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CITY COUNCIL TO INTRODUCE LEGISLATION APOLOGIZING FOR NYC ROLE IN
SLAVERY
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CITY HALL, NY – Elected officials and community leaders will
announce
the introduction of City Council legislation "expressing
profound
regret for slavery and historic wrongs rooted in racial and
cultural
bias." The
resolution, sponsored by Council Members John C. Liu,
Larry B. Seabrook (Chairperson of the Civil Rights Committee) and
Robert Jackson, (Co-Chair of the Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus),
acknowledges New York City's role in sustaining and benefiting
from
the slave trade.
*[Text of draft resolution is attached below].
WHAT:
Council Members to Introduce Legislation Expressing Profound
Regret
for Slavery and Historic Wrongs Rooted in Racial & Cultural
Bias.
WHEN:
Monday, April 23, 2007 at 1:00 PM.
WHERE:
City Hall, Steps.
WHO:
Council Members JOHN LIU, LARRY SEABROOK, ROBERT JACKSON.
Rev. NICHOLAS GENEVIEVE-TWEED, Macedonia A.M.E. Church.
National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NY).
SONIA OSSORIO, President of National Organization of Women (NYC).
LAKSHMJI ANANTNARAYAN, Communications Director, Equality Now!
JASON HANDLEY, American Civil Rights Education Services, Inc.
CARL CALLENDAR, Executive Director, Queens Legal Services.
JOHN PARK, President, Korean American Community Empowerment
Council.
VICKI SHU SMOLIN, President, Organization of Chinese Americans (NY)
WONKYUNG JESSICA LEE, Executive Director, Korean American League
for
Civic Action.
- text of draft resolution -
Res. No.___
Resolution expressing profound regret for slavery and historic
wrongs
rooted in racial and cultural bias.
By Council Members Liu, Seabrook, and Jackson
Whereas, The founders of the United States of America, proclaiming
the
nation's sovereignty in 1776, declared, "We hold these truths
to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these
are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness;" and
Whereas, Racial and cultural bias, afflictions of human
civilization
since its very genesis, were already deeply rooted in American,
and
New York's, culture at the time of the country's independence, for
example, in the instance of the Dutch West India Company's first
cargo
delivery of eleven Africans to New Netherland in 1626; and
Whereas, Perhaps the most rawest and most egregious example of
racial
bias is the institution of human slavery, in which a fundamental
denial of equality and human rights permits the assignment of the
bestial statuses of 'commodity' and 'chattel' to entire groups of
people based, among many possible and equivalently illegitimate
considerations, on the color of their skin, the tenets of their
religion, or the contempt of their sex; and
Whereas, Slave labor in New Netherland played a crucial role in
building the infrastructure for a New World civilization, clearing
forests, laying roads, raising homes and public buildings, and
growing
food; indeed, in reference to New Netherlands' struggle to
establish
agricultural self-sufficiency, Edgar McManus notes in "A
History of
Negro Slavery in New York," "Slavery helped to prepare
the way for
this transition by providing the labor which made farming
attractive
and profitable to settlers.
