NYC Parks as Historical Battlegrounds between Black Equality and White Supremacy
By Mars Plater
When Amy Cooper threatened Chris Cooper’s life by calling the police with the wildly fabricated claim, “There is a man, African American…threatening me” in Central Park, she joined a long history of white New Yorkers who have made public parks unsafe for Black people. Looking back to the early 19th century lays bare the connection between this tense moment in the Ramble and the question of who constitutes “the public” entitled to use public spaces. Between the 1820s and 1860s, the city’s parks were battlegrounds — sometimes literally — between Black New Yorkers who asserted their equal right to relax, play, and protest there and whites who fought to keep these public spaces for themselves.
David Longworth, “Map and Comparative Plans Showing 88 Years Growth of the City of New York,” 1817, Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library, The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1817. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-f06e-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
In the 1820s New York was a small city, crowded onto the tip of Manhattan Island, with two parks larger than an acre: the Battery and the Park (now City Hall Park.) These were places to watch birds, sit under trees, and socialize. As open spaces that could accommodate large crowds, parks were also where New Yorkers celebrated holidays and milestones. On July 5, 1827, Black New Yorkers held a parade to mark the hard-won end of slavery in New York State.[1] In the crowd was a Black teenager named Henry Highland Garnet, who would grow up to become an influential radical abolitionist. He watched as the parade’s Grand Marshal entered the Park on horseback, “saluted the Mayor on the City Hall steps, and then took his way down Broadway to the Battery.” Hundreds of “splendidly dressed” men followed, representing the mutual aid associations, schools, and churches that the Black community had founded against all odds, when slavery was the law of the land in New York State. Garnet would never forget this “proud day…for our people.”[2] The joyful parade through the city’s public parks signaled the start of a new era in which no Black New Yorkers would be enslaved and social equality seemed possible.
Yet emancipation brought backlash, and white New Yorkers responded with violence when Black people participated in public events in the parks. Four months after the parade, a white “gang of desperadoes” “barbarously knocked” a Black woman down during holiday festivities at the Battery. Freedom’s Journal, the nation’s first Black newspaper, insisted, “our brethren in common with other citizens, ought to have the privilege of spending their time” in parks and other public spaces “unmolested.”[3] But during Fourth of July celebrations in the Park in 1829, a group of white men attacked Smart Drayton, a Black man from Charleston, South Carolina. Garnet noted that even though Drayton was vastly outnumbered, “he whipped the crowd, and, of course was arrested….for assault and battery.”[4] The police force, still small and composed mostly of volunteers, condoned white vigilantes who constrained the scope of freedom by driving Black people from public parks.[5]
Municipal authorities declined to call in the militia for days during the Anti-Abolitionist Riots of 1834, allowing vicious white mobs to terrorize white abolitionists and Black New Yorkers.[6] Rioters chased Black people from the Park, knocking down and beating anyone they could catch.[7] Just two days earlier, the Black community celebrated the anniversary of state emancipation at the Park.[8] Violently seizing this public space for white-use only, the rioters enforced a racially exclusive definition of the “public.” Yet Black New Yorkers kept returning to the city’s parks to celebrate their holidays and integrate public space, claiming the right to fully participate in civic life.
Black New Yorkers braved threats of violence to participate in holiday celebrations at the Park at City Hall. “Fourth of July,” Morning Herald, July 6, 1840, 1.
Though dangerous, parks were also crucial sites of political expression for the Black community. In the years between state and national emancipation, gangs of slave catchers stalked the streets, detaining Black people they claimed had escaped from southern enslavers.[9] During trials to determine the fates of captured people, some who had never been enslaved, the Park filled with Black protesters. In 1837, the sheriff and a judge dragged William Dixon to court through a throng of two thousand people, most of them Black women. Someone in the crowd in the crowd tossed Dixon a knife while Kezia Manning and Jesse Harrod attacked his captors, allowing him to flee.[10] City leaders and white New Yorkers, even some who decried slavery, denounced such protests as dangerous mob activity.
Yet Black New Yorkers understood that direct action in the Park put pressure on judges and might make the difference between a community member being sold away into slavery or staying free. Protests escalated in response to the federal 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which had emboldened kidnappers. Watching the Park fill with as many as five thousand protesters ready to fight, the mayor ordered local police officers to stop enforcing the law less than a year after its passage.[11] Politicians were not inclined to listen to the Black community, especially because explicitly racist voting laws denied most Black men suffrage, but they could not ignore the angry crowds gathered right at the seat of local government.[12] Protests were effective.
