Black and White Manhattan

Thelma Wills Foote is Associate Professor of History and African-American Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

In this sober, thoughtful, profoundly researched book, Thelma Foote shows that Black people were fundamental to early New York. Under Dutch founders, English conquerors, and American Revolutionaries, slavery, racial thinking, and slaves' resistance were part of the main New York story. Much of that story is ugly, but it is an American tale that needs telling and Foote has told it very well.