The head of the Harlem Historical Society wants Rikers Island renamed based on the namesake family's connection to slavery.
The embattled jail complex, which has been beset with scandal over poor treatment of inmates and calls to shut it down, gets its name from the family of Abraham Rycken, a Dutch immigrant who settled in New York in the 1600s, according to the New York Historical Society.
Jacob Morris, director of the Harlem Historical Society, recently started a petition to rename the embattled jail complex due to family member Richard Riker's history of helping send blacks into slavery during the 19th century.
Riker presided over the main criminal court in New York City, the Court of Special Sessions, in the early 1800s, and he used his authority in this position to send blacks to slavery as part of what abolitionists called the Kidnapping Club, according to historian Eric Foner.
15 comments:
Here we go another petition...another historical society.
Why not publicize the connection to slavery and the continued encarceration of a race instead?
Let the name be as a beacon to continued slavery behind bars.
A large percentage of the inmates are people of color. At least that is what a corrections officer told me,
if we choose to believe hi. BTW, he is a person of color.
The Riker family owned this island until 1884, long after slavery was abolished.
While we are at it let's take slave owner Washington off the dollar bill and 25 cent piece then knock down the Washington Monument.
Jefferson? Also a slave owner so remove him from the two dollar bill and the five cent piece and while we are at it transform the Jefferson Memorial into a re-education center for white folk.
F.D. Roosevelt should be taken off of the ten cent piece because his family enslaved parts of China via the opium trade.
Jackson was a killer of American Indians so slice him off the twenty dollar bill.
Grant should be gone from the fifty too because he tormented the South during the civil war.
And The whole of New York should be renamed since James the Duke of York, for whom the city and state were named, headed the Royal African Company whose main purpose was the slave trade to America.
I am more upset about the renaming of the Queensboro Bridge to Manhattanite Ed Koch.
From the Ctpost.com:
"Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson are history in Connecticut.
Under pressure from the NAACP, the state Democratic Party will scrub the names of the two presidents from its annual fundraising dinner because of their ties to slavery.
Party leaders voted unanimously Wednesday night in Hartford to rename the Jefferson Jackson Bailey dinner in the aftermath of last month’s fatal shooting of nine worshipers at the historic black church in Charleston, S.C."
Memory, restoration, preservation. That is what historical societies should be concerned with.
Leave re-writing history to others.
Did you know most slaves came to America on Greek ships staffed with Greek ship hands? That is why the first Greek churches were in Mobile and New Orleans, which were slave trading ports.
I bet the Democratic Organization will go along with it.
Yes, because we all know that the name Riker is the cause of the high incarceration rate of blacks!
Guns don't kill people, Confederate flags do!!!
Rename Rikers Island "Planned Parenthood SURVIVER Re Education College for Misfit Democrats"
I know its long but its catchy 👊
>Infamous prisoin named after nasty guy who took away people's freedom
Sounds about right. What do they want to call it? Puppies and Kittens Island?
"Did you know most slaves came to America on Greek ships..."
How about supplying a site to this statement.
How about shedding our slave last names? Malcolm X had the right idea.
I'm sick of the blacks' stupid demands, aren't you?
Sure am, pal.
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