Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (42 page)

There was nothing left to be said, and the delegation left. But Downing and his colleagues published a written response that took exception
to Johnson’s position. “Peace between the races,” they argued, “is not to be secured by degrading one race and exalting another, by giving power to one race and withholding it from another, but by maintaining a state of equal justice between all classes, first pure and then peaceable.”
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Unbowed, Downing continued his fight for equal justice and won several battles. He had moved his family to Newport, Rhode Island, in the 1850s, and established several food businesses there and in Providence. With the opening of his hotel, the Sea-Girt House, he became quite famous. Awed by its utter luxuriousness,
Frederick Douglass’ Paper
devoted an entire article to it, referring to it as “a
first
class fashionable hotel” and opining that Downing would “be amply repaid for his enterprise and heavy outlay of capital, his name being familiar with the visitors at Newport, as a popular and successful caterer.”
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When the hotel burned to the ground in 1860, Downing lost approximately forty thousand dollars. Undeterred, he immediately set about building another, equally grand establishment.

Downing had clout in Newport, and he didn’t hesitate to use it on behalf of his race. His children attended separate “caste schools,” which he deemed inferior to white ones, so he waged a twelve-year campaign to integrate the Rhode Island public school system. When Albro Lyons moved his family to Newport in the wake of the draft riots, the two families joined forces. Young Maritcha and her mother Mary Joseph added their voices to Downing’s repeated petitions for school integration. In her memoir, Maritcha recalled that, after being denied entrance to the local high school, she appeared in person before the Rhode Island state legislature: “I, but sixteen years old, made my maiden speech and, in a trembling voice plead for the opening of the door of opportunity.” Concluding a letter to the legislature, Mary Joseph Lyons requested a change in the law so that

it may be said by Rhode Island, “We have not the fertile prairie produce, the prolific Southern Sun, the gold of California, the copper of Michigan, the coal of Pennsylvania and the oil, but this one point of duty we have—to educate every
soul. Every native and every foreign child that is cast on our coast shall be taught at public cost the rudiments of knowledge, and at last the ripest results of art and science.”
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They succeeded.

Shortly thereafter, Downing moved to Washington, D.C., while still maintaining his home and business in Newport. More strongly committed to integration than ever, he set about knocking down one racial barrier after another. In his 1885
New York Freeman
article, T. McCants Stewart enumerated Downing’s many accomplishments during his Washington years. Consider the following:

Accepting a proposal made by a Rhode Island congressman, Downing took charge of the restaurant in the House of Representatives, where he made contact with politicians of both parties and, emulating the earlier example of his father, took advantage of his situation to deliberate with them on “matters of legislation concerning black Americans.” When a perplexed employee one day asked how he should handle a group of blacks who had just entered the restaurant, Downing unhesitatingly replied: “Serve them and send to me any one who may complain.” He was part of a group that successfully lobbied for the integration of the Senate gallery. The Downings were also the first black family to occupy a box in a Washington, D.C., theater.
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Downing worked closely with Radical Republican Charles Sumner and prevailed on him to ensure the abolition of Jim Crow cars on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Years later, he recalled that as he sat by Sumner’s deathbed, the senator clasped his hand and whispered to him, “Do not let my civil rights bill fail.”
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The bill, guaranteeing that every person, regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, was entitled to the same treatment in public accommodations, was signed into law by President Grant in March 1875.

Reconstruction brought other successes as well. The passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery in 1865 was quickly followed in 1868 by the Fourteenth Amendment, granting citizenship to all those born on American soil, and the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, which at long last granted black men the right to vote. At the same time, the federal
government established the Freedmen’s Bureau, designed to protect the civil, political, and legal rights of newly emancipated slaves and provide them a public school education.

But black Americans still inhabited an ever shifting racial landscape and were soon called back to political struggle to lobby against the post-Reconstruction repeal of civil rights legislation. Many black New Yorkers faced unexpected shifts in personal and professional fortunes. As a group they were geographically mobile. In
Black Manhattan
, James Weldon Johnson detailed their postwar migration. “In the earliest days,” he wrote, “the Negro population of New York, lived, naturally, in and about the city at the tip of Manhattan.” Johnson then traced its movement northward, noting that up until the 1880s the majority lived on Sullivan, Bleecker, Thompson, and other nearby streets. By 1890, however, “the centre of the coloured population had shifted to the upper Twenties and lower Thirties west of Sixth Avenue.” According to Johnson, a change in activity accompanied these geographic shifts. “In New York the Negro now began to function and express himself on a different plane, in a different sphere,” namely in entertainment and professional sports. Those who clung to the old ways moved to Brooklyn. “For some decades,” he concluded, “most of the upper class and well-to-do coloured people had lived in Brooklyn. … A large number of them owned homes there, and Brooklyn was the centre of social life and respectability.”
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My family was among them.

