urban history
Savannah, Georgia
Haunting is one of the key features of this beautiful coastal city. For more than 150 years, the enslavement of African Americans in this community marked the beginning of new freedoms for European settlers and their white American descendants. However, the spectrum of human experience is far deeper and more complex than histories of slavery often indicated.
Alongside its urban neighbor, Charleston, South Carolina, Savannah was a site that preserved the African heritage of the enslaved more effectively than any other region in North America. The story of the Geechee and Gullah communities defined forms of resistance and empowerment that still inspire people around the world.
This specific tour focuses on the history of resistance and the unique composition of the Black community in this region. By emphasizing stories like the Denmark Vesey revolt, we develop a more accurate understanding of the past, reversing generations of omissions and distortions that misled scholars and the general public for more than a century.
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Lower Manhattan, New York
Deep in the roots of this city's commerce are the mercantile trades in Africans as property. Wall Street carries a mantra that ‘greed is good’ based on a series of films over the last fifty years. This assertion appears flimsy and transparent when the history of mercantile capitalism comes into focus. In fact, the knowledge of African enslavement in New York City reveals that bondage was the foundation of wealth at the time of the American Revolution. There was no British colony that did not owe its prosperity to this horrific practice.
The portrait of the merchant in the city’s early history does not receive enough scrutiny. The mythology of Alexander Hamilton provides some level of nuance and a degree of insight into the contradictions of the urban republic. However, the sense of financial liberty that drove the rivalry that killed him may never be fully reconciled. Consider the dual perception that both land and labor created ways to generate wealth.
Where Aaron Burr believed in land ownership and small scale capitalism, Hamilton understood the power of banking and the infinite generative power of individual labor. However, the moral limitations on both ideas (as well as the irrational adherence to them) spurred the passions that became deadly through the antebellum period. Even as Hamilton’s vision prevailed in New York City, the common assumptions that he shared with Burr led to the voracious real estate market that created the modern city and destroyed communities like Seneca Village
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
More successful than New York City in the early 19th century, Philadelphia became the home of the wealthiest free community of African Americans by 1830. Where the primary history of the city focused on Benjamin Franklin and the importance of publishing in the Revolutionary era, the underlying evidence of African American leadership and activism has been overlooked for most of the nation’s history.
The ports on both sides of the Delaware (Camden and Philadelphia) were smaller than the merchant area further north (Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Newark). However, the absence of imperial control in Philadelphia allowed for greater market flexibility, and, consequently, a larger footprint for the trade in enslaved Africans. Quakerism provided an early foundation for the abolitionist movement in the eighteenth century. Yet, the wealthiest families still relied on bondage to secure their financial standing.
In stark contrast, Philadelphia was the center of Black freedom by 1791. Richard Allen and the leaders of the fledgling African Methodist Episcopal church created networks and infrastructure that created the most prosperous Black community in the western hemisphere. Moyamensing and Southwark became hubs of African American institutions that provoked violent repression by 1831 and inspired the expansion of the Underground Railroad by 1845. In many ways, Black Philadelphia was the foundation of the Black Freedom Struggle over the last 250 years.
Richmond, Virginia
Comparable to Philadelphia, but committed to an antebellum nation of enslavers, Richmond fueled the expansion of human exploitation, but free Black families continued to build institutions that would empower abolitionists. The James River Valley was the core of the process of enslavement that eventually spread across the southern United States between 1808 and 1861. More than any other city in the region, Richmond was the example of the slave power that built the nation.
Old Richmond, on the shore of the river, was a model that combined the religious expression of its merchants with the symbolic architecture of the ancient world made modern. The new wealth of the late eighteenth century immediately designed a community that would reflect the nobility that had driven them from western Europe. This fundamental contradiction justified the mass enslavement of Africans and African Americans for two centuries in this region.
The comparison of Black Richmond with Black Philadelphia and Black Charleston is striking. African Americans in Philadelphia expanded the ideal of inclusive freedom. Charleston’s slaveocracy carefully managed the boundaries that maintained the repression of a majority Black population. White leaders in Richmond walked a tightrope that enabled the creation of a small community of free Black people, while sustaining plantations that functioned as open-air prisons for the enslaved.
Harlem, New York
A century after free Black New Yorkers built communities across the boroughs, the New Negro Movement grew as a generation of migrants decided that their voices must be heard by the world. The success of the older families in Black New York opened the doors for thousands of migrants from the South and the Caribbean by 1920. The ambition of the next generation manifested in the work of Alain Locke who famously recognized that a “New Negro” was rising.
