an early version of small-claims court. “Every single thing is built by someone,” she says. “I don’t mean designed by someone, or who gets the credit for building it. Every single block, every single brick, every single building—we’re surrounded by people’s lives and experiences and stories.”
Planning is underway to present those stories in an exhibition at the State House, as well as a digital publication featuring maps, photos and documents. Snowtown History Walks debuted in June, and public art installations and signage for self-guided tours are also being discussed.
Playwright and actor Sylvia Ann Soares, a programs team member and a Cape Verdean descendant of the Portuguese slave trade in Providence, is working on a Snowtown-themed play set to premiere next year. She believes that involvement of artists in the earliest stages of the project is integral to its retelling. “The results will be richer,” she says. “Many people will not read a scientific journal or go to a talk, but if it’s dramatic, if there’s some music, some songs of that era, it brings it alive.”
Soares adds, “I intend to [use the play to] speak out as an inspiration for advocacy against present-day injustice.”
For Pacatte, it’s also an opportunity to broaden our understanding of a part of American evolution that has been swept under the carpet of white history. “Snowtown is a microcosm for the very messy and prolonged process of emancipation that people in the North experienced before the Civil War,” he says. “It’s the story of African Americans [in the U.S.]: They were resilient and kept rebuilding their lives.”
Aurielle Marie
"look!
There go a Black gxrl
body still tethered
to her head
There go a Black gxrl, shirt still dry
no river of marrow or tears
following her up the block
no bile from her head
Can we call her into form? not a river of marrow & small tears
of sweaty fabric, but manna & honeysuckle
from her skull no bile, but beatniks
in bloom. Can we celebrate the child on this side of the grass?
her sweat fabric, honeyed & unmanned
the gxrl young, a fresh world of gardenia
bloom-ing. Can’t we celebrate? The child’s on this side of the grass!
Open the window & usher in a new god! A breeze
gardenia-young, the gxrl a world made fresh.
in her hands—piano keys, sticks of cinnamon gum,
a window into the new. God, an usher opening
a psalm, free to be the thing she was truly made of:
piano keys. In her hands, cinnamon sticks like guns
in the wrong light—never mind that. Today she lives.
A thing to be freed. Made of psalms, & truly
holy. The gxrl will turn flowers into wine. Spills herself no more
wrong. & today, she lives. Never mind the light
offering summer halo. it is a myth, that we die, anyway. We too
holy. No more spills, no more flowers. From wine, gxrl churns herself a will.
Rises from the concrete, her arms full of clove. Her mother’s yard a throne.
Anyway, the myth is that we die. We too, summer offering. Halos
like birds on our shoulders. The gxrl, gardenia, & we planted her
full of clove & her mother. She raises a throne from the concrete, a yard of arms.
The gxrl, a god king. The gxrl, a map of good. The gxrl, a thing worth trending, after all. Just
look!"
“My sole motivation for the poem was this truth: Aiyanna Stanley-Jones should be alive.”
—Aurielle Marie
