Uh-Oh

I want to give a shout out to my cousin in Brooklyn for sharing this little known fact that I’m getting ready to blow up like a Sponge Bob float at a Macy’s Day parade. Did you know that there may be as many as twenty thousand African slaves buried under and around where the World Trade Center towers once stood? Yep, Lower Manhattan is built on a huge slave grave site. So it’s funny how they call it a “grave site” instead of a “cemetery”. There is a difference you know… a grave site can be anywhere, whereas a cemetery is a piece of land specifically designated as a burial place. So now you know why when they find slave remains it is often referred to as a grave site. “A runaway slave named Slippery Sam, along with a rope and pieces of a burnt wooden cross were found at a grave site in Attaboy, Mississippi..” So that is an example of what might be referred to as grave site. He was murdered and buried on Massa Whipaz’s farm right behind the barn. The black people buried on Lower Manhattan are buried in a cemetery according to my understanding of the word and the legalities of removing someone from a cemetery as opposed to a grave site is way, way more complicated. So you may ask why am I calling it a cemetery? Well that’s a long story… we’ll have to go back to the 1400’s ….

A lot of people would have us believe that the Europeans just went over to Africa and just started rounding folks up to be enslaved. Nothing is farther from the truth. Think about it. You go over there and run into villages with peoples heads sticking on poles, and other people with little tiny shrunken heads tied around they wrist… and strong big black men with big wide chests walking around wearing lion and tiger furs with the blood still coming out the mouth like they had just killed them a few minutes ago… and now this dude just offered you a bag of gorilla testicles and crocodile teeth for some beads you was just getting ready to throw away…!! Naw.. bruh, you ain’t even thinking trying to force these cats to do anything.. shat, you still tired from running away from that spider that killed yo buddy this morning… and you just on the outskirts of Africa… ain’t no telling what the flip is in deepest darkest Africa.. Anywho so yeah, the slave trade started when Africans started trading other Africans for European goods on the coasts of Africa. One of the big players in the Atlantic Slave trade and in New Amsterdam was the Dutch West India Company (DWIC). They started small and by the early 1600’s there were about 100 enslaved African men and women in New Amsterdam. So many of you know that I first went to school overseas in Germany. When I got back I could speak fluent German. Dependents child were taught how to speak German in primary school and I was a walking German encyclopedia. Over the years, I have lost the ability to speak German and only know a few words now. It’s true what they say, if you don’t use it you lose it. But I was bound to lose it anyway. I mean how many 7 year old black kids are you going to find in the early sixties that speak German? And as for white folks.. well imagine me going up to one of those old aging hillbilly’s and talking German… Me: “Gutentag mein Herr! (Good morning sir.) Hillbilly: What’d you say about my hair n-word!!…?? Now Ima deal with yo little black azz!!” Anywho.. I’m bringing that up because the men and women who were brought to New Amsterdam by the DWIC were taught to speak Dutch. They wore Dutch clothes and followed Dutch traditions. They were married by the Dutch church and their children were registered as property of the company. In the beginning when we were first brought to New Amsterdam there weren’t that many restrictions placed on us. Most of the enslaved people in New Amsterdam at this time were owned by the DWIC and there was little oversight. They were brought over to build the infrastructure. They cleared land, built roads and bridges, constructed homes and did the farming. Also in these times black people were allowed to carry firearms under special circumstances, rent land and testify in court. So basically at first blacks followed the same laws as the white colonist. After a while the colonist begin to buy their own enslaved people and it was around this time that things begin to change.