Harlem became the neighborhood synonymous with a spirit of Jazz music and a deeper knowledge of the African diaspora. The emergence of the Crisis magazine as a critical publication about the politics and culture of racial justice inspired people around the world. Access of domestic service and industrial jobs created a level of prosperity that only existed in small parts of the American South. Visual and literary arts laid a foundation for freedom; their impact broke the back of American racism in ways that shaped the rest of the century.
While the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan swept across the nation, Harlem became a shelter against the tide of violence and racism. The Harlem Hellfighters were one of the most decorated units in the First World War. They came home and built the 369th Armory, the first weapons depot for African Americans in the nation’s history. Self-determination and pan-Africanism became the driving ideas for Black liberation over the next forty years.
Tulsa, Oklahoma
Nowhere did vocal determination for racial justice reveal the hateful vengeance against Black Americans than Tulsa. Lynchings and riots had become frequent events in the United States over the previous decade. However, the white residents in Tulsa carried a level of resentment that was almost unmatched. Black families became homeowners and created thriving businesses in Tulsa. They event created their own stock market and financial institutions.
Known as “Black Wall Street,” Tulsa was one of dozens of prosperous Black communities across the nation. Local white leaders used both religious and secular justifications to condemn the material success of their Black neighbors. These attitudes became violent aggression in 1921. For almost a week, white racists destroyed the Black community in Tulsa, killing hundreds. In a matter of hours, decades of work and sacrifice were burned and bombed to erase those achievements from the landscape. Worse, white residents decided to prevent anyone from learning the truth for generations.
The pervasiveness of racism, and Black resistance, took many different forms between 1919 and 1947. At the beginning of the era, Black people believed that their hard work and quiet effort could eventually overcome the racial terrorism that they faced. Thirty years later, the unyielding commitment to violent oppression required a generational strategy of legal challenges to carve local exceptions out of the nation of injustice.
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Compton, California
After the westward migration, Southern California became the site of some of the most beautiful Black communities in the world. Los Angeles was notorious for its racism, especially within the police force. This commitment to segregation and white supremacy reflected the emergence of Hollywood as the leader in world cinema. Beneath the surface, however, Black migrant families created new opportunities in areas like Compton between 1945 and 1965.
The glamour and celebrity enabled a culture that blended influences from European, Latin American, and African American cultures. As American entertainment became a hallmark of the nation’s soft power, the transition from the city defined by L.A. Confidential made space for the stories of Easy Rollins and Devil in a Blue Dress. Unlike the growth of the San Francisco and Oakland area two generations earlier, southern California cultivated an image that became the American Dream in the last decades of the twentieth century.
These images gave way to the consequences of resistance against desegregation by 1988. California became a leader in the emergence of mass incarceration of Black and Brown people, especially young men and women under the age of 25. Segregation of the ethnic suburbs hollowed out the opportunities in places like Compton. The rise of gangster culture – The Crips and The Bloods – shaped a new wave of hip hop music through the voices of NWA, Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Dogg. At the end of Boyz N da Hood, Compton became a site of tragic death as a symbol of civil rights dreams destroyed.
Independence Heights (Houston), Texas
After the Civil War, the word of freedom reached Texas slowly. Black families responded with a celebration that changed the world - Juneteenth. Galveston, Texas, was the site where the US Army arrived to announce the formal end of racial enslavement in 1865. This coastal community was the primary port for cotton grown in the greater Houston area of southeastern Texas over the previous two decades. African Americans celebrated the day of Jubilee for almost 150 years before the rest of the nation realized its importance.
More importantly, Independence Heights became one of the first free Black communities to form after the Civil War. This pattern of self-determination spread throughout the former Confederacy and followed groups of Black migrants called the Exodusters. These families created independent Black communities up the Mississippi River and west along the Missouri River. Without the support of a Homestead Act, African Americans redefined the meaning of freedom on the frontier in the late nineteenth century.
Houston after the Civil Rights Movement would become a capital for racial justice and equal opportunity. The movement to industrialize southern cities created the Sunbelt prosperity that symbolized American success through the Cold War period. From Los Angeles to Phoenix to Houston to Atlanta to Charlotte, massive federal investment made this region to the base for the world economy in the twenty-first century.
Eatonville, Florida
Central Florida was a site of grand marronage in the antebellum South. Two generations later, free Black families moved to this area and created the first incorporated Black town in the United States -- Eatonville, home of Zora Neale Hurston. As northern Florida served as a frontier for American plantations, similar to southern Georgia and Alabama, the area further south became a haven for Native Americans and African Americans who fled abusive systems of extraction. The longstanding Seminole Wars symbolized traditions of marronage across the Caribbean and into South America.
