New York City needs to “do better” to prevent black residents from being evicted from their neighborhoods, Mayor Eric Adams said Sunday during an address that marked Juneteenth’s party.
Speaking in Central Park, Adams compared the current uprooting of people of color in U.S. neighborhoods, including the five districts, to slavery.
“When I was in Ghana last year, [I] he saw families being displaced, torn to pieces, and taken to America by slavery in the hulls of ships, living in dungeons, spending months and months living in their human waste, taking their babies, and seeing them scattered and displaced. “He said.
“It’s no different here,” Adams told the crowd at the Central Park Conservancy’s Juneteenth celebration.
“We can’t look at ourselves in the rearview mirror and say we should have done better when we’re here right now,” he said. “We’re going to do better right now. We recognize the presence of people to be part of the community they built.”
The mayor noted Seneca Village, which was established in 1825 in the western parts of what is now Central Park and became the home of more than 200 free black people, who were evicted some 30 years later to make way. in the iconic Manhattan green space. .
“Imagine being displaced over and over and over again,” Adams said. “When this village broke down to build this park, we moved the energy from Seneca Village. It never came back.
Speaking in Central Park, Adams compared the current uprooting of people of color in U.S. neighborhoods, including the five districts, to slavery. Michael Noble Jr. for The Washington Post via Getty Images
“We will not commemorate Seneca Village when we are creating another destruction of a Seneca Village,” he said.
“We have to think about it as we run around looking at this beautiful space [Frederick] Olmsted built, while we look at how big this Central Park is in midtown Manhattan, we moved some families here. We have destroyed lives, “said the mayor. “There were families here long before Starbucks. They were here and they provided a base.”
Black communities in the area were forced to relocate and rebuild in other neighborhoods, such as Harlem, downtown Brooklyn and Bedford Stuyvesant, Adams said, adding, “And now what’s going on? we are moving again “.
New York City needs to “do better” to prevent black residents from being evicted from their neighborhoods, Mayor Eric Adams said during an address that marked Juneteenth’s vacation.Twitter/@NYCMayor
“No one wanted this land. This land was unattractive. No one wanted Manhattan,” Adams added, referring to the less prosperous decades of New York City history. “These churches left because they had to go to other places like Harlem in downtown Brooklyn.
Adams, New York City’s second black mayor, noted that in recent decades, black Americans have been forced out of the neighborhoods of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Atlanta; communities he lamented had encountered “destruction”.
“We start over and over again, and we wonder why we see some of the crises we face in black in brown communities,” he said. “Every time they could get a point of footing, they would be displaced again. As soon as you started building something, it broke. “
Adams, who in April announced that Juneteenth would be a paid holiday for city workers, encouraged the approximately 40 attendees not only to reflect on the past, but also to make sure it is not repeated.
“We educate our kids so they know there were people here who built this city we call New York,” he said.
June, one of the oldest holidays in America, marks the official end of slavery in the United States in 1865, when Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to inform the last Confederate sympathizers that they had lost. the Civil War, so all slaves needed. be released. In June 2021, Juneteenth became the 12th federal holiday.
Adams began Saturday weekend with a visit to a Hamptons synagogue.
Earlier on Sunday, the mayor’s office announced that the City Hall and several other buildings will be lit up on Sunday and Monday evenings in red, black and green, the color of the pan-African flag, to honor the party.
“This Juneteenth, we proudly say that the history of blacks is the history of the United States,” Adams said in a press release. “Today is a time to remember and celebrate the countless contributions of black Americans to our country, while acknowledging the many sacrifices and hardships our community has faced.
“I hope all New Yorkers join me in recognizing the freedom that was denied to black Americans for too long.”
The red, black, and green municipal buildings are Bronx Borough Hall, David N. Dinkins City Hall, Manhattan City Hall, Queens Borough Hall, Staten Island Borough Hall, and the DSNY Salt Shed Complex.
In addition, the colors will be displayed in a large number of Big Apple landmarks, including Madison Square Garden; 30 Rockefeller Plaza; The Empire State Building; the Javits Center; One World Observatory and National September 11 Memorial Museum.