THE NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY ONCE AGAIN LEANS INTO THE HISTORY OF BLACK FOLKS IN NY

by Vivian Phillips

The odds are stacking up against the possibility that there will ever be another exhibit like the one mounted by the New-York Historical Society in 2005, Slavery in New York. It was a bold and, at the time, unsettling exhibition—one that did more than trace the arrival of the first Africans brought to New Amsterdam in 1627 by the Dutch West India Company. It forced visitors to confront a truth long buried beneath mythology and civic pride: for more than two centuries, New York was not merely complicit in American slavery, but central to it.

The Triangle Slave Trade. Courtesy Experience Media Group Krent/Paffett/Carney, Inc

The exhibit dismantled the convenient fiction that slavery was a Southern institution alone. Through documents, artifacts, maps, and lived stories, it made clear that New York’s rise as a commercial and financial powerhouse was inseparable from the buying, selling, insuring, and financing of enslaved human beings. While the charging bull on Wall Street has come to symbolize strength, speculation, and capitalism, the exhibition made plain that the city’s economic foundations were not built on cattle, trade alone, or even industry, but on chattel. Enslaved labor cleared land, built roads, docks, and homes, and generated the wealth that flowed through Manhattan’s banks, counting houses, and ports. Wall Street itself, quite literally, once bordered a wall built by enslaved Africans.

The New-York Historical Society dedicated nearly two years to researching and assembling Slavery in New York, uncovering archival material that had been ignored, mislabeled, or deliberately forgotten. In doing so, the institution affirmed something radical: that the history of enslaved people in New York is not marginal or supplementary to the city’s story—it is the story. The exhibit altered how educators, scholars, and the general public understood New York’s past, and it set a high-water mark for what public history could accomplish when institutions chose courage over comfort.

That such an exhibition would be mounted today feels increasingly unlikely. In an era marked by political backlash against so-called “divisive” history, shrinking funding for humanities institutions, and coordinated efforts to sanitize the past, projects of this magnitude face steep resistance. Yet if history has proven anything, it is that the New-York Historical Society does not easily cower when confronted with the responsibility of telling hard truths.

True to form, the institution has once again embarked on a bold interpretive project—this time turning its attention to Black life, creativity, and resistance through a lens still too often erased. On view now through March 8, The Gay Harlem Renaissance lifts up a vital and frequently sidelined dimension of one of the most celebrated cultural movements in American history.

Portraits of Bessie Smith and Jimmie Daniels, both by Carl Van Vechten - Van Vechten Collection at Library of Congress.

Centered around The New Negro (1925), the landmark anthology edited by philosopher and cultural critic Alain Locke, the exhibition reframes the Harlem Renaissance not only as a flowering of Black art and intellect, but also as a space of queer possibility. Locke himself—often described as the movement’s architect—was gay, as were many of his contemporaries, collaborators, and protégés. Their sexuality was rarely discussed openly in their time, yet it profoundly shaped the communities they built, the aesthetics they advanced, and the spaces in which they found freedom.

The exhibition immerses visitors in the social world of 1920s and 1930s Harlem: rent parties that doubled as survival strategies and incubators of joy; speakeasies that blurred racial and sexual boundaries; cabarets and nightclubs where performers bent gender, sound, and style. These spaces were not just entertainment venues—they were sanctuaries. They offered refuge to Black artists navigating the twin violences of racism and homophobia in a nation that criminalized same-sex desire and rigidly policed respectability.

White downtown audiences often ventured uptown under the cover of night, drawn by the thrill of Harlem’s nightlife, while Black performers and patrons carved out fleeting zones of autonomy and expression. Within these circles, singers, poets, dancers, writers, and intellectuals found camaraderie, intimacy, and affirmation. Figures such as Langston Hughes, Gladys Bentley, Bessie Smith, Richard Bruce Nugent, and others existed within a continuum of queerness that scholarship is only now fully recovering and naming.

Gladys Bentley c. 1930, courtesy Wikimedia

What The Gay Harlem Renaissance makes clear is that queerness was not an anomaly within the movement—it was woven into its fabric. The Renaissance’s experimentation, its defiance of Victorian norms, and its insistence on self-definition all resonated deeply with Black LGBTQ+ experience. To remove queerness from this history is to misunderstand the movement entirely.

Unfortunately, the New-York Historical Society’s online materials offer only limited insight into the exhibition's full scope, a reminder of how fragile access to this history can be. A similar exhibition, Harlem Renaissance and Black Queer History, was mounted several years ago at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Even there, the digital footprint is understated—one of those pages you must already know to search for in order to find. That quietness feels less accidental in a moment when government institutions face mounting pressure to obscure, minimize, or outright erase histories deemed inconvenient.

This makes exhibitions like The Gay Harlem Renaissance all the more urgent. They stand not only as acts of preservation, but as acts of resistance—asserting that Black history is complex, expansive, and inseparable from Black queer life. Just as Slavery in New York once demanded that the city reckon with its origins, this exhibition insists that we reckon with who has always been here, creating, loving, surviving, and shaping culture in ways that cannot—and should not—be scrubbed away.

In a time when history itself feels under siege, the New-York Historical Society’s willingness to tell these stories remains both rare and necessary.