The First Black Neighborhood in NYC
A march brings up the secret history of Washington Square
As I emerged from the grimy 14th Street station into the sunlight, I heard the roar of a thousand people shouting, “No Justice! No Peace!” The march from Harlem was making its raucous way down Sixth Avenue, banging on drums and waving signs that read DEFUND THE POLICE and I CAN’T BREATHE. It was the second weekend after George Floyd’s murder and there were 27 protests all over the city that day.
“Where are you? I’m on 12th Street,” my friend Rachel texted. Our plan was to go to the demonstration in Union Square, but in a quick flurry of texts, we decided to follow the march we had stumbled upon instead. It was headed to Washington Square.
I fished out the sign that I’d hurriedly made at home — “YELLOW PERIL SUPPORTS BLACK POWER” — and marched with the crowd to 12th Street where I found Rachel wearing a black face mask that covered her up to her glasses. We bumped elbows in an awkward display of coronavirus etiquette and re-joined the march, shouting along with 10,000 or 20,000 people, “Who’s streets? Our streets!” It was a slogan I remembered from the Tompkins Square Riot so many years ago. Only back then, it was “Who’s streets? OUR FUCKING STREETS!”
The march passed under the Washington Square arch. I was amused to film protestors waving BLACK LIVES MATTER signs at the pockmarked stone face of George Washington, who owned 317 slaves and used their teeth in his dentures. Take that, George!
Just then, a piece of random New York City history popped up in my brain. I stopped filming and quickly googled to make sure that I wasn’t making it up. And there it was: the Washington Square area was a Black settlement in the 1640s. Not only that, it was the first black settlement in the entire United States.
Let that fact sink in. Washington Square was originally a Black neighborhood. When we say black people built America, it’s often an abstract concept. But there we were, standing more-or-less in the exact spot where a Black man called Paolo d’Angola once had a farm, 380 years ago.
Not much is known about d’Angola but his name pops up here and there in court cases and public records. Like many slaves of that time, his last name indicated the country he came from.
In the 1600s, Angola was literally making a killing exporting slaves to Brazil. These slaves were often captured by the Imbangala, a fierce group of mercenary refugees that had a devil’s deal with the Portuguese: slaves for guns.
D’Angola was probably captured from interior Africa. From there, he was most likely put on a Portuguese ship on his way to Brazil or the Caribbean when his ship was seized by the Dutch. They brought d’Angola to America with 10 other African men in 1626. This was just two years after New Amsterdam had been established. These 11 men were the first slaves in what is now New York.
Back then, slavery was still years away from ballooning into the brutal transatlantic industry that it would become. D’Angola experienced a different kind of servitude that gave him a few basic rights. He was not paid for his labour, but he could work for wages during his free time. He could not own real estate, but he could own “moveable property” like pots and pans and clothing. He could marry and have children without worrying that his family would be sold off, but his children would be born slaves. He could sue white colonists and testify against them in court. And the Dutch promised him that after a certain number of years in captivity, he would attain freedom.
The African slave population in New Amsterdam grew slowly. Two years after d’Angola arrived, a ship brought three African women. Fifty slaves came in 1630, then three more slaves in 1633. D’Angola married a woman named Dorothy Creole. He had three children. He and the other slaves were put to work clearing the land and paving the Bowery and Broadway, which were originally Lenape trails. They built the wall on Wall Street. They built the fort, the docks, the sawmill, the church, the first city hall.
In 1644, D’Angola and the other first arrivals demanded that the Dutch make good on their promise of freedom. They petitioned the Company’s inept director, Willem Kieft, who had soured Dutch relations with the Lenape by instigating a series of raids.
Caught between angry settlers and even angrier Native Americans, Kieft acquiesced to the slaves’ demands. He granted d’Angola and his fellow petitioners half-freedom. They also received land in a designated area strategically located between the Native Americans and the Dutch settlement, most likely with the idea that the Lenape would have to get past both the Blacks AND the wall, before attacking the Dutch.
In this way, 18 years after he arrived in America, d’Angola and his wife found themselves almost in control of their lives. But their freedom was contingent on paying a tribute every year to the Company — despite the fact that they had worked for nearly two decades without wages. They also had to return to working for the Company if there was an emergency labor shortage. The most problematic condition of their freedom was that their children would be born into slavery. The only way half-freed Blacks could obtain freedom for their children was to buy them from the Company.
But they did have land. Six or eight acres of it. Enough to build a house, grow vegetables, and provide goats and sheep with a pasture. D’Angola’s neighbors were Simon Congo, Anthony Portuguese, and Big Manuel, all of whom had come from Africa with him. By 1664, there were at least 30 farms owned by black families stretching nearly 100 blocks from what is now Union Square to Canal Street. The area was eventually called the Land of the Blacks.
When I look at drawings of Manhattan of that time, it’s unrecognizably bucolic and heartbreaking in its beauty. There was a hill near Bayard Street overlooking a large freshwater pond surrounded by mulberry trees. Minetta Waters — filled with trout, bass, and pike fish — meandered from what is now Madison Square through Washington Square to the Hudson River. It cut right through d’Angola’s land. Did he fish in the creek and drink out of the cool water? What did he and his wife grow on Washington Square? Apples, peaches, plums? Are there any particles of the soil there now that he sifted through his hands?
The Land of the Blacks did not survive long. In 1660, Charles II, the king of England, formed the Royal African Company with his younger brother James, the Duke of York (later King James II). The initial charter was to search for gold in the West Coast of Africa, but within three years, slavery was added to the mandate. When the Duke of York attacked and took over New Amsterdam in 1664, his goal was to turn the city into a major hub for the slave trade. Slavery is entrenched in the very establishment of New York.
Before they surrendered, the Dutch gave all their half-freed slaves full emancipation. Almost immediately afterwards, freed Black people were demoted to legal aliens under the British. D’Angola had died by then, but his wife lived to see Black lives change drastically under the British.
Within twenty years, wealthy white landowners had seized most of the land owned by Black people. Slavery laws became more entrenched and codified. A slave market was built on Wall Street near the East River. Most of the slaves in New Amsterdam had been owned by the Dutch West India Company but under the British, slavery spread to nearly 40% of the white population of New York. Soon, New York had more slaves than any other colonial city except for Charleston, South Carolina.
Needless to say, the formerly semi-free Black people of New York City did not enjoy their new situation. This powder keg of resentment and repression exploded in a revolt in 1712, when a group of 23 slaves set fire to a building on Maiden Lane. The slaves waited until a crowd assembled to put out the fire, then they attacked and killed nine white men. After the revolt was put down, the city passed even more restrictive laws, making it all but impossible for slaves to attain freedom.
After the revolt, the remaining farms still held by Black people in the Land of the Blacks were seized and sold off. By the late 1720s, the Land of the Blacks had vanished. But the Black community never really went away. About a hundred years later, the area around Minetta Lane became known as Little Africa.
We approached the fountain in the center of the park as the swelling violin in Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” flooded Washington Square. People raised their fists and stood in salute. A group of Native Americans began a drumming ceremony.
All the ancestors are here, I thought, as I looked around at everyone solemnly holding aloft signs affirming Black rights. Paolo d’Angola. Dorothy Creole. Simon Congo. Big Manuel. Say their names.
