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Return to Sender: Prison as Censorship Exhibit (9/14-10/28) - curated by MK!

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Return to Sender: Prison as Censorship Exhibit (9/14-10/28) - curated by MK!

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PEN America's Prison and Justice Writing Program co-curates "Return to Sender: Prison as Censorship" with Mariame Kaba. The exhibition features writing and art by incarcerated creators that examine how prisons enact censorship and limit free expression for incarcerated authors, readers and artists. The exhibition will be on display at EFA Project Space from September 14 through October 28, and is free to the public Wednesday through Saturday (12-6pm ET). Register to attend the opening on Thursday, September 14.

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Return to Sender: Prison as Censorship | Exhibit Opening

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The exhibition features writing and art that examine how prisons enact censorship and limit free expression for incarcerated authors, readers, and artists.

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Studying Community: How to Do a Walking Tour (page 2)

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Studying Community: How to Do a Walking Tour (page 2)

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Studying Community: People, Space, and Time (page 1)

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Studying Community: People, Space, and Time (page 1)

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The fun way to GET everyone involved in resisting U.S. fascism & building power to defeat it.

4 bingo cards available in Spanish, Portuguese, English, & Chinese. Each PDF comes with a bonus 5th blank card for creating your own!

Setup for Resistance Bingo

1. Decide the number of players.
Play Resistance Bingo alone, or with family/friends/co-workers/network. Each card was made with consideration for ranges in age, experience, and access to activities.

2. Print/Photocopy/Email the bingo sheet making sure that you have enough for each person to play.
There are 4 different Resistance Bingo cards in total. Check out all four cards next week!

3. Decide which difficulty level you will play.
Four Corners Win ★, Horizontal/Vertical Line ★★, Diagonal Line ★★★, Black Out ★★★★

4. Decide on what the prize will be for the winner(s).

5. Decide how long you will play the game and how you will update each other on your progress.

How to Play Resistance Bingo

To win Resistance Bingo, a player must place their initials inside each corresponding box for the act of resistance they have taken. (Keep in my mind that part of resisting fascism includes organizing and building power to defeat it long term. We encourage folks to expand their thinking on what resistance is and can look like.)

Once a player obtains the necessary boxes for the level of difficulty they are playing, they should shout/post/call/text, ""

When a person successfully gets all of the boxes needed and shouts ""," the game is paused to see if they have indeed won. Check that the player can in some way verify that they indeed can check off that box (some actions may need some explaining and details shared), and then if so, the player with the winning Resistance Bingo card has won the game. No #AlternativeFacts playing here please.

Time to play again with a new card or a new way of playing!

Additional Hacks or Ways to Play Resistance Bingo:

1. Resistance Bingo, Teams Edition
Play the game in teams! Challenge another group to play with your team, and see who can get "" first as a group!

2. Resistance Bingo, Pen Pal Edition
Post progress/photos/videos/inspiration to FB/Twitter/IG with #ResistanceBingo to play with others living in different places and/or inspire others and grow the resistance!

3. Resistance Bingo, Ice-Breaker Edition
Use the bingo cards as a "get to know you" activity and gather signatures from individuals in the group to both meet people and see who has what skills and experience in the room.

CSS Resistance Bingo Project Partners

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Resistance Bingo - Center for Story-based Strategy

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The fun way to GET everyone involved in resisting U.S. fascism & building power to defeat it. 4 bingo cards available in Spanish, Portuguese, English, & Chinese. Each PDF comes with a bonus 5th blank card for creating your own! Decide the number of players. Play Resistance Bingo alone, or with family/friends/co-workers/network.

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Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care (2023) by Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba 

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Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care (2023) by Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba 

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"[ Let This Radicalize You] is both a how-to guide for community activists and a deeply-felt assessment of how we can better support one another to sustain lifelong involvement in progressive efforts.... [The Book] is a well-wrought antidote to the pervasive despair of living in Trumpian times.... Kaba is known for reminding those in her orbit to see crises as opportunities for radical action rather than hopelessness. Let This Radicalize You urges us forward, prodding us to bring the world we want into existence with creativity, persistence and sass." -The Indypendent

"This is a prophetic work, one that will be pressed with great urgency into the palms of friends and comrades, kin and colleagues, and anyone else ready to rise up against machineries of mass death. With great clarity and generosity, Hayes and Kaba model how participants in movements can be tough on systems while being gentle with one another and themselves, nurturing a "counterculture of care" as an integral part of building the next world." -Naomi Klein, author, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal

"In this time of perpetual crisis, when too many of our movements are imploding and the work often feels soul crushing, Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba have turned decades of collective wisdom and experience into the text we desperately need right now. This book will radicalize even the 'radicals' by reminding us that to be radical is not to have all the answers or some special portal into transcendent knowledge. It is about seeing and moving differently in the world. It means having the courage to imagine, make mistakes, to trust, listen, learn, think, and rethink; to resist punditry, pedestals, and perfection; to reject cynicism and embrace critical analysis; to plot, to hold on, to care and commune, to show up, to love. They teach us to mourn and organize, and that we who believe in freedom have to rest. And they understand better than anyone what Dr. King meant when he called on us to 'rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world.'" -Robin D. G. Kelley, author, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

"Let This Radicalize You is a rich treasury of practical lessons and insights from organizers and activists across many of today's most important sites of struggle. Through deeply moving storytelling, Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba share a stirring vision of commitment and collaboration that is rooted in love, reality, and solidarity-and one that doesn't shy away from the challenges we face inside and outside our movements or the high stakes. This book is a gift for everyone, no matter their level of political engagement, interested in building the new worlds of care and mutual flourishing that we need." -Astra Taylor, author, Remake the World: Essays, Reflections, Rebellions

"There is so much incredible goodness between these covers. How I wish I had this wisdom when I was young. Everything within fills me with hope and joy for our future. This book is about reclaiming our humanity and care for one another as we seek to heal ourselves and our world. It is an essential work that can change the course of the history we create each day!" -Lisa Fithian, author, Shut It Down: Stories from a Fierce, Loving Resistance

"Let this Radicalize You is geared toward helping young organizers learn to strategize, make critical analyses, and to act effectively and with integrity in the communities they work with. Perhaps most important of all, it shows the need to go beyond having a nuanced critique or organizing one-off events-it is a text that teaches us how to build a movement. The authors have more than succeeded in meeting their task: Let This Radicalize You should be required reading for anyone entering social movements and wishing to eradicate harm and create more liveable futures. But this book is also a movement encyclopedia for anyone who is oriented toward liberation or even slightly curious about what it might mean for us to get there. This is a necessary text for the freedom dreamers, the poets, the seasoned activists, the rebels, and the community builders from all walks of life, because it shows us what it means to be transformed in the service of liberation. Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba show us that freeing ourselves and freeing one another is work, but, importantly, that it is work that can and must be done together." -Robyn Maynard, coauthor, Rehearsals for Living

" Let This Radicalize You is a beacon of world-making potential you won't find anywhere else. In the wretched catastrophes of the racial capitalocene, this book is your guide to elsewhere, and it is brilliant." -Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, coauthor, Rehearsals for Living

" Let This Radicalize You is part handbook, part liberatory vision, designed to inspire you to deepen your involvement in radical movements while accompanying you along the way. Holding hope amid a dystopian world, Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba created a book that will serve our movements for years to come." -Ejeris Dixon, coeditor, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

"The compounding crises of this era can so easily drive us into paralysis and despair. This beautiful book pulls us instead toward a politics rooted in our deepest values of care, compassion, and community. Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba have created a visionary and urgently needed guide to cultivating hope and action in treacherous times." -L.A. Kauffman, author, Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism

"Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba have produced one of the most essential treatises on mutual aid ever written. It begins and ends with the reality that any movement that truly wants to remake the world has to be founded on one unshakeable principle: care. Let This Radicalize You is a letter addressed to our vulnerable hearts, reminding us that our love, support, and solidarity really can build a whole new world." -Shane Burley, author, Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse

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What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe.

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No More Police: A Case for Abolition (2022) by Mariame Kaba & Andrea J. Ritchie

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No More Police: A Case for Abolition (2022) by Mariame Kaba & Andrea J. Ritchie

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"Exploring movements to defund and abolish police through the lens of long legacies of Black feminist abolitionist organizing, No More Police offers an unflinching look at the traps that lie along the path to abolitionist futures, and critical guidance for readers who want to be part of bringing them into being. Add this timely and engaging book to the top of your must-read list."

-Angela Y. Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz

"More than a synthesis and summation of the conditions of our movements' work over the last two years, and more than just an abolitionist movement timeline going back decades, Kaba and Ritchie weave together our collective stories, contradictions, tensions, and all, and gift us with a road map to a future free of cops and cages. This is a must-read in the abolitionist lexicon."

-Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, Movement for Black Lives and co-director of the Highlander Center

"Kaba and Ritchie provide a much-needed primer on the demand to defund the police and how that demand can be leveraged toward an even more fundamental transformation of the violence of policing. The authors root their analysis in the reality of today's movements and offer practical, concrete recommendations that activists and organizers can put to work right now."

-Rachel Herzing, co-author of How to Abolish Prisons

"An absolutely brilliant contribution. Black feminist abolitionists Kaba and Ritchie's passionate mandate is that we never give up on the vision of a world where justice and safety live alongside each other."

-Beth Richie, author of Arrested Justice

"Kaba and Ritchie are knowledgeable, passionate, and skilled at elucidating complex concepts clearly, without sacrificing nuance. The book is deeply researched and flawlessly argued, and the plan they lay out is practical, compassionate, and circumspect. . . . A brilliantly articulated plan to abolish the police."

-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

" No More Police is a passionate, eloquent condemnation of the carceral policies and mindsets that have long governed America."

-Booklist (starred review)

"This book pushes those of us who have been fighting police and sexual violence for decades to think past prosecutions and prisons toward a future where we stop violence before it starts and transform harm when it happens."

-dream hampton, filmmaker and writer

"In the powerful and generative tradition of Black feminist freedom-making, No More Police not only presents a compelling case for the abolition of police, but points us in the direction of building a safer and more just future. Ritchie and Kaba have worked for decades in transformative justice and abolitionist movements. The richness of that experience, the love that fuels it, and the brilliant insights that flow from it, shine brightly in this book."

-Barbara Ransby, activist, author, and historian

"Kaba and Ritchie are such trusted souls in Black Liberation movements, and No More Police passionately synthesizes the experiences and expertise necessary for building a new world with less violence on all fronts."

-Raquel Willis, author and activist

" No More Police makes a sharp and compelling Black feminist case for a world without police, and without policing. Kaba and Ritchie are movement veterans, and their writing is as meticulously researched as it is grounded in practical knowledge gleaned over decades of abolitionist movement work. At once theoretically nuanced, analytically insightful and highly accessible, No More Police is an essential, must-read book for this moment."

-Robyn Maynard, author of Policing Black Lives and co-author of Rehearsals for Living

"With No More Police, Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie have written the definitive text on police abolition. The magic of this book is its ability to address the practical concerns of the present while strengthening our ability to craft ambitious and transformative freedom dreams for the future. Carefully researched, passionately written, and persuasively argued, No More Police is a must-read text for policymakers, activists, educators, and anyone else committed to imagining and building beyond the carceral world."

-Marc Lamont Hill, author of We Still Here: Pandemic, Policing, Protest, and Possibility

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In this powerful call to action, New York Times bestselling author Mariame Kaba and attorney and organizer Andrea J. Ritchie detail why policing doesn't stop violence, instead perpetuating widespread harm; outline the many failures of contemporary police reforms; and explore demands to defund police, divest from policing, and invest in community resources to create greater safety through a Black feminist lens.

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Creating space for all of our SPICEESelves

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Creating space for all of our SPICEESelves

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Creating space for all of our SPICEESelves

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Document details

Students of Abolition: A Time Capsule

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This zine is the culmination of time spent deep in study, imagination, conversation, and community building during Project NIA's summer 2021 Abolitionist Youth Organizing Institute (AYO, NYC!). A group of 60 young people, ages 16-24 spent 7 days learning about prison industrial complex abolition, organizing, and restorative justice. At the close of the institute a smaller group of participants submitted their reflections on PIC abolition and the envisioning of abolitionist futures. This zine includes submissions from S.L, Jaime, Lily Ahluwalia, Liv, Lauren Dotson, Tasfiya, Chris Chen, J.L.S, Kayana J, Trasonia, Kintan Silvany, Akash Singh, Re'Nyqua Farrington, yvetta fordjour, Zenith Jarrett, Prisca, Hedaia, and Safiya; along with graphic notes from Laura Chow Reeve. It was designed by mickey ferrara.

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This zine is the culmination of time spent deep in study, imagination, conversation, and community building during Project NIA's summer 2021 Abolitionist Youth Organizing Institute (AYO, NYC!). A group of 60 young people, ages 16-24 spent 7 days learning about prison industrial complex abolition, organizing, and restorative justice.

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Cosmic Possibilities: An Intergalactic Youth Guide to Abolition

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Cosmic Possibilities: An Intergalactic Youth Guide to Abolition

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Cosmic Possibilities: An Intergalactic Youth Guide to Abolition

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Cosmic Possibilities: An Intergalactic Youth Guide to Abolition is a creative and reflective dreamspace made by and for young people to imagine liberatory new worlds. What does it look like when our abolitionist visions for the world are realized? What did it take to get us there?

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Read the Zine from One Million Experiments, where we explore community-based projects that expand our ideas about what keeps us safe.

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Listen to the Podcast: One Million Experiments

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Listen to episodes from the One Million Experiments Podcast, where we explore community-based projects that expand our ideas about what keeps us safe.

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Kelly Hayes connects with activists, journalists and others on the front lines in this Truthout podcast.

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"Silence Prevails: East Village Community Gardens During the Pandemic" zine by Aki Onda

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"Silence Prevails: East Village Community Gardens During the Pandemic" zine by Aki Onda

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Scenes of beauty, life, and love in the midst of unfreedom are the inspiration behind the artist Tourmaline 's Pleasure Gardening walking tour. Organized on the occasion of the 2021 celebration of Juneteenth, the holiday that marks the emancipation of enslaved Black people in the United States, this audio tour of Manhattan brings together real spaces where people dreamed up and then practiced versions of freedom during slavery and other forms of involuntary servitude.

From Salacia and her vision of a counter-monument on Rikers Island to her recent body of photographs, Tourmaline has been captivated by pleasure gardens. In her research, she discovered that in the early 19th century these gardens-sometimes referred to as pleasure grounds or public gardens-arose along the edges of lower Manhattan, established by Black folks as a place where they could gather. While no photographs exist of these gardens, we can imagine them as places where Black people could feel the lushness of the earth or indulge with one another at a time when slavery was still legal.

We invite you to explore these stories in Pleasure Gardening with Tourmaline, where you'll hear from the artist and others-including abolitionists, educators, historians, curators, and scholars-who not only cultivate their own pleasure gardens, but maintain those planted by our ancestors.

Through nine short audio stops accompanied by musician and mystic Laraaji's soundscape, this tour visits four sites across New York City. Wherever you are, you can follow along below as the stops are given more context and evocatively imagined through the illustrations of Ebony Flowers. You can also access a transcript of the tour here.

Introducing Pleasure Gardening with Tourmaline

Ebony Flowers. Map of Pleasure Gardening with Tourmaline walking tour. 2021

Boarding House for Black Sailors, 330 Pearl Street (Part 1)

Also known as the Colored Sailors' Home, the Boarding House for Black Sailors was founded in 1829 by Albro and Mary Lyons, prominent Black abolitionists who owned property throughout Manhattan and used their wealth to create opportunities for other Black people. The Boarding House-originally located on 20 Vandewater Street and intersecting with both Frankfort Street and Pearl Street-was destroyed in 1863. Its approximate location today is 330 Pearl Street.

Listen to Cynthia R. Copeland, public historian and president of the Institute for the Exploration of Seneca Village, discuss the connections between the Underground Railroad and the Boarding House for Black Sailors.

Boarding House for Black Sailors, 330 Pearl Street (Part 2)

In addition to functioning as a stop along the Underground Railroad and a place where freed Black people could find accommodation at a time of physical and financial exclusion, we might also imagine the Boarding House as a space where Black sailors came together to share laughs and secret glances, and perhaps even sunbathe, feeling the East River's breeze.

Hear from Tourmaline and her former college professor, Robin D. G. Kelley, as they consider some of the ways the Black sailors might have practiced freedom dreaming.

African Society for Mutual Relief, 42 Baxter Street (Part 1)

The African Society for Mutual Relief held its earliest meetings in a schoolhouse located on Rose Street. In 1820, 12 years after its founding, the Society moved to 42 Baxter Street (at that point named Orange Street), a transition aided by a gift of $1,800 from Juliette Noel Toussaint, who was married to one of the city's leading hairdressers in the early 19th century.

"You have to understand that [at that time] $1,800 was a lot of money for an association where members paid 25 cents a year to be members," says Mariame Kaba. "So it was a significant donation. She's a woman, a Black woman who very few people know the name of, but she was incredibly important to the mutual aid of Black New York."

Hear Mariame Kaba, founder of Project NIA, explore the history of the African Society for Mutual Relief.

African Society for Mutual Relief, 42 Baxter Street (Part 2)

The freedom dreams launched by the African Society for Mutual Relief continue to reverberate today, often in spite of-or, in the case of Marsha P. Johnson 's work, in resistance to-the systems of unfreedom that sit at Baxter Street.

Listen to Tourmaline as she reflects on the activism of Marsha P. Johnson at this site.

David Ruggles's Home, 36 Lispenard Street

Edmund V. Gillon. Church Street between Lispenard and Walker Streets. c. 1975. Edmund Vincent Gillon. Museum of the City of New York. 2013.3.1.824

By the time David Ruggles grew involved in New York's abolitionist movement, no Black person-free or otherwise-was safe in the city. On several occasions, emancipated Black residents were kidnapped and sold into slavery. It was in the middle of such persistent danger that Ruggles declared, "In our cause, mere words are nothing-action is everything."

No trace remains of David Ruggles's original home, which was located in the same spot as the brick building on the left-hand side of this photograph. Today the building houses a coffee shop, and only a plaque affixed toward the building's rear acknowledges this history and Ruggles's contributions.

Robin D. G. Kelley, reflecting on Ruggles and the freedom dreams he launched from his home, asks us to reflect on the stories and places that have been lost or forgotten: "What would New York City look like had there been more militant opposition, fighting to hold on to these spaces? How do you defend these spaces? Think about how many historic spaces were destroyed in New York, not yet by dramatic acts of violence, but by state policies of eminent domain, freeway construction, urban renewal-this sort of soft power that's been way more destructive."

Hear writer and activist Mariame Kaba describe the ways David Ruggles fought for the freedom of Black people within and beyond New York City.

Seneca Village, Central Park between West 82nd and West 89th Streets (Part 1)

At a time when New York City's Black residents were blocked from owning land, a Black community nevertheless arose. Spanning from 82nd to 89th streets, in what is now known as Central Park, Seneca Village was home to countless Black families. The community first began in 1825, after Andrew Williams, an African American man who lived downtown, purchased three lots of farmland.

"It does become somewhat of an integrated community," says Cynthia R. Copeland, an educator and public historian. "We did have female landowners in Seneca Village in the 19th century, which was just amazing. And to see people coming from different regions of the country-New Jersey and the Eastern seaboard, Maryland. We had somebody who supposedly came from out West. We had a member who was described as coming from Africa and somebody from Haiti. There's this mixed blend of families that is happening in the community."

Hear from Cynthia R. Copeland on how archaeological research has helped us reimagine Seneca Village.

Seneca Village, Central Park between West 82nd and West 89th Streets (Part 2)

Invoking eminent domain, the government's right to claim private property for public use, Seneca Village was razed to the ground as construction on Central Park began in 1857. Hundreds of people were displaced, and the effects of this forced movement remain difficult to uncover.

Still, the spirit of Seneca Village persists, taking new forms with each person who tends to this history. In Tourmaline's words: "As more and more people learn about the history of Seneca Village and the history of Central Park, people get to have their own relationships and make meaning from that place. This is really a story of our expansive desires, the history of them, and our now, using that [desire] as a launching pad to expand even more."

Listen to Tourmaline's reflections on the ways Seneca Village manifests today.

While no photos of Seneca Village have been confirmed, we know that early illustrations describing the community as a " squatter settlement" are far from accurate. We can begin to reimagine Seneca Village by looking at photographs of Central Park in the midst of construction in 1862, or right before construction began in 1858.

Yet perhaps the most meaningful representations of Seneca Village are those developed from the freedom dreams of artists and caretakers like Ebony Flowers, whose illustration shows us a vision of Seneca Village grounded not in empty space, but in people and community.

Credits
With special thanks to the guests who joined Tourmaline on her tour, including:
Cynthia R. Copeland, President, Institute for the Exploration of Seneca Village
Mariame Kaba, Director, Project NIA
Robin D. G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in US History, University of California, Los Angeles
Laraaji, musician and mystic
Some Additional Resources and Bibliography
Central Park Conservancy. Discover Seneca Village: Selected Research Topics and Resources. September 2020.

Central Park Conservancy. Seneca Village Site.

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Black New Yorkers: 1613-1865. The New York Public Library.

Marie Warsh. " Exploring Northern Central Park: A History Told Through Rocks and Hills." Urban Omnibus, 2015.

Asha Futterman and Mariame Kaba. Radical Black Women of Harlem Walking Tour. Barnard Center for Research on Women.

The Black Gotham Archive.

Columbia University. Seneca Village Project.

MoMA PS1. Homeroom: Black Trans Liberation: Memoriam and Deliverance.

MoMA Audio is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

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Pleasure Gardening with Tourmaline | Magazine | MoMA

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Scenes of beauty, life, and love in the midst of unfreedom are the inspiration behind the artist Tourmaline 's Pleasure Gardening walking tour. Organized on the occasion of the 2021 celebration of Juneteenth, the holiday that marks the emancipation of enslaved Black people in the United States, this audio tour of Manhattan brings together real spaces where people dreamed up and then practiced versions of freedom during slavery and other forms of involuntary servitude.

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Some Low or No-Cost NYC Opportunities Related to What We Discussed in the YPHI

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Some Low or No-Cost NYC Opportunities Related to What We Discussed in the YPHI

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Some Low or No-Cost NYC Opportunities Related to What We Discussed in the YPHI

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Welcome to BGX Summer Season 2023 - Nerdy Thursdays ...

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Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room (Ongoing exhibition at The Met)

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Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room (Ongoing exhibition at The Met)

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Seneca Village-a vibrant nineteenth-century community of predominantly Black landowners and tenants-flourished in an area just west of The Met, in what is now Central Park. By the 1850s, the village comprised some fifty homes, three churches, multiple cemeteries, a school, and many gardens. It represented both an escape from the crowded and dangerous confines of lower Manhattan and a site of opportunity, ownership, freedom, and prosperity. In 1857, to make way for the park, the city used eminent domain to seize Seneca Village land, displacing its residents and leaving only the barest traces of the community behind.

