By: Daniella Doria
The Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, made a speech Sunday in Central Park to mark the celebration of our newest federal holiday, Juneteenth. Adams compared the modern day uprooting of people of color from neighborhoods across the US, including the five boroughs, to slavery.
“When I was in Ghana last year, I saw how families were displaced, torn apart and brought over to America through slavery in the hulls of the ships, living in dungeons, spending months and months living in their human waste, having their babies taken from them, and saw them dispersed and displaced,” he said. That’s no different here. We cannot look in the rear view mirror and say we should have done better when we are here right now. Let’s do better right now. Let’s acknowledge the presence of people to be part of the community that they built.”
The New York Post reports Adams pointed to Seneca Village, which was established in 1825 in the western portions of what is now Central Park, and became home to more than 200 free black people — who were evicted about 30 years later to make way for the iconic Manhattan green space.
“Imagine being displaced over and over and over again,” Adams said. “When this village was torn apart to build this park, we displaced the energy of Seneca Village. It never came back.
Adams continued to say, “Let’s not commemorate Seneca Village when we’re creating another destruction of a Seneca Village. We should think about that as we jog through here as we watch this beautiful space that [Frederick] Olmsted built, as we look at how great this Central Park is in the center of Manhattan, we displaced some families here. We destroyed lives. There were families here long before Starbucks. They were here, and they provided a foundation.”
Black communities in the area were forced to move and rebuild in other neighborhoods, such as Harlem, downtown Brooklyn and Bedford Stuyvesant, Adams said, adding, “And now what’s happening now? We’re displacing them again.”
Adams — who in April announced Juneteenth would be a paid holiday for municipal workers — encouraged the roughly 40 attendees to not just reflect on the past but to also make sure it does not repeat itself.
“Let’s educate our children so that they know that there were folks who were here that built this city that we call New York,” he said.
Juneteenth, one of America’s newest holidays, marks the official end of slavery in the US on the date in 1865, when Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to inform the last remaining Confederate sympathizers that they lost the Civil War, so all slaves needed be freed. In June 2021, Juneteenth became the 12th federal holiday, writes The New York Post’s Reuven Fenton and Sam Raskin.
