Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Stickers expose NY’s links to slavery
Campaign debunks myth of North as land of freedom
Group’s mission aims to debunk myth of North as an idyllic land of freedom.
NEW YORK — Last month, Vanessa Thompson stepped outside the juice bar where she works on Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn and noticed a sticker on a light pole.
“John van Nostrand was a slave owner,” it said. “According to the US census in 1790, the (Van) Nostrands owned 6 people.”
Thompson, who is Black, was dumbfounded. “I didn’t even know anything about that,” she said. “He could’ve owned me.”
The sticker was partly the brainchild of Elsa Eli Waithe, a comedian living in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, who, along with two collaborators, has been on a mission to let New Yorkers know that a good number of the city’s streets, subway stations and neighborhoods are named after enslavers.
The project was inspired in part by a talk between Waithe, who is Black and grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, and a white friend about a Confederate monument in Portsmouth, Virginia, that was dismantled last August. Waithe recalled the friend’s dismissing the statue as a Southern issue.
But just a few months before, while scrolling through social media, Waithe had stumbled upon records from the nation’s first census in 1790, which listed well-known New York families like the Leffertses, the Boerums and the Nostrands. To the right of those names was another category: “slaves.”
According to the census, the Lefferts family enslaved 87 Black people throughout New York City (Prospect Lefferts Gardens and an avenue in that Brooklyn neighborhood were named after them). The Boerums owned 14 slaves (the neighborhood Boerum Hill is named for them). And the Nostrands (of the 8-milelong Nostrand Avenue) enslaved 23 people (this number would nearly double by the beginning of the 19th century).
The discovery sparked Slavers of New York, a sticker campaign and education initiative dedicated to calling out — and eventually mapping — the history of slavery in New York City.
Designed by Ada Reso, who is Waithe’s roommate, and with research by Maria Robles, the stickers, which mimic street signs, feature the names of prominent New Yorkers and provide details on the number of slaves they owned.
So far, the trio has distributed about 1,000 stickers, mostly in Brooklyn, though they hope to expand eventually throughout the five boroughs.
The group’s mission reflects a growing body of scholarship challenging the assumption that New York City and the North, more generally, were idyllic lands of freedom.
“We’ve all been given this education around, ‘Slavery happened in the South, and the North were the good guys,’ when in reality it was happening here,” Robles said.
Enslaved labor was foundational to New York’s early development and economic growth, said Leslie Harris, a professor of history and African American studies at Northwestern University and author of “In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863.”
For parts of the 17th and 18th centuries, the city was home to the largest urban slave population in mainland North America, Harris said. At one point, 40% of Manhattan households owned slaves, most of them Black women doing domestic work, she explained. The local economy was also heavily dependent on the slave trade: Wall Street banks and New York brokers financed the cotton trade and shipped the crop to New England and British textile mills, according to Jonathan Daniel Wells, a history professor at the University of Michigan.
For enslaved people in the South who escaped to New York, a main stop on the Underground Railroad, permanent freedom was not guaranteed. Throughout the first half of the 19th century, Black people were often kidnapped in New York City — both those who had been born free and those who had escaped bondage — and were sold in the South.
Slavery dates to the city’s very beginnings. In the 17th century, Peter Stuyvesant, director-general of the Dutch colony that gave rise to New York, enslaved 15 to 30 people on his 62 acres, part of which was in the area that is now the Bowery, according to Jaap Jacobs, an honorary reader in the school of history at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Today many sites still bear his name — Stuyvesant High School and Stuyvesant Town among them. The websites for the school and apartment complex do not mention his history as a slave trader and owner. Neither does St. Mark’s Church, under which Stuyvesant is buried.
But the Stuyvesant stickers, which were distributed around the city last fall, offer the additional information.
“Peter Stuyvesant was a slave trader,” they read. “Peter Stuyvesant trafficked 290 human beings in the first slave auction in Manhattan.”
Stuyvesant High School, which offered admission to eight Black students out of 749 spots for the 2021-22 academic year, is working to update its website to include more context on Stuyvesant, according to a Department of Education spokesperson, who added that the department “has a sustained commitment to build an anti-racist education system that serves all children, in all school communities.”
Nadeem Siddiqui, general manager of Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village, said that the vast apartment complex near the East River “will always be a community that supports equity for all, and we have a zero-tolerance policy for racism or discrimination of any kind.”
And St. Mark’s Church has hosted virtual conversations with Jacobs focusing on “slavery in Stuyvesant’s world,” according to the Rev. Anne Sawyer, its rector. She added that a temporary memorial outside the church honors slaves owned by members of the church and by Stuyvesant.
Unlike many movements, Slavers of New York is not seeking explicitly to strip the names of enslavers from the public eye, Waithe said.
“Our goal is to get the information to the people who live in and around the community and let them decide what they want to do about it,” Waithe said.
Back in Crown Heights, in front of Lionheart Natural Herbs and Spices, a Nostrand sticker has been on a parking meter for months. Tracey Reid, the store’s owner, seems fine with it staying put. “It’s important for people to not just think, ‘OK, we’re on Nostrand Avenue,’ but to know it’s part of the history of slavery,” she said.
The project has seen a few detractors, mostly in the form of people who may see the stickers as vandalism. Last fall, all of the stickers on Bergen Street in Brooklyn disappeared within an hour of going up, according to Reso and Robles.