Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (29 page)

John M. Daniel: “Negroes are not
men
, in the sense in which the term is used by the Declaration of Independence.”

E. N. Elliott: “The Negro is … a variety of the human race. … By himself he was never emerged from barbarism, and even when partly civilized under the control of the white man, he speedily returns to the same state if emancipated.”

Josiah Nott: “In the broad field and long duration of Negro life, not a single civilization, spontaneous or borrowed, has existed, to adorn its gloomy past. … The superior races ought to be kept free from all adulterations, otherwise the world will retrograde, instead of advancing, in civilization.”
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Some niggerologists were even homegrown. In 1853 a New York doctor, John Van Evrie, proclaimed: “The Negro is not a black white man, or a man merely with a black skin, but a different and inferior species of man.”

Building upon earlier racial thinking, scientific racists were determined
to prove that Negroes were a species separate in origin from whites, mentally and morally inferior, incapable of advancement and improvement. Given these racial disparities, they opined, any attempts at social mingling—or worse, at miscegenation—would be disastrous to western civilization.

Scientific racism reflected the deep-seated beliefs of many Americans, but it also actively shaped them. Its very language breathed new and ferocious vigor into racial stereotypes; hateful caricatures poisoned the lives of black Americans on a daily basis. Even more devastating were the material consequences of discriminatory legislation and practices, and the ever thriving system of southern slavery that increasingly imperiled their survival.

Black New Yorkers were not immune to this new strain of racism. They were protected neither by their free status nor by their northern residence. After all, it was the New Yorker John Van Evrie who argued that even freedom and education could not transform the Negro any more than “it would be to change a cow into a horse, or to raise the dead.”
²
In the years leading up to the Civil War, black leaders devised a variety of counterattacks on a variety of fronts—local, national, and even cosmopolitan.

Once again, black leaders organized around James McCune Smith. In a notice published in
Frederick Douglass’ Paper
in May 1855, Rev. J. W. C. Pennington informed visiting “colored ladies and gentlemen” that they were entitled to use the city’s public transportation on equal terms with whites. If they encountered trouble, Pennington continued, they should “call upon Dr. Smith, 55 West Broadway, Mr. T. L. Jennings, 167 Church St., or myself 29 Sixth Ave., and we will enter your complaint at the Mayor’s office.”
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Smith, Pennington, and the rest of the black community never knew quite what to expect. It seemed that the rise of scientific racism would have been accompanied by a stricter regulation of race relations. But that’s not exactly what happened. When black New Yorkers assumed acceptance, the door might just slam in their face. Conversely, when they expected hostility, they might just get kindness. Sometimes they made the strangest of allies. Or they were left with the unpredictable. The rule of whimsy reigned.

Walking around the city, Van Evrie and his friends must have despaired at witnessing the many public spaces—streets, marketplaces, saloons, dance halls, hotels, and the like—where whites and blacks of New York’s lower classes freely associated with one another. In his
Glimpses of New York City
, southerner William Bobo noted with horror the interracial character of Church Street. It was not so much a Negro street, he wrote, as one “where Dutch and negroes stand on the same platform,” drinking and gambling at places like the St. Charles Exchange. “Did you ever see,” he asked with disgust, “such a mixture of negroes and whites all on an equality”?
⁴

It was in places like these that blackface minstrelsy flourished from the 1820s on. Although not its birthplace, New York was a fertile breeding ground. Minstrelsy first emerged as an expression of alienation on the part of the city’s underclass—
both
black newcomers fleeing the South and disaffected white youths who donned blackface as a gesture of solidarity against civic authority. This mixed population invented strange, new, rhythmic movements, dancing for eels at Catherine Market and wheeling Jim Crow by the docks. Over time, however, minstrelsy grew in popularity, moved into theaters, and became a business. Van Evrie and his friends got their way as black performers were banned from the stage, audiences segregated, and what was once free rebellious expression hardened into nasty racial stereotypes.

Amazingly, one of minstrelsy’s most prominent stages was the Chatham Theater, the very same place where the Tappan brothers had conducted their interracial abolitionist meeting that led to the 1834 riot. A theater before the Tappans turned it into a chapel, by 1839 the building had reconverted to its original purpose. It was there that T. D. Rice, best known for his Jump Jim Crow performances, appeared, as did Dan Emmett and his famed Virginia minstrels. It’s there that you could follow the travails of Jim, hero of “de New York Nigga”:

When de Nigger’s done at night washing up de china,

Den he sally out to go and see Miss Dinah,

Wid his Sunday go-to-meetins segar in his mouth.

So many stereotypes make their way into the song. The narrator happily invokes the N-word; he sings in a dialect that gets more pronounced with each verse; Jim is hardly a man, since he must wash china; whites mock his dandified appearance; it’s obvious that he can’t keep a woman since he later finds Dinah on the street with none other that “Arfy Tappan” (raising the specter of amalgamation); and at the Bowery he finds Rice acting “de brack man” and bringing “de money in.” But, never mind, you won’t get to see the performance anyway, “’Cause de neber hab rom to let in de nigga.”
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The black elite avoided places like Church Street and the Chatham Theater. In both their political activism and their social lives, they put their trust in appearing respectable, keeping company with respectable people, and patronizing respectable venues. Nevertheless, they faced the unpredictable. Would they be accepted on the same terms as other Gothamites? Relegated to a segregated section? Suffer the humiliation of being turned away? The rule of whimsy reigned.

Travel on city conveyances was a necessity, but a trip on a railroad car could be perilous. Public transportation, as we know from history, has so often been a battleground of race relations where the close proximity of blacks and whites produces unwanted (for some) physical intimacy and raises the dangerous specter of racial equality.

