In 1860 Abraham Lincoln failed to carry New York City by 30,000 votes, and there was a good reason. By then the city’s prominent businessmen, who also controlled leading politicians and major newspapers, had cemented an alliance with the southern planter aristocracy. The next year Mayor Fernando Wood, representing this business community, proposed New York rename itself “Tri Insula,” and continue to trade with if not secede and join the Confederacy. His brother ran the Daily News, a racist, pro-Confederate mouthpiece.
In 1863, after pro-Confederate governor Horatio Seymore told Manhattan crowds that revolution “can be proclaimed by a mob as well as by a government,” the white working-class exploded against Lincoln’s new draft law. Tens of thousands of immigrants and other working people rioted against Lincoln’s new law, terrorizing and killing citizens of color, anti-slavery whites, and even police who stood in their way. Seymour returned to three times address rioters as “my friends.” This worst urban riot of the century was not subdued until the arrival of several divisions, largely of New York soldiers from the Gettysburg battlefield [where they could have pursued General Lee’s defeated army].
Professor Singer also makes clear there was a side to this history worth celebrating. New York was the home of such titans of the anti-slavery crusade as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. Untold numbers of lesser known heroic New Yorkers, whites and African Americans, men and women, put their lives on the line to battle human bondage, help enslaved men and women escape, and fight racial discrimination. In their struggle against those whose wealth and influence made the city a leading slave trading port, they suffered many defeats and humiliations. White and black New Yorkers who assembled to protest slavery often faced racist mobs urged on by New York mercantile and banking elite, and their media.
Professor Singer, a city secondary school teacher, a professor at Hofstra, a prodigious researcher, and an indefatigable trainer of educators, is an accomplished hand at creating valuable teaching tools. New York and Slavery grows out decades of scholarly investigations, and includes examples of his many efforts to field test his materials in classrooms, in teacher training seminars, and includes an eleven page bibliography.
Fully documented, engaging and easy to read, New York and Slavery includes teacher suggestions for using memoirs, oral and local history — and even provides student-created rap lyrics on its material. It is highly encouraging that the State University of New York published New York and Slavery. This should help achieve Singer’s goal that this story reaches public school teachers and pupils, particularly in New York.
New York and Slavery is part vital information, part methodology for teachers and students, and part personal polemic. Singer airs opposing views and has a dialog with his material that can encourage teachers to offer controversial material in classes. Some readers may prefer the author less involved and or judgmental, but this is neither his style nor way of thinking.
New York and Slavery is a singular gift to New York teachers and children, and a milestone in the battle for historical truth. How else, Singer’s book seems to ask, are we ever going to solve our racial nightmare, educate our children for a multicultural world, and provide future citizens with the knowledge they need?
Can any New York teacher, college professor, or Board of Education member ever again say, “we did not know these facts” or “we did not know how to teach this?” Professor Singer, his helpers young and old, have done everyone’s homework and deserve our thanks.
In a long, productive career in multicultural education this volume stands as Singer’s best work. Hopefully it will encourage educators in other states to teach the truth about slavery.
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