Explore Black History in the Village this Month
GVSHP is celebrating Black History Month with some great programming and wonderful additions to our Civil Rights and Social Justice Map. Check out our recent program “Free and Enslaved Africans in Lower Manhattan, 1613-1741” here, and sign up for upcoming programs “Recovering the Lost Origins of the Black Arts Movement in Greenwich Village, Harlem and San Francisco” and “The Genius of Little Africa: Black Radical Thinkers, Entrepreneurs, and Abolitionists in the Village” here.
Did you know that on this day in 1865, Greenwich Village resident Henry Highland Garnet became the first African-American to address congress, at the invitation of President Abraham Lincoln? Or that on this day in 1909, the NAACP was founded, an organization which held its first public meeting at Cooper Union’s Great Hall on Astor Place? These are just some of the recent additions to GVSHP’s Civil Rights and Social Justice Map, including information about North America’s first free black settlement, which covered much of Greenwich Village and the East Village, the first black Catholic Church in the north, St. Benedict the Moor Church on Bleecker Street, and the Women’s House of Detention on Greenwich Avenue, where Black Panther Angela Davis was held when she was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, and protested against mistreatment of prisoners and racial discrimination in the jail.
The map has more than thirty sites connected to African-American history, and over a hundred connected to civil rights and social justice history – see them all here.
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