| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Leslie M. Harris. In the Shadow of Slavery: African-Americans in New York City, 1626–1863. (Historical Studies of Urban America.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2003. Pp. xii, 380. $42.50.

Leslie M. Harris's study of the first two hundred and thirty-seven years of African-American life in New York City begins with the 1991 discovery of the eighteenth-century African Burial Ground beneath twenty feet of Lower Manhattan "asphalt, concrete and rubble" (p. 1). Harris's work represents a feat of excavation and reconstruction no less daunting. At one level, it is a history of the "long" civil rights movement in New York City. As such, it traces the myriad ways African Americans fought for public power through the period of legal slavery (which ended in 1827) and into an era of increasingly tenuous legal freedom that lasted at least through the draft riots of 1863. Indeed, one of the book's contributions is to demonstrate that there were multiple and competing movements for freedom and equality, that the "black community" existed as a project, never as a given, and that "complex divisions of status, class, outlook and aspiration" (p. 287) characterized black struggles in New York from the start. At another level, Harris has written a history of enslaved and free black labor in New York that is meticulously attentive to the ways in which the class situations of middle-class white and black abolitionists, on the one hand, and the black laboring poor, on the other, came to shape their differing political perspectives and strategies. Finally, the author traces the evolution of racial caste and race consciousness in New York, illustrating how different groups of black New Yorkers responded to shifting definitions of white supremacy and managed to respond creatively and assertively to an urban culture at best characterized by profound uncertainty and at worst bent on their annihilation. The book weaves these themes—black activism, slavery and labor, and race—into a narrative that provides, at once, a richly evoked portrait of a black community in the making and a corrective to the new labor history's tendency to slight the black worker and the racialized dimension of American working-class formation.

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