The Civil War became the fulcrum of the conflict, and the waves of destabilization shook the foundations of Florida’s plantation society. In the aftermath of the conflict, thousands of African Americans moved to communities like Jacksonville in hopes of reuniting their families and building free communities. In Eatonville, the most ambitious Black families came together to create the first incorporated Black town in the United States. For three generations, they created churches and schools based on detailed plans that reflected their freedom dreams.
One of the most important writers in American history, Zora Neale Hurston, grew up in Eatonville. It was the primary setting for her extraordinary literary works, Of Mules and Men and Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston created new forms of political art, influenced by the New Negro Movement and the international renaissance most often associated with Harlem New York. However, it was the independent Black towns that manifested the spirit of the twentieth century by building prosperous communities. These communities would become the basis of the Civil Rights Movement, led by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Red Bank, New Jersey
Mentor to Booker Washington, WEB DuBois, Ida Wells-Barnett, and Marcus Garvey, Timothy Thomas Fortune built his vision of a free Black community on the soil where Black revolutionaries challenged the lies of the American Revolution. Even before independent Black towns formed in the nineteenth century, Black neighborhoods led by dynamic leaders emerged, especially in the northeast. From Boston to Philadelphia, the victories of limited emancipation after the American Revolution opened the door for civil rights organizations that demanded immediate abolition of enslavement everywhere.
These initiatives coalesced in the sustained efforts known as the Colored Conventions Movement. These conventions emerged in urban centers but expanded across the free states of the North. Even after Reconstruction, it was the conventions that shaped the efforts to create spaces of Black freedom. One of the most important communities was in Red Bank, New Jersey. Dignitaries like Alexander Crummell and Frederick Douglass visited the area to explore the possibility of Black communities where prosperity and equality prevailed.
When Timothy Thomas Fortune arrived in 1901, he moved aggressively to create a base for liberation struggle in the state, across the nation, and around the world. With a dozen churches, several schools, and a cadre of educators, Fortune helped to organize the National Afro-American League, the National Negro Business League, and, most importantly, the Bordentown Manual Training and Industrial School. These efforts made the later formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Urban League, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association possible. They also provided safety for the emergence of Jazz music, led by William “Count” Basie, and countless scientific advances developed by Dr. James Parker, Sr., Dr. James Parker, Jr., and Walter McAfee – the founders of the Black Brain Belt communities from Middletown to Belmar. Similar communities of Black inventors and innovators would emerge nationwide between 1910 and 1990.
New Orleans, Louisiana
The unique blend of Indigenous, Spanish, African, French, and British cultures shaped the jewel of the Gulf of Mexico. New Orleans is arguably the first city of the modern age in the western hemisphere. Syncretism – the blending of cultures from every part of the world – defines its architecture, history, cuisine, and art. Beyond the waves of commercial and industrial evolution, the city preserved its agricultural foundations through a period of manufacturing expansion and against the global digital revolution after 1975.
Enslavement was the heart of the city’s existence, but primarily as a site of trade. Even the wealthy plantations in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi that surrounded New Orleans never shaped it completely. The nuances of enslavement that allowed for free Black populations and degrees of freedom that reflected forms of colorism made the city into a place that defied easy categorization. The sense of easy relaxation cloaked a deep and fierce determination about individual freedom and local pride. More than anything, New Orleans is a place of hidden meanings and valuable secrets for everyone who visits.
As the twenty-first century moved forward, digital history became a vital way to protect the love and legacy that defines New Orleans. Shifting Landscapes, a project of the Herman-Grima and Gallier Historic Houses, explores the history of urban enslavement with its contradictions firmed embedded in both the narrative and the analysis. Every layer of the recreation reveals new insights from multiple perspectives about the daily life in the French Quarter. The features about the rare objects and documents preserved in the Gallier House also teach visitors about the transformation of the city itself during the period of the Civil War.
Erie, Pennsylvania
Very few experts know the role of Black sailors in defending American freedom and securing a set of Underground Railroad routes to Canada. Most scholars understand the War of 1812 as the final battles of the American Revolution. Few people in present society understand or acknowledge this distinction. However, it is an essential piece of knowledge in the context of the early American frontier along the Appalachian mountains. Consider that the United States was almost an entirely coastal and urban society before 1820. Migration westward was powered by the internal trade in enslaved Africans through the middle of the nineteenth century. In the north, there was a slower trend of westward movement, encouraged by the possibility of land ownership.