Slave labor was especially important in
the agricultural development of the Hudson Valley, where an acute
scarcity of free workers prevailed;" and
Whereas, During the colonial period, slaves considered to be
dependable and to have demonstrated reliable service might be
offered
a perverse half-freedom in exchange for regular tribute to the
Dutch
West India Company and compulsion to labor on specific company
projects, a fiscally-driven part-time forced labor practice
utilized
even by Peter Stuyvesant; and
Whereas, British rule of New York resulted in even greater growth
of
the slave trade, transforming the local slavery paradigm from one
based on forced labor for project purposes to a marketplace in
human
misery focused more specifically on the business of selling human
lives; and
Whereas, Those slaves who might seek escape and freedom from
bondage,
through organized revolt or individual flight, were subjected to
the
cruelest tortures imaginable: burned alive, lynched, dismembered –
living beings deemed less than human and subjected to most
unnatural
and inhuman treatments by a society anesthetized to its own
humanity
by the scourge of slavery; and
Whereas, New York's abolition of slavery was a gradual, slow
process,
described by Northwestern University Professor David Gellman as
"political give and take, though it seems appalling that real
human
beings should be subject to this give and take," and in the
face of
the specter of eventual abolition, slave owners hurried to sell
their
slaves – and any other blacks they might be able to capture - in
Southern markets; scholar Edgar McManus notes in "A History
of Negro
Slavery in New York" that after 1800, the New York's black
population
growth rate stagnated as "the exodus was largely the work of
kidnappers and illegal traders who dealt in human misery;"
and
Whereas, Gradual abolition created categories and subcategories of
slavery; for example, a 1799 state act freed all children born to
New
York slaves after July 4, 1799, but nevertheless required these
children to serve their mothers' masters until males reached the
age
of 28 and females reached the age of 25; indeed, these carefully
distinguished gradations of slavery and servitude amount to little
more than semantics of degradation; and
Whereas, According to historian Leslie Harris's "In the
Shadow of
Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863,"
following the
January 1863 enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation,
"Democratic
Party leaders raised the specter of a New York deluged with
southern
blacks," a flood which would supposedly create overwhelming
labor
competition that would completely upset and ruin the antediluvian
City's economy; and
Whereas, An outgrowth of such rumor mongering as well as simmering
racial, political, and financial tensions, the New York City Draft
Riots of 1863 revealed a City torn apart by bias and hatred,
during
which eleven black men were lynched, countless blacks were beaten,
hundreds of blacks were forced out of New York City, and property,
including homes, stores, and orphanages, and public buildings, was
burned and destroyed; and
Whereas, Slavery is not the only stain on New York's past, and
denial
of fundamental rights and oppression have extended to groups other
than Africans; and
Whereas, Racial and cultural bias may be said to characterize the
American nation's relationship with North American indigenous
peoples
including the New York Iroquoian tribes – St. Regis Mohawk,
Oneida,
Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca Nation, Tonawanda Band of Seneca, and
Tuscorora; the Shinnecock tribe; and the Poospatuck tribe,
once-independent nations subjected without due process to
dispossession of their land and consigned to reservations with
little
comprehension of or regard to ties to land or family; and
Whereas, In not establishing universal suffrage to women until
ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution in 1920,
America lagged behind nations like New Zealand, Finland, Norway,
and
Denmark, and within the United States itself, states like Wyoming,
Colorado, Utah, and Illinois preceded New York in granting
suffrage;
in this regard, cultural biases delayed the political equality of
women due to now-incomprehensible assumptions about the roles and
abilities of the female sex and
Whereas, Women in New York were extended the right to vote in
1917, an
accomplishment due in great part to decades of both local and
national
organizing led by renowned New York activists like Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, an organizer of the landmark 1848 Seneca Falls
Convention,
and suffragist and temperance advocate Susan B. Anthony; and
Whereas, More than three centuries after the year 1776 and nearing
the
150 year anniversary of the Civil War, the estimable promise of
the
words of the Declaration of Independence remains unfulfilled, and
the
inaccessibility of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
which
many of our fellow New Yorkers experience is manifest in the
myriad
forms of oppression and inequity still borne of racial and
cultural
bias; and
Whereas, African American, Hispanic-American, Asian American and
Native American communities continue to suffer from financial and
social inequities, patterns of housing segregation, deficiencies
in
educational resources, and de facto remnants of formerly codified
racism; and
Whereas, Cultural misunderstandings and subjection to bias are the
unlucky legacy of any group that may differ from the status quo,
and,
today, immigrant communities, persons with disabilities, and the
***, gay, bisexual, and transgender community are just a few
examples of additional groups facing constant threat of bias from
other citizens in addition to legal requirements and exclusions
often
decried as unfair, inequitable, and inconsiderate of these groups'
civil and human rights; and
Whereas, In considering the value and necessity of an expression
of
regret and, in essence, an apology, the Council of the City of New
York recognizes that reconciliation and healing of historical
wounds
inflicted by racial and cultural bias is possible only with the
extension of a formal recognition of injurious actions and formal
repentance for both those actions and their persistent
repercussions;
and
Whereas, As one of the world's most diverse cities, truly
representative in makeup of the professed American ideal of a
societal
melting pot, New York City acknowledges with great pride the
strides
it has taken, legislatively, socially, and otherwise, in promoting
a
more just, more humane, more equal society, driven not by racial
and
cultural bias but by a firm commitment to a belief that there is
strength in diversity, power in understanding, and that, without
qualification, all men are created equal, now, therefore, be it