[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in SoHo. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. You know our radio listening parties where we interview musicians about new releases, discuss their inspirations, get into the writing and the process, well, just like the conversation we had with Ana Tijoux moments ago. Now we're bringing these interviews to you in front of an audience for an event series we're calling Listening Party Live. Our latest one is happening tomorrow at 7:00 PM in the WNYC Greene Space.

I'm going to be speaking with the band Future Islands about their creative process, and they'll perform songs from their new album titled People Who Aren't There Anymore. Now, in-person tickets are sold out, but you can join the live stream. Head to wnyc.org/thegreenespace for more information. Again, that is tomorrow night, Tuesday night at 7:00. Future Islands. Hope to see you there, either in person or virtually. Now that is in our future. Let's get this hour started with some New York City history.

[music]

The New York City Tenement Museum recently opened its first exhibit dedicated to a Black family. For decades, the museum has told the stories of some of the working-class folks who lived on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Immersive exhibits recreate the homes of former residents, helping visitors understand their lives, as well as how immigration and migration helped shape New York City. Now, for the first time, one of the stories being told is about a Black couple named Joseph and Rachel Moore. Joseph was born free in New Jersey, Rachel from Ulster County, but like thousands of others, they settled in Lower Manhattan in the years following the Civil War.

The origin of the exhibit is fascinating and happens to contain a WNYC connection. The exhibit is called A Union of Hope: 1869, and it opened just last month at the Tenement Museum. Joining me now to talk about it is Annie Polland. She is the president of the museum, the Tenement Museum. Welcome back to the show.

Annie Polland: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Here also joining us is Leslie Harris. She's professor of History and African American Studies at Northwestern University, and she's written extensively on slavery in New York. She also consulted on the development of the exhibit. Professor Harris, welcome back.

Professor Harris: Thanks so much.

Alison Stewart: Is it all right if I use first names?

Annie Polland: Absolutely.

Professor Harris: Absolutely.

Alison Stewart: All right. Excellent. All right. As I said, the exhibit looks at the lives of Joseph and Rachel Moore. What made you choose them? Annie, you want to take that?

Annie Polland: Sure. We have been telling a story about Joseph and Bridget Moore, an Irish couple who lived at 97 Orchard in 1869. We were using a city directory to show that they lived at 97 Orchard. Our visitors noticed that above Joseph Moore was a Joseph Moore with a C-O-L, apostrophe, D next to his name, for colored, the 19th-century term for people of African descent, and asked about that. We started to think about it, started to research it, and here we are.

Alison Stewart: Leslie, when you first heard about this, what are some of the first questions that came to your mind when you saw the two Moore families next to each other?

Professor Harris: First, I couldn't believe it. Working on this project has been almost magical. The idea that just out of this directory, we would suddenly be able to recreate this entire history, a parallel history of another family, and there are so many connections between those two families. They were both waiters at one point. They're probably both migrants to-- Of course, what we know, but they're both migrants to the city.

They have parallel lives in terms of marriage and loss. Both of those families are Catholic. It's just fascinating and amazing, and it's one of those magical moments in history where you ask a simple question and you're in a whole new world of what was possible and how people lived their lives.

Alison Stewart: One of the interesting things you show in the visit on this tour, I went yesterday, is how the thought about bringing Black New Yorker stories forward, part of it came in part from a letter that someone wrote about something they heard on WNYC. We're going to hear a little audio, but tell us a little bit about this so we can set up this audio for folks.

Annie Polland: In 1989 Ruth Abram and Anita Jacobson had just started the Tenement Museum, and it was just a tenement that was rather dilapidated. It was a time capsule, but it needed a lot of work. People thought they were crazy to create a museum out of a tenement. Ruth Abram went on WNYC to talk about this project and raise awareness for it. When she was on it, she said that she wanted this to be a museum that told the story of free Black families, Irish families, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, and German. She also said she wanted it to be a place where people could encounter their great-great-grandparents.

A woman named Gina Manuel, a Black woman, 62 years old, living in New York, a longtime listener of WNYC, as she described herself, heard it, and immediately typed this gorgeous letter that-- Leslie and I talk all the time about, even though we've read it over and over and over again. It's beyond. It's so perfect that we knew we needed that to start out the exhibit.

