“Re-Naming Rikers”
“Long before it became the site of the nation’s second-largest jail, Rikers was the home of one of New York City’s most prominent families, a Dutch-American dynasty with ties to the slave trade. In his latest book, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Eric Foner reveals that one of the family’s most celebrated figures, a legal official named Richard Riker, was part of a kidnapping ring that terrorized black New Yorkers in the 1800s…
For generations, these names were nothing more than white noise in our civic discourse, familiar sounds with unfamiliar origins. But “we are now facing a growing acknowledgement that slavery haunts the national imagination,” says Mark Auslander, a professor of anthropology at Central Washington University. Auslander is the author of The Accidental Slaveowner, an acclaimed book about a Georgia community struggling with its slaveholding past. He views initiatives like the Rikers Island petition as evidence of a cultural shift in how Americans are discussing the “Peculiar Institution.”…
descendant James Riker wrote a history of the family’s northern Queens community and described it as a place where “slaves were found even in the ministers’ families…
As New York’s City Recorder from 1815 to 1838, Richard Riker was the legal official responsible for returning the city’s fugitive slaves to their masters in the South. In Gateway to Freedom, Eric Foner details Riker’s involvement in a network of pro-slavery officials and slave-traders known as the “Kidnapping Club.” Riker’s allies would detain both escaped slaves and free blacks alike, and present them at the Court of Sessions. Riker would deport them to the South before they could obtain a lawyer or a witness to testify on their behalf.”
Related: “Historical Symbols in Midst of a ‘Purge Moment’”; A beautiful podcast episode, lyrically titied “Notes on an Imagined Plaque to be Added to the Statue of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, Upon Hearing that the Memphis City Counci has Voted to Move it and the Exhumed Remains of General Forrest and his Wife, Mary Ann Montgomery Forrest, from their Current Location in a Park Downtown, to the Nearby Elmwood Cemetery”’