During the mid 1600’s the DWIC began hiring overseers to boss around the black folks. I said boss around because the black folks had been there going on a quarter century so they already knew what they were doing, hell they built the cabins the bosses were sleeping in and the roads they took to get to those cabins and planted and cooked the food they were eating. So yeah somebody was probably complaining about the kneegrows running around heh acting out and that they heard a couple of them talking about marrying a white woman. Anywho, the company said they were brought in to supervise. Now even though they brought in supervisors, they knew in the back of their tiny little racist minds that they needed this black labor force, which nearly numbered a third of the population. Although the colony was basically established, they still had to deal with the Native Americans who were hiding in the woods behind every tree ready to scalp the first musketeer that wasn’t able to see the door to the house he left out that morning. The blacks knew that and petitioned for their freedom. In 1644 New Amsterdam and the DWIC granted them what was called Half Freedom or Conditional Liberty status. So remember the story I just told you about the musketeers? I wasn’t playing… well the status granted the blacks the right to own property, but that property had to be on the outskirts of the settlement as a buffer zone to Indian attacks. In addition they had to pay an annual tax in produce and be available for any labor the colony might need. Now we all know the adage that no good deed goes unpunished and this seemingly good fortune was no exception. Although the black adults were granted this status, their children would remain slaves. Still it was better than nothing. They didn’t have to depend on the massa to feed, cloth and provide them shelter any longer. Massa: “Boy didn’t I tell you to shuck and jive when I have company??!! Now take them pants off I bought!!… Who told you you could wear drawers??!!” So yeah, it wasn’t ideal, but they had to make do… and they did pretty well. In all, the half freed men own a total of about 100 square blocks in the middle of what is now known a Manhattan. It stretched for two and a half miles and was among the first black communities in the United States. As the New Amsterdam grew, so did the need for labor and more labor meant more black folks. So they hired a man named Peter “The Anti-Christ” Stuyvesant. His job was to bring order to the kneegrows.. I mean colony. It wasn’t all bad.. because of Stuyvesant, blacks had to take on a larger role and started learning skills such as bricklaying, carpentry and blacksmithing. Things were going good for the half freed men. Some were welcomed into the Dutch Reformed Church, where they were offered education and religious training, and were allowed to marry and baptize their children. So earlier I said that blacks were allowed to marry, but it wasn’t marriage in the eyes of Christ unless the massa said so, and he only said so if you belonged to his church. Those other marriages were voodoo marriages according to them… even though it was them who performed them.. Anywho.. they started getting these privileges and that’s when the anti-christ struck. In 1655 Peter Stuyvesant imported 300 enslaved Africans directly from Africa and eventually became the largest owner of slaves in the colony. He was also the first one to supervise public slave auctions in New Amsterdam. Within ten years the slave population tripled to almost 900 people. The 1664 tax rolls show that one in eight colonist now owned slaves in a place which would one day be known as Bed-Stuy where 300 years later a man named Malcolm X would say by any means necessary and where Christopher Wallace would tell millions if you don’t know, now you know… jucee fruit!! Yep I love my Biggie. By the way, Bed-Stuy is the combined names of two historic black communities, Bedford and Stuyvesant Heights. They take their nom de plume from the Duke of Bedford in England and the slaver Peter Stuyvesant. The name “Bed-Stuy” which is what it is known by today, is fairly recent and is thought to have originated in the 1930’s. Anyway speaking of England, it was right about this time, that England took over the colony from the Dutch and turned the fan on high.. if you know what I mean.

