Re-Conceptualizing New York as an African City

Author: Adedamola Osinulu

For the professor fortunate enough to teach a course with global content in New York City, the opportunities to draw lessons from the city appear limitless. Nevertheless, tasked with developing new coursework about African cultural production for NYU Liberal Studies, several fundamental questions come to mind: (i) What does it mean to teach in New York City? (ii) What does it mean to teach with the city? (iii) What does it mean to teach about Africa? (iv) And finally, what does it mean to teach about Africa in New York?

Teaching in New York means one is teaching in the global city par excellence; it is the nexus of global flows of ideas, people, and money. It also means that one is teaching in an ethnically and culturally diverse city. The Statue of Liberty points to New York’s pedigree as an immigrant city and the newly stamped passports at JFK, Newark, and LaGuardia airports witness the continuation of that tradition. The same, never-ending flows that make it a global city also guarantee that it is an ever-changing city. New social agglomerations occupy old spaces and urban facades absorb new inscriptions that transmit new meanings in a never-ending flux.

Teaching with New York, therefore, presents an opportunity to take advantage of its diverse population by seeking engagement with the various, resulting communities. Furthermore, perhaps more than any other city, New York is blessed with an abundance of cultural institutions housing a wide range of cultural products (high, low, and everything in between) that can be mobilized in the service of curricular goals. The city itself – its buildings, parks, streets, and even its underground – is a repository of history that can be excavated for meaning, layer by layer.

Claiming Africa as one’s terrain of instruction is a task made impossible by the vastness of the subject. Indeed, appending that moniker “Africa” to any course requires interrogating the term, its history, and its utility. The continent is both geographically vast and culturally diverse. Furthermore, it is impossible to discuss the continent and its people without including its diasporas – the Black Atlantic that emerged in the wake of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the world that emerged out of the Tran Saharan Slave Trade, as well as the universe of exchanges across the Indian Ocean. The question that must start such an inquiry is “Where is Africa?” Perhaps because of the vastness of the subject, but more accurately because of the built-in biases of knowledge production in the west, teaching students about Africa inevitably means correcting misinformation about the continent and its peoples that they have encountered in popular culture, news media, and even academic sources. It also means grappling with America’s history of racial prejudice against people of African descent. As such teaching about Africa is often a project of re-education.

Which brings us to the final question of what it means to teach about Africa in New York City. For this instructor, it meant finding ways to utilize New York’s resources to illuminate the rich cultural production of African, African immigrant, and Afro-diasporic populations. Furthermore, it meant looking for opportunities to highlight the contributions of Africans and African Americans to the development of New York City as we know it today. I, therefore, developed the senior seminar “Africa, NY: Discovering a Continent in the City” with the premise that New York is an African city. In the paragraphs below, I will use three sites that my students visited to illustrate that assertion – Washington Square Park, the African Burial Ground National Monument, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.  

In 1613, the Dutch trading ship Jonge Tobias, captained by Thijs Mossel, sailed into the Hudson Harbor – an area that had been discovered by Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524 and explored by Henry Hudson in 1609, when he travelled up the river on behalf of the Dutch East India Company. The Tobias was in search of trading opportunities with the indigenous Lenape people with hopes of returning to Europe with a cargo of animal fur. Aboard the ship was Jan Rodrigues (Juan Rodriguez), a free man of African descent who had been born in Santo Domingo (La Española) to an African woman and a Portuguese man^[1]. Rodrigues refused to return with his ship and the crew to Europe insisting that the captain sail on without him. A year later, in 1614, another Dutch ship arrived to find Rodrigues at the same location and employed him for the duration of their stay. In the weeks that followed, the Jonge Tobias returned to find him employed by the new arrivals and a dispute ensued. Rodrigues remained in Manhattan and is believed to have set up a trading outpost and married into the Lenape tribe (Stevens-Acevedo et al. 2013). As such, we find that the first non-indigenous settler in the area that is now known as Manhattan was a man of African descent.

