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Janae Pierre: Welcome to NYC NOW your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC, I'm Janae Pierre. This is our one and only episode. Today we're celebrating Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day. Before we get the celebration started, here's your news headlines from Lance Luckey.

Lance Luckey: Harriet Tubman has been the subject of operas, multiple movies, and two us postage stamps. Now efforts are underway to designate a long stretch of New York state roadways in her honor, WNYC's Arun Venugopal has more.

Arun Venugopal: The proposed Harriet Tubman Underground railroad corridor would stretch for 500 miles. It'd start in New York City, where the former fugitive and civil war spy conducted much of her work and fundraising in service of emancipation. It would end at Niagara Falls near the canadian border. The group leading the effort is the Underground Railroad Consortium of New York state, which says its goal is to get a bill passed by the state legislature in early 2026 to authorize the corridor. The group says it wants to educate the public about the state's history of abolition and emancipation. Historians say Tubman made up to 13 trips between free states in the north and the south guiding scores of enslaved friends and family to freedom.

Michael Hill: As youve been hearing a lot happening on this Juneteenth holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. Mayor Eric Adams is lighting up City Hall and other municipal buildings tonight at sunset in red, black and green. The colors come from the pan african flag, a tricolor banner thats a symbol of freedom for Black Americans and the broader african diaspora. Adams says the holiday is a moment to reflect on the contributions of African Americans in New York City and around the country. Besides City Hall, Bronx borough Hall, the David Dinkins Manhattan Municipal Building, and the Department of Sanitation Salt shed complex in Hudson Square will be lit up in the three colors tonight. 84 degrees near 88 later. This is WNYC at 12:06.

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Janae Pierre: Today is Juneteenth, which seems like the perfect time for a little history. Thats after the break. Stick around.

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On this date in 1865, enslaved African Americans in Texas were finally told they were free nearly two years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. 40 years earlier in New York, a small group of African Americans and immigrants from Europe bought land and lived in what is today parts of northwest Central park. It was called Seneca Village and was located in the park's perimeter from West 82nd to 89th street. In 1857, they were evicted from that land. For more WNYC's Michael Hill talked with John Reddick. He's the director of community projects at the Central Park Conservancy.

Michael Hill: John, how did Seneca Village come to be? Who were the people who bought land there and lived there?

John Reddick: Well, it's very interesting. In 1825, there had been a series of cholera outbreaks and things that made New Yorkers question burials so close to where the population was living. They were closing down the African burial ground, a burial ground that was in the area of Washington Square Park. For African Americans who had limited property even downtown had to start looking other places. Mother A.M.E. Zion and several of its members came up to look at land in the area that would become Central park. There were Irish during a period where there was a high level of Irish immigration to America, and there's a small Irish population and a smaller German population.

We saw intermarriage in their records and things like that.

Michael Hill: How much money did they buy the land for, and how big was this piece of land?

John Reddick: Well, it's interesting because the city, around 1811, decided the grid was going to be the system of organizing streets in New York, even though the bulk of the population was before below 14th street. Maybe they were buying plots of land for $60 or so.Very quickly, particularly after the opening of the Erie Canal, New York became the center of commerce in New York, and land values skyrocketed. With that increased land value, if you had $250 worth of property, you could qualify for the vote. That was a rule that was implied only to African Americans. It had initially been for all voters, but when the change came to give freedom to Blacks in New York, that was lifted from white voters to Black voters had to come up with that value.

Michael Hill: Why that area of Manhattan, of all places? Why there?

John Reddick: They very much in a unique place in terms of being distant from being targeted for things in some of the churches downtown, in ways that this community was distant from a lot of that. It's hard to sort of equate that same lifestyle if you had to move. For me, I feel like that's the biggest loss. The sense of the total community and what it gives to each other. It's trying to balance everything with where you're living. I think here it coalesced the way that gave them comfort and security to set their own destiny.

Michael Hill: Were these African Americans thinking, we buy this now that the land as you mentioned was going to increase in value?

John Reddick: What's very interesting, there's two groups of African Americans that have a history post Seneca Village. There's like a family named the lions and a woman named Elizabeth Gloucester, who went on to become one of the most wealthy African Americans in New York. They speculated on the land, and they got the right to vote through the value of the land, but they actually were living elsewhere. For them, that was a money transaction of which they did benefit. There's no evidence that they protested what was being compensated them when the sale came.

There was a gentleman named Andrew Williams who he couldn't read or write on all his protests. It was just making an X, but he bought land to really live there. His being displaced and his protest was really based on the fact that he could not find an equivalent community. This had three churches, a school. When he started thinking about where would he go, I could totally see why he would ask for more resources because to find a community where he would have those same values as an African American would have been very difficult.

Michael Hill: John, how does the Central Park Conservancy reconcile with this history of displacement of people followed by major development?

John Reddick: What people don't realize, which we do because we're part of the park, is really the topography that those people looked at in 1825. Very much of it's still there. Tanner Spring, a water source that provide water for them still percolates water. The view to the west to the Hudson river from Summit Rock, it's still the highest point in the park. It's still a point where you can view both downtown and to the west to the Hudson. We look at Seneca Village in the context of today, certain things have elevated certain expectations about what the land would have been over time. As african american, I feel very rewarded that I can go back and actually see what they looked at in ways I wouldn't if there was a hotel there or a house there or other things.