This project has roots in the homes of Seneca Village, of which only a fragmented history remains. Like other period rooms throughout the Museum, this installation is a fabrication of a domestic space that assembles furnishings to create an illusion of authenticity. Unlike these other spaces, this room rejects the notion of one historical period and embraces the African and African diasporic belief that the past, present, and future are interconnected and that informed speculation may uncover many possibilities. Powered by Afrofuturism-a transdisciplinary creative mode that centers Black imagination, excellence, and self-determination-this construction is only one proposition for what might have been, had Seneca Village been allowed to thrive into the present and beyond.

The title, Before Yesterday We Could Fly, is inspired by Virginia Hamilton's legendary retellings of the Flying African tale, which celebrates enslaved peoples' imagination, creative uses of flight, and the significance of spirituality and mysticism to Black communities in the midst of great uncertainty. Activated through vision, sound, and storytelling, and furnished with a kaleidoscope of works from The Met's collection-from Bamileke beadwork and 19th-century American ceramics to contemporary art and design that celebrates rich and diverse traditions-the room foregrounds generations of African diasporic creativity. Before Yesterday We Could Fly also celebrates a number of new acquisitions made specifically for the project and is animated by exciting commissions from Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Fabiola Jean-Louis, and Jenn Nkiru.

In keeping with the collaborative spirit of Afrofuturism, The Met's curatorial team worked with lead curator Hannah Beachler, who envisioned and designed this space with consulting curator Michelle Commander. Since 2019, the group has engaged numerous creative and intellectual partners to infuse the installation with additional ideas and perspectives. Here, at a vital intersection at the heart of the Museum, this project opens a space for yet more histories to be told that look toward a more resilient future.

#MetAfrofuturist

The exhibition is made possible by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation and the Director's Fund.

Additional support is provided by Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne and the Terra Foundation for American Art.

The Met's quarterly Bulletin program is supported in part by the Lila Acheson Wallace Fund for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, established by the cofounder of Reader's Digest.

This exhibition features ambient audio for the five-channel digital video installed in the Living Room and Television section.

For assistive listening, join our free WiFi network (MetMuseumFreeWiFi) and select the short URL below to connect to exhibition-specific content.

First-time users will need to select the short URL a second time after downloading the "Listen Everywhere" app.
metmuseum.org/AFPR-listen ing

Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room Bulletin

The Met's latest Bulletin features texts that honor the real, lived history of the Seneca Village residents and explores works by Black creators from the eighteenth century to the present day through the lens of Afrofuturism. The publication also includes an original graphic novella by author and illustrator John Jennings.

Read Now

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Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Seneca Village-a vibrant nineteenth-century community of predominantly Black landowners and tenants-flourished in an area just west of The Met, in what is now Central Park. By the 1850s, the village comprised some fifty homes, three churches, multiple cemeteries, a school, and many gardens.

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The Bowery Boys: Case Files of the New York Police Department 1800-1915

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The Bowery Boys: Case Files of the New York Police Department 1800-1915

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Uniformly chic: Law enforcement officers of the New York Metropolitan Police from 1871 show off their fancy blue threads. Twenty years previous, they weren't even required to wear standardized apparel. (Courtesy NYPL Digital Library)

We're playing Good Cop / Bad Cop this week, as we take a close look at four events from the early history of the New York Police Department. You'll meet shining stars of the force like Jacob Hays, who kept the peace in the early 19th century armed with a mean billyclub - and the only man to ever hold the title of High Constable of New York. And then you'll encounter Joseph Petrosino, the Italian immigrant turned secret weapon in the early battles against organized crime.

Not all the early men in blue were so recommendable. During the Police Riot of 1857, cop turned against cop while the city burned and "Five Points criminals danced in the streets." And finally there's the lamentable tale of officer Charles Becker, the only member of the New York Police Department to be executed for criminal misdeed.

But did he really commit the crime - commissioning the murder of a nervous gambler who was prepared to rat him out?

#1 The Saga of High Constable Hays
Imagine encountering this face on a gaslit street at night! Jacob Hays watched over the streets of New York for over 40 years, one of the most dedicated men ever to watch over the city. Hays would become one of New York's best known - and most feared - men, thanks to his agility with a billy club and his early skills of detection and crime solving. ( NYPL)

This is the corner of Broadway and Grand Street in 1818. A wildly bustling street corner today, but quite a different story back in Hays' day. The constable roamed over a much smaller city - this was at the northern outskirts - and a far different range of crimes. By 1818, he would have only had about a couple dozen officers in his employ, all of whom reported directly to him. ( NYPL)

#2 The Police Riot of 1857
New York once had two different - and competing - police forces and boy they just did NOT get along. It all came to blows one June day in 1857, with state-sponsored Metropolitan police officers attacking the renegade men of the Municipal police force.

And it was because of Fernando Wood, the crafty mayor of New York in the 1850s who refused to comply to the state's authority over city law enforcement. Wood used the police for his own political advantage and hastened its descent into corruption.

#3 Petrosino!
The short Italian immigrant Joseph Petrosino, who become the NYPD's most potent tool against the growing forces of organized crime during the first years of the 20th century.

Petrosino was assassinated in Italy by the mob and his funeral procession through the city drew thousands of mourners. Today, you can visit the freshly refurbished Petrosino Square at Lafayette and Kenmare streets and see many artifacts relating to Petrosino at the New York City Police Museum.

Petrosino's funeral procession passed by the U.S. Custom House, April 9, 1909. ( LOC)

#4 Murder At The Metropole
Charles Becker and his wife beaming to the press, although I don't know what they're smiling about. Becker was convicted of authorizing the murder of down-and-out gambler Herman Rosenthal. The disgraced cop was eventually sent to the electric chair.

The prime witness against Becker was the otherworldly looking Bald Jack Rose, who claimed to have intimate details linking the officer to the vicious crime, which took place outside the Metropole Hotel in midtown.

Two of the gunmen in the Rosenthal murder, nicknamed Gyp The Blood and Lefty Louie, pictured here with the men who brought them in.

I wish the first three tales had full-length histories as good as Mike Dash's Satan's Circus, which recounts the excrusiating tale of Herman Rosenthal's murder and Becker's arrest. The Becker story is actually recounted in several books, including a fairly recent one by Rose Keefe called The Starker: Big Jack Zelig, the Becker-Rosenthal Case, and the Advent of the Jewish Gangster.
CORRECTION: In referring to the new components of the Metropolitan Police, I mention the 'city of Richmond' when I meant the 'county of Richmond' - aka Staten Island.

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Case Files of the New York Police Department 1800-1915 - The Bowery Boys: New York City History

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Uniformly chic: Law enforcement officers of the New York Metropolitan Police from 1871 show off their fancy blue threads. Twenty years previous, they weren't even required to wear standardized apparel. (Courtesy NYPL Digital Library) PODCAST We're playing Good Cop / Bad Cop this week, as we take a close look at four events from the ...

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NYPL- Doc Chat Fifty-One: Policing Gender, Race, and Sexuality in 20th-Century New York City (and in the Archives)

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NYPL- Doc Chat Fifty-One: Policing Gender, Race, and Sexuality in 20th-Century New York City (and in the Archives)

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By Julie Golia, Associate Director, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books and Charles J. Liebman Curator of Manuscri

On April 7, 2022, Doc Chatters read between the lines of one 1929 arrest record to explore the intersection of gender, race, sexuality, and policing.

Committee of Fourteen Records; NYPL Digital Collections, Image ID: 57474725.

A weekly series from NYPL's Center for Research in the Humanities, Doc Chat pairs an NYPL curator or specialist and a scholar to discuss evocative digitized items from the Library's collections and brainstorm innovative ways of teaching with them. In Episode Fifty-One, NYPL curator Julie Golia and historian Emily Brooks discussed archival records documenting the 1929 arrest and sentencing records of women in Harlem produced by the Committee of Fourteen, a citizen-run anti-vice association. Golia and Brooks explored the history of policing and criminalizing women of color, working-class women, and young women, and revealed how documents produced by the carceral state can be read in ways that affirm the humanity of those they sought to criminalize.

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Below are some handy links to materials and sources suggested in the episode

Episode Fifty-One: Primary Sources

" Harlem," 1929, Police Cards, Card Files, Series V. Investigations, Committee of Fourteen Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division. New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Explore the finding aid for the Committee of Fourteen Records.

Researchers may also be interested in the Committee of Fifteen Records (see the finding aid). The Committee of Fifteen was a similar citizen's committee that operated earlier than the Committee of Fourteen did. Significant portions of that collection have been digitized and can be explored on NYPL Digital Collections.

Episode Fifty-One: Readings and Resources

Elizabeth Clement, Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900-1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

Douglas J. Flowe, Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

Jennifer Fronc, New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era (University of Chicago Press, 2009).

LaShawn Harris, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City's Underground Economy (University of Illinois Press, 2016).

LaShawn Harris, "' Women and Girls in Jeopardy by His False Testimony: Charles Dancy, Urban Policing, and Black Women in New York City during the 1920s," Journal of Urban History Vol. 44, No. 3 (May 2018), 457-475 (article accessible onsite at NYPL).

Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (W.W. Norton & Company, 2019).

Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk With You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice and Reform in New York, 1890-1930 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

Marilynn S. Johnson, Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City (Beacon Press, 2003).

Shannon King, Whose Harlem is This, Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism in the New Negro Era (New York University Press, 2015).

More Doc Chats in Fall 2022!

Doc Chat has wrapped its Spring 2022 season. You can catch up on past episodes and explore helpful resources on the Doc Chat Channel of the NYPL blog. We'll kick off another lively and thought-provoking season this fall. Make sure you don't miss an episode by signing up for NYPL's Research newsletter.

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Doc Chat Fifty-One: Policing Gender, Race, and Sexuality in 20th-Century New York City (and in the Archives) | The New York Public Library

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Historians discuss what one handwritten arrest record can tell us about gender, race, sexuality, and policing in 20th-century NYC.

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NYPL- Doc Chat Episode Twelve: Putting Protest Photography Under the Lens

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NYPL- Doc Chat Episode Twelve: Putting Protest Photography Under the Lens

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Doc Chat Episode Twelve: Putting Protest Photography Under the Lens | The New York Public Library

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In the final Doc Chat of the year, we dug into the stories behind photographs of radical demonstrations in early 20th-century New York City…

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Looking Backward (1888) -  Edward Bellamy (full pdf)

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Looking Backward (1888) -  Edward Bellamy (full pdf)

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Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (2016) by Rebecca Solnit & Joshua Jelly-Schapiro 

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Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (2016) by Rebecca Solnit & Joshua Jelly-Schapiro 

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Winner of the 2017 Brendan Gill Prize from the Municipal Arts Society of New York”The maps themselves are things of beauty . . . A document of its time, of our time.” —Sadie Stein, New York Times “One is invited to fathom the many New Yorks hidden from history’s eye.” —Maria Popova, Brain PickingsNo…

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The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography (2009) by Katharine Harmon

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The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography (2009) by Katharine Harmon

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Follow the latest in MAPS + ART on Facebook here

THE MAP AS ART
Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography
Katharine Harmon
​With essays by Gayle Clemans

Princeton Architectural Press, 2009
Hardcover / 256 pages / $45.00
Paperback / 256 pages / $29.95

​Artists' maps lead to unexpected destinations: places turned upside down or inside out, territories riddled with marks understood only by their maker, landscapes connected more to the interior mind than the exterior world. In an era of globalized politics, culture, and ecology, contemporary artists are drawn to maps to express their visions. Using paint, salt, souvenir tea towels, or their own bodies, map artists explore a world free of geographical constraints. The Map as Art is filled with 250 colorful works by well-known artists-Ed Ruscha, Julian Schnabel, Olafur Eliasson, William Kentridge, Vik Muniz-and many more less-familiar artists for whom maps are the inspiration for creating art.

A remarkable collection of 360 colorful, map-related visions of experimental cartography by well-known artists and design thinkers."
-Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

Arresting and utterly gift-worthy."
​-Francine Prose, Oprah's O Magazine

Artists have toyed with maps before-there's Salvador Dali's Surrealist 'Map of the World' and Jasper Johns' splotchy sendup of the Lower 48, for starters. But The Map as Art, a new coffee table curiosity by Katharine Harmon, shows how much traction the idea has with artists today.... Rand McNally seems a world away."
-The New York Times

Katharine Harmon knows this territory. As the author of our best-selling book You Are Here, she has inspired legions of new devotees of imaginative maps.... Together, the beautiful reproductions and telling commentary make this an essential volume for anyone open to exploring new paths."
-Photo Eye

Who hasn't pored over a map, totally absorbed, oblivious to the passage of time? If you're inclined to such daydreaming, The Map as Art will intrigue, delight and perplex you, as you browse through 160 contemporary artists' interpretations of mapping the world."
-PopMatters

The Map as Art richly surveys today's artistic landscape and its relation to the map. For anyone who's ever gotten lost in the pages of a AAA road map or daydreamed of faraway places while spinning a globe, here is ample opportunity for fascination. Over 250 pages of visually engaging, thought-provoking works are rife with relevance."
-Cool Hunting

In this, the era of blind follow-the-GPS-style navigation, what is the future of maps? The colorful, creative, and downright disorienting answer can be found in The Map as Art by Katharine Harmon. The cartographic coffee table book heads into the uncharted territory of 'imaginative maps,' 360 representations of places created by artists and designers.... Whether you're interested in how we envision political landscapes, represent neighborhoods, or visually manipulate directional information, you can get there from here."
-Liquid Treat

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The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography

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Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature (2019) by Jean-Christophe Cloutier

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Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature (2019) by Jean-Christophe Cloutier

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ISBN: 9780231193313

408 Pages

Format: Paperback

List Price: $35.00 £30.00

ISBN: 9780231193306

408 Pages

Format: Hardcover

List Price: $105.00 £88.00

ISBN: 9780231550246

408 Pages

Format: E-book

List Price: $34.99 £30.00

Recasting the history of African American literature, Shadow Archives brings to life a slew of newly discovered texts-including Claude McKay's Amiable with Big Teeth -to tell the stories of black special collections and their struggle for institutional recognition. Jean-Christophe Cloutier offers revelatory readings of major African American writers, including McKay, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison, and provides a nuanced view of how archival methodology, access, and the power dynamics of acquisitions shape literary history.

Shadow Archives argues that the notion of the archive is crucial to our understanding of postwar African American literary history. Cloutier combines his own experiences as a researcher and archivist with a theoretically rich account of the archive to offer a pioneering study of the importance of African American authors' archival practices and how these shaped their writing. Given the lack of institutions dedicated to the black experience, the novel became an alternative site of historical preservation, a means to ensure both individual legacy and group survival. Such archivism manifests in the work of these authors through evolving lifecycles where documents undergo repurposing, revision, insertion, falsification, transformation, and fictionalization, sometimes across decades. An innovative interdisciplinary consideration of literary papers, Shadow Archives proposes new ways for literary scholars to engage with the archive.

A very timely addition to the contemporary discussion of "the archives" among scholars of African American literature, culture, and history and in literary studies generally. Modern Philology

Jean-Christophe Cloutier's excellent Shadow Archives reminds us that scholarly archives, especially literary archives, are always a sort of interpretation. James Smethurst, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Modern Philology

Though the subject is narrow, this study succeeds at being both masterfully scholarly in tone and at the same time easily comprehensible. Valuable to those in the fields of library science, history, and African American literature, this rich volume should not be overlooked...Highly recommended. Choice

Most compelling is Cloutier's overarching purpose: to explore the deliberate, cautious, and sometimes frustrating ways Claude McKay and three roughly contemporary African American novelists-Ann Petry, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison-approached the archiving and preservation of their papers, and the degrees to which archival collections clarify and reconfigure their legacies. Steve Nathans-Kelly, New York Journal of Books

Shadow Archives is an impressive book.... Cloutier situates his work in the larger context of archival studies and theories, makes important discoveries, and by immersing himself in the "scenario" of many texts comes to fresh insights about writers, works well known and newly discovered, as well as their notes, drafts, letters, lives, writing practices, politics, and aesthetics. Stephanie Browner, Eugene Lang College-The New School, Textual Cultures

Cloutier offers an encouraging look at how modern archival and scholarly practice can do justice to literary history at large through what he calls an "archival sensibility." The Columbia Review

[This] monograph promises a historically and theoretically grounded account of the archival practices that informed the writings of McKay, Ellison, Richard Wright, and Ann Petry. . . Generally, Cloutier's book is highly recommended to anybody interested in African American literature of the mid-twentieth century. More specifically, any future history or theory of the archive in African American letters will have to grapple with Shadow Archives. Stephan Kuhl, Goethe University Frankfurt, African American Review

With Jean-Christophe Cloutier's scholarship in hand today, we are now better informed and poised to protect the integrity of African American archives for tomorrow. New England Quarterly

In this fascinating book, Jean-Christophe Cloutier, an expert archivist and researcher, presents an original and compelling approach to the history of African American literature through what he terms "archival sensibility." Grounded in Cloutier's astute and nuanced discussion of the troubled history of black literary collections, Shadow Archives reads a variety of African American novels as alternative repositories for the black experience. This thought-provoking book provides an important new lens to view the works of Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Ann Petry; Shadow Archives is a welcome addition to literary criticism. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University

Shadow Archives is a page-turner in which Cloutier follows a trail of mistakes, misplaced manuscripts, and missed opportunities that came to define much of twentieth-century African American cultural production. With scholarly ease and writerly grace, he has produced a new and essential story of how our most famous black writers-Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison-actively negotiated their relationship to the past. For them, archives were never dead, but sites of political necessity, historic urgency, and, as Cloutier compellingly shows, a space through which they could reinvent themselves and American culture writ large. Salamishah Tillet, author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination

No novel in hiding is safe from Jean-Christophe Cloutier. He is-hands and laptops down-one of the very best literary detectives and literary historians of his talented generation. In Shadow Archives, he offers a genuinely fresh look at twentieth-century African American writing focused on the rise of black special collections and on the archival entanglements of a who's who of modern black novelists. It will be one of the best academic books of the year, a memorable contribution to African American studies and a fruitful redirection of the archival turn in American literary scholarship. William J. Maxwell, Washington University in St. Louis

As much a tour de force of archival sleuthing as an indispensable theoretical recalibration, Shadow Archives demonstrates that mid-twentieth-century black literature was indelibly molded by the "archival sensibility" of black writers. Tracking the peculiar fate and promise of African American literary papers in the midst of the boom in special collections libraries, Cloutier's book is literary history in the guise of a boomerang-an exhilarating reminder of the "belated timeliness" and lurking potential of even the neglected and the obsolete. Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: "Not Like an Arrow, but a Boomerang," or The Lifecycles of Twentieth-Century African American Literary Papers
1. Black Special Collections and the Midcentury Rise of the Institutional Collector
2. Claude McKay's Archival Rebirth: Provenance and Politics in Amiable with Big Teeth
3. "At Once Both Document and Symbol": Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and the Lafargue Clinic Photographic Archive
4. An Interlude Concerning the Vanishing Manuscripts of Ann Petry
5. "Too Obscure for Learned Classification": Comic Books, Counterculture, and Archival Invisibility in Invisible Man
Coda. Disappointed Bridges: A Note on the Discovery of Amiable with Big Teeth
Appendix: Artifact Biographies or Vagabond Itineraries of Key Documents Discussed in This Book
Notes
Permissions
Index

Short-listed, 2020 ASAP Book Prize, Association for the Arts of the Present

Winner, 2020 Waldo Gifford Leland Award, Society of American Archivists

Winner, 2019 MSA Prize for a First Book, Modernist Studies Association

Winner, 2020 Modern Language Association, Matei Calinescu Prize

About the Author

Jean-Christophe Cloutier is assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is coeditor of Claude McKay's Amiable with Big Teeth (2017) and editor of the original French writings of Jack Kerouac, La vie est d'hommage (2016).

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Shadow Archives | Columbia University Press

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Recasting the history of African American literature, Shadow Archives brings to life a slew of newly discovered texts-including Claude McKay's Amiable wi... | CUP

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Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019) by  Saidiya Hartman (full pdf)

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Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019) by  Saidiya Hartman (full pdf)

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David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City by Graham Russell Gao Hodges (full pdf)

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David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City by Graham Russell Gao Hodges (full pdf)

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The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War by Jonathan Daniel Wells (full pdf)

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The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War by Jonathan Daniel Wells (full pdf)

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Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (full pdf)

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Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (full pdf)

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Southern Horrors by Ida B. Wells (full text)

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Southern Horrors by Ida B. Wells (full text)

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Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases : Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 1862-1931 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

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Book from Project Gutenberg: Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases

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Queer History of the Village- Jay Toole, Social Justice Tours

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Queer History of the Village- Jay Toole, Social Justice Tours

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Social Justice Tours, Queer Histoy of the Village

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"Ask China", repeats the man who calls himself our President. It's a timeworn distraction tactic: Displace responsibility for your failures onto an "enemy-Other". There is nothing new, either, about his coded language: Viruses are a metaphor for so-called "foreigners", the body is a metaphor for the "nation", and our "body" is being invaded by "viruses". But what might be new, along with the comprehensive revelation of America's structural weaknesses, is the widespread realization that extreme xenophobia in America is not a thing of the past.

Our amnesia is subsiding. With the spread of the Coronavirus has come an emergent public interest in tracing the origins of xenophobia. But can we actually locate the origins of American xenophobia, the way we now locate the epicenters of mysterious diseases, and stay far, far away? The answer is not in tracing xenophobic tendencies to "other" parts of the country, but to look around and within. How have our own particular ancestral communities been impacted by, and/or implicated in, the xenophobia that spread alongside epidemics in the past?

The drive to trace the movement of incurable diseases with mysterious causes is a natural one. But when you decide to close off and protect your country, your state, your city, your tribe, your family, some issues that may have seemed settled, arise again: Who was "here first"? Who has a right to travel, and who has a right to remain? When Sioux tribes recently refused to take down their checkpoints in South Dakota, all this came up once more. When you decide to close your borders, whose borders are you really talking about, and where do you draw the line?

SJT walk leader Rebecca Manski offers you "Contagion: Xenophobia is a disease that spreads" as a kind of roadmap to that history, starting with Lower Manhattan. "​

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Walking tours of social justice issues in New York City

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During Jane's Walk NYC weekend, the simple act of exploring the city is enhanced with personal observations, local history, and civic engagement. Jane's Walk NYC encourages people to share stories about their neighborhoods, discover unseen aspects of their communities, and connect with visitors and neighbors alike.

Jane's Walk 2023 was held May 5, 6, and 7. You can view photos from the weekend on our Flickr page.

Questions for the Jane's Walk NYC team? Email janeswalknyc@mas.org.

Jane's Walk NYC is paid for in part by Swig Equities and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

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During Jane's Walk NYC weekend, the simple act of exploring the city is enhanced with personal observations, local history, and civic engagement. Jane's Walk NYC encourages people to share stories about their neighborhoods, discover unseen aspects of their communities, and connect with visitors and neighbors alike.