Erie, Pennsylvania, became an early hub of industrial growth from western New York and especially accelerated by the Erie Canal. American commercial markets, though still rigidly segregated across Pennsylvania and Ohio, allowed for an alternative to the systems of enslavement in Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri. The emergence of Black Codes explicitly treated Black Americans as second-class citizens at best. Still, that situation was better than the wholesale commodification of Black people that prevailed below the Mason-Dixon line. As a result, free Black people moved to communities like Erie and served in the American military in hopes of a chance for a better life.
This series of choices laid the foundation of what would become the Underground Railroad in western Pennsylvania. These activists, who were Black and White Americans, opened the door for European immigrants, especially the Germans and Irish to find new homes on the fronter and create new markets. The rise of Andrew Carnegie and the city of Pittsburgh, as part of the railroad and steel industries, symbolized the consolidation of the United States as an industrial power. That transformation was the different in the success of the Union in defeating the Confederacy and ending slavery. Beyond the important victories for Black Freedom, it was the coalition of people who defended democracy and equal justice who created the possibility of a nation strong enough to deny Nazism and genocide almost a century later.
Omaha, Nebraska
The birthplace of Malcolm X fought to preserve his legacy through a replica of his home and a museum dedicated to his memory. A century later, this city represents one of the most important strategies for creating Black wealth. As Nell Irvin Painter argues in her classic book, Exodusters, the plains region of the United States is one of the most important areas to understand the emergence of communities dedicated to Black Freedom. While most of the professional history has focused on the urban communities of the Atlantic coast, Ohio river valley, and the Mississippi River valley, the towns along the Missouri River between 1880 and 1970 tell a very different set of stories about migration and freedom.
The era of the New Negro movement offers a chance to draw contrasts among the Black migrant families who moved to New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The impact in places like Tulsa, Wichita, Omaha, Saint Louis, and Topeka reveal essential testimonies about self-reliance, endurance, and prosperity. While the Black Wall Street in Oklahoma was famously destroyed by white terrorism, the other Black communities in the region overcame the racists to provide examples of racial justice. The story of the NAACP in Topeka alone shines brightly enough to challenge the ongoing dirge of impossibility that dominates much of professional history.
Omaha is a particularly important site to consider. The specific narrative of Malcolm X’s birth and departure from the region reinforces stories of caution. This fact is especially true when considering the efficiency of the local government in destroying his birthplace immediately after he was assassinated. More deeply, however, Omaha reveals one of the largest racial wealth gaps in the nation because so many of the wealthy white families invested in insurance for more than a century. Black families did not match this growth in terms of family investment, however, the aggregate wealth still exceeded many Black communities nationwide. In a world that is defined by digital finance, Omaha teaches a lesson about cooperative investment and its growth that could empower hundreds of millions of people around the world.
Manalapan, New Jersey
The suburbs of the late twentieth century United States grew rapidly and became the symbol of capitalist prosperity by the end of the global Cold War. Manalapan, New Jersey, was named the third-best place to live in the United States because of its impressive McMansions and proximity to large, natural green spaces. Behind this history, however, was an important story of Black resilience and resistance. When Lila Stevenson brought a congregation together for the migrant laborers who lived without running water and electricity in this area, she laid the foundation for the Community Refuge Church. The local commitment of white authorities to a nineteenth century vision of pastoralism and local agriculture prevent the creation of a larger, thriving Black community in western Monmouth county.
However, camps for these Black families formed in places like Pergolaville – named for the local farmer who employed most of the adults in the region. Pergolaville was over 1000 people in 1960, but by 1980, it had been wiped off the map and converted into low-income housing for senior citizens (overwhelmingly white). The erasure of rural Black communities became a major feature of metropolitan suburbanization across the United States. Worse, it became a model for regional development around the world as national governments in China and Europe dismantled the capacity for rural communities to sustain themselves.
Against this trend, the Ham family in western Monmouth county built multiple churches and sustained the process of equal access to education for a decade before the Brown v. Board of Education decision. With more than fifty children and dozens of churches in their community, the Hams led the Black Freedom Struggle in rural New Jersey between 1947 and 2017. For seventy years, they provided access to stable jobs, educational opportunities, home and business ownership in ways that only Timothy Thomas Fortune imagined was possible a century earlier. One of the few remaining sites that documents this achievement is the Court Street School on Waterworks Road in Freehold.
The images gathered here showcase “Wilma’s Way” – the homestead held by the Hams’ youngest daughter and the gathering site for their holiday celebrations. This place persisted with Black ownership until 2024, finally giving way to the regional suburbanization that swept so many Black families away over the previous forty years.