In 1664, the English seized New Amsterdam and integrated it into their own slave based economy. One of England’s main trading partners were the West Indies. The white folks in New Amsterdam were making a killing selling them food, wood, and livestock. The more goods they sold, the more the need for labor. By the mid 1700’s 20% of New York’s population were enslaved Africans. So I guess you noticed I stop calling it New Amsterdam. After the British took it in 1664, they renamed it after the Duke Of York, who would later become James II. James II only ruled for a few years.. and after reading that, I thought about that old negro spiritual… “I Can’t Wait Till You Get Yours…,” James got his, when in 1668 somebody took “his” throne. Anywho before that, James II was a major shareholder in the Royal African Company, which held a monopoly on the British slave trade. So when you see all those movies about folks being thrown overboard on the Atlantic Slave Trade, forced fed, raped, murdered and brutalized, that was the English doing that shat under James II and his successors. With the British in power, slave trading vessels were granted port privileges, and a slave market was established on Wall Street near the East River docks. Laws were passed to control the status and behavior of enslaved Africans and their lives became a living hell. Read to control the status as being ” It’s mine… all mine!!” What does that mean? Oh that’s the thing you sit on. In 1703 almost half of the population in New York owned at least one slave. The only city with a higher percentage was Charleston “By Gawd Boy”, South Carolina. Ever hear of the “Act For Preventing the Conspiracy of Slaves?” It was the first of its kind in the colonial era and it became law after the British took over New York. The law was passed after a man named William Hallet, his wife and five kids were murdered in their beds by an axe wielding slave and his wife. The law prescribes death to any slave that murders or attempts to murder their master or his wife. Nothing new there.. I mean if you kill yo massa, then they gonna deal with it right? So why did they think it was important to specifically pass this law stating what everybody already knew if an enslaved person killed a white person? They did it because it was the manner of death you would be subjected to if you violated. The following is a transcript of the first recorded capital crime in Queens County where the Hallet’s were killed:
“The perpetrators were two of the Hallett family’s slaves – a husband and wife. The couple was allegedly provoked by being “restrained from going abroad on the Sabbath.” The killers were quickly caught and were executed in front of a crowd “on the plains east of that village” on February 2nd (only 1 week after the crime). The male was hung “in gibbets”, while the female was burned at the stake.”
Now… I don’t know about you.. but if somebody told me I’d be hung in gibbets if I did such and such a thing… then I ain’t messing with those people and that’s that. I don’t even know what gibbets mean, but Im sure that shat ain’t pleasant. That’s why they did it in front of everybody and as a encore, they burned the other one at the stake. Okay.. I did look up gibbet and was expecting to see something really fiendish.. and at first glance you might figure you could deal with that… that’s a picture of one above this paragraph. But what you don’t know is that they usually fa’kay you up before they put you in there and then they would hang the gibbet on a gallows like structure and leave your azz in there for years. Oh before I forget and for those who don’t know, “Fak’ay” is ghetto French for something we don’t say in polite company… Anywho, the purpose was so that your body wouldn’t fall apart after you were gone and folks would remember that this is what happens to people that piss them off. You would be up there until your bones literally fell through the bars in the cage. In the meantime they would lower it at night, so that as you were dying, rats could feed off your body and them and other people could fa’kay with you.. then they would hoist you back up in the morning. So you know them medieval folks didn’t play around when it came to torture, but apparently this contraption was even too much for them as it was banned in the late 1700’s as being cruel and inhuman. You know at first I thought I read, they hung him in “gibblets,” I’m like what in the prehistoric Alabama of the 1st Confederate slave slinging crap is that? I mean gibblets is small pieces of something right? Anyway…