CIRCA 1862

THE DRAFT RIOTS HAD
inflicted untold hardships on New York’s black population, the effects of which would reverberate for years to come. I wondered how those who, like Peter Guignon, had moved to Brooklyn fared in the years leading up to the Civil War. I pretty much lost sight of Peter after his appearance at Albro Lyons’s and James McCune Smith’s side during the mass meeting for James Hamlet in City Hall Park in 1850. I knew that he married Cornelia Ray sometime in the 1840s and that their first child, Peter Jr., was born in 1849. Although Peter and Cornelia hoped for a larger family, they lost subsequent children in infancy. From 1847 until 1854, Peter was listed in the New York City directories as a hairdresser. He then vanished, only to reappear in the 1858 Brooklyn directory, residing and working as a druggist in Williamsburgh.

I was convinced that Peter’s move to Brooklyn augured well. Until the draft riots, his comrades from the Mulberry Street School had been successful, fulfilled in their chosen careers, actively engaged in politics, married with families, and as financially secure as any black New Yorker could be at the time. In contrast, Peter had suffered through the early death of his first wife, Rebecca, and floundered in trade. But the early 1860s turned out to be years of uncertainty and sorrow for him. Against a backdrop of public and as yet unresolved racial conflict, Peter faced personal and familial travails that must have broken his heart and crushed his spirit.

In increasing numbers, black New Yorkers were deserting the island of Manna-Hata, Washington Irving’s fabled land of milk and honey that the ancient inhabitants of Communipaw had made their seat of empire, and that was later renamed Gotham. They were fleeing to the less developed and quieter town of Brooklyn. Peter, his brother-in-law Peter Williams Ray, the Hamilton brothers Thomas and Robert, and James McCune Smith joined William J. Wilson and others who had been Brooklyn residents for years.

Blacks had been in Brooklyn since its inception. Shortly after settling in Manhattan, the Dutch crossed the East River, founding Breuckelen and other towns (Flatlands, Flatbush, New Utrecht, and Bushwick). As in New Amsterdam, they enslaved Africans, who even after gaining their freedom were never given the same rights as white citizens, but were forced among other things to pay higher taxes and duties. Once the British took over Kings County in 1664, they adopted the same methods that they had in Manhattan, increasing the number of slaves and imposing harsh conditions on them. In 1790, approximately 40 percent of white families in Kings County owned at least one slave. Throughout the eighteenth century, the proportion of blacks to whites remained high. In 1801, there were approximately 4,000 whites in Kings County, 1,500 free blacks, and 330 slaves.
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The town of Brooklyn grew slowly. In 1820, its population was only slightly more than 7,000 inhabitants, compared with over 130,000 in New York. A tidal wave of Irish immigration soon swelled its numbers, and by 1835 Brooklyn was big enough to obtain a city charter. With approximately 25,000 inhabitants, it was the seventh largest city in the United States. When the towns of Williamsburgh and Bushwick merged with Brooklyn on January 1, 1855, it jumped to third largest, with a population of 205,000. The newly consolidated city was a mix of industry and country life. Shipyards, warehouses, and factories of various kinds—glass works, casting furnaces, tanneries, stone-cutting yards, breweries—lined the East River from Red Hook to Greenpoint. As in Manhattan, Brooklyn’s most important commercial and manufacturing enterprises were based in slave commodities. Sugar dominated, and families like the Havemeyers made their fortune in refineries, distilleries, and sugar warehousing. The city’s residential sections lay away from the shorefront. In Williamsburgh, two-story frame homes were typical. Pigs roamed the streets, and families often kept goats and cows in their yards, selling milk to passersby. Outside the city proper, Flatbush, Flatlands, New Utrecht, and Gravesend remained rural towns surrounded by open spaces and farmland well into the 1870s.

Brooklyn, circa 1874 (Courtesy John Norton)

The city teemed with immigrants. By 1860, around the time Peter appeared in the city directory, 37 percent of Brooklyn inhabitants, or 104,000, were foreign born, 54 percent of whom hailed from Ireland and 25 percent from Germany. They dwarfed the city’s black population, who now numbered a mere 4,900. Unable to keep pace with European immigration, black Brooklynites dwindled to slightly over 1 percent of the population in 1870.
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Although their percentages were in steady decline from the 1830s on, Kings County blacks made their presence felt. After emancipation in 1827, the slaveholding Lefferts family sold off parcels of their extensive land to their newly freed slaves. From this former farmland two black communities, Weeksville and Carrville, emerged in the 1830s in what was then Brooklyn’s Ninth Ward, now Bedford-Stuyvesant. Named after their founders, these communities were all-black enclaves much like Seneca Village in Upper Manhattan. The men of the approximately one hundred families living in Weeksville and Carrville were primarily tradesmen—barbers, tailors, carpenters, painters, butchers, shoemakers, coopers, and ropemakers. Just as blacks had done decades earlier in Lower Manhattan, they established their own institutions—a school, churches, a burial society, mutual relief organizations, an orphanage, and a home for the aged.

In subsequent years blacks who came to Brooklyn moved into the Fort Greene area, which was known as part of the city’s “Black Belt.” Although an integrated neighborhood where whites vastly outnumbered blacks, in 1860 Fort Greene contained more than half of the city’s black population. Many, like William J. Wilson and his family, were part of the black elite. Entrepreneurs rather than artisans and tradesmen, Fort Greene residents counted real estate agents, restaurateurs, and undertakers among their ranks. They too established their own churches and schools. To a greater extent than blacks in Weeksville and Carrville they formed social clubs and literary societies similar to those across the East River.
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