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In the
Shadow Slavery
African Americans in New York City, 1623-1863
By Leslie M. Harris
"The black experience in the antebellum
South has been thoroughly documented. But histories set in the
North are few.
In the Shadow of Slavery, then, is a big
and ambitious book, one in which insights about race and class
in new York City abound. Leslie Harris has masterfully brought
over two centuries of African American history back to life in
this illuminating new work." David Roediger, author of
The Wages of
Whiteness
In 1991 in lower Manhattan, a team of
construction workers made an astonishing discovery. Just two
blocks from city hall, under twenty feet of asphalt, concrete,
and rubble, lay the remains of an eighteenth-century "Negro
Burial Ground." Closed in 1790 and covered over by roads
and buildings throughout the site turned out to be the largest
such find in North America, containing the remains of as many as
20,000 African Americans. the graves revealed to New Yorkers and
the nation an aspect of American history long hidden: the vast
number of enslaved blacks who labored to create our nation's
largest city.
In the Shadow of Slavery lays bare
this history of African Americans in New York, starting with the
arrival of the first slaves in 1626, moving through the
turbulent years before emancipation in 1827, and culminating in
one of the most terrifying displays of racism in U.S. history,
the New York City Draft Riots of 1863. Drawing on extensive
travel accounts, autobiographies, newspapers, literature, and
organizational records, Leslie M. Harris extends beyond prior
studies of racial discrimination. She traces the undeniable
impact of African Americans on class, politics, and community
formation, offering vivid portraits of the lives and aspirations
of countless black New Yorkers.
Written with clarity and grace, In the
Shadows of Slavery is an ambitious new work that will prove
indispensable to historians of the African American experience,
as well as anyone interested in the history of New York City.
Publication Date: March 2003 -- The
University of Chicago University Press *
* * * * I have focused my research efforts on
exploring the history of pre-Civil War African Americans in the
United States and their struggles to achieve freedom and racial
equality. My work complicates the idea of a unified "black
community" by examining how class and gender identities
united and divided blacks' efforts to achieve political
equality. I demonstrate that issues of class, gender, and
sexuality were crucial both to those who tried to argue for
African-American racial inferiority, and for attempts by African
Americans to define political strategies and racial identities
that would enable them to achieve full political citizenship in
the United States.
In the Shadow of
Slavery
My first book,
In the Shadow of Slavery, examines the impact of slavery and emancipation on
class formation among blacks and whites in New York City.
Between 1626 and the completion of emancipation in 1827, New
York City contained the largest urban slave population outside
of the South. The existence of slavery in New York had an
indelible effect on the political, social, and economic
institutions of the city. I outline the ways in which blacks'
varied responses to racism in New York and the continuation of
southern slavery led to the formation of distinctive
middle-class and working-class ideologies of political activism
among blacks. I also examine white attitudes towards blacks in
New York City, which were shaped by New York's own history of
slavery as well as the continuation of southern slavery.
The vast majority of whites excluded blacks
from the political arena, and from equal opportunity in the
economic arena. Thus, although blacks in the early 1800s viewed
New York City as a place of freedom and opportunity, by the
Civil War, the city had lost its promise for many blacks. The
extreme violence of the Draft Riots of 1863 capped over two
decades of dramatic decrease in New York's black population.
Using New York City as a case study, I demonstrate the ways in
which both northern and southern slavery, northern emancipation,
and racial identity influenced the construction of class and
community for blacks and whites in the pre-Civil War United
States.
Enchained Masculinity
My second research project,
"Enchained Masculinity: African-American Men of the Slave
South," continues my exploration of the ways in which
gender and sexual identities complicated racial identities for
pre-Civil War African Americans. The idea for this book was
inspired in large part by an undergraduate course I developed in
1997 entitled "Slavery in U.S. History and Culture."
In examining the historical literature available for the class,
I realized that the literature on black men's experiences of
slavery was virtually non-existent. In the earlier historical
literature of slavery, historians assumed men's experiences as
the normative slave experience.
Thus, men's experiences of slavery were not
examined as a gendered experience, with particular differences
attached to their roles as husbands, fathers and sons. Although
women's historians have since made great strides in
understanding women's experiences of slavery and the meaning of
womanhood for slaves, little has been done to explore the
particular experience of men under slavery or slaves' conception
of manhood. Further, much of the recent historical literature on
slave families has been written through the lens of women's
history, or through gender history that is seen as a simile for
women's history. Additionally, the historiography on masculinity
in the United States is largely about white men.
By focusing on slave men's roles between the
Revolutionary War and the Civil War (1783-1861), I hope to bring
the analytical tools of women's and gender history to black
men's lived experience, and to remove black slave men from the
realm of stereotype. I am particularly interested in the
definitions of masculinity that grew out of the conflict between
whites' enslavement of and paternalist ideology towards blacks;
and possible alternative models of masculinity, manhood, and
patriarchy developed by slaves themselves, men and women.
These models of manhood within the slave
community grew out of both Euro-American and African cultural
influences, but were rooted in the conditions of slavery: forced
labor; the threat to the family of separation by sale, and of
sexual and physical abuse; and the efforts of slaveowners and
white southern society generally to control the social and
cultural lives of slaves. This examination of black men's lives
and black masculinity has a wider importance beyond academia.
The general public continues to be interested in the legacy of
slavery in current-day African-American gender relationships.
Although a direct line cannot be drawn between the antebellum
era and today's black community, I hope that this project
ultimately will intervene in the continuing debates over the
ways in which history is used by the public.
| Leslie M. Harris, Associate Professor, (B.A.,
Columbia University, 1988; M.A., Stanford University, 1989; Ph.D, 1995).
Pre-Civil War African-American Labor and Social History; New York
City; Slavery; Southern History.
In
the Shadow of Slavery: African
Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (forthcoming 2002, University
of Chicago Press). "Enchained
Masculinity: African-American
Men of the Slave South" (book project in process)
Bowden 332 Department of History Emory University
Atlanta, GA 30322 404-727-5130 (Office) 404-727-4959 (Fax)
lharr04@emory.edu (Email) |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and
the Education of a President
By
Ron Suskind
A new
book offering an insider's account of the
White House's response to the financial
crisis says that U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim
Geithner ignored an order from President
Barack Obama calling for reconstruction of
major banks. According to Pulitzer
Prize-winning author Ron Suskind, the
incident is just one of several in which
Obama struggled with a divided group of
advisers, some of whom he didn't initially
consider for their high-profile roles.
Suskind interviewed more than 200 people,
including Obama, Geithner and other top
officials . . . The book states Geithner and
the Treasury Department ignored a March 2009
order to consider dissolving banking giant
Citigroup while continuing stress tests on
banks, which were burdened with toxic
mortgage assets. . . .Suskind states that
Obama accepts the blame for mismanagement in
his administration while noting that
restructuring the financial system was
complicated and could have resulted in
deeper financial harm. . . . In a February
2011 interview with Suskind, Obama
acknowledges another ongoing criticism—that
he is too focused on policy and not on
telling a larger story, one the public could
relate to. Obama is quoted as saying he was
elected in part because "he had connected
our current predicaments with the broader
arc of American history," but that such a
"narrative thread" had been lost.—Gopusa
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 4 August 2008
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