Alison Stewart: In the exhibit, we see the letter. I have a copy of it right here. It's an old-school typewriter. You're fortunate enough to get the actor, I love this actor, Tamara Tunie, to read this letter from Gina Manuel, dated March 6, 1989. Let's take a little bit of a listen to two clips from it.

Tamara Tunie: Dear Ms. Abram, I am a longtime listener at WNYC-AM radio. What a delight as an old New Yorker to hear that at last the history of my family and my old New York will be preserved.

Alison Stewart: In the letter, she goes on to make a request.

Tamara Tunie: Most of society seems to write us off when they look at the history of New York City, and America, but my people were part of New York City long before it was a city as such. Some of them, like my great-grandmother, told us about the Civil War Riots when they burned down the old colored orphanage. When Lincoln Hospital, the old building, was for sick and poor slaves. They did laundry, swept chimneys, laid bricks, tarred roofs, and did serve in the Army in all the Wars and deserve to be remembered. Sincerely, Gina Manuel, Assistant Circulation Manager, Literary Department. PS. forgive typos on coffee break.

Alison Stewart: So great. She starts that paragraph, says, "So when you're planning the museum, I beg of you, please, please don't forget them," which is such a moving moment in this letter. Leslie, just big picture, not the Tenement Museum, perhaps, but big picture. Why aren't there more stories known about African Americans in this period, African American New Yorkers?

Professor Harris: I think we just forgot. Listening to her letter, that part where she describes all those laborers, all those different people who literally made New York, for a long time in history, writing the history of working people was not part of our history at all. When we turned to write working-class history, particularly in New York, the focus on the Statue of Liberty, the massive migration from Europe, the numbers, that was a focus for most people.

When we talked about Black people in New York too, we thought about Harlem. As a college student, the Harlem Renaissance in the '80s was this big rediscovery as a topic of history. I ended up writing about this earlier time period that is part of the Tenement Museum history. It was there to be discovered. The records of the orphanage that Gina Manuel mentions are at the New York Historical Society. They're amazing records, but people hadn't really asked the question.

Listening to her letter again gives me chills because the chimney sweeps, the laundresses, those are the people I write about. Those are the lives that I uncovered in my book, and to think that She was in New York, I was in New York, and we never met. I really wish I could have met her. I wish that my book had been available for her, to let her know that I had not forgotten and that people are now reading this work.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, if you have a question about the Tenement Museum's exhibit about Joseph and Rachel Moore or a question about Black history in New York City, you can join the conversation. 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. You can also text to us at that number, or maybe you're a New Yorker of African-American descent who can share something about your family's history in the city. You can pull a Gina Manuel right now on the radio. 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. You can join the conversation as well.

My guests are Annie Polland, she's president of the Tenement Museum, and Leslie Harris, professor of History and African American Studies at Northwestern University. We're talking about A Union of Hope: 1869, the Tenement Museum's first exhibition focusing on a Black family. Let's learn a little bit more about Rachel. Rachel was born in 1828 in Ulster County, near New Paltz, right?

Annie Polland: Exactly.

Alison Stewart: What do we know about her family?

Annie Polland: We know that her parents had both been enslaved, and we know that that area was a place where there had been a lot of enslavement. We don't know that much more. We know that when she was about 21 years old she made the decision to come to New York City. We learn that she comes here, she comes to Lower Manhattan. She marries a man named Thomas Kennedy from Georgia. We think he had been self-emancipated. He had been enslaved and came to New York.

He worked as a porter. He had already been married to a woman named Elizabeth. Had two children. Elizabeth died. He married Rachel. Rachel, as a young woman, comes to New York City and takes on all of this responsibility, and probably was working to support the family as well. Thomas would end up passing away in 1856. She then worked as a laundress to support the family.

Alison Stewart: Joseph was born 1836-ish in Belvidere, New Jersey. What was Belvidere like?

Annie Polland: Belvidere was more mid-size but more rural. It's on the border of Pennsylvania by the Delaware River. His story was different in the sense that his parents had both been born free as well and he was born free. He worked as a butcher or apprenticed as a butcher as early as age of 13.