Even the Vanderbilts today don't live in the same house. You can't afford to live in the same house their grandparents lived in. Just the sense of property, in the sense that the same people would be in the same place in New York 150 years later, it's unlikely.

Janae Pierre: That's John Reddick, Director of Community Projects at the Central Park Conservancy talking with WNYC's Michael Hill.

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10 years after Seneca Village was founded, one man made a daring move that, until recently, hasn't been well known. In 1839, John Swanson Jacobs freed himself from slavery by boldly walking out of the Astor House hotel in New York City, leaving behind a note for his enslaver which read, "Sir, I have left you not to return. When I have got settled, I will give you further satisfaction. No longer yours." Jacobs went on to become a notable abolitionist traveler and writer. Collaborating with prominent figures like Frederick Douglass. Historian Jonathan Schroeder rediscovered Jacobs autobiography that was originally published in Australia and edited its reissue called The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots. He joins me now to discuss the book. Jonathan, welcome.

Jonathan Schroeder: Thank you for having me.

Janae Pierre: Can you start by explaining who John Swanson Jacobs was and why his narrative is considered a groundbreaking discovery in the context of slave narratives?

Jonathan Schroeder: John Swanson Jacobs, he was an abolitionist, primarily known as the brother of Harriet Jacobs, who is the best known Black female author of the 19th century. Both John and Harriet were born 6th generation slaves in Edenton, North Carolina. Their stories, which they both published autobiographical slave narratives, represent the first chance that their family had to tell their side of what slavery was like.

There's a lot in there that doesn't make it into the autobiography, because even as this autobiography is exceptionally radical in that it calls out slave owners and politicians by name and refuses to depict the Black body in pain in order to incite sympathy and pity in white audiences, it still narrates the period from John Jacobs birth until his escape from slavery in 1839. My goal was really to fill in what doesn't appear in the autobiography because of the constraints on writing in the mid 19th century. Really what that means is that when an ex slave author is writing an autobiography and when they have the possibility of publishing their autobiography within the US, it was always under the surveillance or supervision of white abolitionists, which put velvet handcuffs on the writer.

John Jacobs is writing in Australia, outside of all that, he doesn't have those invisible constraints. He's able to really speak his mind or say the kind of thing that could not be said in America.

Janae Pierre: Such an interesting life he has lived. Let's go back to 1855. John Jacobs would essentially become an expatriate, and that's when he wrote his life story in an Australian newspaper. How common was it for former slaves to flee the country?

Jonathan Schroeder: It was actually extraordinarily common, particularly after the second Fugitive Slave act was passed in September 1850. That law struck down different northern states, laws that prevented the enforcement of the original 1793 law, which was supposed to compel people in the north to help southern slave owners recapture their escaped slaves. When the 1850 law was passed, though, every northern official and individual was supposed to, by law, help recapture escaped slaves. In the process this law jeopardized the lives of many free persons of color in the north.

An estimated 5% of the Black population left the US after 1850, which is a number that probably is in the hundred or hundreds of thousands.

Janae Pierre: As mentioned before, Jacobs decided to walk out on his enslaver in New York City in 1839, and that was almost 30 years before Juneteenth, when federal troops informed slaves of their freedom. New York City would then become one of the most prominent locations for abolitionists during that time, like sojourner truth and Frederick Douglass. Can you talk about how important New York City was to the abolitionist movement?

Jonathan Schroeder: One thing that made New York such an important place for abolitionists was the fact that it was, by the 1850s, the leading port in the world, and it was a place that mid atlantic and southern enslaved people could sail for, especially people who were enslaved but grew up along the waterways like John Jacobs, and many of the men in his family. New York City was also a place where people like David Ruggles were famed for providing help and support and mutual aid for recently escaped slaves, for people that were on the underground railroad and were making their way north, or like a whole host of people who made their way through New York on their way to New Bedford, Massachusetts, Canada, or even England.

Janae Pierre: As we recognize and celebrate Juneteenth, what else can we learn from the story of John Swanson Jacobs?

Jonathan Schroeder: For an author like John Jacobs, the truest mark of what is autobiographical in his life, he doesn't locate in just a mere description of the things that happened to him and the things he did. He actually wants to, through rhetoric and oratory demonstrate how far he has come since he escaped from slavery in 1839 when he was illiterate. He wasn't actually able to write the note that he left on his owner Samuel Tredwell Sawyer's bed. He actually had to get a friend who worked at a trunk maker shop down the street on Fulton Street to write the note for him.

The fact that he reproduces that note in 1855 is a way for him to say, between 1839 and 1855, look at where I've come under my own power through my own effort to educate myself and how that is an extension of how he's chosen to live as a free person.

Janae Pierre: I've been speaking with literary historian and editor Jonathan Schroeder about the reissued autobiography titled The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots. Jonathan, thanks.

Jonathan Schroeder: All right. Thank you so much, Janae.

Janae Pierre: Jonathan Schroeder will be speaking about this on August 28th at the Bryant Park's Summer Reading Series. Learn more about it on their website. Thanks for listening to NYC NOW from WNYC. I'm Janae Pierre. We'll be back on our regular schedule tomorrow.

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