Memorializing Manhattan’s earliest African residents.
Kamau ware 1 surveys the East River. As the sun sinks behind the towers of the Financial District, trucks grumble past, cyclists ding their bells, and a ferry slices by. He encourages the seven people who are following him to tune all this out and imagine what the view might have looked like 300 years before, when the harbor was likely speckled with galleons and sloops—many carrying slaves. “How does it feel in your stomach?” he asks.
Ware is leading a walking tour, one prong of Black Gotham Experience, or BGX, an evolving and immersive storytelling project that aims to bring to life the history of black people in early colonial New York—starting before the city was even called that, back when Dutch and English settlers and Native Americans were still wrestling for control of it.
The project was born in 2008, when Ware, then an educator at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, was asked a question that he couldn’t answer. The museum, which aims to honor the immigrant experience, offers tours of the apartments inhabited in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by recent arrivals—most of them Irish, Jewish, or Italian. As one of Ware’s tour groups trudged along, a little girl wanted to know: Where were the black people?
In pursuit of an answer, Ware started with Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris’s anthology, Slavery in New York, and a related exhibit at the New-York Historical Society. Soon he was poring over primary sources, including court documents on slave uprisings, trying to stitch together a more complete picture of daily life for the city’s earliest African residents.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July/August 2017-Ausgabe von The Atlantic.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
Bereits Abonnent ? Anmelden
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July/August 2017-Ausgabe von The Atlantic.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
Bereits Abonnent? Anmelden
THE AIRPORT-LOUNGE ARMS RACE
Inside the ever more extravagant competition to lure affluent travelers
Hypochondria Never Dies
The diagnosis is officially gone, but health anxiety is everywhere.
Miranda July's Weird Road Trip
The author's midlife-crisis novel is full of estrangement, eroticism, and whimsy.
The Wild Blood Dynasty
What a little-known family reveals about the nation's untamed spirit
The Engrossing Darkness of The Crow
Can a cult hit point the way forward for the beleaguered comic-book movie?
The Godfather of American Comedy
The funniest people on the planet think there's no funnier person than Albert Brooks.
The History My Family Left Behind
A gun, a lynching, and an exodus from Mississippi
Ozempic or Bust
America has been trying to address the obesity epidemic for four decades now. So far, each new \"solution\" has failed to live up to its early promise.
THE ART OF SURVIVAL
In living with cancer, Suleika Jaouad has learned to wrench meaning from our short time on Earth.
DEMOCRACY IS LOSING THE PROPAGANDA WAR
AUTOCRATS IN CHINA, RUSSIA, AND ELSEWHERE ARE NOW MAKING COMMON CAUSE WITH MAGA REPUBLICANS TO DISCREDIT LIBERALISM AND FREEDOM AROUND THE WORLD.