Alison Stewart: Leslie, why would Black people want to come to New York City, especially Lower Manhattan? What was there for them?

Professor Harris: Sure. For a lot of the 19th century, and particularly as slavery is ending in New York, it really is a mecca. People are moving from more rural areas and even coming from the South as a place of freedom, a place to create community. New York is where the first newspapers are founded. There are Black churches that are built in New York, there are mutual aid societies, and there's a lively culture, dance, music, all of these things.

Some enslaved people, even when they were enslaved in New York, traveled to New York on weekends with their owners, or to the markets to sell goods from rural places. New York was really known as a center of Black activity and a place possibly where you could become involved in politics to a greater degree than in a more rural place.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. Anne from Brooklyn has something really interesting to add to the conversation. Hi, Anne. Thanks so much for calling in.

Anne: Hello. I just wanted to mention very briefly why it seems that the Black experience is ignored. It wasn't really ignored, it wasn't known about, because, for instance, the Statue of Liberty had nothing to do with immigration. People think it was welcoming immigrants. I understand, because the Europeans saw that when they came here on the ships. If you look at her feet, they are shackles that are opened and broken. The French actually gave that to us as a symbol of the freeing of the slaves. American slaves had nothing to do with immigration.

However, Emma Lazarus put a poem at her foot that said, "Give me your tired, your homeless," so they thought that that's what it meant. That was not the same thing as what the actual statue meant. Also, if you look at the HBO series, The Gilded Age, which is on HBO now, they talk about Brooklyn and how some Black people were middle class, owned stores, even had servants. They're not all tenement dwellers. That's another thing. Then how at one point Thomas Edison owes the light bulb to a Black inventor, Lewis Latimer, whose home is landmarked in Queens. Latimer owns the patents for the wick inside and the screw base. Edison only owns the patent for the globe.

Alison Stewart: Anne I think is a walking historian. That is a point that should be made, is that the African-American experience, or anybody's experience, is not a monolith.

Annie Pollen: Absolutely.

Alison Stewart: What the Tenement Museum concentrates on is Lower Manhattan and that particular experience.

Annie Pollen: Yes. Absolutely, and the layers of history. How important it is to understand that not only did the statue have the shackles on her feet, originally, she was holding those shackles and they were more visible and they changed that over time. Anyways, history is very layered.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about where Rachel and Joseph ultimately ended up living. The street doesn't exist anymore, technically.

Annie Pollen: It's West Broadway, but it was called Laurens Street. I just learned yesterday that John Laurens was an abolitionist. There's exciting more and more layers to discover. They lived on a street called Laurens Street, that is what we now know of as West Broadway. It was very much a very crowded tenement district.

Alison Stewart: Do we know, Leslie, why they would've settled blocks away from where the Tenement Museum is on Orchard?

Professor Harris: Sure. Laurens Street is really in one of the centers of Black life in New York. Even though there isn't legal segregation or residential segregation in the way that we think of today with hard lines, there are places in New York where Black institutions and Black people are more likely to congregate. The tenement that they lived in was mixed. There were Black people, there were Irish people and other groups of people. The tenements that make up the Tenement Museum tended to be more European immigrants. The Irish immigrant Joseph and Bridget Moore lived in a majority-White environment.

That area of Manhattan where they settled, there would've been churches, schools, and people around them who were, one, open to having African Americans. There would've also been African-American businesses there and other things that would have been welcoming to them. They would've been able to get a foothold in the city by assistance from others who lived around them.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the Tenement Museum's new exhibition, A Union of Hope: 1869. We'll take more of your calls and we'll talk more about the exhibit after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[music]

This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Allison Stewart. My guests are Dr. Annie Pollen, president of the Tenement Museum, and Dr. Leslie Harris, professor of History and African-American Studies at Northwestern. They're letting me call them Annie and Leslie. We're talking about the Tenement Museum's, A Union of Hope: 1869, the Tenement Museum's first exhibition about a Black family. We've been asking people who are Black New Yorkers to share their family stories. Cheryl from Manhattan has called in. Hi, Cheryl.

Cheryl: Hi. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: You're on the air.

Cheryl: Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: Sure.