In 1833 slavery was abolished in all of the British Empire.. at least for the most part. There were exceptions for those contrary folks… Massa: “Oh now I can kiss it cause you free right?” What he didn’t know was that the law made slavery illegal but did not apply to coercion. Coercion might look something like this… Massa: Oh you free John Henry… you can leave anytime you want to.. but I’m afraid yo private parts hafta stay here..” The threat of violence and death replaced the chains and whip in the United Kingdom after the act was passed. Of course here in the states the law didn’t matter. Massa: John Henry take this glass of lemonade to my sweet innocent daughter Mary Sue on the balcony… but leave your private parts down here…” Anywho New York actually made slavery illegal before the British Empire. They outlawed it in 1817, although it was to be phased in over 10 years. It went like this…
“All slaves born between the 4th of July, 1799, and the 31st of March, 1817 shall become free, the males at 28, and females at 25 years old. All slaves born after the 31st of March, 1817, shall be free at 21 years old and all slaves born before the 4th day of July, 1799 shall be free on the 4th day of July, 1827.”
So the main reason why there were so many blacks in New York was because of the Revolutionary War. Thousands flocked to New York when British General Henry Clinton offered freedom to all slaves who fought for the British. The Revolutionary War ended in 1783. By 1780 there were over ten thousand black folks living in the future Big Apple. Speaking of the Big Apple.. guess where that name came from? It was popularized by a sports writer in the 1920’s when he referred to the many horse race winners as winning the “big apple.” Horses.. apples… get it? Anywho, back to what we were talking about… most of these men who came to New York were escaped slaves from other colonies down south. So as I said earlier, New York began freeing their slaves before Great Britain. Slaves in Great Britain were treated as non human. They were considered chattel property. Chattel property is any property that is not real estate. In Britain slaves were often worked to death as it was cheaper to buy another one than to keep one alive. British Massa: “I say there old chap.. I believe that blimey is dead.. I tell you that bugger just dropped dead outta pure spite.. getting ready to have a cup of tea I was.. taint a polite bone in his body I say.. the blaggard!!…” These were the type of folks the black men were will to fight for to gain their freedom. But what did they have to lose? George Washington had decreed that “neither negroes, boys unable to bear arms, nor old men” could enlist in the Continental Army. As fate would have it, two days after Washington made the decree, somebody got an azz whoopin in the Battle of Kemps Landing in Virginia. Those blacks fighting for the English put it on Washington’s men and captured his commanding officer leading the battle. Lord Dunmore who had to flee earlier and was held up on the HMS Fowey returned and had the British Union Jack hoisted over the city. For the first time he formally acknowledged the proclamation he had sent out the week before granting freedom to any enslaved workers of rebels who escaped to British custody. “Free fried chicken and grape soda to any black man who bears arms against the Kings enemies!!” Alright.. Ima stop… anyway tens of thousands of blacks took up the English promise of freedom to bear arms against the colonialist. Meanwhile GW had a change of heart. It seems that they were running out of men having to fight a much larger British force. Now you might wonder why would any enslaved black would want to fight for the colonialist, seeing all the blackhearted shat they was doing to us.? Well that was because of a man named Crispus Attucks. According to history, he was the first man killed in the Revolutionary War and he was black. Many blacks supported the anti-British agenda because of Attucks… and I’m using the word “many” very lightly because in the scheme of things.. only around 9000 fought for the colonies, while north of 20,000 fought for the British. Anyway.. just wanted to throw it out there that there were some black men fighting for the colonist…
Black Enslaved Colonist: “George, the British say they will free me and give me fried chicken and grape soda if I take up arms against you..”
George Washington: “Boy not only will I free you, but Ima throw in a biscuit and jelly with yo fried chicken and grape soda!! Colonel Sanders.. see that this boy is taken care of!!”
Colonel Sanders: “Sgt Popeye!! You heard the General!! See that this boy is taken care of!!”
Okay.. Ima stop… for real this time… anywhoooo… so yeah, we all know how that turned out. The British lost, but made good on their promise to free some of the black men that fought alongside them. Now the ones hey freed couldn’t remain in the America, so the British immigrated them to Nova Scotia in Canada. Years later they would return because of economic hardship, and unkept promises by the British. Unfortunately not all the black soldiers who fought for the British were freed. Fearing to upset the Loyalist who had allowed their slaves to fight on the Crowns side, the British reneged on their promise to free those men and they remained enslaved. The Loyalist along with their enslaved people were resettled in Florida or on plantations in the Bahamas, Jamaica and other British territories throughout the Caribbean. So before we get to what happened to the blacks that fought for the colonist, If you want to get additional information on the evacuation of black Loyalist then there is a movie called “The Book Of Negroes” which details the evacuation. As like most of our history on TV… it will cost you to watch it… but if you wanna see how the Klan hung Quimbo for sleeping in the watermelon patch dreaming about white woman… well shat.. that’s free on every streaming service, including episode 5 where they give you an in-depth behind the scenes look at the 30 minute azz whoopin they gave him just before they strung him up…

So we talked about there were only an estimated 9000 colonial blacks that fought on the side of the patriots who had promised them their freedom in exchange. Now to be honest I could make a long story short and tell you right off the bat that not many an Afro Sheen spraying one was freed… but since they giving out in-depth behind the scenes looks.. well so will I. No discussion of black patriots fighting during the Revolutionary war is complete without mentioning Peter Salem and Crispus Attucks, the latter of which you can read about here. So Peter Salem was born in 1750, in what is now Salem, Massachusetts to an enslave mother owned by Jeremiah Belknap. Belknap later sold her son to Major Lawson Buckminster. As an aside slavery began in Massachusetts in 1637, when they basically said that anyone who ain’t white is a slave… I mean anyone!! Even yo dog!! So I’m not going to go off on this tangent, but it is a really interesting article about slavery in Massachusetts which you can read here when you get the time. So yeah.. Peter was sold to Buckminster who grew fond of the boy and in time emancipated him. By emancipating Salem, he was now free to carry arms and join the Massachusetts militia. Remember in this time blacks were not allowed to carry firearms and if they caught you with one.. well lets just say you might find yourself hung in gibblets or was that gibbets.. whateva it was it wasn’t pleasant. So Salem joined the militia and saw his first battle at Concord. The Concord and Lexington battles were the ones which kicked off the war. It was also at Concord that Paul Revere rode through town shouting his famous warning.. ” You Can Save Up To 15% More At Geico..” oh wait a minute.. sorry.. “The British Are Coming..” That darn Geico commercial is everywhere.. right? Anywho, Salem is recorded as serving at Concord for four days fighting alongside the militia. On April 19, 1775, he enlisted in the 6th Massachusetts Regiment under Colonel John Nixon. Nixon would go on to be promoted to General and his regiments would fight in most of the major battles during the war, including arguably the most famous, “Bunker Hill.” On June 17, 1775 Peter Salem would be forever linked to Bunker Hill by having his depiction forever captured in John Trumbull’s “The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill.” He is on the right hand side of the picture above standing standing slightly behind who I believe to be Colonel Nixon who is holding the sword out. He’s the only black guy in the portrait. The man on the left lying mortally wounded is John Pitcairn, leader of the British forces and the one who was thought to have been shot by Peter Salem. The leader of the British forces having been shot by a former slave was some big shat back then.. but evidently not big enough. Remember when I told you GW decreed that no blacks could fight in the Continental Army.. that was two days after Peter killed Pitcairn. Salem served for another 4 years and in civilian life tried his hand at various trades. He died in 1816 at a poorhouse in Framingham Massachusetts. In 1882 the townspeople of Framingham, Massachusetts, erected a monument in his memory at his burial site at the Old Burying Ground in Framingham… and they say he was one of the lucky ones… the vast majority of the blacks that fought for the colonialist were re-enslaved and just so you know.. the statue is gone too. Now let’s jump back to the 1800’s.

