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 Feb. 9, 2006 | Vol 5 No. 03 |
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In this issue of Spotlight on The Region: – Choosing to Remember Slavery in the Region – Planning for the Region’s Next 4 Million Residents – Calendar
Yet history appears to be often an act of selective forgetting as well, and this is more disturbing. It’s about losing what you don’t want to remember, no matter how important, and letting time wash away any traces that might bring it to mind. The exhibit “Slavery in New York,” at the New York Historical Society until March 26, is evidence of this selective forgetting, as well as of the counter trend that we can also re-remember. The exhibit tells and shows how slavery was widely practiced in the region, from the city’s founding under the Dutch in the early 1600s until abolition in 1827 by the State of New York. In between those two points, New York, and for much of that time Connecticut, New Jersey and Rhode Island, were “slave states,” with their economies and cultures entwined with the “peculiar institution.” The exhibit’s intention is to help us remember something we forgot. Until recently, I doubt that if you approached 100 people in the streets, even one of them would have known that the region had a long history of slavery. Perhaps some historical memory of New York-based slavery remained within pockets of the black community based on oral communication, but the standard school-boy history is that slavery existed in the South, not the North. The fact that slavery was legal in every state in the Union in 1776 is a reference point that no longer exists. I first learned in any depth about the region’s involvement with slavery a few years ago when I read the majestic Gotham, A History Of New York To 1898, written by Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace. The book’s first few hundred pages go into New York’s history of slavery in some detail. The city and region did not just dip lightly into slavery, but in fact were entwined with it. In 1750 about 20 percent of the city’s population were black slaves, and at the time of the Revolution probably close to one in two households owned at least one slave, a higher percentage than in the South. Distinguished New Yorkers like John Jay, governor and first chief justice of the United States, and Aaron Burr, vice president of the United States, owned slaves. But when the evil of slavery is pinned on our founding fathers, it is to Virginians like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington that it is attached, not to New Yorkers. It was not just New York City that was immersed in slavery. Long Island had plantation-style agriculture, and Newport, R.I., destined to be a late 19th century jewel of the gilded age, was the capital of financing the import and export of slaves in the 17th and 18th century. Its crisp colonial infrastructure, paid for with slave trade profits and taxes, can still be seen. The tipping point for the abolition of slavery in New York and much of the Northeast was the Revolution. Slaves that went over to the British received their freedom, and thousands did just that. When the Revolution was over, the British allowed most of the escaped slaves to immigrate to Canada. This led to a reduction in the percentage of slaves in the general population, which made the fight to end slavery politically easier. It still took several decades of hard political work, though. The most significant law came in 1799, which granted eventual freedom in early adulthood to all slaves born after that date. In 1827, slavery was finally abolished completely. A generation later came the Civil War, which ended slavery everywhere. But even by that time, historians say New Yorkers had begun to forget their slave-owning ways. What I’m curious about is how this selective forgetting works. I’m confident that professional historians never “forgot” that slavery existed. The record was too extensive. But on a popular and national level, almost everyone else did. In New York, the catalyst for remembering anew was the discovery of the African American Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan during the construction of a federal office building. This African burial ground was no secret; it was heavily used for burials of slaves and free blacks for more than a century. Yet its “discovery” provoked a re-remembering of a part of history we had forgotten. I suspect that in some ways we were ready to re-remember this unpleasant and less flattering part of our past, where as before we weren’t. The “Slavery in New York” exhibit is the first of three on the subject to be held at the New York Historical Society’s grand building on Central Park West. The second will focus on artistic treatments of slavery, while the third will focus on the commerce of slavery in New York. This first exhibit, which takes up the entire first floor and a part of the second, uses film and various audiovisual presentations to convey much of the essential historical record. These treatments were at times overdone to my taste, and it struck me that museum exhibits are consisting less and less of historical artifacts, and more as a collection of words and images on computer screens. I found the most compelling parts of the exhibit to be the most old-fashioned parts, which were the display of centuries-old letters, deeds and ship books, with translations (at times high-tech) of their faded cursive letters in Dutch or English. There is an original deed of sale from 1781 recording the sale of one black girl, “Violet,” for 56 pounds from one individual to another. One faded document from the early 1600s, borrowed from the New York State Archives, directs Peter Stuyvesant, New Amsterdam’s leader, to bring in more slaves from Curacao to boost company profits and provide labor for farmers. As a native Virginian, most of whose great-grandfathers owned slaves, it’s hard to put a name on the smug, guilty feeling of satisfaction I first felt when learning of New York’s long record of slavery. There’s probably some fancy German word for it. I always felt that slavery was the South’s unique burden of sin to carry. Now I find out that burden should be more widely shared, if indeed it must be carried at all. Slavery has existed in almost every culture and corner of the world at one time or another, so it’s difficult to draw a lesson from its history, but it does show that we are probably wrong whenever we label one people, one region, or one culture as historically having more than its share of inhumanity to man. Rather than label, it’s probably better to try to remember. If we can remember our past, even the less flattering parts, it’s more likely that we can behave better in the future. Where Will We Put the Next 4 Million People? Hughes and Seneca’s re-centralizing theory runs directly counter to predictions put forth by suburban boosters such as writers David Brooks and Joel Kotkin, who have predicted a spreading archipelago of ever-expanding low-density cities. Although time will tell who is right, it’s possible that Hughes and Seneca’s theories may be more applicable to the Tri-State Region, where build-out, environmental factors and political dynamics may put a limit on how much additional suburbanization is possible. If it’s true that we’re running out of land and transportation capacity to sustain de-centralized growth, it is also true that we don’t have the transit infrastructure and redevelopment strategies to accommodate a more centralized pattern of growth. From Long Island to New Jersey, many parts of the region will be completely built out in the next 20-30 years if current patterns continue. Congestion on both transit and roadway systems have reached barely tolerable levels with almost no new capacity added in the last 40 years. While we continue to lose a dwindling amount of open space, we may soon need to shift our emphasis from the choice between “smart growth” and “sprawl,” to the choice of “smart growth” or “no growth?” The New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (NYMTC) projects that the Tri-State metropolitan area will be home to four million new residents by 2030. Where can we build the housing and job base to support them, and what type of transportation, land use and environmental strategies are needed to ensure that growth also supports more widespread and sustainable prosperity? On Thursday, Feb. 16, RPA President Robert Yaro will address this question at the NYMTC offices in Lower Manhattan. Yaro will describe how other regions have addressed impending growth by reaching consensus on a regional vision, one that details future land use development and transportation priorities. In such a large, diverse region as ours, reaching a consensus of residents, businesses and policy-makers is a huge challenge, demanding significant resources and innovative techniques. This free public lecture, Regional Visioning: Land Use and Transportation for Four Million New Residents, begins at 1 p.m. RSVPs are required due to lobby security. Contact Barbara Lynch at NYMTC, 212/383-7241 or BLynch@dot.state.ny.us. – RPA Staff Questions Or Comments On What’s In This Issue? Send Them To The Editor Of Spotlight On The Region, Alex Marshall At alex@rpa.org
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April 19-23 |
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Spotlight on The Region A publication of Regional Plan Association, Robert Yaro, President, Alex Marshall, Senior Editor 212-253-2727, x360 alex@rpa.org www.rpa.org |
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