Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City Read Online Free PDF Page A

what
they
deem worth preserving, discarding what
they
consider trivial, irrelevant, or even threatening to their way of life. They create history, determining what can be forgotten, and what must be remembered and passed on to future generations. Evenafter archives have been assembled, they never remain static monuments but are imbued with a sense of impermanence. Materials get damaged, lost, sold, removed from their original site and forgotten, destroyed through political upheaval or just sheer carelessness.
    What would I find? Not find? How would I be able to put together the scraps that I found? What could I make out of those I didn’t find?
    I visited the Schomburg Center time and again, and haunted the city’s many other libraries, museums, historical societies, and memorials. I gradually realized that although much of New York’s black history was irretrievably lost, some of it was still there, buried but waiting to be found. I also discovered that despite any personal or cultural traumas nineteenth-century black New Yorkers might have suffered, many had made determined, if sometimes futile, efforts to commemorate their history.
    In the nineteenth century, black New Yorkers lacked the means to create their own archives. New York’s white elite had them. In 1804, wealthy merchant John Pintard joined forces with ten friends to form the New-York Historical Society. Pintard had been intimately involved in the great events that shaped the city’s history. During the revolutionary war, he was commissioned to help alleviate the lot of American prisoners held captive by the British. He later became a merchant, accumulating a considerable fortune in the East India trade (before losing it by taking over a friend’s debt). He served in the state legislature and the New York City Corporation, while many of his colleagues were lawyers and politicians. According to Pintard and the other founders, the New-York Historical Society’s mission was “to collect and preserve whatever may relate to the natural, civil or ecclesiastical History of the United States in general and of this State in particular.” Acutely aware of the fragility of historical records, Pintard insisted that their first step must be “to rescue from the dust and obscurity of private repositories such important documents, as are liable to be lost or destroyed by the indifference or neglect of those into whose hands they may have fallen. For,” he continued, “without the aid of original records and authentic documents, history will be nothing more than a well-combined series of ingenious conjectures and amusing fables.” 8
    Pintard maintained that the society would limit itself to “collectingand preserving whatever may be useful to others in the different branches of historical inquiry.” What was Pintard’s definition of “useful”? Who were the “others” who would find the preserved documents useful? We can get a sense of the answers to these questions by perusing the advertisements that the founders placed in local newspapers in which they requested donations of biographical memoirs, newspapers, magazines, accounts of imports and exports, and material related to early Indian settlements. They made no mention of the experiences of New York’s black population. This doesn’t mean, however, that black history is entirely absent from the society’s archives. True, its founders didn’t seem particularly interested in it, undoubtedly finding it “useless,” hardly worthy of historical inquiry, or perhaps even inconveniently contradictory to the history of the city they envisioned. Nevertheless, traces of black life do surface, albeit couched within a white context, located on the margins of white history, and presented from a white perspective.
    Yet black Americans never countenanced abandoning the preserving and telling of their history to white elites. Due to their straitened circumstances, the older generation could only engage in sporadic