Cheryl: First-time caller. Thanks. Fantastic. I just wanted to share a little story about my great-grandfather that I was telling the person who answered the call. Basically, he was born in the late 1800s, but he used to be the leader of a big band called [unintelligible 00:16:57] Ramblers back in the 19-teens. He was a piano player and a band leader. I was told the reason why I know that is because my great-grandpa passed away when I was about eight, so maybe 1972. There were all kinds of variety of Black people who were prominent during the Jazz Age, et cetera. He wasn't famous, but he was known among jazz circles in [unintelligible 00:17:20] Harlem back in the 19-teens. Just wanted to share that story.

Alison Stewart: Love that story. Cheryl, thank you for calling in. Annie, we were talking into the break about how these stories are passed down and why it's important to acknowledge oral history as much as history that's been written down.

Annie Pollen: Absolutely. I think in this case, because the textbooks haven't done as good of a job until Leslie came along, in telling this history, that then the family history that the caller just referenced, she's probably hearing this history from her great-grandfather when she's eight years old, or maybe from other relatives. That was the same thing with Gina Manuel.

Gina Manuel was able to talk about, in vivid detail, what her great-grandparent's life was like and her grandmother's life was like because they told her those stories. They must have just been such vivid storytellers for that to be passed down. I think that is not just for this exhibit but for all of our exhibits at the Tenement Museum. Really thinking about what is passed down in families and how do we elevate those stories so they can be woven back into the dominant narrative.

Alison Stewart: That said, Leslie, how do you research a family like the Moores?

Professor Harris: We're lucky in this moment to have access to all of the work that the Mormon Church has been doing in terms of genealogical work. Using Ancestry.com or the open access version, Families First, for anyone who's doing family history, just look in there. There are all kinds of documents that continue to be surfaced. Of course, manuscript census records are one very good place to start just to see who was in the household, where people lived, and who their neighbors were even.

The other kinds of ways to begin to research, and we found a surprising amount about this family, is also through newspapers. Old newspapers that are now digitized as well. We found a surprising amount of information just coincidentally because later in his life, he was involved in a criminal case where they happened to describe his apartment and the things that are on the walls in this news story. Annie can say more about this, but we're able to recreate parts of his apartment.

Certainly, oral histories matter. All of these kinds of ways of looking for things are how we find out more about these families. I can't emphasize enough how important it is for families themselves to save these stories, to ask elders more about what they remember of their lives and what they heard from their own parents and grandparents about their lives.

Alison Stewart: Annie [unintelligible 00:20:09]

Annie Polland: Yes. I would just add the Black press, and specifically the advertisements. We learned so much about the life of the neighborhood from the advertisements from a Black woman who opened a business teaching people how to sing and play guitar to another Black woman who opened up a business, an ice cream saloon just down the block from Joseph and Rachel. The advertisements in the Black press were so helpful in helping us imagine the broader network that was so important for their lives and for understanding why people stayed in the Eighth Ward.

Alison Stewart: The Eighth Ward is the area.

Annie Polland: Correct. Yes.

Alison Stewart: We should say that that's what that area, east of here a little bit, SoHo, that we think of now. Leslie, what would a Black gentleman have done to make money to make ends meet at this time?

Professor Harris: Any range of things that they would have tried to do. Annie said that Joseph Moore apprenticed as a butcher. Unfortunately, he was not able to take up that occupation when he came to New York, because whites tended to limit Blacks from taking those kinds of skilled laboring jobs, but we know that he was a waiter, and for African American men, that was a great job. It was one of the more prestigious jobs, one of the more well-paying jobs, and he did that for some time.

Unfortunately, most African American men were limited to low-wage and "unskilled jobs." Chimney sweeping as a business, and they often employed children in that, picking up trash, waitering is one, also being a butler in a home, all those kinds of things. Also, probably the most well-paying job, a difficult job, was being a sailor. You were paid very well, particularly if you went on oceanic voyages, but then you'd be away from your family for months or years at a time. When you came home, you had a lot of money and resource to share with your family.

Now, that's the working class. There are African American men who are ministers, who become teachers, who own businesses. Thomas Downing's Oyster Cellar is an elite restaurant. He's only able to serve white people, not because of legal segregation as we think of it today, but because of whites would not allow Black people to sit in the same restaurant with them. In order for him to have that level of a restaurant, he could not serve Black people, but he was still an anti-slavery activist and worked against racial discrimination.