In 1621, the Dutch West India Company obtained the exclusive right to settle New Netherland. Three years later, in 1624, 30 Dutch families settled on Governor’s Island and a year later, they moved to the tip of Manhattan to form New Amsterdam. In 1626, 11 African slaves, owned by the Dutch West India Company were brought to the settlement. The labor of those skilled African slaves, who had acquired expertise in other colonies, quite literally laid the groundwork for the settlement of the new colony at New Amsterdam. These skills included construction work, agriculture, and domestic labor. The slaves’ expertise in farming played a role in the manumission of 11 enslaved men and women (but not their children) who, in 1644, were given farmland to the north of the settlement. The former slaves settled in the area that is now Greenwich Village, the South Village, and parts of the Lower East Side and East Village (Apmann 2018). According to the Washington Square Park Conservancy (WSPC), and significantly from my vantage point at NYU, that land includes the area we now know as Washington Square Park. Paolo d’Angola, who was one of that initial shipload of African slaves to New Amsterdam, was granted the land that is now Washington Square Park as farmland (GVSHP). In fact, the freed blacks of New Amsterdam owned most of the land that is now occupied by NYU. As an example, one individual, Manuel Groot (Big Manuel), was granted eight acres in the land that was bounded to the north by what is now West 4th street, to the south by Bleecker Street, to the west by LaGuardia Place, and to the east by Broadway. In concrete terms that includes the land that houses the Bobst Library, the Stern Business School and NYU Faculty housing at Washington Square Village Apartments. In addition to providing food for the settlement, these African men and women were given that land so as to create a buffer zone that protected the settlement from attacks by the indigenous Lenape. The end of Dutch control in 1664 and the establishment of British suzerainty was bad news for these and other Africans on the island. They lost their right to the land and it was appropriated by English and Dutch landowners. This pattern of property infringement and historical erasure is emblematic to the city’s treatment of its African residents and their history.

In the years that followed the British takeover of New Amsterdam and its re-christening as New York in honor of James II the Duke of York, the city’s population of enslaved Africans continued to increase and constituted about 20 percent of the overall population. Because they were not allowed into churchyards, Africans were buried on a piece of property owned from 1673 by a Dutch woman, Sara Van Borsum. The burial ground remained in use until 1794 (Moore, n.d.). Just about 200 years later, in 1991, prior to construction of a new Federal Courthouse near City Hall in downtown Manhattan, construction workers and archeologists working for the U.S. General Services Administration uncovered one of the most significant archeological discoveries in American history – human remains that proved the continued existence of what had once been called the Negro Burial Ground. Underneath the hustle and bustle and buildings of downtown Manhattan, it is thought that there are the remains of approximately twenty thousand African Americans. In response to the GSA’s plans to disinter the remains of these African Americans to facilitate the construction of the Federal Courthouse, New York’s African American community swung into action to seek a halt to construction and pursue respectful treatment of the remains of these ancestors. Eventually, a compromise was reached wherein the footprint of the Federal Courthouse was altered, the remains were re-interred on the portion of the plot that was left uncovered, and wherein a memorial, designed by Haitian-America architect Rodney Leon, was built on the site. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1993 and President George W. Bush designated the now renamed African Burial Ground as a National Monument in 2006. It is the first national monument in New York dedicated to Africans and Americans of African descent. Yet it must be remarked that for a National Monument comparable to Ellis Island or even the Stonewall Inn, the African Burial Ground remains relatively obscure. Many passersby discover it accidentally and my students upon visiting the site observed that it felt like a half-hearted compromise tucked behind the building. Here again, we are confronted with the invisibility of the African contribution to the city, quite literally, the invisibility of the African bodies upon which the foundations of the city of New York rest.

