FILE – New York Metropolis Mayor Eric Adams speaks throughout a information convention at Metropolis Corridor, Dec. 12, 2023, in New York.
(AP Photograph/Peter Ok. Afriyie, File)
Because the second Black mayor of New York Metropolis, I’m proud to rejoice Juneteenth, a day that commemorates June 19, 1865, when each enslaved Black American was lastly free. This can be a day of significance not only for Black Individuals, however for all Individuals. It’s a day when the promise of freedom lastly matched Black Individuals’ lived actuality. It’s a day when the liberty for which America is understood for all over the world lastly grew to become accessible to a wider group of residents.
Nonetheless, as everyone knows, that was solely the beginning of an extended battle — a battle for equal entry from housing and well being care to the poll field and boardrooms that continues to the current day. In honor of Juneteenth and the progress now we have revamped the previous centuries and a long time, our administration desires to play its half in utilizing the current to reckon with our previous so we are able to construct a greater future.
New Yorkers stroll by way of neighborhoods like Brooklyn day-after-day, unaware of the historical past proper underneath their toes and surrounding them. To inform that historical past, we launched “More Than a Brook: Brooklyn Abolitionist Heritage Walk,” an interactive audio tour that explores Brooklyn’s history as a critical neighborhood for the Nationwide Abolitionist Motion and the Underground Railroad. The 4.5-mile walkable path incorporates 19 stops highlighting the numerous landmark websites that seize the borough’s wealthy abolitionist historical past. Alongside the best way, along with seeing well-known abolitionist websites, you may study vital native historic figures, together with businesswoman Elizabeth Gloucester, pioneering sisters Dr. Susan Smith McKinney-Steward and educator Sarah J. Tompkins Garnet, and Plymouth Church preacher Henry Ward Beecher. The tour might be accessed in your smartphone, pill, or different system by way of the Landmark Preservation Commission’s website. With this interactive tour, our metropolis can rejoice the heroes who stood up towards injustice, risked their lives, and fought for the liberty they deserved.
The town’s abolitionist historical past lives throughout all 5 boroughs. In Staten Island’s Oakwood Heights, we’re commemorating our shared historical past by designating the Frederick Douglass Memorial Park as a landmark. The Frederick Douglass Memorial Park is the one non-sectarian cemetery based by — and particularly for — New York Metropolis’s Black neighborhood. The memorial park opened in 1935, providing a dignified cemetery for Black New Yorkers at a time when discrimination and segregation excluded them from different burial websites and restricted them to substandard amenities and providers. In a time when others turned their backs on Black New Yorkers, this park selected to open its doorways. The 14.88-acre burial website memorializes Black heritage and honors the generations of Black Individuals who’re buried there. Frederick Douglass Memorial Park supplied a dignified and devoted area for the Black neighborhood to honor those that transitioned. However, our remembrance of Juneteenth can’t be simply symbolic, however substantive.
As not too long ago as final January, Black New Yorkers had been 4 occasions extra more likely to be unemployed than white New Yorkers, however, due to our efforts, now we have been in a position to slender this hole, and now the unemployment rate for Black New Yorkers is at its lowest point in half a decade. This marks the primary time since 2019 that the Black unemployment price in New York Metropolis has been beneath 8 %. And between January 1, 2022, and April 1, 2024, the Black unemployment price within the 5 boroughs decreased from 10.7 % to 7.9 % — a 26 % lower. Whereas our work isn’t performed, our metropolis is making actual progress in delivering financial fairness.
This Juneteenth, I name on all New Yorkers to study and honor our metropolis and nation’s inspiring and troubled previous and proceed to construct on the progress now we have made. Allow us to rejoice American beliefs, American freedoms, and American potential, collectively. And allow us to begin proper right here, in probably the most various metropolis on the globe, a spot the place these from all walks of life dwell facet by facet, proud to name themselves by one identify: New Yorkers.
