That was me
Defining the "African-American"
- Thread starter Bawon Samedi
- Start date
That was me
K.O.N.Y
Superstar
This seems to be true. Most AA had a path of least resistance stance it seems when it came to migrating to urban metros. Most blacks from new York have Carolina and Georgia roots(myself included). Brehs literally went to whatever major city was directly north of them
Same thing with Mississippi and Alabama with cities like Chicago,Detroit
Texas and lousiana are the most western traditionally southern states
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CinnaSlim
Queen of Swords
It's cool, I can see the path my grandmother's family took from slavery on the map
Camilla, GA > Knoxville, TN>>> Columbus, Ohio> Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania > New York, NY
Camilla, GA > Knoxville, TN>>> Columbus, Ohio> Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania > New York, NY
This is my father's side of the family in a nutshell. Most people don't know the history of slaves laying the foundation for Wall Street and Manhattan. Matter of fact, If my memory is correct, Wall Street started as a slave trading market. This is where the ancestors of my fathers side descend from. I've been researching this for about a year and a half.
My maternal side are late comers to NY. They're from North Carolina, but came to NY during the 60s.
K.O.N.Y
Superstar
Basically the same scenario but with my grandma and her Raleigh nc family. The 60s was a big decade for migration to NY as well
Xtraz2
Superstar
Yeah I said that, all these nikkaz got it from me, tryna take my credit
IllmaticDelta
Veteran
yes sir
Welcome to the most ambitious exhibition ever assembled on the subject of slavery in New York. On October 7, Slavery in New York, a multimedia exhibition, reveals a history of which most people are unaware, illuminates the contributions of the enslaved and explores the role slavery played in the making of New York and the United States.
Though it is barely mentioned in school textbooks, slavery was a key institution in the development of New York, from its formative years. We believe the philosophical notion that if you want to understand the present, you have to start by understanding the past.
What Americans know about freedom we learned in the school of slavery. Those in our past who spoke the language of liberty always had in mind - and often in view - shackles on the legs and manacles on the wrists of the enslaved.
At the height of the revolutionary conflict, George Washington, our greatest apostle of freedom but also the owner of hundreds of slaves, warned that if the Americans did not resist British tyranny they would become "as tame and abject slaves as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway."
New York has preeminently been the capital of American liberty, the freest city of the nation - its largest, most diverse, its most economically ambitious, and its most open to the world. It was also, paradoxically, for more than two centuries, the capital of American slavery.
As many as 20 percent of colonial New Yorkers were enslaved Africans. First Dutch and then English merchants built the city's local economy largely around supplying ships for the trade in slaves and in what slaves produced - sugar, tobacco, indigo, coffee, chocolate, and ultimately, cotton. New York ship captains and merchants bought and sold slaves along the coast of Africa and in the taverns of their own city. Almost every businessman in 18th-century New York had a stake, at one time or another, in the traffic in human beings.
During the colonial period, 41 perent of the city's households had slaves, compared to 6 percent in Philadelphia and 2 percent in Boston. Only Charleston, South Carolina, rivaled New York in the extent to which slavery penetrated everyday life. To be sure, each slaveholding New Yorker usually owned only one or two persons.
In the urban landscape, there were no plantations. Slaves slept in the cellars and attics of town houses or above farmhouse kitchens in the countryside. They did virtually all of the work of many households - bringing in the firewood, the water, and the food; cleaning the house and the clothing; removing the wastes. They were vital to the work of early craftsmen and manufacturers, and many became skilled artisans themselves. And they performed almost all the heavy labor of building New York's infrastructure.
Slaves constructed Fort Amsterdam and its successors along the Battery. They built the wall from which Wall Street gets its name. They built the roads, the docks, and most of the important buildings of the early city - the first city hall, the first Dutch and English churches, Fraunces Tavern, the city prison and the city hospital.
Slavery was no milder in the urban North than in the Deep South. Instances of abusive treatment permeate public and personal records. The city's Common Council passed one restrictive law after another: forbidding blacks from owning property or bequeathing it to their children; forbidding them to congregate at night or in groups larger than three; requiring them to carry lanterns after dark and to remain south of what is now Worth Street; threatening the most severe punishments, even death, for theft, arson, or conspiracy to revolt - and carrying out these punishments brutally and publicly time and again.
http://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/history.htm
Why do you think they went to your State instead of going up North?
Oceanicpuppy
Superstar
Most of my family stayed in the south only a few of us moved to the midwest only because my granddad was running from the law not because of industry. Some of them were in Birmingham during the whole civil rights thing. 
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Didn't know you spoke on the great migration but
If you was dropping knowledge about our history.
BmoreGorilla
Veteran
Baltimore had the highest population of free blacks of all the cities in the slave states so there was already a black economic base here
Oceanicpuppy
Superstar
what the fukk happened?
BmoreGorilla
Veteran
Integration
