"Long before it became the site of the nation’s second-largest jail, Rikers was the home of one of New York City’s most prominent families, a Dutch-American dynasty with ties to the slave trade. In his latest book, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Eric Foner reveals that one of the family’s most celebrated figures, a legal official named Richard Riker, was part of a kidnapping ring that terrorized black New Yorkers in the 1800s...
For generations, these names were nothing more than white noise in our civic discourse, familiar sounds with unfamiliar origins. But “we are now facing a growing acknowledgement that slavery haunts the national imagination,” says Mark Auslander, a professor of anthropology at Central Washington University. Auslander is the author of The Accidental Slaveowner, an acclaimed book about a Georgia community struggling with its slaveholding past. He views initiatives like the Rikers Island petition as evidence of a cultural shift in how Americans are discussing the “Peculiar Institution.”...
descendant James Riker wrote a history of the family’s northern Queens community and described it as a place where “slaves were found even in the ministers’ families...
As New York’s City Recorder from 1815 to 1838, Richard Riker was the legal official responsible for returning the city’s fugitive slaves to their masters in the South. In Gateway to Freedom, Eric Foner details Riker’s involvement in a network of pro-slavery officials and slave-traders known as the “Kidnapping Club.” Riker’s allies would detain both escaped slaves and free blacks alike, and present them at the Court of Sessions. Riker would deport them to the South before they could obtain a lawyer or a witness to testify on their behalf."
Related: NYT on reconsidering statues and names in the south; Memory Palace episode about the park? also on 99PI
FB: "By turning to long-overlooked black and anti-slavery sources, Harris was able to piece together the first widely read account of Richard Riker’s involvement in the New York Kidnapping Club.
Colgate University’s Graham Hodges built on Harris’ research in David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City. This 2010 biography of an abolitionist-journalist uncovered numerous examples of the judicial abuses at Riker’s court, including one diabolical episode in which he tried to send a free seven-year old boy into slavery. The book documents the beginnings of the tortuous, 200-year association between the Riker name and the criminal justice system of the U.S."
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