JOHN E . DOWELL , JR .
John Dowell ’ s Cotton
By Brittany Webb
WHEN JOHN E . DOWELL , JR . SEES COTTON , he sees red . He sees labor — plantation slavery and all its attendant violences — the role it played in inventing Black Americans as a race of people , brutalizing ancestors physically , mentally , psychologically , fracturing family trees . He sees the way it underwrote the United States ’ economic prowess , creating unprecedented wealth in places that largely escape the geographic association with American chattel slavery in our collective memory . Places like Wall Street , Central Park , and Washington Square in New York City . The physical violence of the harvesting practice and lived experience of enslavement , the psychic violence of dehumanization that extends past life into deaths marked by mass graves , the hypocrisy of churches and parks associated with a public good — these all haunt these cherished , seemingly innocuous public spaces . Dowell sees this violence and its erasure . Sees the haints and saints and wants you to see them , too . Dowell ’ s Central Park is Seneca Village . His Washington Square is a sacred burial ground , his New York City a plantation . Historic churches appear in the contemporary city on blood-saturated soil .
Wall Street stands as a global symbol for New York ’ s financial district and , by extension , American economic power . The fact that its name comes from a wall built by enslaved Africans in 1653 to protect Dutch settlers to New Amsterdam from indigenous natives and rival English settlers is a lesser-known history . Wall Street became the location for New York ’ s first slave market in 1711 , and historians estimate that 41 % of households in New York had slaves during the colonial period . While slavery in the urban northeast was not the plantation slavery of states further south , cotton was a cash crop that enriched the shippers and merchants in the north as well as the south , building financial institutions that helped make New York a global city . Dowell ’ s photos remind us of cotton ’ s role as a New York wealth generator by ensuring we see it as the grounds out of which these great institutions grew . Cotton is literal , figurative , and spiritual . It lies in fields , chokes Wall Street high rises , crowds the contemporary urban streets . It comes into focus , seemingly with arms and legs . It comes at you . It flies out of chimneys and church organ pipes , swirls about dreamy and menacing , and dares us to confront its soft and cutting histories .
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