In the 1850s, New York’s rail companies were privately owned. There were no laws on the books regulating who could and couldn’t board a streetcar. As Maritcha dryly noted in her memoir, “riding, for colored folks, depended upon the whims of respective stage drivers.” Experiences varied. Ignored or jeered at by drivers as she tried to get to and from school, the teenage Maritcha was often forced to walk several miles on her own. When the elderly Thomas Downing accompanied a woman friend uptown, the conductor made several attempts to throw them off his car. Downing steadfastly refused, claiming he was not in violation of any law; his fame alone saved him from mistreatment. As the doctor of the Colored Orphan Asylum, James McCune Smith needed to ride
uptown every day during an outbreak of the measles. When the asylum’s managers discovered that the conductors refused to accept him on their cars, they encouraged him to hire a private conveyance at their expense.
⁶

But if it so chose, the law could intervene on the side of blacks. Elizabeth Jennings, the daughter of the same Thomas Jennings listed as a contact person in Pennington’s newspaper announcement, put it to the test in 1854. For years, she had ridden the Third Avenue railroad car to church without incident. One Sunday, however, a conductor refused to allow her and a friend to board, telling them to wait for the next car specifically designated for blacks. An angry Jennings remonstrated, maintaining that she was “a respectable person, born and raised in New York” and that he was “a good for nothing impudent fellow for insulting decent persons while on their way to church.” The conductor and a police officer dragged her from the car and, in her words, “drove me away like a dog.” Jennings sued and, amazingly, was awarded approximately $225 plus court costs. Yet this was about half of what she had asked for.

In his opinion in the Jennings case, the judge stated that streetcars should be available to “colored persons, if sober, well-behaved, and free from disease.” Although welcome, the comment also made plain whites’ continued stereotyping of blacks, and hinted that simply being black could be enough to place a traveler outside the category of respectable, sober, well-behaved. In 1855, Pennington was forcibly ejected from a Sixth Avenue car, propelling him to place his notice in
Frederick Douglass’ Paper.
In 1856, the same happened to Peter Porter and his wife. Both sued; Pennington lost his case, but in 1858 Porter won on appeal, leading him to proclaim that now “the five cents of a colored man were as good as those of a white man.”
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Not quite true, since conductors continued to remove blacks from their cars.

The black elite felt most secure at cultural events that brought them together with their white counterparts. It was here, they believed, that class would trump race. In a series of newspaper columns published in
Frederick Douglass’ Paper
, Philip Bell insisted that “color-phobia is fast abating in our Island City,” and as proof cited the many instances where he and his friends happily mixed with members of the white elite. When he attended a lecture at the Mercantile Library, the audience was “an equal admixture of black and white. Side by side sat they, no shrinking of the aristocratic white lady from companionship with the black one. The white philanthropist Peter Cooper sought an introduction to the black savan, Dr. J. W. C Pennington.” Similarly, Bell noted that at the newly opened Academy of Music, “Democracy prevails: no ‘Negro pew,’ no place for ‘respectable persons of color’; the black amateur of music takes his seat beside the white professor of la belle science.” Finally, he mused that at Goupil’s art gallery, spectators found themselves in the presence of an “inimitable and inspired work of art [such that] no prejudice can enter. Caste is forgotten, and colorphobia is rebuked into silence.”
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Yet the elite could never be sure. When New York’s Crystal Palace, built after the London original, opened in 1853, it became a popular tourist destination. Nevertheless, a contributor to
Frederick Douglass’ Paper
wrote, black New Yorkers “have been casting the ‘Horoscope,’ as to whether colored people would be admitted.” In her memoir, Maritcha recalled that “about 1856, mother took her flock to visit Crystal Palace, located somewhat above where the Grand Central depot now stands.” She then added somewhat cryptically: “For this outing the preparations were very extensive.”
⁹
Was Maritcha merely referring to the burdens of a long trip with children? Or does her comment betray the family’s anxiety over possible rejection and the need to prepare for whatever might happen: be respectable, dress well, behave with impeccable manners, and don’t break down if admission is denied.

Even in more select settings, whimsy prevailed. James McCune Smith freely visited Niblo’s, one of the fanciest spots in town for fine dining and sophisticated entertainment, while Pennington was denied entrance to attend a lecture there. In perhaps the most bizarre twist of irony, blacks were prohibited from attending the concert of one of their own, Philadelphia singer Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, known as the “black swan.” A contributor to
Frederick Douglass’ Paper
informed readers that a placard outside Metropolitan Hall announcing her upcoming
performance advised that “no colored person can be admitted, as there is no part of the house appropriated for them.” “Prejudice against color” like this, he fulminated, was “the most brainless, brutal, and inconsistent thing,” especially given that whites had no problem accepting the intimate presence of black cooks, butlers, coachmen, or barbers. Blacks protested and were finally allowed entrance; the chief of police was on hand for fear of a disturbance.
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There was little to be hopeful about in the nation’s legislative and judicial decisions that were fast chipping away at the few rights black Americans still possessed. The decade began with the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, mandating the return of escaped slaves captured in free states to their owners in the South. Hard on its heels came congressional passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, allowing settlers to decide the slavery issue through the vote and thus effectively repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had prohibited slavery in the territories. The final blow occurred in 1857 with the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, opening federal territory to slavery and denying African Americans the right to citizenship.

James McCune Smith’s office was the place where black leaders planned their responses to these events. Until his death in 1865, he was the heart and soul of New York’s black community. His medical and pharmaceutical practice was located in a brick building on West Broadway between Thomas and Anthony Streets. Behind his office was a backroom, which, Maritcha wrote, functioned as a “rallying centre.” It was “visited daily by men, young and old [who] held discussions and debates on all the topics of the day.” They constituted, she continued, a “constructive force that molded public sentiment which had much to do in bringing about a more favorable state of things affecting the colored people of the State.”
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