The Radical Agenda may utilize affiliate links for recommended books and resources. This means we may earn a small commission from clicks or purchases through those links at no cost to you. We only recommend products and services we believe in. All opinions shared are entirely our own. Thank you for supporting The Radical Agenda!
Today, over forty-two million people a year walk through Central Park in New York. The park itself is a beautiful oasis in the middle of the bustling New York City, however its history is less than sparkling. That same area used to be home to a thriving town called Seneca Village.
It all started in 1825, when a white couple, John and Elizabeth Whitehead, sold off parcels of their land. While enslavement did not end in New York until 1827, some free African Americans did purchase land from the Whiteheads and begin to make their homes there.
Over the next thirty-two years, Seneca Village became home to over three hundred and fifty people, three churches, two cemeteries, and at least one school. It was a diverse mix of African Americans, Irish immigrants, and German immigrants, filling fifty homes across the five acres of land. The churches were integrated.
At that time in New York, state laws allowed free African-American men to vote in elections as long as they met certain criteria. One of those requirements was to be a land owner. Seneca Village housed 10% of the African Americans in the state who had voting rights during that time.
Across the pond in Europe, the Europeans had vast gardens for the elites to walk around and escape the noise of the city life. New York elite decided that they would like to adopt that concept in their city, and began looking for land. Their original location choice was on the east side, but the white residents of that area fought back and the courts determined eminent domain in that area to be “unconstitutional,” so they kept looking and decided to use eminent domain of the land including and surrounding Seneca Village.
The government initiated a propaganda smear campaign against the people who lived in the village, calling them “squatters,” “thieves,” and worse, in effort to discredit the citizens and justify leveling their homes to create a park for leisure. This campaign was led by a man named Robert Moses, whose job it was to identify vulnerable communities of minorities, create a propaganda campaign to convince everyone that the areas were “bad,” (thus lowering the property value for compensation) and that tearing them down and making them fun spaces for the majority was the way to go – using eminent domain to make it happen. This happened for decades. Now we call it “urban renewal.”
The residents fought back and filed several lawsuits, but they lost every one. With the propaganda campaigns lowering their property values, it is unlikely that whatever compensation the residents received was fair. Those who refused to leave were forcibly removed from their homes in 1857, and very few records exist about where everyone actually went. It is also unlikely that they were able to become land owners elsewhere without adequate compensation from the sale of their homes.
Seneca Village only lasted 32 years before the city took the land by eminent domain to create Central Park.
