Central Park Was Built on a Destroyed Black Community The shocking untold story behind Central Park! Before NYC's famous park existed, the land was home to Seneca Village - a thriving community of 225 Black property owners from 1825-1857. This was the largest Black landowning community in pre-Civil War New York, complete with churches, schools, and voting rights. But in 1857, the city used eminent domain to forcibly remove 1,600 residents and erase this beacon of Black freedom to build a park fo

The forgotten history of Seneca Village, a thriving Black community in New York City that was erased to make way for Central Park in the 1850s. | MarkizMarketing

In honor of Black History Month, we're celebrating the people of Seneca Village, one of the first black communities of New York. "They defined what it meant to be an American, even when the law and the government did not see them as such." | Secrets of the Dead