Black History Month

The slow end of slavery in New York reflected in Brooklyn’s Old Town records

New York is a commercial city, created by the Dutch as a trading hub and expanded over centuries to become a financial and commercial center. It was governed by the rules of capitalism more than enlightenment thought or statements about freedom and equality. Nowhere is this more evident than in New York’s actions regarding enslaved people. Several collections in the Municipal Archives contain records documenting enslaved people, most notably the Common Council Papers and the Old Town Records. A sampling can be viewed here https://www.archives.nyc/slavery-records

Town of Flatlands Slaves: Birth Register, Manumissions; Records of Personal Mortgages, 1799-1838, volume 4054, Index to manumissions. Kings County Old Town Records Collection. NYC Municipal Archives.

New York City’s population of enslaved people was second only to Charleston, South Carolina. As the Northern state with the largest number of enslaved people, New York was the second-to-last to eliminate slavery—New Jersey was the last.

Chapter fourteen of the publication A Century of Population Growth from the first census to the 12th (1790-1900), issued by the United States Census Bureau, details the population of enslaved people. Titled Statistics of Slaves, it notes that the first census for the United States conducted in 1790 enumerated the 3,929,214 people in the country. The report cites 697,624 enslaved people residing in twelve states as well as Kentucky and the Southwest Territory. Vermont, Massachusetts and Maine are omitted from the analysis because slavery had either been eliminated or was not a practice in those locales.

New York State counted 21,193 enslaved people in the 1790 population as well as 4,600 free Black people. The number of enslaved people diminishes in succeeding decades due to State legislation “gradually” emancipating people until in 1840 when there were four people enumerated as slaves. In 1790, there were 7,795 enslaver households with an average number of 2.7 people in bondage in those households. That’s the average, but some founding fathers such as Robert Livingston and John Jay held more people in bondage.

Town of Gravesend, Slave and School Records, 1799-1819, volume 3017. Kings County Old Town Records Collection. NYC Municipal Archives.

In an article titled “Gateway to Freedom” historian Eric Foner estimates that two-thirds of the 3,100 Black residents of Manhattan were enslaved. “Twenty percent of the city’s households, including merchants, shopkeepers, artisans, and sea captains, owned at least one slave. In the immediate rural hinterland, including today’s Brooklyn, the proportion of slaves to the overall population stood at four in ten—the same as Virginia.”

Town of Flatbush, Board of Health: Manumitted and Abandoned Slaves, 1805-1814. Kings County Old Town Collection. NYC Municipal Archives.

Foner defined Brooklyn as it is today—the entirety of Kings County. But in the late 1800s, Brooklyn was one of many towns in the county which also included Flatbush, Flatlands, and Gravesend among others, all of which had their own governments and thus, their own government records. The records from those towns in the Municipal Archives are collectively called “The Old Town Records.” Consisting largely of property assessments, meeting minutes and oyster bed permits, there are a handful of records that document enslaved people. All of these records have been digitized from microfilm and can be found on the DORIS website.

Town of Flatlands Slaves: Birth Register, Manumissions; Records of Personal Mortgages, 1799-1838, volume 4054. Kings County Old Town Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

The Flatlands registry is organized in alphabetical order and each page has entries for the names of owners of slaves, the name, sex of the child and the time when born and a column for Abandoning service received. After the A-Z index there are entries attesting to the birth of children as required by law. Entries date from 1800 to 1821.

The Flatlands records include the Record of Personal Mortgages, Slaves Register, and Records of Personal Mortgages which lists children born to enslaved women. These records were created to comply with various laws passed by New York State between 1785 and 1817. Legislative bodies rarely act quickly and in the case of manumission the State Legislature took baby steps to eliminate slavery unlike counterparts in the other Northern States.

The New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves and Protecting Such as Them as Have Been or May be Liberated was formed in 1785 in New York City and consisted of Quakers and prominent men such as John Jay, Gouverneur Morris and Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton’s proposal that members must manumit their slaves was rejected by the full group. Nevertheless, the organization lobbied members of the Legislature to pass laws abolishing slavery, only to settle for the gradual emancipation.  According to Foner, resistance to abolition “was strongest among slaveholding Dutch farmers in Brooklyn and elsewhere.”

Town of Flatlands Slaves: Birth Register, Manumissions; Records of Personal Mortgages, 1799-1838, volume 4054, page 16. Kings County Old Town Records Collection. NYC Municipal Archives.

