Smith visits New York in order to observe how the city grapples with and presents its under-recognized history with the transatlantic slave trade. The first section of the chapter focuses on Smith’s experience of a walking tour given by Damaras Obi that tackles the topics of the Underground Railroad and New York’s relationship with slavery. During this tour, Damaras recounts New York’s origin as a Dutch colony (initially known as New Amsterdam) where the first enslaved Africans were imported in 1626. These men, and the men who were continuously transported to New Amsterdam in the following years, would build and reinforce the wall that would later give its name to New York’s famous Wall Street.

The wall’s original purpose was to protect the Dutch from retaliatory attacks from Native American tribes after the 1643 massacre (wherein over a hundred Lenape men, women, and children were killed). However, the wall was also an important defensive barrier against the British, whose troops were continuously attempting to annex the Dutch’s valuable plots of land throughout this time period. In 1664, the British would successfully defeat the Dutch and take over the colony—including the colony’s sizable enslaved population. Under British rule, the mortality rate of African slaves skyrocketed while the demand for slave labor steadily increased as the British sought to modernize the colony, leading to a growing reliance on the transatlantic slave trade.

It is estimated that at this time forty percent of households in British Manhattan owned slaves and that by the time of the American Revolution, “New York had the highest proportion of enslaved Black people to Europeans of any northern settlement, with approximately three thousand enslaved people in the city and twenty thousand more within fifty miles of Manhattan.” Due to these facts, it is impossible to separate New York’s history from its history as a hub of slavery, both in the buying and selling of enslaved people themselves and in how the financial district became deeply enmeshed with the profitability and distribution of goods from Southern plantations.

In this way, Smith pushes back against the common narrative that because New York banned slavery within the state in 1827 and fought on the “right” side of the Civil War, they represent the “good guys.” What is often overlooked in order to reinforce this narrative of New York as a progressive abolitionist state is that Fernando Wood, the mayor of New York City when the Civil War broke out, ardently pushed for the state to secede from the Union. This was because New York’s economy was tightly intertwined with the raw exports the city received from the Southern states, especially the lucrative cotton trade.

Smith visits two other sites that are crucial to understanding New York’s relationship with its Black population. The first is Central Park, which only exists now because in 1857 the State of New York forcibly relocated over 200 Black, Irish, and German landowners from their homes in Seneca Village. The Village, one of the first communities to provide an opportunity for land ownership and stability to its majority Black inhabitants, was cleared for the sole purpose of providing the increasingly metropolitan city with a pastoral landmark modeled on Paris’s Champs-Élysées and London’s Kensington Gardens.

The second landmark is the Statue of Liberty, erected in 1886, which many Black Americans both at the time of its construction and since have considered a hollow monument, representing a promise that was never truly fulfilled. Smith notes that instead of her iconic tablet, the Statue of Liberty was originally proposed to be holding a pair of broken chains in her left...