September 13, 2005
For years, Mary K. Carter felt that New York's two-century history as a slave state was treated as an embarrassing secret, mostly ignored in school curriculums.

"Many people are surprised when you talk about slavery's existence in New York," said Carter, a Freeport resident and retired middle-school teacher in the Rockville Centre school district. "They're surprised because it's taught as something that happened in the South."

So when the education department at Hofstra University began working on a curriculum to help school children understand how the enslavement of Africans helped build New York's wealth and power, she joined the team.

That curriculum has been named this year's "exemplary social studies program" by the nation's largest association of social studies teachers.

The curriculum - a 268- page guide for teachers that includes links to Web sites, primary documents and suggested lesson plans - will be honored at the National Council for the Social Studies' 85th annual conference Nov. 19 in Kansas City, Mo.

"It gives a lot of legitimacy to the idea that slavery ought to be taught in New York," said Hofstra education professor Alan Singer, who led a team of 80 teachers and education students in producing the study guide.

Singer said the curriculum flowed from 1996 legislation directing the state Board of Regents to devote attention to three of history's injustices: the Irish Potato Famine, the Holocaust and the enslavement of Africans.

Although much course material on the Holocaust already existed, and a famine curriculum was delivered to every school in the state in 2002, disagreements over content slowed production of a curriculum on slavery.

Originally, state education officials envisioned a guide that would document how kindly New Yorkers helped runaways flee the South via the Underground Railroad. But Singer and others felt such an upbeat portrayal would reinforce beliefs that slavery was a Southern institution abhorred by New Yorkers. They called for a more hard-hitting curriculum that dealt with the reality that slavery was a New York institution.

"I think it is something that can't be ignored," Singer said.

The Hofstra curriculum, produced in collaboration with the New York City schools department and the Brooklyn Historical Society, took the more hard-hitting approach.

New York was a slave state for longer than it has been a free one - from 1627 to 1827. In 1711, a law passed by New York's city council established a slave market where Wall Street stands today.

Profits from the slave trade continued to enrich New Yorkers long after state legislation in 1799 mandated the gradual end of slavery here. Fortunes made from slave profits later helped finance the Long Island Rail Road, the American Sugar Co. and Citibank, according to the Hofstra curriculum.

Even after slavery ended here, it continued to underpin New York's economy. Investments in shipping and Southern plantations enriched New York banks and brokerage houses, said George Washington University historian James O. Horton. And cotton, sugar, tobacco and other slave products provided jobs for factory workers, warehousemen, stevedores, and immigrant day laborers.

New York's economy was so linked with slavery that at the eve of the Civil War on 1861, Mayor Fernando Wood spoke of a "common sympathy" with "our aggrieved brethren of the slave states," and called for the city to break from the North.

"By 1860, the value of slaves in America exceeded the value of all the banks, all the factories and all the railroads in the United States," Horton said. "If you don't understand African-American history, you'll never understand American history."

The Hofstra curriculum is part of a spurt of scholarly work on the North's extensive role in forcing enslaved Africans to work in Manhattan, Long Island, the Hudson Valley and farther north. In June, Brown University produced a lesson plan for secondary students titled "A Forgotten History: The Slave Trade and Slavery in New England."

And the New York Historical Society is finalizing a new exhibit titled "Slavery in New York," which will open Oct. 7.

Historical Society president Louise Mirrer said, "The topic of slavery in New York is virtually absent from school curricula. There really is no focus on this topic."