Maya Davis is a current graduate student in the Library and Information Sciences at the Pratt Institute. She is interested in archiving, cultural stewardship, the African diaspora, data visualization, swimming, and trying exotic fruits.
This project was built using Python to visualize the streets in Brooklyn that are named after slave-holding families. For the prototype, the focus is on the neighborhood of Flatbush which was previously a town in the 18th and 19th centuries. The streets highlighted identify slave-holding families and list the names of the people held captive. The charts extrapolate data from the North East Slavery Records Index to show the amount of people enslaved according to records of the time, broken down by family and year.
The history of African enslavement in the United States focuses heavily on the South, where slavery lasted the longest. However, Northern states and territories were also involved in the slave trade from the beginning, even though their role is downplayed due to earlier abolition. The world-famous landmark Wall Street was one of early America’s top slave auction blocks. Last semester, I learned more about Seneca Village, a settlement of free African Americans that was expelled to create Central Park. A few years back, I heard that Cortelyou Rd in Brooklyn was named after an enslaver, and that stuck with me. Despite the abolitionist rebranding of the North, there are remnants of slavery’s legacy in New York City.
For this project I wanted to see if there were any other street names with the similar history. I looked up old maps in the digital collections of the New York Public Library to investigate evidence of plantations, and I found a map from 1855, “Plan of the city of Brooklyn, L.I.”. This map showed old farm lines with the corresponding property owners, as well as planned streets and street names. I saw a lot of familiar names on this map and decided to look further. This led me to finding enslavement information from The Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation, the NYC Municipal Archives, In Pursuit of Freedom and the North East Slavery Records Index. I confirmed a lot of the connections I made from the old city maps and decided to move ahead with this project. I feel very strongly that knowing the past informs the present and shapes the future. If we can make the connections to our history, we can remedy those old mistakes and educate New Yorkers about the violence that built this city.
I’d like to take a moment to thank Fred Benton, co-director of NESRI, for sending the Brooklyn dataset and a copy of the Brooklyn Directory of Families. Without your help this would not have been possible.
The street names must be further substantiated using genealogical records. Some family names were spelled mutliple ways, like the Vanderveers, and it is unclear from my preliminal research if these were different families or misspellings.
Slavery records seldom include identifying information about enslaved people. There are countless names lost to time.
I hope that I can keep working on this project and map the entirety of Brooklyn. I’d like to work with NESRI directly to accomplish this. Additionally, I’d like to digitze the old Brooklyn planning maps and make an interactive layer that highlights property ownership before modern Brooklyn (like a chlorpleth map). I imagine I’d need a team of GIS and data visualization professionals, map librarians, and archivists. There are a lot of exciting paths to explore!
Families with only one record are in the table below:
| Family | Year | Number of Enslaved |
|---|---|---|
| Clarkson | 1755 | 4 |
| Cortelyou | 1800 | 7 |
| Ditmas | 1810 | 6 |