Six years ago I met a young colored man, a college student recently returned from Germany where he had been engaged in graduate work. He was born, he told me, in one of the Gulf States, and I questioned him as to whether he intended going back to the South to teach. His answer was in the negative. "My father has attained success in his native state," he said, "but when I ceased to be a boy, he advised me to live in the North where my manhood would be respected. He himself cannot continually endure the position in which he is placed, and in the summer he comes North to be a man. No," correcting himself, "to be half a man. A Negro is wholly a man only in Europe."
Half a man! During the six years that I have been in touch with the problem of the Negro in New York this characterization has grown in significance to me. I have endeavored to know the life of the Negro as I know the life of the white American, and I have learned that while New York at times gives full recognition to his manhood, again, its race prejudice arrests his development as certainly as severe poverty arrests the development of the tenement child. Perhaps a study of this shifting attitude on the part of the dominant race, and of the Negro's reaction under it, may not be unimportant; for the color question cannot be ignored in America, nor should the position taken by her largest city be overlooked. And those who love their fellows may be glad, among New York's four millions—its Slavs and Italians, its Russians and Asiatics—to meet these dark people who speak our language and who for many generations have made this country their home.
[CHAPTER I]
"Up from Slavery"
The status of the Negro in New Amsterdam, a slave in a pioneer community, differed fundamentally from his position today in New York. His history from the seventeenth to the twentieth century contains many exciting incidents, but those only need be considered here that show a progress or a retardation in his attainment to manhood. What were his struggles in the past to secure his rights as a man?
Slavery in the early days of the colonies was more brutal than at the time of final emancipation. Savages recently arrived from Africa lacked the docility of blacks reared in bondage, and burning and torturing, as well as whipping, were recognized modes of punishment. Masters looked upon their Negroes, bought at the Wall Street market from among the cargo of a recently arrived slaver, with some suspicion and fear. Nor were their apprehensions entirely without reason. In 1712 some of the discontented among the New York slaves met in an orchard in Maiden Lane and set fire to an outhouse. Defending themselves against the citizens who ran to put out the flames, they fired, killing nine men and wounding six. Retribution soon followed. They were pursued when they attempted flight, captured and executed—some hanged, some burned at the stake, some left suspended in chains to starve to death.
Perhaps it was the memory of this small revolt that caused the people of New York in 1741 to lay the blame for a series of conflagrations upon their slaves. Nine fires that seemed to be incendiary came one upon another, and a robbery was committed. To escape death herself, a worthless white servant girl gave testimony against the Negroes who frequented a tavern where she was employed, declaring that a plot had been conceived whereby the slaves would kill all the white men and take control of the city. New York was aflame with fear, and evidence that at another time would have been rejected, was listened to by the judges with grave attention. The slaves were allowed no defence, and before the city had recovered from its fright, it had burned fourteen Negroes, hanged eighteen, and transported seventy-one.[1]
Historians today think that the slaves were in no way concerned in this so-called "plot." The two thousand blacks in the city might have done much mischief to the ten thousand whites, but their servile condition made an organized movement among them impossible. We may infer, however, from the fear which they provoked, that they were not all docile servants. In a letter written at the port of New York in 1756, an English naval officer says of the city, "The laborious people in general are Guinea Negroes who lie under particular restraints from the attempts they have made to massacre the inhabitants for their liberty."[2] Janvier in his "Old New York" thinks, "that the alarm bred by the so-called Negro plot of 1741 was most effective in checking the growth of slavery in that city." Probably the restlessness of the slaves, their efforts toward manhood, in a community where there was little economic justification for slavery, contributed to the movement for emancipation that began in 1777.
Emancipation came gradually to the New York Negro. Gouverneur Morris at the state constitutional convention of 1776-1777 recommended that "the future legislature of the state of New York take the most effectual measures consistent with the public safety and the private property of individuals for abolishing domestic slavery within the same, so that in future ages every human being who breathes the air of this state shall enjoy the privileges of a freeman." The postponement of action to a future legislature was keenly regretted by John Jay, who was absent from the convention when the slavery question arose, but who had hoped that New York might be a leader in emancipation. The state's initial measure for abolishing slavery was in 1785, when it prohibited the sale of slaves in New York. This was followed in 1799 by an act giving freedom to the children of slaves, and in 1817 by a further act providing for the abolition of slavery throughout the state in 1827. This law went into effect July 4, 1827, the emancipation day of the Negroes in New York.