You do have a small but significant Black middle class and upper class, the people who found newspapers, and people who as the abolitionist movement takes off, the movement against slavery, began to use that as a career. They give speeches, they make money. They raise money for the abolitionist cause, but they also collect a salary as activists against slavery.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Lorraine from Eatontown, New Jersey on line one. Hi, Lorraine. Thank you for calling in. You are on the air.

Lorraine: Hi there. Am on the air. Hello, and thank you so much, all of you. This is just wonderful. There is way too much for me to say, so let me try to narrow it down. I have a little production company, if you will, called Wisdomkeeper, and I do historical portrayals of African American women. One of those women is Sojourner Truth. Sojourner Truth, as your guests may know, was from Ulster County. When I heard that Rachel was probably from there too, that suggested to me that her family may have been owned by the Dutch. Those folks who were owned by Dutch did not speak English.

If they were sold to other families that were English-speaking, it was a problem, and it was a great problem for Sojourner. I try to find local people that I can do stories about, but it's a lot of research and there are a lot of holes and dead ends. When I can do Harriet Tubman or Sojourner Truth, I am able to bring a lot of history and a lot of information to people because, unfortunately, our stories have not been told enough. As I tell them, I find people are interested, so it's time to tell more and more.

Alison Stewart: Lorraine, thank you so much for calling in. That's something I learned on the tour yesterday that was interesting about Rachel is I believe she could read but couldn't write. Was that the case?

Annie Polland: I think so. She worked as a laundress, and that's one of the big emphases on the exhibit, because you can see that work, you can see the laundry tub, and you can imagine the way in which she's carving out a life through this work and the tremendous skill that it took as well.

Alison Stewart: Leslie mentioned that through newspaper articles, you were able to tell some of the things that Rachel and Joseph had in their home. There's a picture of Abraham Lincoln. It wasn't so in their Laurens' home, but the report said he did actually have a picture of Lincoln and at least one of his homes, correct?

Annie Polland: Correct. We know for sure that he would end up after 1880 living in Jersey City in New Jersey, and he remarried. Rachel, we believe passed away sometime between 1870 and 1880. Joseph re-married a woman named Francis Morgan and they had a household and they had children. There was a woman in their neighborhood who was fleeing domestic violence, domestic abuse, and they sheltered her. Because of the crime that was committed against that woman, a reporter came to talk about and to look at his home and saw that he indeed had a portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

We don't know for sure he had that when he was at 17 Laurens, but it's the closest thing we have to understanding someone who we've depicted in the 19th century. Usually, you don't have that kind of information. We thought that was close enough to make that leap.

Alison Stewart: Leslie your book is called In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863. What do you wish people understood about that period? What's either a myth you'd like to correct or a piece of information you'd like people to know?

Professor Harris: I think what was most important for me about that book, and one of the things I went in, was to understand just how important the African American presence was. How significant it was to New Yorkers before the 20th century. So much of our understanding of Black Manhattan is about Harlem, which is very far from this Lower Manhattan location. There was just such a significant Black presence in New York, basically, pretty much from its founding.

The first settler, a non-native settler, was of African descent, Jan Rodriguez, and people have begun to investigate that he may have been from the DR, the Dominican Republic initially. Then the arrival of Europeans very quickly, they brought enslaved Africans to help build the city. That enslaved presence morphs into a free Black presence, but New York is really a capital of free Black life and New Yorkers of all backgrounds are very aware. Thinking about the politics of race, of African Americans, of what slavery means, of what it means to be free if you're Black, as opposed to if you're white, all of these things are an integral part of New York City history from the very beginning.

Alison Stewart: There's so much to learn at the Tenement Museum. You can go on A Union of Hope: 1869. There are many other tours about women's contributions, about families. My guest has been Dr. Annie Polland, president of Tenement Museum, and Dr. Leslie Harris, professor of History and African American Studies at Northwestern. Thank you for sharing the exhibit with us.

Annie Polland: Thank you for talking about it with us.

Professor Harris: Thank you so much.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.