So even though at this time New Yorkers still had slaves, they thought that their slaves lived better than those slaves down south toiling under Massa Whipaz and Boss Fetch It. As a matter of fact they often threatened folks who back sassed with the prospect of sending them down “the river.” NY Massa: Boy if you back sass again Ima send you down the river to Massa Whipaz and he gonna make you start pickin the cotton my drawers are made of and den Ima order a hundred pair!!! Anyway that’s where that saying “send you down the river” comes from. Most slaves being sent to the south from the north were shipped down the Mississippi River. But even though the slaves up north had it slightly better than the ones down south, it was still hard going. Although there weren’t any cotton, rice or sugar plantations in NY, a lot of the raw material was processed there. That meant long hours of backbreaking work in the factories. Households usually had one or two slaves and all the household chores were done by them. Back in those days land was at a premium and that meant smaller living quarters.. for everybody including slaves. With a smaller living space black families were often separated with fathers, mothers and children being sold to different families. In New York the slaves stayed in the same house as the massa. The people who could afford it had seperate rooms for their slaves, while those who did not had their slaves sleep on the kitchen floor.. but neva eva did they sleep in the parlor or on the living room floor. That’s something the massa didn’t even allow… sound familiar? Mamma, Her Mamma, Her mamma’s mamma: Boy whatcha doing in my living room!!? Get out my living room!! You know you don’t play in my living room!!” Lol… Anywho, so yeah I think a lot of our parents discretions are rooted in the way our ancestors were treated when they were enslaved.

Well we covered the a lot of stuff that happened between the 1400’s and the mid 1800’s. Everything left is the stuff after the Civil War to the present. It wasn’t until 1964 that segregation was made illegal in the United States. All during the periods we talked about, blacks remained segregated from whites. It was the rule of law that we be segregated and that meant from all public places including cemeteries. So we had our own cemeteries, our own places where we were interred and buried our families. Yet now those places are called grave sites instead of cemeteries when they come across them. They must think we are not be getting enough blood to our brains. Did you know that during the years leading up to the Civil War, some people in the medical field thought that blacks should be periodically beaten and tortured as it promoted greater blood flow to the brain resulting in a smarter slave..
Massa: “Boss Man go out there and whip all my kneegrows… They need to figure out how they gonna pick mo cotton tomorrow..”
Anywho, so the reason that they don’t call these places cemeteries where they find hundreds of blacks buried is because if they called them cemeteries than certain laws are triggered.. like contacting their nearest relative before the body is moved. If somebody says “aw hell no.. you ain’t moving them..” then you got to go to court and who knows what else. It just more expedient to call it a grave site. Over the course of hundreds of years black people were buried in Manhattan by other blacks because they couldn’t be buried anyplace else. If that’s not a cemetery than I guess I’m not getting enough blood to my brain..

Thanks for reading Hill1News.