The first of the manumission laws was enacted in 1799 when the white, male body passed the “Gradual Emancipation Law” that required any child born to enslaved women after July 4, 1799 to be freed. But, not so fast. Those children were required to continue serving the “owner” of his or her mother until reaching age 25 for women and 28 for men. A tricky provision of the law allowed the enslaver to make the child a charge to the local government by filing a manumission notice within one year of the child’s birth. The government would then pay up to $3.50 per month for someone to care for the child, frequently the same enslaver until age 21. The timeframe for payment and the amount of the payment were later reduced and then eliminated in 1804.

Town of Flatbush ledger, Births and Manumissions of Slaves, 1799-1814, volume 107.  Kings County Old Town Records Collection. NYC Municipal Archives.

Eighteen years later, in 1817, the Legislature enacted the second of the gradual manumission laws, decreeing that enslaved people born before 1799 would be freed on July 4,1827 and that children born to enslaved mothers between 1817 and 1827 would be free after reaching age 21. The tricky math meant a child born in 1827 conceivably could have been enslaved until 1848, although the census records show that was not a common-place occurrence. By 1830 there were 75 remaining enslaved people in New York State and by 1840, there were four. But the State and the City’s economies were linked to the southern states with large populations of enslaved people. Foner wrote, “The economy of Brooklyn, which by mid-century had grown to become the nation’s third largest city, was also closely tied to slavery. Warehouses along its waterfront were filled with the products of slave labor—cotton, tobacco, and especially from Louisiana and Cuba. In the 1850s sugar refining was Brooklyn’s largest industry.”

Honoring Black History Month, 1990

New York City municipal broadcasters like Channel L and WNYC-TV provided access to video technology that under-served communities were often denied or excluded from. Operating from 1977 to 1991, Channel L produced a large number of programs that focused on issues that affected the lives of black Americans, with titles like “Black Leadership in NYC,” “Black Folk Art,” “AIDS in the Black Community” and many more.

On February 21st, 1990, Channel L aired a call-in talk show hosted by then State Senator David Paterson, titled “Honoring Black History Month.” Now, 30 years later, the Municipal Archives is digitizing tape from the Channel L collection, including this Black History Month tape. This is part of an ongoing effort to preserve and make available the Archives’ large audio/visual holdings. Program guests included community activist Elombe Brath, Hunter College philosophy professor Frank Kirkland, artist Glenn Bolton AKA Daddy-O and music producer Robert A. Celestin. Together with calls from the New York City public, they discussed the legacy of Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the freeing of Nelson Mandela, the impact of rap music on American culture and Black History Month in general.

Honoring Black History Month, February 21st, 1990. Channel L collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated February 21st, 1965 and April 4th, 1968, respectively. For decades since, the content of their lives and the ideals they died for have shaped the basic way in which we discuss and remember the Civil Rights movement that came to define the 1960s. For these commentators in 1990, only a single generation had come to adulthood since the death of Dr. King. Now, another 30 years later, the conversations recorded in this video are no less relevant.

Honoring Black History Month, February 21st, 1990. Channel L collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

Callers did not need to look to the past to find inspirational leaders fighting for racial justice, though. On February 11th, 1990, only 10 days before this program aired, Nelson Mandela was freed from his 27-year imprisonment in South Africa as the Apartheid system began to dissolve. Mandela would go on to make a pan-African tour before meeting other leaders around the world, including President George H.W. Bush, Pope John Paul II and the first black mayor of New York City, David N. Dinkins. The time span from Mandela’s release to today is roughly the same as the time span from Malcolm X’s death in 1965 to 1990 when this video was made.

Honoring Black History Month, February 21st, 1990. Channel L collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

By 1990, rap music had grown from block parties in The Bronx to a rapidly expanding cultural phenomenon, but was still seen by some as inflammatory and controversial. Although it now is one of the most financially successful and appreciated musical genres in the world, many people in 1990 viewed groups and artists like NWA, Public Enemy and Ice-T as emblematic of problems with black culture in America. Yet many others, like Robert A. Celestin, saw rap for what it was- the voice of a new generation of black Americans, unwilling and incapable of tolerating an unjust system any longer.

In addition to the WNYC-TV and Channel L collections, the NYPD surveillance film collection at the Municipal Archives has rarely seen films of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and The Black Panthers available for viewing online now on the NYCMA website. http://nycma.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/NYCMA~3~3