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COVID-19 HEALTH + SAFETY POLICIES

Ensuring the health and safety of our guests, staff, and the public is our top priority. Central Park Conservancy programs follow recommended guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, New York State, and New York City.

At this time, the Conservancy does not require visitors to wear masks during the tour. However, all participants should continue to monitor themselves for COVID-19 symptoms and stay home if they feel unwell.

Contact [email protected] if you need to request a raincheck for a future program due to illness or exposure to COVID-19.

Read about tour policies related to COVID-19, inclement weather, and more on our Frequently Asked Questions page.

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Before Central Park was built, the area from West 82nd to West 89th Street was home to Seneca Village , the largest community of African-American property owners in New York.

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Black Gotham Experience walking tours bring you into a reconstructed New Netherland and British New York. Participants witness the impact of the African Diaspora on the making of New York City and the birth of the United States of America through real people whose images have been erased. Insight and empathy allow emotional connections to these character-based stories that stay with you after the tour ends.

Walking tours are available as private and public experiences. Public tours are organized in Fall, Spring, and Summer seasons which include special events such as open studios, talks, and exhibitions.

Length: 1.5 hrs | Meet up at Washington Square Park under the Arch at 5th Avenue

The first of five in the core stories of the Black Gotham Experience starts in 1643 with the beginning of a small town known as Land of the Blacks right outside the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. By 1655, the Land of the Blacks was over twice the size of SoHo today and it continued to exist after the English take the island from the Dutch, making it the first free Black community in New York. This walking tour explains how this community started and how it continued to exist into the 18th century. Other Side of Wall Street concludes on the first day of British New York in September 1664.

Length: 1.5 hrs | Meet up at the BGX Studio on 192 Front Street in Manhattan

The second of five in the core stories of the Black Gotham Experience starts in 1664 in the small town known as Land of the Blacks on day two of British New York. Sarah's Fire is a tale set on the southern tip of the island Manhattan that is home to both free and enslaved Black people. This walking tour illustrates the peculiar universe of urban slavery in a port city with deep ties to the sugar plantations of the West Indies. A key persona in this story is an enslaved woman named Sarah who is one of 29 people that participate in the first militarized Black rebellion on the island of Manhattan on April 6 1712.

Length: 1.5 hrs | Meet up in front of Bowling Green Park in Lower Manhattan in front of the Museum of the American Indian

The third of five in the core stories of the Black Gotham Experience starts in 1712 in the wake of more slave codes passed in British New York. The port city of New York has shifting political and class divisions that shape the environment of the enslaved leading up to the 1730s. Although stricter laws have been passed to limit Black life, the population of enslaved Africans continues to increase as does poor European indentures creating a large and loosely organized underclass that seek change. The result is a rebellion in 1741 known as "the Great Negro Plot" which is documented in a New York Supreme Court. The extensive journal by one of the justices stitches together a plot that evolved around a charismatic enslaved Black figure named Caesar. This journal gives an insightful look into slavery, colonial law, class, and politics.

Length: 1.5 hrs | Meet up in front of The Apollo Theater in Harlem

Kuzaliwa brings you into the Harlem Renaissance. is a suite of creative works by the Black Gotham Experience that reflect upon the legacies of the Harlem Renaissance in the twenty-first century. Grounded by physical spaces in Harlem, connections within African diasporic culture emphasizes noting the relevance of Black creativity and political awakening on the island of Manhattan. We highlight Harlem as a space of flourishing Black culture and artistry unbounded by the narrow confines of historic eras. In naming this celebration "Kuzaliwa," a Swahili word meaning "birth," we also embrace Harlem as a place of encounter and imagination for thinkers and artists from across the African Diaspora.

C itizen Hope Part (1765-1838)

Stay Tuned...

State of Mirrors (1838-1883)

Stay Tuned...

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Black Gotham Experience walking tours bring you into a reconstructed New Netherland and British New York. Participants witness the impact of the African Diaspora on the making of New York City and the birth of the United States of America through real people whose images have been erased. Insight and...

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StoryMaps Version of Slavery and Resistance Tour

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StoryMaps Version of Slavery and Resistance Tour

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SLAVERY & RESISTANCE IN NYC (1626-1865) Walking Tour by Mariame Kaba

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SLAVERY & RESISTANCE IN NYC (1626-1865) Walking Tour by Mariame Kaba

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Walking Tour created by Mariame Kaba

Digitized by Claire Goldberg, Anna Wu & Fatima Koli

The Atlantic Slave Trade was the largest forced migration in world history. Twelve million Africans were captured and enslaved in the Americas. More than 90 per day for 400 years. Over 40,000 ships brought enslaved Africans across the ocean. Though New York Passed an act to gradually abolish slavery in 1799 and manumitted the last enslaved people in 1827, it remained an intrinsic part of city life until after the civil war, as businesspeople continued to profit off of the products of the slave trade like sugar and molasses imported from the Caribbean.

By the turn of the eighteenth century, enslaved and free black New Yorkers had become sufficiently familiar with the laws to both openly break them and try using them to advance their own interests and causes. They waged constant struggles, individually and collectively, against the constraints of their lives. They founded some of the earliest African-American churches, schools, and publications in the country. Black New Yorkers also established and ran successful businesses, created Underground Railroad stations, assisted and defended runaways, and helped organize and run antislavery and abolitionist societies.

This site features a digitized walking tour exploring sites that were central to the lives of enslaved and free Black New Yorkers.
For additional background before beginning the tour, click here.
For an alternate version of the tour, click here.
For more about Mariame Kaba's work, click here.
To learn more about the Barnard Empirical Reasoning Center, click here.
If you have any feedback about the site, click here.

Below is an overview of the tour's path.

The sites are split into 3 sections. To begin, click sites 1-7 and then scroll.

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Walking Tour created by Mariame Kaba Digitized by Claire Goldberg, Anna Wu & Fatima Koli The Atlantic Slave Trade was the largest forced migration in world history. Twelve million Africans were captured and enslaved in the Americas. More than 90 per day for 400 years. Over 40,000 ships brought enslaved Africans across the ocean.

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Radical Black Women of Harlem Tour Guide by Mariame Kaba

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Radical Black Women of Harlem Tour Guide by Mariame Kaba

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Research and Writing by Asha Futterman (BC '21) and Mariame Kaba
Map design by Arrianna Planey
Publication design by Neta Bomani
Download the Guide (PDF)
Harlem is both an idea and a place. What became known as the 'Black Mecca' began as a farming village inhabited first by the Lenape and then by the Dutch. The first Black people in Harlem, both freed and enslaved, worked on farms in the area known as Niew Haarlem. New Haarlem was formally established as a settlement by Peter Stuyvesant in 1658 and was named after the Dutch city of Haarlem. For generations, the sole connection between Niew Haarlem and Niew Amsterdam was a diagonal road built on an old Native path: a street we now call Broadway...

Learn more about this history and the extraordinary contributions of radical Black women who built community, fought for freedom, and imagined other futures, including Williana Jones Burroughs, Regina Anderson Andrews, Ella Baker, Claudia Jones, Lorraine Hansberry, Salaria Kee, Madame C.J. Walker, A'Lelia Walker, Victoria Earle Matthews, Zora Neale Hurston, Louise Thompson Patterson, Dorothy Height, Pauli Murray, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Billie Holiday, Audre Lorde, Madame Stephanie St. Clair, Marvel Cooke, Eslanda Goode Robeson, Una Mulzac, Grace Campbell, and Willie Mae Mallory.
Above, Asha Futterman leading the first Radical Black Women Walking Tour on April 7, 2019, with over 35 people in attendance, co-facilitated by Mariame Kaba.
The Radical Black Women of Harlem Walking Tour offers an important contribution to the effort to uplift Black women's intellectual, social and political work. We encourage community members, students, and educators to use this guidebook to organize tours in New York City, or as inspiration to design guidebooks in other neighborhoods and cities. Download the guide here.
Header image credit: Ola Ronke Akinmade
Photo credit: Matt Harvey Read Asha Futterman's reflections in "Because of Them, I Am Not Alone: Radical Black Women of Harlem."Read Mariame Kaba's reflections in "Genealogy of a Walking Tour."

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Radical Black Women of Harlem Walking Tour | Barnard Center for Research on Women

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The Radical Black Women of Harlem Walking Tour was researched by Asha Futterman with support from Mariame Kaba, with map design by Arrianna Planey, and publication design by Neta Bomani. This tour guide is designed for educational and organizing use by students, educators, and community members.

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Black Power to Black People: Branding the Black Panther Party (through Sept 10)

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Black Power to Black People: Branding the Black Panther Party (through Sept 10)

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During the 1960s, the civil rights of Black Americans were among the key issues addressed by demonstrators and protesters as they confronted many of the long-standing injustices that plagued the country. A number of Black-led organizations set out to redress systemic oppression, rallying the support of their communities through a variety of creative means. In particular, the Black Panther Party emerged as one of the most influential militant groups of the time. The posters in this exhibition chronicle how the Black Panther Party devised a specific graphic language to reaffirm Black humanity and decommodify Black life. Its heroic images of party members, widespread distribution of printed materials like The Black Panther newspaper, and political campaign posters allowed the Black Panther Party to control its own narrative and brand Black nationalism to advance a communal revolution.

As one of the largest groups to confront the plight of Black Americans, the Black Panther Party adopted Black nationalism as an ideology, practice, and identity to mobilize the community. Proponents of Black nationalism advocated for the economic and political self-sufficiency of Black people in order to achieve liberation from oppressive systems. A Black Power platform (a form of Black nationalism) guided the Black Panther Party as it branded a new movement that relied heavily on the use of bold language, striking graphics, and powerful photographs of its members wearing black-leather jackets and carrying exposed firearms. More specifically, the graphics and posters of the Black Panther Party became important to the dissemination of information; they effectively exposed the public to radical images that captured a shift in tone in the fight for civil rights. With an emphasis on militancy, the Black Panther Party successfully mobilized visual and written content in its posters and newspapers to further establish an authentic Black identity, responding to historic systems of exploitation and anti-Black violence.

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Black Power to Black People: Branding the Black Panther Party | Poster House

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During the 1960s, the civil rights of Black Americans were among the key issues addressed by demonstrators and protesters as they confronted many of the long-standing injustices that plagued the country. A number of Black-led organizations set out to redress systemic oppression, rallying the support of their communities through a variety of creative means.

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Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration - The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (Through December)

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Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration - The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (Through December)

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The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is the current destination for the acclaimed exhibition, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration curated by Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood. Marking Time explores the impact of the US prison system on contemporary visual art. This exhibition, presented across three galleries -Latimer, Exhibition Hall, and Media Gallery- highlights artists who are or have been incarcerated, alongside artists who have not been incarcerated but whose practices expose aspects of the carceral state. Seen together, their works reveal how punitive governance, predatory policing, surveillance, and mass imprisonment impact millions of people. Forty artists appear in Marking Time, including Cedar Annenkovna, American Artist, Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter aka Isis Tha Saviour, Sara Bennett, Kristina Bivona, Conor Broderick, Keith Calhoun & Chandra McCormick, Susan Lee-Chun, Daniel McCarthy Clifford, Tameca Cole, Larry Cook, Russell Craig, Halim Flowers, Henry Frank, Gwendolyn Garth, Maria Gaspar, Dean Gillispie, Ronnie Goodman, Gary Harrell, James "Yaya" Hough, Ashley Hunt, Jesse Krimes, William B. Livingston III, Mark Loughney, Ojore Lutalo, C.A. Massey, George Anthony Morton, Ndume Olatushani, Jesse Osmun, Jared Owens, Kenneth Reams, Rowan Renee, Gilberto Rivera, Billy Sell, James Sepesi, Sable Elyse Smith, Todd (Hyung-Rae) Tarselli, Jerome Washington, and Aimee Wissman.

Dr. Fleetwood references the Schomburg Center's collections in her companion book of the same name, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration. An important organization in the proliferation of prison art programs, whose organizational papers and letters are in the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books division, was the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), organized in the late 1960s by Benny Andrews and a host of artists active in the Black Arts Movement. Dr. Fleetwood writes, "the BECC's mission hinged on a belief in art as a tool of revolution and on an idea of healing that was generated by Attica prisoners in their manifesto."

Art made in prisons is crucial to contemporary culture, though it has been largely excluded from established art institutions and public discourse. Marking Time aims to shift aesthetic currents, offering new ways to envision art and to understand the reach of the carceral state on life today. The exhibition is curated by Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media at NYU, 2021 MacArthur Fellow, NYPL Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center Fellow and 2007 Schomburg Center Scholar in Residence with support by exhibition coordinator Steven G. Fullwood, Novella Ford, Associate Director of Public Programs and Exhibitions at the Schomburg, and the assistance of graduate researchers Eva Cilman and Xavier Hadley.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a dynamic series of public programs, performances and education initiatives organized with several community partners.

The exhibition debuted September 17, 2020, at MoMA PS1 and was organized by Fleetwood with assistant curators Amy Rosenblum-Martín, Jocelyn Miller, and Josephine Graf.
Press Release

Featured Artwork in Marking Time

Exhibition Tours

Free 45-minute tours of the Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration exhibition will take place on select Mondays at 11 AM, 12:30 PM, and 2 PM. The tour is limited to the first 15 people who sign up. Current tour dates are June 12, June 26, July 10, July 24, August 7, and August 21 . Additional dates will be added. Registration available here.

While you're here! Explore the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture-founded in 1925 and named a National Historic Landmark in 2017-is one of the world's leading cultural institutions devoted to the research, preservation, and exhibition of materials focused on African American, African Diaspora, and African experiences. Also, visit the Schomburg Shop or shop online at schomburgshop.com.

Free Talks & Programs

IN-GALLERY CONVERSATION WITH GEORGE ANTHONY MORTON
Tuesday, May 23, 2023 | 1 PM | Latimer Gallery
Join us for a conversation with artist George Anthony Morton. During his nine years in federal prison, Morton focused on portraiture by studying the "Old Masters" of pre-nineteenth-century Europe, using his research as a way to manage penal time and as a rebuke to his punitive sentence. While on parole, Morton was accepted to the Florence Academy of Art, which emphasizes classical European aesthetic traditions. His painting Mars (2016) is inspired by Portrait of Juan de Pareja (1650) by Diego Velázquez; Juan de Pareja was a notable painter who was enslaved by Velázquez and is the current subject of the exhibition Juan de Pareja: Afro-Hispanic Painter, on view at The Met featuring items from the Schomburg's collections. Come early to experience Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration in all three galleries and hear from Morton about his process and influences on his artwork.

EXHIBITION OPENING RECEPTION & PUBLIC PROGRAM
Monday, May 1, 2023 | 5 PM - 9 PM
Experience Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration in all three galleries and stay for a timely artist and curator talk and an immersive musical performance.

5:30 PM Book Signing with Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, author of "Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration." Books will be available for purchase from the Schomburg Shop.

7:00 PM Curator Introduction and Artist Talk featuring Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, artists Gwendolyn Garth, Ndume Olatushani, Gilberto Rivera, and Sable Elyse Smith moderated by Marking Time Exhibition Coordinator, Steven G. Fullwood

8:00 PM ECHOES | GESTURES | ABOLITION, live performance of "Second to Last" featuring composer, musician and scholar Kwami Coleman and percussionist Shakoor Hakeem

FROM THE ARCHIVE | Between the Lines: Marking Time by Nicole Fleetwood with Elizabeth Hinton
Monday, September 21, 2020
Revisit the September 2020 conversation between curator Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood and historian Dr. Elizabeth Hinton discussing Fleetwood's book, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration. The book is based on interviews with artists currently and formerly incarcerated, prison visits, and the author's own family experiences with the penal system. Presented in partnership with NYPL, The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

FROM THE ARCHIVE | Between the Lines: Chasing Me to My Grave by Winfred Rembert
Conversation with Patsy Rembert, Erin I. Kelly, and Nicole R. Fleetwood Tuesday, November 9, 2021
Winfred Rembert (1945-2021) was an artist from Cuthbert, Georgia. In 1970, while Rembert was in prison and doing forced labor near Turner County, GA, he met his future wife Patsy Rembert. It was Patsy who first convinced her husband to pursue art seriously, and to tell his life story visually, using the leather-tooling skills he had learned in prison. His paintings on carved and tooled leather have been exhibited at museums and galleries across the country, and compared to the work of Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Horace Pippin. Rembert was honored by the Equal Justice Initiative in 2015, awarded a United States Artists Barr Fellowship in 2016, and is the subject of two award-winning documentary films: All Me and Ashes to Ashes. Chasing Me to My Grave presents Rembert's breathtaking body of work alongside his story, as told to philosopher Erin I. Kelly.

Research the Schomburg Collections

Black Emergency Cultural Coalition Records, 1971-1984 | Sc MG 399

Black Emergency Cultural Coalition Inc. (BECC) was organized in January 1969 by a group of African American artists in response to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Harlem on My Mind exhibit, which omitted the contributions of African American painters and sculptors to the Harlem community. Members of this initial group that protested against the exhibit included several prominent African American artists, including Benny Andrews and Clifford R. Joseph, cofounders of the BECC. The primary goal of the group was to agitate for change in the major art museums in New York City for greater representation of African American artists and their work in these museums, and that an African American curatorial presence would be established. In 1971 the work of the Coalition grew to include the creation of an Arts Exchange program in correctional facilities. This program arose in response to major riots at the Attica correctional facility in New York. The BECC was stirred by the prisoner's demands for rights and justice. The first class in September 1971 was held at the Manhattan House of Detention. (Source: Finding Aid)

Black Voices From Prison | Sc 810.8-K

Black Voices from Prison is a collection of poetry by Etheridge Knight and other inmates of Indiana State Prison with an introduction by Roberto Giammanco. Etheridge Knight (April 19, 1931 - March 10, 1991) was a poet associated with the Black Arts Movement, who served an eight-year-long sentence after his arrest for robbery in 1960. His debut collection of poems was titled Poems from Prison and his follow up, Black Voices From Prison was originally published in Italy under the title: Voci negre dal carcere.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to MoMA PS1; American Friends Service Committee's Prison Watch Program; Center for Transformative Action, Cornell University; Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles; Independent Curators International (ICI); JTT, New York; Justice Arts Coalition; Malin Gallery, New York; Ohio Justice and Policy Center; Prisoner Express; William James Association; Women on the Rise!; and The Fleetwood Family.

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Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration

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Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration explores the impact of the US prison system on contemporary visual art. This exhibition highlights artists who are or have been incarcerated alongside artists who have not been incarcerated but whose practices interrogate the carceral state. Curated by Dr. Nicole R.

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Shana M. Griffin: ERASED//Geographies of Black Displacement @Fordham University’s Ildiko Butler Gallery (through October 30)

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Shana M. Griffin: ERASED//Geographies of Black Displacement @Fordham University’s Ildiko Butler Gallery (through October 30)

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The Fordham University Galleries
Ildiko Butler Gallery
June 19 - October 30, 2023
Fordham University at Lincoln Center map
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
New York, NY 10023
fordhamuniversitygalleries

The Visual Arts Program at Fordham University is pleased to present ERASED//Geographies of Black Displacement, an exhibition of over sixty works by organized by Associate Clinical Professor Casey Ruble.

Combining found objects, photographs, text, paintings, and ephemera, ERASED explores geographies of Black displacement, dislocation, containment, and disposability in land-use planning, housing policies, and urban development. It focuses on two locations: griffin's home state of Louisiana and New York City-specifically the area surrounding Fordham's Lincoln Center campus, which was a working-class Black and brown neighborhood known as San Juan Hill before Robert Moses spearheaded its razing in the 1950s in the name of "urban renewal."

Among San Juan Hill's many notable residents (including jazz legend Thelonious Monk) was Alice Dunbar-Nelson, a writer, teacher, feminist activist, and civil rights leader who was born in New Orleans in 1875 and lived in the San Juan Hill neighborhood in the late 1800s. It was there that Dunbar-Nelson met and began working with Victoria Earle Matthews, who founded "a Christian, non-sectarian Home for Colored Girls and Women" called the White Rose Mission. The mission offered food, education, and job placement to newly arrived Black women from the South and the West Indies. griffin's installation San Juan Hill, A Feminist Remembrance: Victoria Earle Matthews, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and the White Rose Mission (2023) pays homage to these extraordinary women by reimagining the parlor of the late-nineteenth-century mission.

Also on view are a selection from griffin's Cartographies of Violence (2020-present), which began as a series of black-and-white paintings incorporating maps of New Orleans and, for this show, was expanded to include maps of New York; SOIL (2021-present), which combines black-and-white photographs of Louisiana plantation sites with over a hundred jars filled with dirt, water, plant matter, debris, bricks, and minerals found at those sites to construct an unconventional monument of remembrance and create a counter-archival narrative of the carceral spaces where enslaved people worked, died, created families, disappeared, and witnessed loved ones born and sold into servitude (a portion of the jars are featured here); and three powerful sculptures comprised, respectively, of seventy-five pounds of handmade square iron nails and related metalwork from the 1800s displayed in a pile on a low platform, fifteen pounds of tools contained in a glass jar, and a heap of chunks of concrete and other building material that references the destruction of Black and brown communities like San Juan Hill.

Together with the other works in the show, these pieces examine the multiple ways displacement takes place, how it shapes Black life, and how sites of displacement become ones of everyday violence, subjectivity, resistance, and possibility.

ERASED was made possible by a Teaching Race Across the Curriculum (TRAC) grant offered by the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer at Fordham University. Associate Clinical Professor Casey Ruble organized the exhibition and was the lead author of the grant; it was coauthored by Professor Mark Street and Adjunct Professors Matthew Lopez-Jensen, Tochi Mgbenwelu, Oscar Oliver-Didier, and Adriana Warner.

As part of the production and curation of the exhibition, griffin made site visits to places in and around the Lincoln Center campus, met with community leaders, built relationships with members both within and outside the Fordham community, presented to classes, and collaborated with students in Ruble's Visual Justice course and Advanced Lecturer Diana Kamin's Photography, Identity, Power course. The students contributed research during the conceptualization phase of the project. Programming associated with the show and a closing reception will take place in the fall.

