Vereen plays games at the store Thursday nights with other members of the Wilmington Board Games, described on its Web site as a group "dedicated to playing fun, social, strategic board and card games in the Wilmington area." Cape Fear Games opened in November 2009 and offers free space to play for gamers of all skill levels and types, from those who like collectible cards or miniature warriors to connoisseurs of classic board games such as Monopoly and Clue. In 2009, sales of board games in the United States grew to $849.5 million, a 3.6 percent jump from 2008, according to market research firm IBISWorld. And indeed, upon completing this account of arrests and abductions, one is left with a haunting sense of loss, with a recognition of what Harriet Jacobs termed "wrongs which even the grave does not bury.Just for fun on a recent Thursday evening, Erich Vereen tried to keep four deadly diseases from spreading across the globe and wiping out humanity.Īlthough the Leland resident was only playing a board game called Pandemic at Cape Fear Games, 3608 Oleander Drive, his passion for these strategic games has helped fuel the board game industry in recent years, as individuals and families search for cheaper ways to have fun in a suffering economy. Wells concludes his study by proposing that its contents offer supporting evidence in the ongoing case for reparations. Wells's analysis provides a genealogy of racist policing, and in an effective epilogue, he underscores the connection with our present moment, emphasizing that the struggle of Ruggles and others "against the New York Kidnapping Club is redolent of today's Black Lives Matter movement" (p. Still, The Kidnapping Club deserves to be widely read, not least because of its timeliness. The alternating chapters examining the Kidnapping Club and the transatlantic slave trade cohere incompletely, and the book's momentum begins to flag after Ruggles departs for Massachusetts two-thirds of the way into the narrative. Instead, the author foregrounds everyday acts of complicity and their damning human consequences.įull of essential stories, the book falters only in that its various parts do not always add up. By zooming in on stories like Downing's, Wells refuses to reduce northern support for slavery to an abstraction. Wells fills his account with the microbiographies of African Americans stolen into slavery such as Stephen Downing, an accused runaway arrested by New York sheriff's officers, jailed in Bridewell Prison, and shipped to a Virginia plantation under the cover of night. Unlike many previous studies, however, The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War unpacks the ramifications of northern complicity in extraordinarily specific detail. An ever-growing body of literature has illuminated how white northerners propped up and benefited from the institution of southern slavery. What sets this book apart is the scale of its analysis. Throughout, we see how Ruggles promoted militant collective action among African Americans less to preserve than to create free space in New York City. He focuses especially on the activism of David Ruggles, a radical journalist who fought back both in print-he coined "The Kidnapping Club"-and by organizing, taking a leadership post in the New York Committee of Vigilance. White elites accepted the illegal use of the port of New York as a slave-trading hub, Wells contends, because they knew Wall Street's profits depended on slave-grown cotton.īlack New Yorkers never stopped resisting kidnapping and slave trading in their city, Wells makes clear. Along with tracing "a 'reverse underground railroad,'" Wells shows how New York politicians and businessmen countenanced and even profited from another kidnapping effort: the transatlantic slave trade (p. Constitution's fugitive slave clause, this loose affiliation of police officers, city officials, and judges worked in concert to abduct Black New Yorkers-free people as well as runaways-and sell them south into enslavement. Wells's narrative centers on the machinations of the eponymous New York Kidnapping Club. His account brings us to pre–Civil War New York City, detailing how white authorities actively and repeatedly subverted Black freedom. Strange incongruity in a State called free!" In a beautifully researched study, Jonathan Daniel Wells elaborates on the making of this incongruity. "I was, in fact, a slave in New York," Jacobs wrote, "as subject to slave laws as I had been in a Slave State. Near the end of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Harriet Jacobs explained how she had escaped the South but not slavery.
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