No, New York wasn’t the anti-slavery hero you thought it was – City & State New York
No, New York wasn’t the anti-slavery hero you thought it was – City & State New York
The simplest narrative of American history portrays the North as a humanitarian anti-slavery hero in the fight for freedom and equality for African Americans. But a closer look at history will reveal something much darker.
The same beliefs of Black inferiority were expressed by political and business leaders, and the citizens who put them in charge, in both Northern and Southern states in ways that were both implicit and explicit. New York state is one of the many Northern states that has a history with slavery and anti-Blackness that’s built into the fabric of its institutions – it is just much more hidden compared to the states that made up the Confederacy.