Many, many thanks go to Clinical Professor Abby Goldstein for her critical support in the production of the show, to Renee Royal and Velda Griffin for supporting griffin in delivering her artwork to Fordham University, to Allyson Spellacy for assisting with installation, and to Associate Clinical Professor Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock and Adjunct Professors Vincent Stracquadanio and Anibal Pella-Woo for their help. We are indebted to the many people who met with, collaborated with, or invited griffin to speak to their classes, or otherwise supported the production of the show, including Professor Mark Street; Adjunct Professors Matthew Lopez-Jensen and Adriana Warner; Advanced Lecturer Diana Kamin; Assistant Professor Catalina Alvarez; Julie Gafney, Kujegi Camara, Keisha Shay, and Surey Miranda-Alarcon at Fordham's Center for Community Engaged Learning; David Shuffler and Siddhartha Sanchez at the Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice; Margarita Curet, former President of the Amsterdam Houses Tenants Association; Rebecca Popp and Anna Troester at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, who co-created the Legacies of San Juan Hill web platform; and Dean Laura Auricchio, Chief Diversity Officer Rafael Zapata, and Professor Anne Fernald. A huge thank you to the students in Ruble's Visual Justice course-Aidan Auel, Emma Burden, Jessica Clouser, Alyssa Daughdrill, Basti Garbanzos, Mila Grgas, Joyce Kang, Jasiel Louison, Allison Moffitt, Zaharaa Matar-Mohamad, Madeline O'Brien, Kierstin Oliver, Saman Peyman, Alexandra Pupo, and Julian Sites Pistor-and in Kamin's Photography, Identity, Power course-Liza Arentsen, Pia Bello, Nico Boza, Max Callara, Alyssa Daughdrill, Karim Ghobrial, Kirsten Gottlieb, Gabrielle Gowans, Colleen Hathaway, Mariana Lopez Ramon, Colin Loughran, Gabriel Matsumoto, Ernesto Perez, Hailey Pryor, Vashma Ramdass, Keegan Roeder, Melody Ruiz, Trey Sullivan, and Sheridan Tyson. Finally, we are very grateful for everyone in Security and Facilities Management and in Custodial Services for their generous help in making the installation process a smooth one.

Shana M. griffin is a New Orleans-based Black feminist activist, independent researcher, sociologist, abolitionist, and artist. griffin's practice is interdisciplinary, research-based, and decolonial, centering the experiences of Black women most vulnerable to the violence of poverty, incarceration, polluted environments, reproductive regulation, economic exploitation,
housing discrimination, and climate change. Her work exists across the fields of sociology, geography, Black feminist thought, digital humanities, and land-use planning, and within movements challenging displacement, carcerality, reproductive control, climate impacts, and gender-based violence. She is a 2022 Andy Warhol Curatorial Research Fellow, 2022 New Orleans Center for the Gulf South Monroe Fellow, 2021 Creative Capital Awardee, and 2020-21 John O'Neal Cultural Arts Fellow.

Casey Ruble teaches courses in the Painting & Drawing and Art & Engagement areas of study in Fordham's Visual Arts Program. She is represented by Foley Gallery in New York and has received grants and fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, Warhol Foundation (through the arts residency Parse Nola), New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, New Jersey Council for the Humanities, and New Jersey Council on the Arts. Influenced by minimalist literature, documentary photography of the 1970s, and true-crime television, her multidisciplinary work focuses on history, memory, and place, often as they pertain to racial inequity. She is currently at work on an independent experimental documentary film set in New Orleans.

For more information on this exhibition, contact Casey Ruble at ruble@fordham.edu and Shana M. griffin through her website, .

For more information, please contact Vincent Stracquadanio .

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Shana M. griffin: ERASED//Geographies of Black Displacement

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The Fordham University Galleries Ildiko Butler Gallery June 19 - October 30, 2023 Fordham University at Lincoln Center map 113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue New York, NY 10023 fordhamuniversitygalleries The Visual Arts Program at Fordham University is pleased to present ERASED//Geographies of Black Displacement, an exhibition of over sixty works by organized by Associate Clinical Professor Casey Ruble.

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About The American Manifest

Tracing the flow of these northeastern waterways - the historically charged rivers and ports of New York City and Cincinnati's Ohio River, which are not often considered in relation to each other - artist Charles Gaines, in his first-ever public art installation, offers a multifaceted interrogation of the dual role of the northern states in both maintaining and abolishing slavery, and the enduring implications of the racialized systems, myths, and logics that underpin the nation's economic and legal foundations that persist today. Through large-scale sonic and sculptural works, the project grapples with the entangled systems of property, citizenship, displacement, and freedom that enables and furthers racial capitalism, a mechanism for enforcing white supremacy in the United States of America. Gaines's work for The American Manifest originates with the 1857 Dred and Harriet Scott historic Supreme Court decision, which decreed that people of African ancestry were not U.S. citizens and therefore could not sue for their right to freedom, and demands the viewer contend with the legacies and afterlives of chattel slavery, Manifest Destiny, and colonialism.

Sited within two key cities whose histories have shaped the identity of America, this project invites the public to consider New York and Cincinnati's waterways' in both upholding slavery and securing liberation, a duality that challenges reductive narratives of the history and legacy of slavery in America. Times Square, often called ​"the crossroads of the world," exists as a global emblem of capitalism, commerce, and media, with over 300,000 daily pedestrians. Five miles away, in the middle of the New York Harbor, Governors Island feels comparatively serene. The Island played an integral role in the city's economic and political history; it served as a Lenape fishing and hunting camp, an early colonial Dutch settlement, a home for the British ruling Governors and, later, a U.S. Military and Coast Guard base from the Revolutionary War until the late 1990s, before becoming publicly accessible in the mid-2000s. Halfway across the country, Cincinnati's John G. and Phyllis W. Smale Riverfront Park connects downtown Cincinnati to the Ohio River, which historically served as a demarcation point and transportation route between southern slave states and the free states in the north.

The project originated in Times Square with a performance-based installation, Manifestos 4: The Dred and Harriet Scott Decision, and sculptural installation, Roots. Continuing Gaines's Manifestos series, and specifically building upon his Manifestos 4 composition with the creation of a new vocal arrangement, this performance transforms the original text of the Supreme Court's 1857 Dred and Harriet Scott historic decision, which decreed that people of African ancestry were not U.S. citizens and therefore could not sue for their right to freedom. Featuring a woodwind quintet, piano and tenor, the 5‑part performance was staged on July 13 and July 14 in Times Square. Roots, on view from July 13 through September 23, 2022, consisted of a series of seven American Sweetgum trees, presented with the root systems upside down and painted to a surreal and dystopic effect. The trees, which were indigenous to the eastern United States and grew in Times Square, a forested area and beaver pond prior to colonization, are known for their impressive root systems that require vast open spaces to grow.

Opening in multiple locations throughout Cincinnati in 2024, The American Manifest will travel to the banks of the Ohio River in Cincinnati's John G. and Phyllis W. Smale Riverfront Park, accompanied by an additional site-specific commissioned work to deepen the geographic nuances of colonial expansion. The Ohio River has historically represented both a route to liberation, as the one-time gateway between slave and ​"free soil" states, as well as a historic route used to transport enslaved persons to the infamous port of New Orleans. The project's journey to this location from New York makes a final connection between the plantation logic of people as property, federally recognized in the case of Dred and Harriet Scott, and the era of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion, which established the American West landscape as the rightful property of the United States government.

Project Support

Charles Gaines: The American Manifest is made possible in New York and Cincinnati by the visionary support of the Ford Foundation, Lambent Foundation Fund, a fund of Tides Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, VIA Art Fund, FotoFocus, The Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Charina Endowment Fund, Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust, the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, Morgan Stanley, Wave Pool, and mediaThe Foundation, inc.

Major support is provided by Hauser & Wirth, Suzanne and Bob Cochran, Marie Douglas, Karl Iagnemma and Ann-Kristen Lund, Jacob and Deborah Kotzubei, Jon Neidich, Bob and Renee Parsons, Sanjeev Rathi, Eric Richter, Waddell Family Foundation, Jed Walentas, Christopher Walker, Margaret Wang, Debi and Steven Wisch, and additional anonymous donors.

We are also grateful for the support of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA); public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) in partnership with the City Council and Mayor Eric Adams; and the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

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The American Manifest: Moving Chains | Governors Island (en-US)

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Presented by Creative Time, Governors Island Arts, and Times Square Arts Open Hours Thursday & Friday: 12-5PMSaturday & Sunday: 10AM-5PM Closed Friday,

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NY At Its Core: Port City (1609-1898) exhibit

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NY At Its Core: Port City (1609-1898) exhibit

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Follow the story of the city from the time of Henry Hudson’s voyage of discovery to the establishment of the five boroughs of Greater New York.

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Looking Backward (1888) -  Edward Bellamy

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Looking Backward (1888) -  Edward Bellamy

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Looking Backward: 2000-1887 is a utopian novel by Edward Bellamy, a journalist and writer from Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts; it was first published in 1888.

It was the third largest bestseller of its time, after Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. It influenced many intellectuals, and appears by title in many socialist writings of the day. "It is one of the few books ever published that created almost immediately on its appearance a political mass movement".

In the United States alone, over 162 "Bellamy Clubs" sprang up to discuss and propagate the book's ideas. Owing to its commitment to the nationalization of private property and the desire to avoid use of the term "socialism", this political movement came to be known as Nationalism-not to be confused with the political concept of nationalism. The novel also inspired several utopian communities.

The decades of the 1870s and the 1880s were marked by economic and social turmoil, including the Long Depression of 1873-1879, a series of recessions during the 1880s, the rise of organized labor and strikes, and the 1886 Haymarket affair and its controversial aftermath. Moreover, American capitalism's tendency towards concentration into ever larger and less competitive forms- monopolies, oligopolies, and trusts -began to make itself evident, while emigration from Europe expanded the labor pool and caused wages to stagnate. The time was ripe for new ideas about economic development which might ameliorate the current social disorder.

Edward Bellamy (1850-1898), a relatively unknown New England-born novelist with a history of concern with social issues, began to conceive of writing an impactful work of visionary fiction shaping the outlines of a utopian future, in which production and society were ordered for the smooth production and distribution of commodities to a regimented labor force. In this he was not alone-between 1860 and 1887, no fewer than 11 such works of fiction were produced in the United States by various authors dealing fundamentally with the questions of economic and social organization.

Bellamy's book, gradually planned throughout the 1880s, was completed in 1887 and taken to Boston publisher Benjamin Ticknor, who published a first edition of the novel in January 1888. Initial sales of the book were modest and uninspiring, but the book did find a readership in the Boston area, including enthusiastic reviews by future Bellamyites Cyrus Field Willard of the Boston Globe and Sylvester Baxter of the Boston Herald.

Shortly after publication, Ticknor's publishing enterprise, Ticknor and Company, was purchased by the larger Boston publisher, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., and new publishing plates were created for the book. Certain "slight emendations" were made to the text by Bellamy for this second edition, released by Houghton Mifflin in September 1889.

In its second release, Bellamy's futuristic novel met with enormous popular success, with more than 400,000 copies sold in the United States alone by the time Bellamy's follow-up novel, Equality, was published in 1897. Sales topped 532,000 in the US by the middle of 1939. The book gained an extensive readership in Great Britain, as well, with more than 235,000 copies sold there between its first release in 1890 and 1935.

The first version of the novel published in China, heavily edited for the tastes of Chinese readers, was titled Huitou kan jilüe (回頭看記略). This text was later retitled Bainian Yi Jiao (百年一覺 ), or "A Sleep of 100 Years" and in 1891-1892 this version was serialized in Wanguo gongbao; the organization Guangxuehui (廣學會; Society for Promoting Education) published these pieces in a book format. This first translation, the first piece of science fiction from a Western country published in Qing dynasty China, was done in an abridged format by Timothy Richard. The novel was again serialized in China in 1898, in Zhongguo guanyin baihua bao (中國官音白話報); and in 1904, under the title Huitou kan (Looking Backward), within Xiuxiang xiaoshuo (繡像小說; Illustrated Fiction).

The book remains in print in multiple editions, with one publisher alone having reissued the title in a printing of 100,000 copies in 1945.

Bellamy's novel tells the story of a hero figure named Julian West, a young American, who towards the end of the 19th century, falls into a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep and wakes up 113 years later. He finds himself in the same location ( Boston, Massachusetts), but in a totally changed world: It is the year 2000, and while he was sleeping, the United States has been transformed into a socialist utopia. The remainder of the book outlines Bellamy's thoughts about improving the future. The major themes include problems associated with capitalism, a proposed socialist solution of a nationalization of all industry, and the use of an "industrial army" to organize production and distribution, as well as how to ensure free cultural production under such conditions.

The young man readily finds a guide, Doctor Leete, who shows him around and explains all the advances of this new age, including drastically reduced working hours for people performing menial jobs and almost instantaneous, internet-like delivery of goods. Everyone retires with full benefits at age 45, and may eat in any of the public kitchens (realized as factory-kitchens in the 1920s-30s in the USSR). The productive capacity of the United States is nationally owned, and the goods of society are equally distributed to its citizens. A considerable portion of the book is dialogue between Leete and West wherein West expresses his confusion about how the future society works and Leete explains the answers using various methods, such as metaphors or direct comparisons with 19th-century society.

Although Bellamy's novel did not discuss technology or the economy in detail, commentators frequently compare Looking Backward with actual economic and technological developments. For example, Julian West is taken to a store which (with its descriptions of cutting out the middleman to cut down on waste in a similar way to the consumers' cooperatives of his own day based on the Rochdale Principles of 1844) somewhat resembles a modern warehouse club like BJ's, Costco, or Sam's Club. He additionally introduces a concept of "credit" cards in chapters 9, 10, 11, 13, 25, and 26, but these actually function like modern debit cards. All citizens receive an equal amount of "credit". Those with more difficult, specialized, dangerous, or unpleasant jobs work fewer hours (in contrast to the real-world practice of paying them more for their efforts of, presumably, the same hours, or of those jobs being filled by members of the impoverished unable to find other forms of employment). Bellamy also predicts both sermons and music being available in the home through cable "telephone" (already demonstrated but commercialized only in 1890 as Théâtrophone in France).

Bellamy's ideas somewhat reflect classical Marxism. In chapter 19, for example, he has the new legal system explained. Most civil suits have ended in socialism, while crime has become a medical issue. The idea of atavism, then current, is employed to explain crimes not related to inequality (which Bellamy thinks will vanish with socialism). Remaining criminals are medically treated. One professional judge presides, appointing two colleagues to state the prosecution and defense cases. If all do not agree on the verdict, then it must be tried over. Chapters 15 and 16 have an explanation of how free, independent public art and news outlets could be provided in a more libertarian socialist system. In one case, Bellamy even writes, "the nation is the sole employer and capitalist".

Though Bellamy tended to stress the independence of his work, Looking Backward shares relationships and resemblances with several earlier works-most notably the anonymous The Great Romance (1881), John Macnie's The Diothas (1883), Laurence Gronlund's The Co-operative Commonwealth (1884), and August Bebel's Woman in the Past, Present, and Future (1886). For example, in The True Author of Looking Backward (1890) J. B. Shipley argued that Bellamy's novel was a repeat of Bebel's arguments, while literary critic R. L. Shurter went so far as to argue that " Looking Backward is actually a fictionalized version of The Co-operative Commonwealth and little more". However, Bellamy's book also bears resemblances to the early socialist theorists or 'utopian socialists' Etienne Cabet, Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, and Henri Saint-Simon, as well as to the 'Associationism' of Albert Brisbane, whom Bellamy had met in the 1870s.

On publication, Looking Backward was praised by both the American Federation of Labor and the Knights of Labor. Many members of the Knights read Looking Backward and also joined Bellamy's Nationalist clubs. Looking Backward was also praised by Daniel De Leon, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Upton Sinclair.

In 1897, Bellamy wrote a sequel, , dealing with women's rights, education, and many other issues. Bellamy wrote the sequel to elaborate and clarify many of the ideas merely touched upon in Looking Backward.

The success of Looking Backward provoked a spate of sequels, parodies, satires, dystopian, and 'anti-utopian' responses. A partial list of these follows.

Directly 'anti-Bellamy' responses:

Bachelder, J. A.D. 2050. Electrical Development at Atlantis (1891)

Harris, G. Inequality and Progress (1897) [which assumes Bellamy advocated an absolute equality of goods]

Michaelis, R.C. Looking Further Forward: An Answer to "Looking Backward" by Edward Bellamy (1890)

Morris, William, News from Nowhere (1890)

Roberts, J.W. Looking Within: The Misleading Tendencies of "Looking Backward" Made Manifest (1893)

Sanders, G.A. Reality: or Law and order vs. Anarchy and Socialism, A Reply to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and Equality (1898)

Satterlee, W.W. Looking Backward and What I Saw (1890)

Vinton, A.D. Looking Further Backward (1890)

West, J. [pseud.] My Afterdream (1900)

Wilbrant, C. Mr. East's Experiences in Mr. Bellamy's World (1891)

Direct and positive utopian responses / unofficial sequels:

Berwick, E. 'Farming in the Year 2000, A.D.', Overland Monthly (1890)

Bellamy, C.J. An Experiment in Marriage. A Romance (1889) [Bellamy's brother]

Chavannes, A. In Brighter Climes, or Life in Socioland (1895) by A. Chavannes

Chavannes, A. The Future Commonwealth (1892)

Claflin, S.F. Nationalism. Or a System of Organic Unity (189x)

'Crusoe, R.' Looking Upwards; or Nothing New (1892)

Emmens, S.H. The Sixteenth Amendment (1896)

Flower, B.O. Equality and Brotherhood (1897) [A positive response to Bellamy's Equality; see also 'The Latest Social Vision', Arena v. 18, pp. 517-34]

Flower, B.O. The New Time (1894)

Fuller, A.M. A.D. 2000 (1890)

Geissler, L.A. Looking Beyond (1891)

Giles, F.S. The Industrial Army (1896)

Gillette, K.C., The Human Drift (1894)

Griffin, C.S. Nationalism (1889)

Gronlund, L. Our Destiny. The Influence of Nationalism on Morals and Religion (1890) [first syndicated The Nationalist, (March-September 1890)]

Hayes, F.W. The Great Revolution of 1905: Or, The story of the Phalanx (1893)

Hertzka, T. Freeland, a Social Anticipation (1890)

Howard, E. To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898)

Howells, William Dean. A Traveler from Altruria (1894)

Howells, William Dean. Letters of an Altrurian Traveller (1904)

Howells, William Dean. Through the Eye of the Needle (1907)

McCowan, A. Philip Meyer's Scheme (1892)

Moffat, W. White, G., and White J., What's the World Coming To? (1893)

Porter, L.B. Speaking of Ellen (1890) [not a utopia]

Salisbury, H.B. 'The Birth of Freedom', The Nationalist (November 1890, Mar-Apr 1891)

Schindler, S. 'Dr. Leete's Letter to Julian West', The Nationalist (September 1890)

Schindler, S. Young West: A Sequel to Edward Bellamy's Celebrated Novel "Looking Backward" (1894)

Stone, C.H. One of Berrian's Novels (1890)

Worley, F.U. Three Thousand Dollars a Year (1890) [a gradualist utopia]

Hillman, H.W. Looking Forward (1906)

The result was a "battle of the books" that lasted through the rest of the 19th century and into the 20th. The back-and-forth nature of the debate is illustrated by the subtitle of Geissler's 1891 Looking Beyond, which is "A Sequel to 'Looking Backward' by Edward Bellamy and an Answer to 'Looking Forward' by Richard Michaelis".

The book was translated into Bulgarian in 1892. Bellamy personally approved a request by Bulgarian author Iliya Yovchev to make an "adapted translation" based on the realities of Bulgarian social order. The resulting work, titled The Present as Seen by Our Descendants And a Glimpse at the Progress of the Future ("Настоящето, разгледано от потомството ни и надничане в напредъка на бъдещето"), generally followed the same plot. The events in Yovchev's version take place in an environmentally friendly Sofia and describe the country's unique path of adapting to the new social order. It is considered by local critics to be the first Bulgarian utopian work.

The book also influenced activists in Britain. Scientist Alfred Russel Wallace credited Looking Backward for his conversion to socialism. Politician Alfred Salter cited Looking Backward as an influence on his political thought.

William Morris's 1890 utopia News from Nowhere was partly written in reaction to Bellamy's utopia, which Morris did not find congenial.

Beyond the purely literary sphere, Bellamy's descriptions of utopian urban planning had a practical influence on Ebenezer Howard's founding of the garden city movement in England, and on the design of the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles.

During the Great Strikes of 1877, Eugene V. Debs opposed the strikes and argued that there was no essential necessity for the conflict between capital and labor. Debs was influenced by Bellamy's book to turn to a more socialist direction. He soon helped to form the American Railway Union. With supporters from the Knights of Labor and from the immediate vicinity of Chicago, workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company went on strike in June 1894. This came to be known as the Pullman Strike.

The book had a specific and intense reception in Wilhelminian Germany including various parodies and sequels, from Eduard Loewenthal, Ernst Müller and Philipp Wasserburg, Konrad Wilbrandt and Richard Michaelis.

The Russian translation of Looking Backward was banned by the Tsarist Russian censors.

In the 1930s, there was a revival of interest in Looking Backward. Several groups were formed to promote the book's ideas. The largest was Edward Bellamy Association of New York; its honorary members included John Dewey, Heywood Broun and Roger N. Baldwin. Arthur Ernest Morgan, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, also admired the book and wrote the first biography of Bellamy.

Looking Backward influenced the novel Future of a New China by Liang Qichao.

Looking Backward was rewritten in 1974 by American socialist science fiction writer Mack Reynolds as Looking Backward from the Year 2000. Matthew Kapell, a historian and anthropologist, examined this re-writing in his essay, "Mack Reynolds' Avoidance of his own Eighteenth Brumaire: A Note of Caution for Would-Be Utopians".

In 1984, Herbert Knapp and Mary Knapp's Red, White and Blue Paradise: The American Canal Zone in Panama appeared. The book was in part a memoir of their careers teaching at fabled Balboa High School, but also a re-interpretation of the Canal Zone as a creature of turn-of-the-century Progressivism, a workers' paradise. The Knapps used Bellamy's Looking Backward as their heuristic model for understanding Progressive ideology as it shaped the Canal Zone.

A one-act play, Bellamy's Musical Telephone, was written by Roger Lee Hall and premiered at Emerson College in Boston in 1988 on the centennial year of the novel's publication. It was released as a DVD titled, "The Musical Telephone."

The first 21st Century work based on Bellamy's novel was written in 2020 by American political scientist and utopian socialist William P. Stodden, titled The Practical Effects of Time Travel: A Memoir. The book, which differs significantly from the original, though follows a similar narrative arc, details a female protagonist's journey, via time machine, to a future where need has been eliminated via a strong Universal Basic Income and National Service Program, while cooperation has replaced competition. The book also discusses a strong influence of technology and robotics in freeing humans from grueling manual labor. The books focused heavily on moral and ethical theory and ethical socialism, rather than materialism, as the ideological foundation of the utopian society.

1. Edward Bellamy, ^ Looking Backward 2000-1887, with a Foreword by Erich Fromm, Signet, 1960. ISBN 0-451-52412-8

2. ^ Bellamy, Edward (2000). Looking backward: 2000-1887. Signet. p. Introduction. Walter James Miller confirms "more than 162 Bellamy Clubs".

3. Sylvia E. Bowman, The Year 2000: A Critical Biography of Edward Bellamy. New York: Bookman Associates, 1958; pp. 87-89.

4. Bowman, The Year 2000, p. 115.

5. Andolfatto, Lorenzo. "Productive distortions: On the translated imaginaries and misplaced identities of the late Qing utopian novel" (PDF version). Transtext(e)s Transcultures (跨文本跨文化), 10, 2015. doi:10.4000/transtexts.619.

