View of William Street, looking up from Frankfort St, 1859

Philip White must have walked William Street countless numbers of times. It lay a mere block west of his drugstore located at the corner of Frankfort and Gold Streets.

A. Weingartner's Lithography

Valentine's Manual

1859

Collection of author

Franklin Market, 1820

Franklin Market was one of the many city-run markets. In operation from the late eighteenth-century, it received its official license in 1820. The market was best known for its butcher stalls whose owners typically wore high hats and long tailed coats. But it also contained fish stands as well as vegetable and fruit stalls. It brought together New Yorkers from all walks of life--rich and poor, white and black, native born and immigrant.

George Hayward

Valentine's Manual

1861

Collection of author

The Kolch or Kalch-Hook Pond, as it was in Olden Times

Collect Pond (called Kalchhook by the Dutch)was initially a spring-fed pond covering about seventy acres fringed by marshland created by its many outlets and surrounded by wooded hills. According to many, “there was no more beautiful spot on the lower island.” But the carelessness of New York’s inhabitants quickly led to its pollution.

In 1803, the city recommended that the Collect be filled in; the process was slow but but finally completed by 1815. The city then proceeded to sell off lots in and around the Collect on which buildings soon arose. But the porousness of this “made ground” made it a highly unhealthy environment and, according to one commentator, "a prolific source of disease."

But this was the site upon which many black New Yorkers--my great-great-great-grandparents among them--would build their homes.

George Hayward

Valnetine's Manual

1860

Collection of author

Crystal Palace

Patterned after London's Crystal Palace and its Great Exhibition, New York's Crystal Palace opened in 1853. Its exhibits showcased the world's new industrial achievements of the world but also trumpeted U.S. national accomplishments. It was a highly popular tourist destination, yet blacks could never be sure whether they would be granted admission.

The Crystal Palace burned to the ground in 1858 and was never rebuilt.

185x

Collection of the author

Mrs. Sarah J. S. Garnet

Sarah Garnet was the oldest child of a large and prosperous Long Island family. A student in the New York public school system, at age fourteen she was appointed monitor under the supervision of John Peterson. Like Maritcha, she spent her entire career in education; she was the first black woman appointed principal of a Manhattan grammar school. She was briefly married to Henry Highland Garnet, but separated from him after a year of marriage.

Devoting herself to feminist causes, Sarah founded the Equal Suffrage Club in the late 1880s which she kept going until her death in 1911. At the end of her teaching career, she joined other women of her grade in the school system to fight for “equal pay for equal work.”

NYPL ID number: 1819714
Harry A. Williamson papers: additions, 1881-1962

Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Dr. Susan Maria Smith McKinney Steward, Physician

Susan McKinney Steward was Sarah Garnet's younger sister, and equally energetic and ambitious. Admitted to the New York Medical College for Women, a homeopathetic school founded by a wealthy white abolitionist woman, Clarence Sophia Lozier, McKinney graduated as class valedictorian in 1870.

In her medical practice, Steward treated both blacks and whites, and specialized in childhood diseases such as marasmus (a wasting away of the body). White newspapers of the time noted that she had “a handsome bank account and lives well [in the] fashionable quarter of the hill.” Given that homeopathy was much more liberal than traditional branches of medicine, McKinney was welcomed into its professional associations, and became a member of state and county homeopathic societies. Unlike her sister, she was able successfully to combine marriage, work, and feminism.

NYPL: psnypl_scg_394
Portrait Collection

1870

Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Victoria Earle Matthews

Victoria Earle Matthews was born a slave, the child of a Georgia slaveholder and one of his female slaves. Her mother escaped north during the Civil War, returning after emancipation to claim her children. By 1873 the family had settled in New York where Matthews attended grammar school before family finances obliged her to go to work. Engaged as a servant in a white household, she was given free access to her employers’ library, beginning a lifelong career of self-improvement.

Matthews devoted herself to settlement activities among poverty stricken black New Yorkers similar to Jane Addams’ work with immigrant families in Chicago. She taught black women how to keep house and established a center to train black girls in domestic work. In 1897, she founded the White Rose Mission to rescue black women recently arrived from the South from the lures of urban life, especially seduction and prostitution.

Matthews was the driving force behind the 1892 creation of the Woman’s Loyal Union, a club for black women. She was also instrumental in founding the black women's club magazine, Woman’s Era, a couple of years later. In its first year, Matthews was president of the Woman’s Loyal Union, while Sarah Garnet and Maritcha Lyons were first and second vice-president respectively.

Following the example set by Ida B. Wells in her antilynching campaign, the Woman's Loyal Union took as its mission the gathering of accurate information about black Americans which they then planned to distribute to both blacks and whites. its members devised a questionnaire to send to black ministers, school teachers, and other public minded leaders asking them to help compile accurate statistics about blacks natonwide, investigate charges of black immorality in the South, and correct existing misperceptions. The women also wrote leaflets on such topics as “Parents and Guardians” and the “Sanctity of Home” to circulate among the masses, hoping that a wider print distribution would be more effective than lecturing to small audiences.
.

Joseph Fischl

NYPL: psnypl_scg_385
Portrait Collection

1903

Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, journalist and civil rights activist

Ida B. Wells was the galvanizing force that propelled Brooklyn’s black women into public activism. Originally from Mississippi, Wells moved to Memphis in the early 1880s and embarked on a career in journalism. In 1889 she became editor and partner of the Free Speech, publishing militant editorials against the practice of lynching that was sweeping the South and praising those blacks who resisted. In 1892, lynching hit close to home when three of Wells’s Memphis friends defended their grocery store agains a white mob that wanted it closed. Afer a police deputy was shot and seriously wounded, the three men were lynched. Wells wrote a series of angry editorials condemning lynching. In response, the local white newspaper called for her lynching, but Wells was already headed north.

After Wells reached New York, T.Thomas Fortune and my grandfather, Jerome B. Peterson, invited her to continue her anti-lynching campaign from the pages of the New York Age. Brooklyn women joined in. Maritcha Lyons and Victoria Earle Matthews rounded up their many friends and acquaintances to host a testimonial dinner for Wells. The dinner was a great success, and, according to Wells, marked the beginning of the club movement among the colored women. It provided the impetus for New York and Brooklyn women to create their club, the Woman’s Loyal Union. Maritcha, Matthews, Sarah Garnet, and Susan McKinney were among the club’s founders.

NYPL: psnypl_scg_515
Portrait Collection

Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations