Black Gotham

Memorializing Manhattan’s earliest African residents.

- Jessica Leigh Hester

Kamau ware 1 surveys the East River. As the sun sinks behind the towers of the Financial District, trucks grumble past, cyclists ding their bells, and a ferry slices by. He encourages the seven people who are following him to tune all this out and imagine what the view might have looked like 300 years before, when the harbor was likely speckled with galleons and sloops—many carrying slaves. “How does it feel in your stomach?” he asks.

Ware is leading a walking tour, one prong of Black Gotham Experience, or BGX, an evolving and immersive storytelling project that aims to bring to life the history of black people in early colonial New York—starting before the city was even called that, back when Dutch and English settlers and Native Americans were still wrestling for control of it.

The project was born in 2008, when Ware, then an educator at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, was asked a question that he couldn’t answer. The museum, which aims to honor the immigrant experience, offers tours of the apartments inhabited in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by recent arrivals—most of them Irish, Jewish, or Italian. As one of Ware’s tour groups trudged along, a little girl wanted to know: Where were the black people?

In pursuit of an answer, Ware started with Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris’s anthology, Slavery in New York, and a related exhibit at the New-York Historical Society. Soon he was poring over primary sources, including court documents on slave uprisings, trying to stitch together a more complete picture of daily life for the city’s earliest African residents.