6. Wang, David D. W. "Translating Modernity." In: Pollard, David E. (editor). Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China, 1840-1918. John Benjamins Publishing, 1998. ISBN 978-9027216281. Start: p. 303. CITED: p. 310.

7. ^ Robert E. Weir, Workers in America: A Historical Encyclopedia.Santa Barbara, Calif. : ABC-CLIO, 2013 ISBN 1598847198 (pp. 68-70).

8. This list was derived from G. Claeys ^ Late Victorian Utopias: A Prospective, (Pickering and Chatto, London, 2008), J. Pfaelzer, The Utopian Novel in America 1886-1896: The Politics of Form, (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 1984), K. Roemer, The Obsolete Necessity: America in Utopian Writings, 1888-1900, (Kent State University Press, Kent, 1976), K. Roemer, Utopian Audiences, How Readers Locate Nowhere, (University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 2003), C.J. Rooney, Dreams and Visions: a study of American utopias, 1865-1917 (1997), F. Shor, Utopianism and radicalism in a reforming America, 1888-1918, (Greenwood Press, Westport Connecticut, 1997), and especially L.T. Sargent British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985: An Annotated, Chronological Bibliography (Garland Publishing, New York, 1988).

9. ^ Ivaylo Runchev (1985). "The Beginning". Narodna Mladezh. Фактически налице е произведение, отличаващо се от оригинала дотолкова, че следва да се говори за нов роман, първия ни български утопичен роман. ("Basically this work differs from the original to such an extent, that we can consider it a new novel, the first Bulgarian Utopian novel.)

10. Paul T Phillips, ^ A Kingdom on Earth : Anglo-American Social Christianity, 1880-1940. University Park, Pennsylvania : Pennsylvania State University Press. 1996. ISBN 978-0271015804 (p. 194).

11. ^ Fenner Brockway, Bermondsey Story : The Life of Alfred Salter. London : George Allen & Unwin, 1949. (p. 6)

12. (Edward Bellamy, ^ Ein Rückblick aus dem Jahre 2000 auf das Jahr 1887, Translation Georg von Gizycki, editor Wolfgang Biesterfeld. Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart 1983 ISBN 3-15-002660-1 (Universal-Bibliothek 2660 [4]), Afterword of Biesterfeld, pp. 301f.)

13. Aaron D. Purcell, Arthur Morgan: A Progressive Vision for American Reform. University of Tennessee Press, 2014 ISBN 978-1621900580 (pp. 214-19)

14. ^ Wang, David D. W. "Translating Modernity." In: Pollard, David E. (editor). Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China, 1840-1918. John Benjamins Publishing, 1998. ISBN 978-9027216281. Start: p. 303. CITED: p. 309.

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887. Boston: Ticknor and Co., 1888. - First edition.

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1889. - Second edition.

Edward Bellamy, "How I Came to Write Looking Backward," The Nationalist (Boston), vol. 1, no. 1 (May 1889), pp. 1-4.

Wakren J. Samuels, "A Centenary Reconsideration of Bellamy's Looking Backward," The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 43(2):129-48.

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Looking Backward: 2000-1887 is a utopian novel by Edward Bellamy, a journalist and writer from Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts; it was first published in 1888. It was the third largest bestseller of its time, after Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ .

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The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute

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In Atlanta to serve as associate pastor of Ebenezer after completing his first year at Boston University, King corresponded with Coretta Scott, whom he began dating during the spring of 1952. This letter from King refers to a possible trip by Scott to Atlanta to meet his parents, a trip she made during August. He also comments extensively on Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887, a book Scott had given King. King calls Bellamy a "social prophet" and a "social scientist" and offers reflections regarding the relative merits and shortcomings of capitalism, communism, and socialism, writing, "I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic."

Friday Morning

Dearest,

Fortunately, I am in a better mood today. your letter was sweet and refreshing to my heart, which had well-nigh grown cold toward you. Of course I have become convinced in the last few days that my love for you is based on such a solid foundation that the stormy winds of anger cannot blow it assunder. Love is such a dynamic force isn't it? It is the most inexplicable and yet the most beautiful force in life. O how joyous it is [ to?] be in it.

Darling I miss you so much. In fact, much to much for my own good. I never realized that you were such an intimate part of my life. My life without you is like a year without a spring time which comes to give illumination and heat to the atmosphere which has been saturated by the dark cold breeze of winter. Can you imagine the frustration that a King without a throne would face? Such would be my frustration if I in my little kinghood could not reign at the throne of Coretta. O excuse my darling. I didn't mean to go off on such a poetical and romantic flight. But how else can we express the deep emotions of life other than in poetry. Isn't love to ineffable to be grasped by the cold calculating heads of intellect?

By the way (to turn to something more intellectual) I have just completed Bellamy's Looking Backward. It was both stimulating and facinating. There can be no doubt about it Bellamy had the insight of a social prophet as well as the fact finding mind of the social scientist. I welcomed the book because much of its content is in line with my basic ideas. I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic. And yet I am not so opposed to capitalism that I have failed to see its relative merits. It started out with a noble and high motive, viz, to block the trade monopolies of nobles, but like most human system it fail victim to the very thing it was revolting against. So today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. So I think Bellamy is right in seeing the gradual decline of capitalism.

I think you noticed that Bellamy emphasized that the [ change?] would be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. This, it seems to me, is the most sane and ethical way for social change to take place. This, it will be remembered, is one of the points at which socialism differs from communism, the former [ strikeout illegible] emphasizing evolution and the latter revolution. Communist would insist that the means justify the end. So if killing a thousand people will bring about a good end the act is ethically justifiable. It is at the point that I am radically opposed to communism. Destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends. The mean does not necessarily justify the end, for, I would insist that the end is pre existent in the mean.

Also I am quite bitterly opposed to the metaphysical structure of communism as well as Marxism. It is based on what is known as Dialectical Materialism. I, being an idealist, rather [ than?] [ remainder missing] materialists, would therefore reject Marx at this point.

There is [ one?] point however, that I have learned from reading Marx and books like Bellamys, and that is that religion [ can?] so easily become a tool of the middle class to keep the proletariant oppressed. To often has the church talked about a future good "over yonder" totally forgetting the present evil over here. As a theologian and one deeply convinced that the way of Christ is the only ultimate way to man's salvation, I will try to avoid making religion what Marx calls the "opiate of the people."

On the negative side of the picture Bellamy falls victim to the same error that most writers of Utopian societies fall victim to, viz., idealism not tempered with realism. In other words, such systems are impractical Bellamy with his over optimism fails to see that man is a sinner, and that he is give better economic and social conditions he will still be a sinner until he submits his life to the Grace of God. Ultimately our problem is [ a?] theological one. Man has revolted against God, and through his humanistic endeavors he has sought to solve his problem by himself only to find that he ha has ended up in disillusionment.

Again Bellamy fails to see [ strikeout illegible] that social systems dont die over night. I dont think he gave capitalism long enough time to die. It is probably true that capitalism is on its death bed, but social systems have a way of developing a long and powerful death bed breathing capacity. Remember it took feudalism more than 500 years to pass out from its death bed. Capitalism will be in America quite a few more years my dear.

Yet with his basic thesis I would concur. Our economic system is going through a radical change, and certainly this change is needed. I would certainly welcome the day to come when there will be a nationalization of industry. Let us continue to hope, work, and pray that in the future we will live to see a warless world, a better distribution of wealth, and a brotherhood that transcends race or color. This is the gospel that I will preach to the world. At this point I must thank you a million times for introducing me to such a stimulating book you are sweet and thoughtful indeed.

As to your visit to Atlanta, I would rather not go into a detail discussion over it because I see that it can break up a beautiful relationship. I see that you are much more influenced by other people than you are by me, as maybe you would rather spend your vacation with them since they have all the answers. Nevertheless [ I?] still extend to you the invitation and hope that you will come. It hurt me very much to know that you believe that I would invite you to Atlanta and then mistreat you, especialy as nice as Ive been to you in the past. Oh well I guess all of us have a little of the unappreciative attitude in us.

If you are coming let me know so that I can make the arrangements. If you dont desire to come also let me know soon and I assure you that [ I?] wont mention it to you any more. Of course if you dont come I will know that you have no confidence in me and I will proceed to think out our courtship in those lines I hope [ strikeout illegible] we wont have to break up about this trip.

Give my regards to [ Scottie?] and the other member of the gang. Be sweet and remember that daddy still loves you.

Eternaly yours

[ signed] "Martin"

P.S. Hope you can read my bad writing

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000-1887 (New York: Modern Library, 1951). Bellamy's novel, originally published in 1888, envisions Boston in the year 2000 as part of a world that had experienced a moral and material transformation. In this new society, capitalism has been replaced by a more socialist form of production and distribution, society has become classless, and individuals acknowledge their common bond and responsibllity for all members of society.

In a previous letter, King had reacted angrily when Scott implied she was against staying with the King family during a visit to Atlanta (King to Scott, 14 July 1952).

King later preached a sermon in which he elaborated on these thoughts (King, "Communism's Challenge to Christianity," 9 August 1953, pp. 146-150 in this volume).

Karl Marx, "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy Of Right: Introduction" (1844).

King may refer to Scott's sister Edythe Scott.

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In Atlanta to serve as associate pastor of Ebenezer after completing his first year at Boston University, King corresponded with Coretta Scott, whom he began dating during the spring of 1952. This letter from King refers to a possible trip by Scott to Atlanta to meet his parents, a trip she made during August.

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Queer History of the Village- Jay Toole, Social Justice Tours

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Queer History of the Village- Jay Toole, Social Justice Tours

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Social Justice Tours, Queer Histoy of the Village

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"Ask China", repeats the man who calls himself our President. It's a timeworn distraction tactic: Displace responsibility for your failures onto an "enemy-Other". There is nothing new, either, about his coded language: Viruses are a metaphor for so-called "foreigners", the body is a metaphor for the "nation", and our "body" is being invaded by "viruses". But what might be new, along with the comprehensive revelation of America's structural weaknesses, is the widespread realization that extreme xenophobia in America is not a thing of the past.

Our amnesia is subsiding. With the spread of the Coronavirus has come an emergent public interest in tracing the origins of xenophobia. But can we actually locate the origins of American xenophobia, the way we now locate the epicenters of mysterious diseases, and stay far, far away? The answer is not in tracing xenophobic tendencies to "other" parts of the country, but to look around and within. How have our own particular ancestral communities been impacted by, and/or implicated in, the xenophobia that spread alongside epidemics in the past?

The drive to trace the movement of incurable diseases with mysterious causes is a natural one. But when you decide to close off and protect your country, your state, your city, your tribe, your family, some issues that may have seemed settled, arise again: Who was "here first"? Who has a right to travel, and who has a right to remain? When Sioux tribes recently refused to take down their checkpoints in South Dakota, all this came up once more. When you decide to close your borders, whose borders are you really talking about, and where do you draw the line?

SJT walk leader Rebecca Manski offers you "Contagion: Xenophobia is a disease that spreads" as a kind of roadmap to that history, starting with Lower Manhattan. "​

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Walking tours of social justice issues in New York City

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What I learned at Liberation Summer Advocacy Camp

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What I learned at Liberation Summer Advocacy Camp

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This summer, more than a dozen high school students are taking part in Liberation Summer Advocacy Camp in New York City. The program is hosted annually by AFSC and our partner Echoes of Incarceration. Most of the students have been personally impacted by the U.S. immigration system or criminal legal system. During the program, participants learn about the injustices in these systems-and how they can use photography, filmmaking, and other artforms to advocate for change.
In this essay, Alexandra Held-Villasenor shares her experience participating in the camp.

My involvement in Liberation Summer Camp began in 2019, right before the start of my junior year of high school. My initial interest in the camp stemmed from my experience as the daughter of two immigrants. The opportunity to not only flex my creative muscles, but to build the skills and knowledge required of effective advocacy, was one that I jumped at. Liberation Summer served not only as an introduction to photographic and creative skills, but also as an avenue through which I have strengthened my passions and beliefs. My experience has even helped cement my interest in attending law school, and the selection of my undergraduate major - political and social thought. Three years later, my involvement in Liberation Summer Camp continues, this time as a rising college junior at the University of Virginia.

In a fast-paced world of communication, mastering media has become a crucial part of advocacy. The intersection of media in advocacy is thoroughly explored and incorporated through the structure of the camp, which is evenly split between 'media' and 'information.' The weekdays alternate between camera training and filming, and information workshops or guest speakers. From the very beginning, campers begin producing photographs and short films and skits that are prompted by the information they learn. By the end of the summer, every camper will have been part of a team and produced a short film on a topic of their choice.

Last summer, I helped produce (and even starred in!) an instructional short film titled "Know Your Rights." When considering what kind of film we wanted to make, the crew and I considered how we could convert a gameshow style into something powerful and instructional. Nearly everyone can enjoy a gameshow, whether as a participant or a viewer; shows like "Family Feud" and "Jeopardy" are known for their humorously compelling format and snappy one-liners. It was this thought that led us to consider a game show based on knowing your rights, specifically in the context of police encounters.

"Know Your Rights" is structured in a snappy and quick interview-style gameshow, where contestants are asked a set of questions designed to test their knowledge of civil rights in police encounters. The questions are simple and straight forward, with varying levels of difficulty. We threw in some softballs you might know from general pop culture, like "Do you have the right to remain silent if stopped and asked questions?" Others were more difficult, and even varied based on your location in the United States, like questions related to stop-and-frisk or filming of police encounters.

Contestants that answered incorrectly had to face a "wheel of doom," which featured punishments like a whipped cream pie to the face and dried crickets. Despite the element of humor, we emphasized that the reality of consequences of police encounters can be much more dire. The game show culminates in the awarding of a "grand prize," which is simply freedom. This ending is meant to showcase a more realistic consequence, parallel to what could happen in a real situation. In some cases, knowing your rights in police encounters could be the difference between life or death.

Our message resonated with a lot of people. And others helped us spread the word. Last summer, the film was screened every weekend at the Town Square Summer Starz Free Movie Nights in Greenpoint, a neighborhood of New York City. It was also recurrently screened in May, at the BRICS Concrete Stories Festival, where it was a finalist in the documentary film category. You can watch the video here.

I left that first summer with a new community comprised of my fellow participants and the Echoes and AFSC crew. The days we spent filled with corny icebreakers, jokes, UNO games at lunch, tough conversations, personal stories, learning, and creating left me with genuine connections and a strong network of support. It was a joy to watch that experience handed to a new set of campers last year, when I joined the camp as part of the Echoes of Incarceration team. It is with excitement that I return for my third year, ready to witness that once more. My hope is that this year's campers leave equipped with not just new knowledge and practical advocacy skills, but also a community that they can always lean on.

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What I learned at Liberation Summer Advocacy Camp

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This summer, more than a dozen high school students are taking part in Liberation Summer Advocacy Camp in New York City. The program is hosted annually by AFSC and our partner Echoes of Incarceration. Most of the students have been personally impacted by the U.S. immigration system or criminal legal system.

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Greenacre Reference Library & MAS Archives

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Greenacre Reference Library & MAS Archives

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Established in 1903, MAS's library is devoted to the complex ecology of cities, urban culture, and the natural and built environment.

About Greenacre Reference Library

The Greenacre Reference Library's collections contain more than 3,400 books and reports, catalogued at Library Thing, approximately 11,000 digital news clippings, and over 2,300 on-paper publications and ephemera produced by MAS over the course of its history. Located within MAS's offices at 488 Madison Avenue, Suite 1900, New York, NY, the library is free and open to the public by appointment during office hours Thursday and Friday. Wi-fi, a separate study room, and Individual research assistance are available.

To arrange a visit, please contact Erin Butler, ebutler@mas.org, 212-935-3960, x1274

About MAS Archives

MAS Archives organizes, preserves, and makes available the historical records of the Municipal Art Society of New York for the use of outside researchers and MAS staff. As the official repository of the organization, the Archives is the custodian of primary source materials and other records of enduring value that document MAS's manifold activities since its founding in 1893. These collections extend and deepen knowledge of the history of MAS and connect the organization's past to its ongoing efforts on behalf of New York City. Materials in the Archives include preservation and planning records, photographs, publications, audio-visual recordings, documentation of The Urban Center and Urban Center Books, MAS walking tours, and the "clippings files" (previously part of The Information Exchange at The Urban Center). The latter collection includes thousands of local, national, and international newspaper and magazine clippings, brochures, flyers, reports, and other articles dating back to 1891. A smaller collection of more recent born-digital articles can be read on-site at the library.

Sign up to stay informed.

Become a member to enjoy free tour tickets, event discounts, and access to members-only programs and content.
Learn about membership

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Greenacre Reference Library & MAS Archives

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About Greenacre Reference Library The Greenacre Reference Library's collections contain more than 3,400 books and reports, catalogued at Library Thing, approximately 11,000 digital news clippings, and over 2,300 on-paper publications and ephemera produced by MAS over the course of its history.

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"Tours as a Tool for Storytelling" by Genevieve Wagner of Jane's Walk NYC

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"Tours as a Tool for Storytelling" by Genevieve Wagner of Jane's Walk NYC

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Tours as a Tool for Storytelling_G.Wagner (1)

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"Living Legacies of Self-Determination in Los Sures, Williamsburg" Led by Daniela Castillo, El Puente

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"Living Legacies of Self-Determination in Los Sures, Williamsburg" Led by Daniela Castillo, El Puente

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Get your walking shoes on, activist hats ready, artistic smocks out and creative juices flowing with this walk led by El Puente, in collaboration with YOU! This in-person guided INTERACTIVE walk will take us through time to visit and embody the legacy of social justice wins led by community efforts in Los Sures/the Southside, Williamsburg, while simultaneously bringing us to contemporary grassroots work and how to join the movement! We'll look at murals bred from collective efforts, visit sites of Environmental [IN]justices and the ongoing activism around them, discuss citizen-science initiatives and engage in some ART-ivism in community & public spaces. In true ode to Jane Jacobs, we'll share a CALL TO ACTION around current efforts to mitigate the harms caused by the Moses-era highway and uplift community visions for the neighborhood.

The route will go near public spaces/playgrounds/parks lining the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, with some pathways being quite bumpy/broken sidewalks. There will be places to sit throughout the walk along our stops. Plenty of transit options in the area, including the G-L-JMZ trains, Williamsburg Buz Plaza, and CitiBikes.

RSVP is required and capacity is limited. Meeting location, ending location, and directions will be provided via email before walk date.

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Living Legacies of Collective Self-Determination in Los Sures, Williamsburg

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Get your walking shoes on, activist hats ready, artistic smocks out and creative juices flowing with this walk led by El Puente, in collaboration with YOU! This in-person guided INTERACTIVE walk will take us through time to visit and embody the legacy of social justice wins led by community efforts in Los Sures/the Southside, Williamsburg, while simultaneously bringing us to contemporary grassroots work and how to join the movement!

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The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography (2009) by Katharine Harmon

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The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography (2009) by Katharine Harmon

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Follow the latest in MAPS + ART on Facebook here

THE MAP AS ART
Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography
Katharine Harmon
​With essays by Gayle Clemans

Princeton Architectural Press, 2009
Hardcover / 256 pages / $45.00
Paperback / 256 pages / $29.95

​Artists' maps lead to unexpected destinations: places turned upside down or inside out, territories riddled with marks understood only by their maker, landscapes connected more to the interior mind than the exterior world. In an era of globalized politics, culture, and ecology, contemporary artists are drawn to maps to express their visions. Using paint, salt, souvenir tea towels, or their own bodies, map artists explore a world free of geographical constraints. The Map as Art is filled with 250 colorful works by well-known artists-Ed Ruscha, Julian Schnabel, Olafur Eliasson, William Kentridge, Vik Muniz-and many more less-familiar artists for whom maps are the inspiration for creating art.

A remarkable collection of 360 colorful, map-related visions of experimental cartography by well-known artists and design thinkers."
-Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

Arresting and utterly gift-worthy."
​-Francine Prose, Oprah's O Magazine

Artists have toyed with maps before-there's Salvador Dali's Surrealist 'Map of the World' and Jasper Johns' splotchy sendup of the Lower 48, for starters. But The Map as Art, a new coffee table curiosity by Katharine Harmon, shows how much traction the idea has with artists today.... Rand McNally seems a world away."
-The New York Times

Katharine Harmon knows this territory. As the author of our best-selling book You Are Here, she has inspired legions of new devotees of imaginative maps.... Together, the beautiful reproductions and telling commentary make this an essential volume for anyone open to exploring new paths."
-Photo Eye

Who hasn't pored over a map, totally absorbed, oblivious to the passage of time? If you're inclined to such daydreaming, The Map as Art will intrigue, delight and perplex you, as you browse through 160 contemporary artists' interpretations of mapping the world."
-PopMatters

The Map as Art richly surveys today's artistic landscape and its relation to the map. For anyone who's ever gotten lost in the pages of a AAA road map or daydreamed of faraway places while spinning a globe, here is ample opportunity for fascination. Over 250 pages of visually engaging, thought-provoking works are rife with relevance."
-Cool Hunting

In this, the era of blind follow-the-GPS-style navigation, what is the future of maps? The colorful, creative, and downright disorienting answer can be found in The Map as Art by Katharine Harmon. The cartographic coffee table book heads into the uncharted territory of 'imaginative maps,' 360 representations of places created by artists and designers.... Whether you're interested in how we envision political landscapes, represent neighborhoods, or visually manipulate directional information, you can get there from here."
-Liquid Treat

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The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography

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"Silence Prevails: East Village Community Gardens During the Pandemic" zine by Aki Onda

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"Silence Prevails: East Village Community Gardens During the Pandemic" zine by Aki Onda

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Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (2016) by Rebecca Solnit & Joshua Jelly-Schapiro 

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Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (2016) by Rebecca Solnit & Joshua Jelly-Schapiro 

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Winner of the 2017 Brendan Gill Prize from the Municipal Arts Society of New York”The maps themselves are things of beauty . . . A document of its time, of our time.” —Sadie Stein, New York Times “One is invited to fathom the many New Yorks hidden from history’s eye.” —Maria Popova, Brain PickingsNo…

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During Jane's Walk NYC weekend, the simple act of exploring the city is enhanced with personal observations, local history, and civic engagement. Jane's Walk NYC encourages people to share stories about their neighborhoods, discover unseen aspects of their communities, and connect with visitors and neighbors alike.

Jane's Walk 2023 was held May 5, 6, and 7. You can view photos from the weekend on our Flickr page.

Questions for the Jane's Walk NYC team? Email janeswalknyc@mas.org.

Jane's Walk NYC is paid for in part by Swig Equities and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

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During Jane's Walk NYC weekend, the simple act of exploring the city is enhanced with personal observations, local history, and civic engagement. Jane's Walk NYC encourages people to share stories about their neighborhoods, discover unseen aspects of their communities, and connect with visitors and neighbors alike.

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The Municipal Art Society of New York – Educating and inspiring New Yorkers to engage in the betterment of our city.