At the peak of slavery in New York, the city had the highest population of urban slaves in the North. As much as 20% of New York’s population was black. Following the abolition of slavery in New York in 1827, the population fell to as low as 1.5% in 1860 (Harris 2014: 3, 22). The abolition of slavery in the South, the failure of Reconstruction, and the horrors of Jim Crowe led to the largest movement of people in American history as African Americans swept northward from the South. In her book The Warmth of Other Suns, former journalist Isabel Wilkerson tells that tale of three African Americans who left the south in one of the three waves that characterized what is now termed the Great Migration. Indeed, it is impossible to understand contemporary American culture and American cities without properly situating ourselves within the Great Migration. One of the three characters she describes, George Starling, left Florida in 1945 for New York’s Harlem. Today, it is Harlem that comes to mind when one thinks of Black New York. Yet part of that visibility is the result of the erasure and disenfranchisement of African Americans in the lower neighborhoods of Manhattan. The Great Migration was the inspiration of longtime Harlem resident and American master painter Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000). His 1941 series The Migration of the Negro consists of 60 panels depicting various aspects of the Great Migration. The panels are held by New York’s Museum of Modern Art and The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. His 1959 painting, The Architect, anchors the Studio Museum of Harlem’s exhibition, Their Own Harlems. In a sense, The Architect is the cornerstone of the Studio Museum’s collection and agenda. A collective of artists, activists, philanthropists, and Harlem residents founded the museum in 1968. Today, it describes itself as “the nexus for artists of African descent locally, nationally and internationally and for work that has been inspired and influenced by black culture” (Studio Museum 2018).

Harlem itself faces a re-evaluation of its status of black culture in America as other black meccas rise around the country and gentrification pushes black residents out (Rhodes-Pitts 2011). It is notable that it is also home to immigrants from Africa who started arriving following the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act. The neighborhood of Le Petit Sénégal in Harlem is characterized by stalls, shops and restaurants owned and operated by Africans from Mali, Senegal, Niger and so on. Its existence points to the impact of West African immigrants on the culture and economy of New York City.

The locations discussed above are just three of the sites I explored with students in my NYU Liberal Studies Senior Seminar “Africa, NY: Discovering a Continent in the City.” Students made physical trips to the sites in questions and explored critical issues through a variety of disciplinary modalities – academic scholarship, film, literature, performance, art, and so on. In response to the course materials, the students produced presentations and papers on African and African diaspora communities throughout the city (Crown Heights, Astoria, etc.), and throughout the world (Tel Aviv, Madrid, Hamburg, etc.). As the class evolved, it became clear that we needed to shift the premise of the class from one of discovery implied in the course title to one of re-conceptualization indicated in the title of this essay: New York can, indeed, be re-conceptualized as an African city.

Footnotes

[1] | For more on Africans in La Española, visit the CUNY Dominican Institute’s online project First Blacks in the Americas: The African Presence in the Dominican Republic available at http://firstblacks.org/en/.

Works Cited

1. Apmann, Sarah. 2018. “North America’s First Freed Black Settlement Right in Our Neighborhood.” GVSHP | Preservation | Off the Grid (blog). February 16, 2018. http://gvshp.org/blog/2018/02/16/north-americas-first-freed-black-settlement-right-in-our-neighborhood/.

2. Folpe, Emily Kies. n.d. “History.” Washington Square Park. Accessed June 14, 2018. http://washingtonsquareparkconservancy.org/history/.

3. Foner, Eric. 2015. Gateway to Freedom : The Hidden History of America’s Fugitive Slaves. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

4. Gannon, Devin. 2017. “On This Day in 1645, a Freed Slave Became the First Non-Native Settler to Own Land in Greenwich Village.” 6sqft. July 14, 2017. https://www.6sqft.com/on-this-day-in-1645-a-freed-slave-became-the-first-non-native-settler-to-own-land-in-greenwich-village/.

5. GVSHP (Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation). n.d. “GVSHP Civil Rights & Social Justice Map.” Google My Maps. Accessed June 13, 2018. https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1NN8Q-GXFGJiZZqDNBm9hxTMGm7E&hl=en.

6. Harris, Leslie M. 2014. In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

7. Moore, Christopher. n.d. “New York’s Seventeenth-Century African Burial Ground in History.” National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/afbg/learn/historyculture/upload/Chris-Moore.pdf.

8. Rhodes-Pitts, Sharifa. 2011. Harlem is Nowhere: a journey to the Mecca of Black America. New York: Little, Brown.

9. Stevens-Acevedo, Anthony, Tom Weterings, Leonor Álvarez Francés, and Simon Hart. 2013. Juan Rodriguez and the beginnings of New York City. CUNY Dominican Studies Institute Research Monograph. New York, NY: CUNY Dominican Studies Institute.

10. Studio Museum. 2018. “The Studio Museum in Harlem.” Timeline. https://www.studiomuseum.org/timeline.