New York Initiative: “We want to tell history right”

New York is teeming with street names that go back to slave owners and slave traders. An initiative in the metropolis draws attention to this. She wants to create awareness – but not erase the past.

A white and green sticker lands on the grimaces of a graffiti wall in Brooklyn. It shows a name in the form of a street sign. “The horror story here is an ideal place for it,” says Ada Reso. “Slavery was also a horror story.” And very few would know: “This is where it happened.”

The young woman takes another sticker out of her pocket and puts it on the wall. It says “Wyckoff” – the name of this avenue. Its namesake was its influential landowner, a settler family, explains Ada’s companion Elsa Waithe and reads what is still on the sticker: “The Wyckoff family kept at least 128 people as slaves between 1698 and 1826.”

They weren’t the only ones. New York was teeming with signs of street names that go back to men who were slaveholders or even slave traders in their day. Elsa lists: “Nostrand, Stuyvesant, Lefferts, Jefferson …” Very few New Yorkers are aware of this.

Elsa, an African-American comedian from the Crown Heights district of Brooklyn, the painter Ada Reso and researcher Maria Robles are now helping. They founded the “Slavers of New York” initiative.

Hundreds of places with charged names

Elsa reports that they have identified more than 500 different locations, which bear the names of around 200 former slave owners. “Typically wealthy landowners, whose ownership later led to the creation of roads. And they were named after them.”

They gained their wealth through the work of the slaves, says Elsa, whose ancestors also had to toil as serfs on American plantations. “That means in plain language: We honor slave owners with the names of our streets.”

Late abolition of slavery

Not until 1827 there was a law for the final abolition of slavery in the city, which is celebrated as liberal today. Elsa learned this from a Twitter post during the Corona lockdown. It was the photo of an old census document: “There was the name of the family, the number of members and then at the very end: the number of slaves …”

Elsa, Ada and Maria found documents and newspaper articles: offers for sale from slaves, search reports from people who had run away. Her picture became clearer and clearer.

It was the time when they mourned George Floyd in the streets with the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement, says Elsa. “It was the time when Confederate monuments came under serious criticism again and more and more statues fell.”

However, the “Slavers of New York” did not want street signs to fall. “We want to get the story right. The narrative is that New York and all of the north were the good guys in the slave days. But New York was a center of the slave trade for the longest time. Wall Street was built by slaves.”

Stick on and stimulate

They had the first stickers printed in a befriended sticker shop. And set off to stick them on the street signs of the same name.

A curious couple stops on Wyckoff Avenue in Brooklyn when Ada and Elsa are buttoning a power box. They want to know what they stuck to it. “They were slave owners,” Elsa explains, pointing to the street sign. “I never thought about that,” says the woman and has a sticker given to her. She’ll stick it on the lantern in front of her house.

The “Slavers of New York” often get such reactions – also on their Twitter account. But just as often people react repulsively, especially if they have white skin: “That might make them feel guilty. They have the feeling that someone is pointing a finger at them because they have done something wrong,” says Elsa. “Among the blacks, rejection often has another reason. They say: ‘We don’t want to be reminded of something like that in our neighborhood.'”

Will the street names be changed?

The trio thinks differently. The “Slavers of New York” are currently expanding their sticker campaign from Brooklyn to all of New York. The likely future mayor of the metropolis, the Afro-American Eric Adams, has hinted that he could imagine changing the street names.

Elsa shrugs her shoulders: “We wouldn’t change anything with just the names. What matters is that we talk and think about it.” The names should stay calm. After all, they were part of the history of this city.