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Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019) by  Saidiya Hartman

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Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019) by  Saidiya Hartman

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Winner of the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism Winner of the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Winner of the 2020 Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography 'Exhilarating…A rich resurrection of a forgotten history.'

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The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison (2022) by Hugh Ryan

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The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison (2022) by Hugh Ryan

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The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison a book by Hugh Ryan

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This singular history of a prison, and the queer women and trans people held there, is a window into the policing of queerness and radical politics in the twentieth century. The Women’s House of Detention, a landmark that ushered in the modern era of women’s imprisonment, is now largely forgotten.…

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In the history of a shuttered lockup for queer women in New York City, a reminder that incarceration has always been a form of social control.

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Hugh Ryan on the Urgency of Prison Abolition

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Hugh Ryan on the Urgency of Prison Abolition

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On the first night of the Stonewall Uprising in June, 1969, there were actually two riots.

In the Women's House of Detention-the prison that hulked just 500 feet down Christopher Street from the bar-incarcerated people heard what was happening outside, and flocked to their small, barred windows. Chanting, "Gay rights, gay rights!" they set fire to their meagre belongings and tossed them at the crowds below-tiny missiles of freedom, like falling stars, blessing the resistance.

In the aftermath of that night, older activists called a community summit in Greenwich Village to channel the Uprising's new, rebellious energy into action. At the meeting, young people who had been present at Stonewall wanted to protest in support of Afeni Shakur and Joan Bird, the queer Black Panther leaders who were at that moment incarcerated in the House of D, along with hundreds of other queer women and trans-masculine people. The meeting organizers were horrified at the thought.

Those younger activists had cut their teeth on the Civil Rights movement, second-wave feminism, the Yippies, the hippies, the flag- and bra-burning of the 1960s, and their vision of freedom was profoundly intersectional (in our modern vernacular). As they stormed out of the community meeting, they claimed a new name, inspired by Vietnamese anti-colonial Communist organizing, and announced their intention to protest the prison in the coming weeks.

Thus, the Gay Liberation Front was born: one foot in the bar, the other in the prison; one mostly white and male and cis, the other largely Black and female and gender-expansive. You probably know something of the first half of that story. If you've never heard the second part, ask yourself why: Whose interests does it serve to tell half our story, to cut off half our root, to stand on one leg and hope it is strong enough to hold us?

Furthermore, how is it possible that 40 percent of people in women's prisons (and 40 percent of children in youth detention for girls) identify somewhere under the broad LBTQ umbrella, yet are rarely acknowledged in most mainstream conversations about LGBTQ life? Or that 1 in 6 trans people has been to prison (and that's 1 in 2 for Black trans people in America)? In fact, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, queer people "are overrepresented at every stage of criminal justice system ... they are arrested, incarcerated, and subjected to community supervision at significantly higher rates than straight and cisgender people ... And while incarcerated, LGBTQ individuals are subject to particularly inhumane conditions and treatment."
Let's tear down these monstrous warehouses of human misery and spend that money taking care of people instead.
That's true today, and it has been true for decades. In writing my recent book about the House of D, I saw generations of queer people who had been devalued, discarded, and destroyed by the very government that was supposed to care for them. When Ruth E. Collins, Superintendent of the Women's House of Detention, wrote in a 1941 annual report that most incarcerated women "would not have been in the hands of the law enforcing agencies, were [they] not, first of all, physically or mentally ill," she could easily have been writing about 1841, or 2021. Everyone seemed to know what was wrong, no one seemed willing or able to change it, and every year, the system gorged itself on more human lives.

Reeling with knowledge, I cast about for someone to make sense of what I was seeing, and of course she was already there, in the House of D: Angela Davis, who spent several months in the House of D in late 1970. Through her autobiography, I began to see prisons as they actually were and are: places in which to cage the people we refuse to care for and catch-basins for every other broken system, from housing, to health care, to education, to our frayed social safety net. Her writing introduced me to the modern abolition movement, where organizer-authors like Mariame Kaba, Andrea Ritchie, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore transformed my political imagination.

Many people end up in prison because, in some fundamental sense, they had no one to care for them, or if they did, those people lacked the resources to turn that care into action: they were poor, they had no family, they were sick or addicted or profoundly hurt, they had been battered by racism, capitalism, misogyny, and homo/transphobia. To the government, they weren't people to help, they were problems to solve as well as potential threats to those in power: white people, rich people, corporations, men.

How often had I felt that way-like something lesser, something wrong, something no one would ever care for? "It's the lonely life," a relative told me when I came out to her in the mid-1990s. In some ways, she wasn't wrong. My family didn't reject me, but if they had, what would I, at 16, have done? At 44, I have already buried so many friends taken by AIDS, or suicide, or drugs, or medical conditions that were never properly diagnosed because, Jesus, who can afford a doctor in America? Now, as I get older without children, who will take care of me?

A need for care connects so many other parts of the broad queer agenda. What is access to medically safe, socially supported gender transition services? Care. What does the AIDS crisis show our government's lack of? Care. What do queer immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers need? Care. Care. Care.

Because queerness is not a vertical identity-it is not often shared between parents and children-so long as our society sees care as something that should mainly come from the nuclear family, there will always be queer people in need of care. So many kinds of care are expected to come from the family: tuition assistance, childcare, elder housing, emergency rental assistance, advice, emotional support, the list is endless. But as Andrew Solomon wrote in his fascinating book, Far from the Tree, "Vertical identities are usually respected ... horizontal ones are often treated as flaws." All too often, the state assumes we should be protected by our families; all too often, queer people need to be protected from our families.

People in need of care end up in the foster system, on the streets, in shelters, in emergency rooms, in asylums, and all too often, in prison. Thus our government pays dearly for every person it refuses to care for, but first, it does its best to let them die. The dead are less expensive, and they can't fight back.

But we still can.

Let's tear down these monstrous warehouses of human misery and spend that money taking care of people instead. Let's acknowledge that our modern movement is rooted in abolition. Let us look up: Remember the prison down the street from the bar. Remember the cis women and trans men who risked everything to fight for our liberation. See them in the stars. Let their fiery missiles alight inside us a burning desire for liberation for all queer people.

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Hugh Ryan on the Urgency of Prison Abolition

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On the first night of the Stonewall Uprising in June, 1969, there were actually two riots. In the Women's House of Detention-the prison that hulked just 500 feet down Christopher Street from the bar-incarcerated people heard what was happening outside, and flocked to their small, barred windows. Chanting, "Gay rights, gay rights!"

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Eliza Webster’s Seneca Village and 19th-Century Black Life in NYC

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Eliza Webster’s Seneca Village and 19th-Century Black Life in NYC

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Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room (Ongoing exhibition at The Met)

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Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room (Ongoing exhibition at The Met)

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Seneca Village-a vibrant nineteenth-century community of predominantly Black landowners and tenants-flourished in an area just west of The Met, in what is now Central Park. By the 1850s, the village comprised some fifty homes, three churches, multiple cemeteries, a school, and many gardens. It represented both an escape from the crowded and dangerous confines of lower Manhattan and a site of opportunity, ownership, freedom, and prosperity. In 1857, to make way for the park, the city used eminent domain to seize Seneca Village land, displacing its residents and leaving only the barest traces of the community behind.

This project has roots in the homes of Seneca Village, of which only a fragmented history remains. Like other period rooms throughout the Museum, this installation is a fabrication of a domestic space that assembles furnishings to create an illusion of authenticity. Unlike these other spaces, this room rejects the notion of one historical period and embraces the African and African diasporic belief that the past, present, and future are interconnected and that informed speculation may uncover many possibilities. Powered by Afrofuturism-a transdisciplinary creative mode that centers Black imagination, excellence, and self-determination-this construction is only one proposition for what might have been, had Seneca Village been allowed to thrive into the present and beyond.

The title, Before Yesterday We Could Fly, is inspired by Virginia Hamilton's legendary retellings of the Flying African tale, which celebrates enslaved peoples' imagination, creative uses of flight, and the significance of spirituality and mysticism to Black communities in the midst of great uncertainty. Activated through vision, sound, and storytelling, and furnished with a kaleidoscope of works from The Met's collection-from Bamileke beadwork and 19th-century American ceramics to contemporary art and design that celebrates rich and diverse traditions-the room foregrounds generations of African diasporic creativity. Before Yesterday We Could Fly also celebrates a number of new acquisitions made specifically for the project and is animated by exciting commissions from Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Fabiola Jean-Louis, and Jenn Nkiru.

In keeping with the collaborative spirit of Afrofuturism, The Met's curatorial team worked with lead curator Hannah Beachler, who envisioned and designed this space with consulting curator Michelle Commander. Since 2019, the group has engaged numerous creative and intellectual partners to infuse the installation with additional ideas and perspectives. Here, at a vital intersection at the heart of the Museum, this project opens a space for yet more histories to be told that look toward a more resilient future.

#MetAfrofuturist

The exhibition is made possible by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation and the Director's Fund.

Additional support is provided by Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne and the Terra Foundation for American Art.

The Met's quarterly Bulletin program is supported in part by the Lila Acheson Wallace Fund for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, established by the cofounder of Reader's Digest.

This exhibition features ambient audio for the five-channel digital video installed in the Living Room and Television section.

For assistive listening, join our free WiFi network (MetMuseumFreeWiFi) and select the short URL below to connect to exhibition-specific content.

First-time users will need to select the short URL a second time after downloading the "Listen Everywhere" app.
metmuseum.org/AFPR-listen ing

Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room Bulletin

The Met's latest Bulletin features texts that honor the real, lived history of the Seneca Village residents and explores works by Black creators from the eighteenth century to the present day through the lens of Afrofuturism. The publication also includes an original graphic novella by author and illustrator John Jennings.

Read Now

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Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Seneca Village-a vibrant nineteenth-century community of predominantly Black landowners and tenants-flourished in an area just west of The Met, in what is now Central Park. By the 1850s, the village comprised some fifty homes, three churches, multiple cemeteries, a school, and many gardens.

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Before the construction of Central Park in 1858, the landscape along what is now the Park's perimeter from West 82nd to West 89th Street was the location of Seneca Village. This African-American enclave existed from 1825 to 1857, providing its residents an escape from unhealthy conditions and pervasive racism experienced in downtown Manhattan, as well as an opportunity to build a new community.

When the City acquired the land for Central Park through the process of eminent domain, the residents of Seneca Village were displaced and forgotten. In the 1990s, historians rediscovered the Village, leading to an ongoing project to uncover this extraordinary community.

In recent years, the Conservancy has undertaken a major effort to conduct new research on Seneca Village and also share its history within the physical landscape of the Park.

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Before the construction of Central Park in 1858, the landscape along what is now the Park's perimeter from West 82nd to West 89th Street was the location of Seneca Village. This African-American enclave existed from 1825 to 1857, providing its residents an escape from unhealthy conditions and pervasive racism experienced in downtown Manhattan, as well as an opportunity to build a new community.

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7/19/23 NYPL Visit- More Resources from Sarah

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Tutorials for technological tools supported at the Barnard Digital Humanities Center - tutorials/StoryMapJS.md at master · dhc-barnard/tutorials

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Mapbox (log in with student email address if you have one)

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Mapbox (log in with student email address if you have one)

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Mapbox | Maps, Navigation, Search, and Data

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APIs and SDKs for AI-powered maps, location search, turn-by-turn navigation, and geospatial data in mobile or web apps. Get started for free.

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Combining automated deployment, instant hosting & collaborative editing, Glitch gets you straight to coding so you can build full-stack web apps, fast

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Barnard Empirical Reasoning Center: YPHI

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Barnard Empirical Reasoning Center: YPHI

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Slavery & Resistance in NYC (1626-1865) Walking Tour by Mariame Kaba

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Slavery & Resistance in NYC (1626-1865) Walking Tour by Mariame Kaba

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Walking Tour created by Mariame Kaba

Digitized by Claire Goldberg, Anna Wu & Fatima Koli

The Atlantic Slave Trade was the largest forced migration in world history. Twelve million Africans were captured and enslaved in the Americas. More than 90 per day for 400 years. Over 40,000 ships brought enslaved Africans across the ocean. Though New York Passed an act to gradually abolish slavery in 1799 and manumitted the last enslaved people in 1827, it remained an intrinsic part of city life until after the civil war, as businesspeople continued to profit off of the products of the slave trade like sugar and molasses imported from the Caribbean.

By the turn of the eighteenth century, enslaved and free black New Yorkers had become sufficiently familiar with the laws to both openly break them and try using them to advance their own interests and causes. They waged constant struggles, individually and collectively, against the constraints of their lives. They founded some of the earliest African-American churches, schools, and publications in the country. Black New Yorkers also established and ran successful businesses, created Underground Railroad stations, assisted and defended runaways, and helped organize and run antislavery and abolitionist societies.

This site features a digitized walking tour exploring sites that were central to the lives of enslaved and free Black New Yorkers.
For additional background before beginning the tour, click here.
For an alternate version of the tour, click here.
For more about Mariame Kaba's work, click here.
To learn more about the Barnard Empirical Reasoning Center, click here.
If you have any feedback about the site, click here.

Below is an overview of the tour's path.

The sites are split into 3 sections. To begin, click sites 1-7 and then scroll.

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Walking Tour created by Mariame Kaba Digitized by Claire Goldberg, Anna Wu & Fatima Koli The Atlantic Slave Trade was the largest forced migration in world history. Twelve million Africans were captured and enslaved in the Americas. More than 90 per day for 400 years. Over 40,000 ships brought enslaved Africans across the ocean.

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Scenes of beauty, life, and love in the midst of unfreedom are the inspiration behind the artist Tourmaline 's Pleasure Gardening walking tour. Organized on the occasion of the 2021 celebration of Juneteenth, the holiday that marks the emancipation of enslaved Black people in the United States, this audio tour of Manhattan brings together real spaces where people dreamed up and then practiced versions of freedom during slavery and other forms of involuntary servitude.

From Salacia and her vision of a counter-monument on Rikers Island to her recent body of photographs, Tourmaline has been captivated by pleasure gardens. In her research, she discovered that in the early 19th century these gardens-sometimes referred to as pleasure grounds or public gardens-arose along the edges of lower Manhattan, established by Black folks as a place where they could gather. While no photographs exist of these gardens, we can imagine them as places where Black people could feel the lushness of the earth or indulge with one another at a time when slavery was still legal.

We invite you to explore these stories in Pleasure Gardening with Tourmaline, where you'll hear from the artist and others-including abolitionists, educators, historians, curators, and scholars-who not only cultivate their own pleasure gardens, but maintain those planted by our ancestors.

Through nine short audio stops accompanied by musician and mystic Laraaji's soundscape, this tour visits four sites across New York City. Wherever you are, you can follow along below as the stops are given more context and evocatively imagined through the illustrations of Ebony Flowers. You can also access a transcript of the tour here.

Introducing Pleasure Gardening with Tourmaline

Ebony Flowers. Map of Pleasure Gardening with Tourmaline walking tour. 2021

Boarding House for Black Sailors, 330 Pearl Street (Part 1)

Also known as the Colored Sailors' Home, the Boarding House for Black Sailors was founded in 1829 by Albro and Mary Lyons, prominent Black abolitionists who owned property throughout Manhattan and used their wealth to create opportunities for other Black people. The Boarding House-originally located on 20 Vandewater Street and intersecting with both Frankfort Street and Pearl Street-was destroyed in 1863. Its approximate location today is 330 Pearl Street.

Listen to Cynthia R. Copeland, public historian and president of the Institute for the Exploration of Seneca Village, discuss the connections between the Underground Railroad and the Boarding House for Black Sailors.

Boarding House for Black Sailors, 330 Pearl Street (Part 2)

In addition to functioning as a stop along the Underground Railroad and a place where freed Black people could find accommodation at a time of physical and financial exclusion, we might also imagine the Boarding House as a space where Black sailors came together to share laughs and secret glances, and perhaps even sunbathe, feeling the East River's breeze.

Hear from Tourmaline and her former college professor, Robin D. G. Kelley, as they consider some of the ways the Black sailors might have practiced freedom dreaming.

African Society for Mutual Relief, 42 Baxter Street (Part 1)

The African Society for Mutual Relief held its earliest meetings in a schoolhouse located on Rose Street. In 1820, 12 years after its founding, the Society moved to 42 Baxter Street (at that point named Orange Street), a transition aided by a gift of $1,800 from Juliette Noel Toussaint, who was married to one of the city's leading hairdressers in the early 19th century.

"You have to understand that [at that time] $1,800 was a lot of money for an association where members paid 25 cents a year to be members," says Mariame Kaba. "So it was a significant donation. She's a woman, a Black woman who very few people know the name of, but she was incredibly important to the mutual aid of Black New York."

Hear Mariame Kaba, founder of Project NIA, explore the history of the African Society for Mutual Relief.

African Society for Mutual Relief, 42 Baxter Street (Part 2)

The freedom dreams launched by the African Society for Mutual Relief continue to reverberate today, often in spite of-or, in the case of Marsha P. Johnson 's work, in resistance to-the systems of unfreedom that sit at Baxter Street.

Listen to Tourmaline as she reflects on the activism of Marsha P. Johnson at this site.

David Ruggles's Home, 36 Lispenard Street

Edmund V. Gillon. Church Street between Lispenard and Walker Streets. c. 1975. Edmund Vincent Gillon. Museum of the City of New York. 2013.3.1.824

By the time David Ruggles grew involved in New York's abolitionist movement, no Black person-free or otherwise-was safe in the city. On several occasions, emancipated Black residents were kidnapped and sold into slavery. It was in the middle of such persistent danger that Ruggles declared, "In our cause, mere words are nothing-action is everything."

No trace remains of David Ruggles's original home, which was located in the same spot as the brick building on the left-hand side of this photograph. Today the building houses a coffee shop, and only a plaque affixed toward the building's rear acknowledges this history and Ruggles's contributions.

Robin D. G. Kelley, reflecting on Ruggles and the freedom dreams he launched from his home, asks us to reflect on the stories and places that have been lost or forgotten: "What would New York City look like had there been more militant opposition, fighting to hold on to these spaces? How do you defend these spaces? Think about how many historic spaces were destroyed in New York, not yet by dramatic acts of violence, but by state policies of eminent domain, freeway construction, urban renewal-this sort of soft power that's been way more destructive."

Hear writer and activist Mariame Kaba describe the ways David Ruggles fought for the freedom of Black people within and beyond New York City.

Seneca Village, Central Park between West 82nd and West 89th Streets (Part 1)

At a time when New York City's Black residents were blocked from owning land, a Black community nevertheless arose. Spanning from 82nd to 89th streets, in what is now known as Central Park, Seneca Village was home to countless Black families. The community first began in 1825, after Andrew Williams, an African American man who lived downtown, purchased three lots of farmland.

"It does become somewhat of an integrated community," says Cynthia R. Copeland, an educator and public historian. "We did have female landowners in Seneca Village in the 19th century, which was just amazing. And to see people coming from different regions of the country-New Jersey and the Eastern seaboard, Maryland. We had somebody who supposedly came from out West. We had a member who was described as coming from Africa and somebody from Haiti. There's this mixed blend of families that is happening in the community."

Hear from Cynthia R. Copeland on how archaeological research has helped us reimagine Seneca Village.

Seneca Village, Central Park between West 82nd and West 89th Streets (Part 2)

Invoking eminent domain, the government's right to claim private property for public use, Seneca Village was razed to the ground as construction on Central Park began in 1857. Hundreds of people were displaced, and the effects of this forced movement remain difficult to uncover.

Still, the spirit of Seneca Village persists, taking new forms with each person who tends to this history. In Tourmaline's words: "As more and more people learn about the history of Seneca Village and the history of Central Park, people get to have their own relationships and make meaning from that place. This is really a story of our expansive desires, the history of them, and our now, using that [desire] as a launching pad to expand even more."

Listen to Tourmaline's reflections on the ways Seneca Village manifests today.

While no photos of Seneca Village have been confirmed, we know that early illustrations describing the community as a " squatter settlement" are far from accurate. We can begin to reimagine Seneca Village by looking at photographs of Central Park in the midst of construction in 1862, or right before construction began in 1858.

Yet perhaps the most meaningful representations of Seneca Village are those developed from the freedom dreams of artists and caretakers like Ebony Flowers, whose illustration shows us a vision of Seneca Village grounded not in empty space, but in people and community.

Credits
With special thanks to the guests who joined Tourmaline on her tour, including:
Cynthia R. Copeland, President, Institute for the Exploration of Seneca Village
Mariame Kaba, Director, Project NIA
Robin D. G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in US History, University of California, Los Angeles
Laraaji, musician and mystic
Some Additional Resources and Bibliography
Central Park Conservancy. Discover Seneca Village: Selected Research Topics and Resources. September 2020.

Central Park Conservancy. Seneca Village Site.

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Black New Yorkers: 1613-1865. The New York Public Library.

Marie Warsh. " Exploring Northern Central Park: A History Told Through Rocks and Hills." Urban Omnibus, 2015.

Asha Futterman and Mariame Kaba. Radical Black Women of Harlem Walking Tour. Barnard Center for Research on Women.

The Black Gotham Archive.

Columbia University. Seneca Village Project.

MoMA PS1. Homeroom: Black Trans Liberation: Memoriam and Deliverance.

MoMA Audio is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

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Pleasure Gardening with Tourmaline | Magazine | MoMA

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Scenes of beauty, life, and love in the midst of unfreedom are the inspiration behind the artist Tourmaline 's Pleasure Gardening walking tour. Organized on the occasion of the 2021 celebration of Juneteenth, the holiday that marks the emancipation of enslaved Black people in the United States, this audio tour of Manhattan brings together real spaces where people dreamed up and then practiced versions of freedom during slavery and other forms of involuntary servitude.

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Erica Buddington on Seneca Village, Draft Riots, Weeksville, and more

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Erica Buddington on Seneca Village, Draft Riots, Weeksville, and more

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All of NYC’s (honestly New York State) Black History is cumulative displacement. Every Black enclave’s destruction is followed by the birth of a new one. Repeat. 

A literal haunting.

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All of NYC’s (honestly New York State) Black History is cumulative displacement. Every Black enclave’s destruction is followed by the birth of a new one. Repeat. 

A literal haunting.

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All of NYC’s (honestly New York State) Black History is cumulative displacement. Every Black enclave’s destruction is followed by the birth of a new one. Repeat.

A literal haunting.
— Erica Buddington (@ericabuddington) March 14, 2022

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All of NYC’s (honestly New York State) Black History is cumulative displacement. Every Black enclave’s destruction is followed by the birth of a new one. Repeat. 

A literal haunting.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
All of NYC’s (honestly New York State) Black History is cumulative displacement. Every Black enclave’s destruction is followed by the birth of a new one. Repeat. 

A literal haunting.

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All of NYC’s (honestly New York State) Black History is cumulative displacement. Every Black enclave’s destruction is followed by the birth of a new one. Repeat. 

A literal haunting.

