Years Before Civil War

In the years before the Civil War, New York police officers sold free Black Americans into enslavement.

According To the Emancipator, a historical abolitionist newspaper, Riker was the leader of a group of officials known as the Kidnapping Club, who “actively collaborated” to both send and sell free blacks in New York who were accused of being fugitives to slaveowners in the South without due process.

This year’s clashes between protestors and the police from Portland to Atlanta to Kenosha are the latest flashpoints in the long history of policing in America. While the police today emerged from a hodge-podge of national and international iterations, one of the United States’ earliest and most storied forces, 

The New York City police, offers modern Americans a lesson in the intractability of problems between the black community and the officers sworn to uphold the law. That long history is both bleak and demoralizing. But this past also reminds us that real change will only happen by learning from the collective American experience, one in which those who supported systems of oppression were met by others who bravely battled against them.

As The nation’s most populous city for most of its history, New York has been uniquely affected by this dynamic. In the decades before the Civil War, when Gotham’s police force was becoming regularized and professionalized, Manhattan routinely erupted in riotous violence over the very meaning of equality.

According To the Emancipator, a historical abolitionist newspaper, Riker was the leader of a group of officials known as the Kidnapping Club, who “actively collaborated” to both send and sell free blacks in New York who were accused of being fugitives to slaveowners in the South without due process.