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In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863. By Leslie M. Harris. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 380. Illustrations. Cloth, $42.50.) Stories of Freedom in Black New York. By Shane White. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. 1, 260. Cloth, $27.95.)
One need only reflect on the secondary sources cited in these two books to see that the history of the African-American population of early New York City has moved from the periphery to the center of historical consciousness. Once confined to specialized journals or niche-filling monographs from lesser publishers, New York's early African-American residents now appear as the topic of books on the lists of the finest scholarly presses. No longer does it matter that a once proportionately large black population in New York City was becoming ever smaller in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Instead, the various ethnic, class, ideological, political, and cultural transformations of antebellum New York are precisely what make it vitally important as a site to study the emergence from slavery of the North's largest community of African Americans.
By selecting a title that reflects neither his specific subject (New York's first African-American theatre and the performers it spawned) nor a specific time span (roughly the 181Os-SOs), Shane White invites the reader to see that his true story is a larger one: freedom, the quest to achieve it, and the obstacles that intrude. he aims at a broad audience, and thanks to the cleverness and vibrancy of his prose, he should certainly win it.
When New York State passed gradual emancipation statutes in 1799 and 1817, it began a process of defining freedom's meaning, a process that African Americans in New York City embraced enthusiastically. From newspapers, police records, manumission society documents, travel accounts, and court records White reconstructs how blacks viewed themselves and how others viewed them. Specific types of language, behavior, and dress created unease among whites but an exhilarating sense of testing limits among blacks. This was a time of experimentation. Theatre emerged as a new form of cultural expression for blacks, which, like other...