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Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy @NYPL Schwarzman

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Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy @NYPL Schwarzman

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The Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy collects publications documenting American history on the national, state, and local levels, including extensive holdings on New York City history. The Division has a renowned collection of family histories and other genealogical collections, with a particular focus on the New York region. Included in the collections are published works from the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society library, photographs, vertical files, postcards, and other visual ephemera.

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Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy collects publications documenting American history on the national, state, and local levels, including extensive holdings on New York City history. The Division has a renowned collection of family histories and other genealogical collections, with a particular focus on the New York region.

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Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division @NYPL Schwarzman

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Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division @NYPL Schwarzman

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Digital Collections - Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division

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Manuscripts & Archives Division @NYPL Schwarzman Building 

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Manuscripts & Archives Division @NYPL Schwarzman Building 

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The Division holds over 29,000 linear feet of manuscripts and archives in over 5,500 collections. The strengths of the Division are the papers and records of individuals, families, and organizations, primarily from the New York region. These collections support research in the political, economic, s…

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General Research Division @ NYPL Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

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General Research Division @ NYPL Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

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Can researchers access the collection without an appointment?
The Library's historic Rose Main Reading Room is open for research and quiet study, and to access the Library's general collections.

Are research appointments required to access the collection onsite?
General collections are available to view without an appointment. However, we encourage patrons to request materials in advance of their visit to ensure availability.

Are virtual consultations available and are they required before making an onsite research appointment?
Virtual consultations are available for researchers who wish to discuss their research plans. Please book a virtual consultation with one of our librarians. You do not have to have a virtual consultation prior to your visit to the General Research Division.

What else do researchers need to know about accessing the collection?
Researchers looking to consult microfilm should request materials in advance of their visit and request access to a microfilm reader in the Rose Main Reading Room.

Can I bring my class to view collections or meet with a librarian?
The General Research Division hosts introductory sessions and subject-specific research classes. If your institution is interested in bringing a class to the Library, please use this form to provide us with details of your request.
Who can researchers contact with further questions?
Please email us at generalresearch@nypl.org.
Ask a Question

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Can researchers access the collection without an appointment? The Library's historic Rose Main Reading Room is open for research and quiet study, and to access the Library's general collections. Are research appointments required to access the collection onsite? General collections are available to view without an appointment.

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Democracy Now- NYPD Surveillance Unveiled: City Claims to Lose Docs on 1960s Radicals, Then Finds 1 Million Records

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Democracy Now- NYPD Surveillance Unveiled: City Claims to Lose Docs on 1960s Radicals, Then Finds 1 Million Records

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NYPD Surveillance Unveiled: City Claims to Lose Docs on 1960s Radicals, Then Finds 1 Million Records

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There has been a major break in the decade-long fight to unveil records related to the New York City Police Department’s surveillance of political organizations in the 1960s and 1970s. In recent years, the NYPD has come under fire for spying on Muslim communities and the Occupy Wall Street movement.…

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Wildly talented high school girls' soccer players descend into savage clans after their plane crashes in the remote northern wilderness. Twenty-five years later, they discover that what began in the wild is far from over.

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SHOWTIME Original Series & TV Shows | SHOWTIME

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Find out more about SHOWTIME Original Series, including Yellowjackets, Billions, Dexter: New Blood, The Chi and more.

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2003 * Rated R * 166 minutes

As waves of immigrants swell the population, corruption thrives in lower Manhattan's Five Points section. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Amsterdam Vallon, an Irish immigrant who returns to New York seeking revenge against Bill "The Butcher" (Oscar®-winner Daniel Day-Lewis), a rival gang leader who killed his father. But Amsterdam's personal vendetta becomes part of the gang warfare in director Martin Scorsese's sweeping historical epic.

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Gangs of New York on SHOWTIME - An immigrant seeks revenge against the gang leader who killed his father.

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Black Gotham Experience is an immersive visual storytelling project that celebrates the impact of the African Diaspora since 1625.

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The Shed produces and welcomes innovative art and ideas, across all forms of creativity.

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Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature (2019) by Jean-Christophe Cloutier

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Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature (2019) by Jean-Christophe Cloutier

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ISBN: 9780231193313

408 Pages

Format: Paperback

List Price: $35.00 £30.00

ISBN: 9780231193306

408 Pages

Format: Hardcover

List Price: $105.00 £88.00

ISBN: 9780231550246

408 Pages

Format: E-book

List Price: $34.99 £30.00

Recasting the history of African American literature, Shadow Archives brings to life a slew of newly discovered texts-including Claude McKay's Amiable with Big Teeth -to tell the stories of black special collections and their struggle for institutional recognition. Jean-Christophe Cloutier offers revelatory readings of major African American writers, including McKay, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison, and provides a nuanced view of how archival methodology, access, and the power dynamics of acquisitions shape literary history.

Shadow Archives argues that the notion of the archive is crucial to our understanding of postwar African American literary history. Cloutier combines his own experiences as a researcher and archivist with a theoretically rich account of the archive to offer a pioneering study of the importance of African American authors' archival practices and how these shaped their writing. Given the lack of institutions dedicated to the black experience, the novel became an alternative site of historical preservation, a means to ensure both individual legacy and group survival. Such archivism manifests in the work of these authors through evolving lifecycles where documents undergo repurposing, revision, insertion, falsification, transformation, and fictionalization, sometimes across decades. An innovative interdisciplinary consideration of literary papers, Shadow Archives proposes new ways for literary scholars to engage with the archive.

A very timely addition to the contemporary discussion of "the archives" among scholars of African American literature, culture, and history and in literary studies generally. Modern Philology

Jean-Christophe Cloutier's excellent Shadow Archives reminds us that scholarly archives, especially literary archives, are always a sort of interpretation. James Smethurst, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Modern Philology

Though the subject is narrow, this study succeeds at being both masterfully scholarly in tone and at the same time easily comprehensible. Valuable to those in the fields of library science, history, and African American literature, this rich volume should not be overlooked...Highly recommended. Choice

Most compelling is Cloutier's overarching purpose: to explore the deliberate, cautious, and sometimes frustrating ways Claude McKay and three roughly contemporary African American novelists-Ann Petry, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison-approached the archiving and preservation of their papers, and the degrees to which archival collections clarify and reconfigure their legacies. Steve Nathans-Kelly, New York Journal of Books

Shadow Archives is an impressive book.... Cloutier situates his work in the larger context of archival studies and theories, makes important discoveries, and by immersing himself in the "scenario" of many texts comes to fresh insights about writers, works well known and newly discovered, as well as their notes, drafts, letters, lives, writing practices, politics, and aesthetics. Stephanie Browner, Eugene Lang College-The New School, Textual Cultures

Cloutier offers an encouraging look at how modern archival and scholarly practice can do justice to literary history at large through what he calls an "archival sensibility." The Columbia Review

[This] monograph promises a historically and theoretically grounded account of the archival practices that informed the writings of McKay, Ellison, Richard Wright, and Ann Petry. . . Generally, Cloutier's book is highly recommended to anybody interested in African American literature of the mid-twentieth century. More specifically, any future history or theory of the archive in African American letters will have to grapple with Shadow Archives. Stephan Kuhl, Goethe University Frankfurt, African American Review

With Jean-Christophe Cloutier's scholarship in hand today, we are now better informed and poised to protect the integrity of African American archives for tomorrow. New England Quarterly

In this fascinating book, Jean-Christophe Cloutier, an expert archivist and researcher, presents an original and compelling approach to the history of African American literature through what he terms "archival sensibility." Grounded in Cloutier's astute and nuanced discussion of the troubled history of black literary collections, Shadow Archives reads a variety of African American novels as alternative repositories for the black experience. This thought-provoking book provides an important new lens to view the works of Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Ann Petry; Shadow Archives is a welcome addition to literary criticism. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University

Shadow Archives is a page-turner in which Cloutier follows a trail of mistakes, misplaced manuscripts, and missed opportunities that came to define much of twentieth-century African American cultural production. With scholarly ease and writerly grace, he has produced a new and essential story of how our most famous black writers-Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison-actively negotiated their relationship to the past. For them, archives were never dead, but sites of political necessity, historic urgency, and, as Cloutier compellingly shows, a space through which they could reinvent themselves and American culture writ large. Salamishah Tillet, author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination

No novel in hiding is safe from Jean-Christophe Cloutier. He is-hands and laptops down-one of the very best literary detectives and literary historians of his talented generation. In Shadow Archives, he offers a genuinely fresh look at twentieth-century African American writing focused on the rise of black special collections and on the archival entanglements of a who's who of modern black novelists. It will be one of the best academic books of the year, a memorable contribution to African American studies and a fruitful redirection of the archival turn in American literary scholarship. William J. Maxwell, Washington University in St. Louis

As much a tour de force of archival sleuthing as an indispensable theoretical recalibration, Shadow Archives demonstrates that mid-twentieth-century black literature was indelibly molded by the "archival sensibility" of black writers. Tracking the peculiar fate and promise of African American literary papers in the midst of the boom in special collections libraries, Cloutier's book is literary history in the guise of a boomerang-an exhilarating reminder of the "belated timeliness" and lurking potential of even the neglected and the obsolete. Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: "Not Like an Arrow, but a Boomerang," or The Lifecycles of Twentieth-Century African American Literary Papers
1. Black Special Collections and the Midcentury Rise of the Institutional Collector
2. Claude McKay's Archival Rebirth: Provenance and Politics in Amiable with Big Teeth
3. "At Once Both Document and Symbol": Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and the Lafargue Clinic Photographic Archive
4. An Interlude Concerning the Vanishing Manuscripts of Ann Petry
5. "Too Obscure for Learned Classification": Comic Books, Counterculture, and Archival Invisibility in Invisible Man
Coda. Disappointed Bridges: A Note on the Discovery of Amiable with Big Teeth
Appendix: Artifact Biographies or Vagabond Itineraries of Key Documents Discussed in This Book
Notes
Permissions
Index

Short-listed, 2020 ASAP Book Prize, Association for the Arts of the Present

Winner, 2020 Waldo Gifford Leland Award, Society of American Archivists

Winner, 2019 MSA Prize for a First Book, Modernist Studies Association

Winner, 2020 Modern Language Association, Matei Calinescu Prize

About the Author

Jean-Christophe Cloutier is assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is coeditor of Claude McKay's Amiable with Big Teeth (2017) and editor of the original French writings of Jack Kerouac, La vie est d'hommage (2016).

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Shadow Archives | Columbia University Press

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Recasting the history of African American literature, Shadow Archives brings to life a slew of newly discovered texts-including Claude McKay's Amiable wi... | CUP

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The Lesbian Herstory Archives exists to gather and preserve records of Lesbian lives and activities, providing access to materials relevant to their lives.

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The Bowery Boys: Case Files of the New York Police Department (1800-1915)

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The Bowery Boys: Case Files of the New York Police Department (1800-1915)

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Uniformly chic: Law enforcement officers of the New York Metropolitan Police from 1871 show off their fancy blue threads. Twenty years previous, they weren't even required to wear standardized apparel. (Courtesy NYPL Digital Library)

We're playing Good Cop / Bad Cop this week, as we take a close look at four events from the early history of the New York Police Department. You'll meet shining stars of the force like Jacob Hays, who kept the peace in the early 19th century armed with a mean billyclub - and the only man to ever hold the title of High Constable of New York. And then you'll encounter Joseph Petrosino, the Italian immigrant turned secret weapon in the early battles against organized crime.

Not all the early men in blue were so recommendable. During the Police Riot of 1857, cop turned against cop while the city burned and "Five Points criminals danced in the streets." And finally there's the lamentable tale of officer Charles Becker, the only member of the New York Police Department to be executed for criminal misdeed.

But did he really commit the crime - commissioning the murder of a nervous gambler who was prepared to rat him out?

#1 The Saga of High Constable Hays
Imagine encountering this face on a gaslit street at night! Jacob Hays watched over the streets of New York for over 40 years, one of the most dedicated men ever to watch over the city. Hays would become one of New York's best known - and most feared - men, thanks to his agility with a billy club and his early skills of detection and crime solving. ( NYPL)

This is the corner of Broadway and Grand Street in 1818. A wildly bustling street corner today, but quite a different story back in Hays' day. The constable roamed over a much smaller city - this was at the northern outskirts - and a far different range of crimes. By 1818, he would have only had about a couple dozen officers in his employ, all of whom reported directly to him. ( NYPL)

#2 The Police Riot of 1857
New York once had two different - and competing - police forces and boy they just did NOT get along. It all came to blows one June day in 1857, with state-sponsored Metropolitan police officers attacking the renegade men of the Municipal police force.

And it was because of Fernando Wood, the crafty mayor of New York in the 1850s who refused to comply to the state's authority over city law enforcement. Wood used the police for his own political advantage and hastened its descent into corruption.

#3 Petrosino!
The short Italian immigrant Joseph Petrosino, who become the NYPD's most potent tool against the growing forces of organized crime during the first years of the 20th century.

Petrosino was assassinated in Italy by the mob and his funeral procession through the city drew thousands of mourners. Today, you can visit the freshly refurbished Petrosino Square at Lafayette and Kenmare streets and see many artifacts relating to Petrosino at the New York City Police Museum.

Petrosino's funeral procession passed by the U.S. Custom House, April 9, 1909. ( LOC)

#4 Murder At The Metropole
Charles Becker and his wife beaming to the press, although I don't know what they're smiling about. Becker was convicted of authorizing the murder of down-and-out gambler Herman Rosenthal. The disgraced cop was eventually sent to the electric chair.

The prime witness against Becker was the otherworldly looking Bald Jack Rose, who claimed to have intimate details linking the officer to the vicious crime, which took place outside the Metropole Hotel in midtown.

Two of the gunmen in the Rosenthal murder, nicknamed Gyp The Blood and Lefty Louie, pictured here with the men who brought them in.

I wish the first three tales had full-length histories as good as Mike Dash's Satan's Circus, which recounts the excrusiating tale of Herman Rosenthal's murder and Becker's arrest. The Becker story is actually recounted in several books, including a fairly recent one by Rose Keefe called The Starker: Big Jack Zelig, the Becker-Rosenthal Case, and the Advent of the Jewish Gangster.
CORRECTION: In referring to the new components of the Metropolitan Police, I mention the 'city of Richmond' when I meant the 'county of Richmond' - aka Staten Island.

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Case Files of the New York Police Department 1800-1915 - The Bowery Boys: New York City History

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Uniformly chic: Law enforcement officers of the New York Metropolitan Police from 1871 show off their fancy blue threads. Twenty years previous, they weren't even required to wear standardized apparel. (Courtesy NYPL Digital Library) PODCAST We're playing Good Cop / Bad Cop this week, as we take a close look at four events from the ...

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5 Shocking Crimes From 19th Century NYC That'll Surprise You Today

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5 Shocking Crimes From 19th Century NYC That'll Surprise You Today

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5 Shocking Crimes From 19th Century NYC That'll Surprise You Today - Photo Gallery - Gothamist

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Gothamist is a non-profit local newsroom, powered by WNYC.

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David Walker’s Appeal Performed by Darryl “D.M.C.” McDaniels

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David Walker’s Appeal Performed by Darryl “D.M.C.” McDaniels

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David Walker’s Appeal Performed by Darryl “D.M.C.” McDaniels

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One of the most "dangerous" men in American history

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One of the most "dangerous" men in American history

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One of the most "dangerous" men in American history | In 1830, David Walker smuggled a pamphlet into Boston Harbor. The US government considered this pamphlet to be one of the most dangerous documents in... | By TED-Ed - Facebook

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In 1830, David Walker smuggled a pamphlet into Boston Harbor. The US government considered this pamphlet to be one of the most dangerous documents in...

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Archival Amnesty: In Search of Black American Transitional and Restorative Justice by Tonia Sutherland

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Archival Amnesty: In Search of Black American Transitional and Restorative Justice by Tonia Sutherland

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View of Archival Amnesty: In Search of Black American Transitional and Restorative Justice

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Return to Article Details Archival Amnesty: In Search of Black American Transitional and Restorative Justice

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Video of "Graveyards of Exclusion" lecture by Jarrett M. Drake

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Video of "Graveyards of Exclusion" lecture by Jarrett M. Drake

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Jarret Drake - Graveyards of Exclusion: Archives, Prisons, and the Bounds of Belonging

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‘Graveyards of Exclusion:’ Archives, Prisons, and the Bounds of Belonging by Jarrett M. Drake

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‘Graveyards of Exclusion:’ Archives, Prisons, and the Bounds of Belonging by Jarrett M. Drake

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"Illustration of Mary Jones (1838)." Mary Jones was a black transgender sex worker imprisoned in New York's notorious Sing Sing prison during the 1830's. May the following essay serve as dedication to her memory and to all sex workers who continue to be criminalized to this day. Image source: Digital Transgender Archive.

On February 9, 2019, I gave the keynote address at the annual Scholar and Feminist Conference organized by the esteemed Barnard Center for Research on Women. This year's conference theme was entitled, "The Politics and Ethics of the Archive." I am grateful to the organizers of the conference as well as those in attendance for my address, a lightly edited version of which begins below.

Before I get into the heart of my talk, I want to offer a preface that explains why exactly I will be discussing archives and prisons in the same breath. It's far from an obvious observation. The short answer is that over the last ten years, I have spent the greater part of my time in both of these spaces in different capacities. The first archive I ever worked at, the Beinecke Library at Yale, sits just a few blocks away from the New Haven Correctional Center, which is a Level 4 high-security jail that incarcerates people prior to trial or sentencing. During the summer of 2008, I would leave from tutoring at the jail and walk into work at the Beinecke. Fast forward four years later in 2012 and I'm a master's student in the archives program at the University of Michigan. I opt to write a master's thesis, because I like torturing myself apparently, and I select as my focus the ways that prisons keep records of people they send to solitary confinement. I'll never forget reading about the fundamentals of records management while at a casino hotel in Tupelo, Mississippi, before driving out the next morning to the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman to talk with prison administrators and guards about their process for packaging people into caged boxes and storing them away for definite or indefinite sentences.

Main entrance to the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, MS. Image source: Wikimedia Commons.

Fast forward four more years to 2016 and I'm a digital archivist at Princeton University by day, helping keep the modern history of a university that made its wealth in part from the labor of enslaved people. By night I was co-teaching English courses to college students who are legally enslaved at different prisons in New Jersey. Fast forward to the present: I'm training to be a social anthropologist, where I spend much of my time thinking and reading about archives and prisons. I mention all of this to say that, prior to my preparation for this talk, I never saw any connections between my experiences in archives and prisons. I arrived at one site, the archive, to labor and arrived at the other, to prison, to liberate. I separated in my mind the labor from the liberation, failing to realize that you can't spell the word liberation without the labor. The only things that seemed obvious to me about both archives and prisons were their racialized, gendered, and classed dynamics. The professional staff makeup of archives is disproportionately white and the largest share of the labor is done by women, whereas the composition of incarcerated people is disproportionately black and poor, while the people most disproportionately criminalized within that demographic are black women, which the historian Dr. Kali Gross (2015) meticulously tracks with her scholarship. These racialized, gendered, and classed dynamics of archives and prisons should be apparent, but what's less so is what I am about to describe. It's been two years since I've visited a prison or worked as an archivist, and this distance has given me room to read, reflect, and ruminate on the social functions these two sites serve. More than anything, I want everyone here to know that I am not pulling these ideas out of my ass and making them up, as men are wont to do in situations such as these. Rather, what you're about to hear comes from engaged experiences, sensitive scenes, and lived tensions. This is not the only or definitive way to look at the problem; it's just the way I do so and my hope is that it might open up for you some of the topics covered at this conference and, if I do my job right, maybe even a few topics that it didn't.

The boundaries of an archive exist equally in their fixity and fluidity. The rarity of archival records, so the logic goes, requires the organizations that manage them to erect and enforce borders capable of communicating to potential visitors that they have indeed entered a separate space. Weighty doors, swipe card readers, and security guards accomplish the aim appropriately. Yet, an archive also must maintain permeable perimeters in order to engender processes of knowledge creation and dissemination. An archive thus attracts potential researchers in part from its support of past researchers seeking to share findings from previous visits. In this way, archives teeter on a tension that simultaneously must keep certain items in and keep certain people out, all the while ensuring a secured but steady cycle of those who enter and those who exit.

The persistent but porous boundaries of archives mirrors that of another site similarly situated on the erection and enforcement of borders: prisons. Penal institutions, too, deploy procedures and practices to communicate to the incarcerated and those who visit them that they have also crossed into a wholly other world. Similarly weighty doors, identification card verification technologies, and correctional officers patrol the perimeters of prisons. They, unlike archives, commit people within their walls against their will but share a dependency on the circulation of souls beyond the bars and back again. That is, prisons in the United States have released millions more people than it incarcerates at any given point in time (Williams 2018). The cycle is precisely the point: a prison that fails to repeat the rhythm is indeed, as Foucault (1995, 266) claims, a failure.

Yet the emphasis by both archives and prisons on boundaries and (circulation of) bodies does not constitute their greatest affinity. Instead, this talk attempts to chronicle, compare, and contemplate how these two seemingly unrelated institutions in the United States converge and diverge on issues of kinship and citizenship. The recent turn in archival praxis towards these two social phenomena prompts a consideration of the ways in which the prison, by design of its social function, embodies their supreme severance. Both archives and prisons articulate expressions of state power, hence what follows carries significance for archivists, anti-prison activists, and the small but growing contingent of thinkers who labor as both, thereby envisioning their work as seminal in contesting 'graveyards of exclusion' in whichever form, forum, or manifestation they take shape.

The term archival praxis used in this talk refers to the range of practices and discourse among a variety of social and professional organizations that operate ostensibly to promote public access to archival records. Examples of these organizations include the historical societies and manuscript libraries organized as independent non-profit entities funded largely by individual monetary donations; as well as the governmental archival repositories and university special collections organized within a larger institution funded from a mixture of public and private sources. Other examples include the increasing number of initiatives intentionally established free from either of those constraints. The tens of thousands of groups in the United States encapsulated in the broad swath of the term 'archival praxis' might appear to suggest that a shared focus on preserving pieces of the past is all that coheres these social spaces into a recognizable whole. However, the historical and contemporary praxis of these organizations actually suggest that archives fulfill grander social functions: kinship and citizenship.

Kinship is, of course, a preoccupation of anthropologists and has been for decades. Rather than simply a substitute for the word family, kinship refers to the structural, systemic, and symbolic elements of the relationships shared among people who identify as kin, whether that be on the basis of blood, obligation, or a mixture of both (Fox 1967). The earliest social science studies of kinship emerged in the British mold of social anthropology, building out theories of kinship based upon the observations of so-called primitive societies (e.g., Evans-Pritchard 1940, Radcliff-Brown 1952, Fortes 1953), mostly those on the African continent who blended political and kinship structures in a way inconsistent with the state bureaucratic apparatus of Europe and the United States. The anthropological study of kinship has been critiqued from a number of scholars within and beyond the discipline, chief among them David Schneider. Schneider argued that the anthropological approach to kinship studies relied on an unstated assumption that 'blood is thicker than water.' He called this assumption part of the 'ethnoepistemology of European culture' (1984, 175) and concluded that anthropologists have to grapple with the implications of this tacit assumption, or else abandon the study of kinship altogether.