In the lead up to the Civil War, the right to leisure in public parks became an increasingly politicized issue. When Frederick Douglass strolled with two white women friends at the Battery in 1850, white men surrounded them, throwing insults and then punches. Douglass felt that he was “in an enemy's land” and the attack against him was indeed a contest over equal access to public space.[13] Braving harassment and attacks to visit the parks, Black people asserted that they were part of New York’s public. Black and white children played together “almost daily in our Park” and were evidence, according to the Tribune in 1857, that “the prejudice of color is acquired or imbibed, not natural and instinctive.”[14] Parks could be places where New Yorkers glimpsed racial equality and even harmony, which is precisely why racists used their fists to keep Black people away.
As debates on the future of slavery in the South grew increasingly fraught, a fractured populace fought for and against the system by demonstrating in the Park. Some nights, abolitionists held demonstrations there.[15] But on others, white crowds listened to local politicians stoke fears that upon emancipation, newly free people would descend upon New York and depress wages for white men. Seven thousand whites marched to the Park in 1856, carrying lanterns bearing an image of a Black man trampling the Constitution.[16] As the city’s center of political expression, the Park reflected deep divisions.
After war broke out, the Park became an actual battleground. In July 1863, whites who could not pay their way out of the draft waged five days of terrorism against abolitionists, the affluent, anti-slavery newspapers, and especially Black people. Mobs hunted New Yorkers of African descent, torturing and murdering at least eleven people and burning homes, businesses, and institutions — including the Colored Orphan Asylum.[17] Rioters spilled out of the Park at City Hall, searching streetcars for Black passengers and setting fire to the nearby offices of the Tribune.[18] The horror only subsided when the federal government sent Union Army soldiers, recently returned from the Battle of Gettysburg, to restore order. In the aftermath of this horrific violence, the Union Army sent the 2nd U.S. Colored Infantry to New York to station in the Park. The Liberator marveled at the sight of Black soldiers drilling “in the Park, so recently the hunting-ground where the infuriated rioters pursued the flying negro.”[19] The troops occupied a highly contested public space, sending a clear message that terrorism against the Black community had become treasonous.
Nineteenth-century New Yorkers understood that parks have symbolic value. Access to these sites of recreation and political expression connects to critical questions about who is included in the notion of “the public” and who is not. In the years leading up to the Civil War, white New Yorkers were explicit in their efforts to define public space as white space. Today, white supremacy often hides behind noise complaints and suspicion of Black and brown parkgoers. When Amy Cooper made false claims of being in danger, with full knowledge that police officers often exert brutal or deadly force against people of color, she tried to show Christian Cooper that he was out of place in his beloved local park. Her actions were rooted in an underlying notion that public parks are for whites only and in a history of maintaining white control over these spaces through violence. More than 150 years after the attack against Frederick Douglass at the Battery, white New Yorkers must confront the ways that we still make parks “enemy’s land” for people of color.
Marika Plater is a PhD candidate at Rutgers University who studies the social and environmental histories of green spaces in NYC.
[1] Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 122-126.
[2] Henry Highland Garnet, A Memorial Discourse (Philadelphia: Joseph M. Wilson, 1865), 24-25.
[3] “Slavery in Cuba,” Freedom’s Journal, November 30, 1827.
[4] Garnet, A Memorial Discourse, 26.
[5] For the small, but rapidly growing, police force, see Paul Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).
[6] Linda Kerber, “Abolitionists and Amalgamators: The New York City Race Riots of 1834” New York History 48 (January 1967): 28-39.
[7] Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: the 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: The Free Press, 2001), 9.
[8] Mitch Kachun, Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 54.
[9] Leslie M. Alexander, African or American? Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 34-36, 122.
[10] “Runaway—Riot—Rescue—Recapture,” Commercial Advertiser, April 13, 1837, 2.
[11] “Meetings of the Colored Citizens of New York,” The North Star, October 24, 1850; Craig Steven Wilder, In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 171-173.
[12] Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 118-119.
[13] Frederick Douglass, “At Home Again,” The North Star, May 30, 1850.
[14] “Negro Race,” New-York Daily Tribune, August 17, 1857, 4.
[15] Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 859; “The New York Meeting,” The Pittsfield Sun, May 18, 1854, 3.
[16] “Democratic Torchlight Procession,” New-York Daily Tribune, September 10, 1856, 5.
[17] Carla Peterson, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 223-258.
[18] J.T. Headley, The Great Riots of New York, 1712-1872 (New York: E.B. Treat, 1873), 179.
[19] “The Arrival of Colored Troops,” The Liberator, December 11, 1863, 199.