Schneider's argument can be extrapolated to archival praxis to make a compelling case that, in the US anyway, the field has likewise tacitly assumed that the family is a primary social entity around which to collect, arrange, and describe a set of archival records. To put it another way, archival praxis in the United States has a family fetish evident through three avenues. The first pertains to the emergence of archival institutions. The second relates to the reality of who currently constitutes a primary archival user base. The third is reflected in a set of technological instructions aimed at assisting that user base.

On the first point about the history of archival institutions, many historians, literary, and archival studies scholars point to the establishment of a national archives by France following the French Revolution as the dawn of modern archival administration. While certainly true to an extent, this declaration does not account for the fact that in the United States, a unified National Archives did not emerge until the 1930s. It would be inaccurate to claim that the way that the French marshalled memory to foment a national identity was mirrored in the United States. Rather, the earliest archival repositories in the United States were the private historical societies and manuscript libraries of New England and the mid-Atlantic regions of the nascent nation. Their primary purpose was not to assemble an archive for the new idea of America, nor was it to be accessible to everyone. Instead these institutions largely collected family papers of the wealthy merchants, enslavers, and politicians who mostly funded these operations. The early emphasis on documenting family history explains why the first public archives in the US emerge in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi following the end of Reconstruction in the South. Without a reliable source of public records, champions of the Lost Cause would have been unable to document their lineage to the Confederate soldiers to whom many Southern towns began erecting monuments and memorials at this same time. A public archive also allowed white Southerners to file claims for pensions owed to descendants of veterans as well as their ability to join groups such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (Galloway 2006). It would be these archival professionals from the South - mainly North Carolina - who initially led the US National Archives and ushered the field into its present professional form.

Recognition of the origins of archive-making in the United States helps highlight how the field of archival praxis would later develop, which brings me to the second point about the field's family fetish: its primary user base. Contrary to what many archivists like to admit, we do not - or, I did not - spend the majority of the day helping historians find the last missing link in the puzzle they were trying to solve and later publish for a prestigious university press. The most consistent and persistent user base of archival repositories have been genealogists (Freeman 1984). This holds true regardless of whether the archive is a public government agency or a division of a private university's library. For instance, while working at the Maryland State Archives, I answered countless reference inquiries from researchers trying to locate a death certificate for proof of an ancestor's birthplace, an especially important piece of information for black people whose births were not systematically recorded in Maryland and other parts of the country. Likewise, during my reference shifts at the university archives at Princeton, a sizeable number of phone calls and emails came from people following up on family legends that they had an ancestor who attended or graduated from Princeton at some point. To cope with the onslaught of calls, reference archivists kept a ready reference database designed with the information that would immediately confirm or deny these intergenerational tall tales. To reiterate, this is not to say that all types of archives rely on or have a substantial usage rate by genealogists. It is to say, however, that a sizeable share of them do.

Evidence to support that assertion brings me to the third way archives embody a fetish on family: through the deployment of Encoded Archival Context - Corporate bodies, Persons and Families (EAC-CPF). EAC-CPF is an international standard of rules for encoding information about the people - corporate bodies, corporal bodies, and families - who create archival records. Establishment of the creator of an archival collection is a first step in distinguishing one set of records from another. It is as significant in the landscape of archival praxis as any other organizing principle, for it determines the scope and content of the records that a researcher will encounter. Thus EAC-CPF as a standard aims to facilitate the creation of "authoritative" records about a corporation, person, or family so that a researcher at an archive in Massachusetts, for example, who is viewing a set of family papers there could easily notice a related set of family papers in Mississippi.

This is significant because EAC-CPF implicitly inscribes the family as a natural, stable, and consistent corporal entity. This assumption barely holds up for white people (Yanagisako 2002), and it certainly does not hold up for the black, indigenous, and Latinx peoples who have had to forge familial ties in particular forms as a way to cope with white supremacy, cisgender heteronormativity, forced migration, mass criminalization, and invading armies (Weston 1997).

Label from 12″ single of 'Love the Life You Live' by Danny Xtravaganza. Danny was a founding member of the House of Xtravaganza, one of the famed houses and families of the New York ballroom scene depicted in cultural works such as the TV show Pose, the novel The House of Impossible Beauties, and the documentary Paris Is Burning. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The elevation of the family in archival praxis as a co-equivalent of a person and a corporation merits more (re)consideration than it hitherto has received. The records of the McDonald's corporation or the papers of Ray Kroc cohere in a particular way that the Kroc Family Papers would not, for family is a messy and imprecise unit of observation. Many in this room, to be sure, are aware of and probably descendants of the many black babies bore from the rape of enslaved black women, neither of whom an archival authority record would recognize as belonging to the family of the enslaver and entitled to the rights therein.

The rights that accompany membership in a family suggest a secondary role of archives in the United States: the cultivation of a citizenry. Archives keep, among other sets of records, the constitutions, the declarations, and the sets of laws that govern a democratic society. The accessibility of the archive, so goes the argument, reflects the fact that citizens have the ability to contest their grievances on the bases of documents stored at the archives (Jimerson 2009). People have used archives to hold accountable states and governments that once authorized their abuse, detention, and other forms of violence (e.g., Roberts-Moore 2002 and Valderhaug 2011). It is within the archive that the subject becomes a citizen, fully aware of the benefits guaranteed in the legal system(s) designed for her enjoyment. The degree to which archival repositories in the United States succeed at this function is independent of the fact that the professional literature and professional organizations such as the Society of American Archivists repeat this rhetoric and purport archives as one of the linchpins of a democratic and thus legitimate state. Without them, it is argued, citizens are reduced to subjects and incapable of holding those in power to account for their actions and misdeeds.

In fact, when several other archivists - some of whom are here today - and I co-created an archive of police violence in Cleveland, Ohio, we soon devised the designation of "citizen archivist" to refer to the people who were responsible for the day-to-day operation and control of the project, in contrast to ourselves as the "advisory archivists" (Williams and Drake 2017). Presumably, other adjectives would have fit the bill; community, resident, or perhaps no othering at all would have sufficed. However, our selection of the modifier 'citizen' adheres to the growing expectation that archives in democratic states exist as a form of protection against a violent, tyrannical, and discriminatory state. The state's discrimination among those within its own polity explains the recent explosion of archives established explicitly to counter the hegemony of the rights-focused framework found in many mainstream archives (Caswell and Cifor 2016). One might read the ever-expanding literature and praxis of community archives as an articulation of the tension between the archive as a site that upholds citizenship and the archive as a site that usurps it (Hughes-Watkins 2018).

The significant takeaway is that the means of archival repositories - collecting and providing access to archival records - must not obscure the social ends of archival repositories. Surely, archives articulate other ends, such as holding collectively memory, a task shared with libraries and museums. But it has been my point to demonstrate the centrality of kinship and citizenship to archival praxis and in doing so highlight their contingencies and inconsistencies. Family members and citizens are not born, but instead must be made and remade (Ong 1996). Archives are a hidden terrain, then, in a much larger battleground of belonging.

In the US, the institution of the prison functions as a foil on this battlefield of belonging. By prison I refer not only to the carceral facilities named as such and administered by state and federal governments but also to the local and transnational sites of detention in which the majority of prisoners are actually held, often times before a trial and sometimes without formal charges. While there is no single unifying logic among these tens of thousands of sites, an overarching impact they all leave is the separation from one's family and the suspension of one's citizenship. Whereas archives instantiate and help to facilitate kinship and citizenship ties, the prison exists to ensure their erasure. A closer examination of the particulars of each will illustrate the point.

Prisons aim to prevent the cultivation of existing familial bonds while circumscribing the creation of new ones. In sum, prisons accomplish this by dramatically reducing the ability of families to remain in contact with incarcerated loved ones. Private companies such as Securus Technologies charge family and friends close to two dollars for twenty-minute phone or video calls. Such calls are even more essential amidst the contemporary landscape of prisons, in which a person might be arrested and convicted in one region of the country but end up incarcerated through a private prison operator in an entirely different one. Even for those persons who are not packaged and shipped offsite, their family members face the toll of traversing to the remote locations they are held, a story captured in the prologue to Ruth Wilson Gilmore's 2007 book Golden Gulag. Even if one is able to reach the prison to visit someone who's incarcerated, the unchecked power of the prison guard can so dehumanize and traumatize a visitor that they may never return. Angela Davis notes in her 2003 book Are Prisons Obsolete? the sexual violence that women prisoners endure via the strip search, yet the same violence is experienced by ostensibly 'free women' visiting loved ones in prison. Citing the need to screen for contraband, officers can force women to reveal their under garments or require Muslim women to remove their hijab for inspection. Often times, this violence occurs in the view of children they have brought with them as well as in sight of other families.

While the gendered violence of prison thus can be an effective mode of family separation, it can also slow the growth of new additions to families as well. For instance, public health scholars and historians are leading initiatives to chronicle the forced sterilization of thousands of people confined in California's psychiatric institutions (Stern et al 2017). The survivors of this eugenicist violence, which lasted for most of the twentieth century and without consent of the victims, were overwhelmingly female and disproportionately Chicana. After the eugenics law was repealed in 1979, hundreds more women prisoners in California were coerced into sterilization immediately after giving birth while still under heavy dosages of drugs to induce labor or alleviate pain.

Another widespread means of population control by the prison is the reduction of states that allow conjugal visits, which provide a safe and intimate space for a couple to have sex or simply spend private time alone outside the immediate view of others. Of the few remaining states that allow these visits, just one permits same-sex conjugal visits, which is another iteration of violence exacted particularly against gay and lesbian lovers. By enacting policies that prevent future family members from ever coming into existence, prisons thereby enact a legal if not unjust means of forced birth control. Whereas archives actively obsess over the preservation of genealogical and (some) bloodline connections, prisons function as a structural severance of those ties. Of course, families and their incarcerated loved ones persist and resist in creative ways, but the overall impact is clear: fewer and weaker familial bonds that are systematically eroded as well as barriers to birth fresh ties.

The assault on kinship by the prison is surpassed only by its attack on citizenship. By stripping incarcerated people of fundamental human and democratic rights, prisons strive to make non-humans out of humans and non-citizens out of citizens. The American studies scholar A. Naomi Paik (2016) classifies people held in U.S. prison camps as living with an indefinite "rightlessness" in which their basic rights as people to bring grievances and have them heard are nullified in the name of national security. Increasingly, this approach is commonplace in domestic jails and prisons as well. The poisoned water wells such as the current case in Massachusetts that has led to multiple deaths, the cruel conditions in South Carolina prisons that led to a riot, and the lack of heating at the federal prison in Brooklyn all typify the human and civil rights stripped of people held in US prisons. People who forget to shelter their pets during a weather catastrophe face more consequences than a prison administration that leaves behind incarcerated people amidst a hurricane or other extreme weather disaster.

The process of prisoner dehumanization preludes the revocation of rights afforded to citizens. Thus, people with prison sentences in forty-eight out of fifty states lose the right to vote during their incarceration and in some states lose it permanently. These voter suppression laws rode a wave of anti-prisoner legislation cosigned by both major political parties and included such activities as the inability to form political action committees and even the right to file a freedom of information request. That latter ability, to have access to the records created in the conduct of government business that is so enshrined in American archival praxis, is disallowed among many people doing time for a felony conviction.

While prisons enforce many other schemes of racist, sexist, and classist controls, it might be said that they additionally enforce a regime that seeks to break kinship ties and dissolve citizenship for people in prison. The mode of the prison's execution - long-term incarceration and the violence associated with it - works to serve these larger ends as well and, when placed alongside of archives, mark prisons as formative sites of un-belonging. Both sites constitute modalities of inclusion as well as exclusion, establishing who is and is not legitimate beings before the eyes of the state. Thus, the change of the Library of Congress subject heading from "illegal aliens" to "noncitizens" (Aguilera 2016), problematic in its own regard, reflects a more accurate summation of the penal logic. Much like family and citizens have to be made, so too must non-family and non-citizens.

With the case made that archives and prisons are at their essence about processes of belonging and un-belonging, how does that connect back to the conference theme of The Politics and Ethics of the Archive? The conference description poses it perfectly. It reads, in part:

How can archival material be put to use to draw attention to muted histories and otherwise invisible networks of affiliation and connection?

The short answer is to read, learn from, and cite black women's work (Inge 2018). The longer answer is to imagine, create, or join projects that intentionally dislodge, disrupt, and offer insurgencies against the technologies of un-belonging that prisons in particular engender. The creation, publication, and distribution of documentation that resists the dehumanization of our carceral culture constitute the crux of the archival matter. If, as I have argued, archives are writ large sites of belonging, it would follow then that they must be marshalled to dismantle the systems and sites based on exclusion from belonging. Two current archives - neither of which explicitly names itself as such - exemplify what this work looks like.

The first example is one I first learned of through Twitter roughly two years ago and have been following ever since. Launched by the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, A Living Chance is a project that gives voice to the muted histories that this conference seeks to reveal by interviewing, illustrating, and detailing the lives of women serving Life without Parole (LWOP) prison sentences in California prisons. The general public and even mainstream prison reformers ignore the stories of these women for multiple reasons. First, they are facing a death sentence, which an LWOP invariably leads to: it is death-by-incarceration. As opposed to death-by-execution cases, which can catapult certain issues to the forefront of our criminal punishment system, death-by-incarceration is less spectacular and more routine. Normally the people who die by this method are older. They are disproportionately black women. This means that the organizing energy required to struggle in solidarity with them is too much for politicians seeking to secure a soundbite. Second, these women were typically convicted of a violent crime which, again, many in the public and prison reformers are unwilling to face because to do so would acknowledge the conspiratorial confluence of sexist and racist violence that many women and gender-queer people face at the hands of intimate partners as well as police. Despite these realities, A Living Chance offers an intervention of how to infuse organizing campaigns with liberatory archival initiatives. In a space that reminds these women of their un-belonging, their project is evidence of the ways in which archivists, abolitionists, and those gravitating towards both can build what the historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez calls a 'rebel archive' in her 2017 book City of Inmates.

The project Testif-i | Storytelling for Change constitutes another such rebel archive. Again focusing on the impacts of incarceration on women as well as the families many lead, this archive elevates stories that are absent from the litany of programs, projects, and funding provided for boys and men escaping the tentacles of carcerality. Like A Living Chance, Testif-i also sprang from an existing abolitionist organizing group, A New Way of Life Reentry Project, that focuses on, among other issues, family reunification. The breakup of families, as described earlier, represents a core tenet of the American prison enterprise. Thus by identifying a targeted topic such as family reunification, the archive thus uplifts the stories of women from across a range of lifestyles, avoiding the seductive prison reformer trap of ranking who is most deserving of care and tenderness. Particularly rebellious about Testif-i is that it goes beyond providing stories of these women, which is a radical act on its own merit, and also contains information about voting rights and a recent legislative change in California that can aid women returning to the outside in accessing employment, housing and education. Testif-i is a testament for how to deploy archives in an effort to resist and rupture the processes of un-belonging that prisons perpetuate, producing what the sociologist Mimi Sheller (2012) might classify as 'citizenship from below.'

The short title of this essay is "graveyards of exclusion" and I want to close with proper attribution of its origins and consider what it means for us today. I first heard this phrase from Derrick Washington: a friend, brother, abolitionist, intellectual, reader, and organizer with the Emancipation Initiative, a grassroots effort to end life without parole (LWOP) in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In addition to his efforts with the Emancipation Initiative, Derrick also gives his time to the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign as an external advisor. He does all this work despite being held in captivity by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In November, Derrick delivered the keynote address to a campus-wide forum convened by the divestment campaign. In the original recording of his speech, he poignantly described prisons as "graveyards of exclusion." Unbeknownst to me, he removed that phrase out of the revised address that we played at Harvard.

However, the phrase resonated with me because it names the stakes so clearly and convincingly. At risk are social and soon physical deaths that pile up in graveyards. An archivist with whom I formerly worked once said that archives are a type of death management work. She advised that archival repositories represent the documentary final resting places of a person's lived experiences. Both she and Derrick are correct, in a sense. Archives manage lives after death, and prisons manage lives before death. The political and ethical end point of this claim should be obvious: if archivists care as much about families and citizenship as much as their websites, publications, and projects profess, then they would begin to see the prison as the ultimate rupture of those notions and envision their work as seminal in contesting these graveyards of exclusion. Nobody belongs in prison, and it is past time for archivists to press the boundaries of society to make this world possible. To do so commands an insurgent intentionality and an orientation to the work that, if practiced, brings us all to a more approximate version of freedom. That is the labor, and if we do it right, that is also the liberation.

A New Way of Life Reentry Project. "Testif-i | Storytelling for Change." Accessed February 12, 2019. http://testif-i.com/.

Aguilera, Jasmine. "Another Word for 'Illegal Alien' at the Library of Congress: Contentious." The New York Times, July 22, 2016, sec. U.S. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/23/us/another-word-for-illegal-alien-at-the-library-of-congress-contentious.html.

California Coalition for Women Prisoners. "A Living Chance." Accessed February 12, 2019. http://alivingchance.com/.

Caswell, Michelle, and Marika Cifor. "From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives." Archivaria, no. 81 (April 1, 2016): 23-43.

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Williams, Stacie M., and Jarrett M. Drake. "Power to the People: Documenting Police Violence in Cleveland." Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1, no. 2 (April 23, 2017). https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.33.

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'Graveyards of Exclusion:' Archives, Prisons, and the Bounds of Belonging

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On February 9, 2019, I gave the keynote address at the annual Scholar and Feminist Conference organized by the esteemed Barnard Center for Research on Women. This year's conference theme was...

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"Moving Toward a Reparative Archive: A Roadmap for a Holistic Approach to Disrupting Homogenous Histories in Academic Repositories and Creating Inclusive Spaces for Marginalized Voices" By Lael Hughes-Watkins

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"Moving Toward a Reparative Archive: A Roadmap for a Holistic Approach to Disrupting Homogenous Histories in Academic Repositories and Creating Inclusive Spaces for Marginalized Voices" By Lael Hughes-Watkins

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The Archives preserves and makes available New York City government's historical records. Explore our collections dating from 1645 to the present including documents, digital collections, still and moving images, ledgers and docket books, cartographic materials, blueprints, and audiovisual materials.

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The Archives preserves and makes available New York City government's historical records. Explore our collections dating from 1645 to the present including documents, digital collections, still and moving images, ledgers and docket books, cartographic materials, blueprints, and audiovisual materials.

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The New York Public Library (NYPL) has been an essential provider of free books, information, ideas, and education for all New Yorkers for more than 100 years.

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New York Police Department intelligence records (circa 1960 to 2015) Finding Aid @ NYC Municipal Archives  

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New York Police Department intelligence records (circa 1960 to 2015) Finding Aid @ NYC Municipal Archives  

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New York Police Department intelligence records circa 1960 to 2015

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This accession contains records relating to New York Police Department surveillance of social/political movements, organizations, and private citizens circa 1960-2015. Earlier records contain information on organizations such as Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN), Black Liberation Army (BLA), Jewish Defense League, Black Panther Party, Students for a Democratic Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and more.

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Edwards Pierrepont papers (1839-1910) Finding Aid @NYPL

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Edwards Pierrepont papers (1839-1910) Finding Aid @NYPL

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archives.nypl.org -- Edwards Pierrepont papers

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The Edwards Pierrepont papers represent a sample of Pierrepont’s work in New York and Ohio, both as a lawyer and as a judge, including case files and related correspondence. Also present is professional correspondence to and from notable lawyers, jurists, and statesmen; and a small quantity of finan…

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Finding Your Way Through Finding Aids: Archives 101

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Understanding the way a finding aid is structured is critical to understanding what is in a collection. Finding aids are arranged hierarchically, so there are multiple levels of content describing the various parts of an archival collection. You will find description of the collection as an entirety, and then description of the smaller groupings that make up that whole collection, which are often called series. These are groups of materials that might be of the same type of document or on a similar topic, and they may be comprised of smaller groupings, called subseries, which are similarly organized by type or topic. They may have been arranged this way by the creator of the collection or by an archivist as part of processing, in order to make the collection easier to user. The final level of material you may see described in a finding aid might be either files, small groupings of materials, or items, which are simply each individual item that is in the collection.

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Context and Content

Scope and Content Notes
There are a few parts of a finding aid that can provide a lot of information about a collection, its creator, and its contents. Perhaps the best place to start your reading of a finding aid is the Scope and Content Note, which will describe what is included in the collection. This note will include information about what types of documents you might find, their subjects and the people, places, and organizations described in the documents, as well as an understanding of the span of time of the materials in the collection. The scope and content note may also describe how the collection is organized, as it may mention the contents of each unique series, but it also might just be a general description of the contents of the collection.
Biographical/Historical Notes

Another note you will often see in finding aids is the Biographical or Historical Note. Collections with creators who are people or families will have biographical notes, while organizational records will have historical notes. This note is exactly what is sounds like it is: it includes information about the creator of the collection, their life; who they might have written to and what the topics they were interested might be; what they did professionally and recreationally; where they lived; and their life dates. Biographical notes might also outline relationships between the creator and family and friends, colleagues and mentors, and other people who were important in their lives. Historical notes for groups do the same kind of description of the organizations which created the records, with information about how they came together, their purpose and functions, mission, important events in their history, and people that have been a part of their history.
Subjects and Agents
In Harvard finding aids, you may see a list of names of people and groups, as well as topics, places, and types of materials. These are what we call "access points," as they are all terms you can search across Hollis or Hollis for Archival Discovery and locate other materials that also include information about these agents (people and groups) or subjects. Agent names and subject terms are devised from standardized lists provided by the Library of Congress, Name Authority Cooperative Program, and other institutions, and they have particular formats. Subjects in particular may appear to be strings of words almost in reverse order; this is how the Library of Congress organizes them. Once you get more accustomed to looking at them, this might feel easier, but it's important to know that these are terms you can use to search across the many archives at Harvard to potentially locate related materials. For example, if you search a single name in its authorized form in Hollis, as you will see in the agents and subjects listing, you will see a long list of all the collections that have that person included as an agent. That might offer a lot more resources than just the first finding aid you've found.

Subject terms can also be troubling, racist, and/or biased; the Library of Congress list of subject headings has many historical terms in use that are degrading, inappropriate, and inaccurate. We are actively working to adjust these terms and provide appropriate, accurate description of our materials, removing the historical terms and supplementing our records with terms from other organizations providing subject heading information, but you may still see those terms within our records.

Levels of Description

Collection

Series/Sub-Series

Folder

Item

Written by Betts Coup
Finding Your Way Through Finding Aids : Archives 101

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Finding Your Way Through Finding Aids: Reading a Finding Aid

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Archivists Love to OrganizeUnderstanding the way a finding aid is structured is critical to understanding what is in a collection. Finding aids are arranged hierarchically, so there are multiple levels of content describing the ...