Rikers Island, a present-day protest and a link to NYC’s ‘Kidnapping Club’ past

A day after Mayor Eric Adams announced he wants to allow federal immigration enforcement agents on Rikers Island, activist Darren Mack told protesters outside City Hall that the potential move bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the jail’s complex history.

Nearly 200 years ago, Richard Riker — a powerful judge whose family the island is named after — was at the center of a network that included city officials, police officers and others who captured Black New Yorkers, purportedly fugitive enslaved people, and delivered them to Southern slave owners, according to historians.

Mack was detained on Rikers Island in 1992 and 1993 and is now the co-founder and co-director of Freedom Agenda, which works with people affected by incarceration. On Feb. 14, he told the crowd that Adams’ proposal to bring U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents back to Rikers would put Black and Latino immigrants in enforcement agents' crosshairs and was on par with Richard Riker’s harmful actions.

“[Riker] made a deal with racists from the South that came to New York City to kidnap free Black men, women and children to put them back into the bondage of the oppressive system of slavery,” said Mack. He added that Adams, who wants ICE to work with city officials targeting gang members and violent criminals, “made a deal to put immigrants into a system of bondage on Rikers Island, and that's not right.”

Mack’s invocation of Riker focused fresh attention on the city’s early treatment of Black New Yorkers, the jail’s inextricable ties to the slave trade, and offered more grist – in the context of immigration – for those urging the jail facility's closure. For advocates like Mack, the story of Riker is a thread connecting the past to a present in which an overwhelming majority of detainees at his namesake jail are Black and Latino.

Adams announced on Feb. 14 that he was preparing an executive order to permit ICE agents to operate in the jail complex. A 2014 law, which was passed amid concerns that unauthorized immigrants accused of crimes were being put into deportation proceedings even after being acquitted of any criminal charges, effectively bars them from doing so. Adams has not yet released the executive order putting his plan into motion.

But criminal justice advocates' goal of closing the troubled jail has proved elusive, and so has changing the jail's problematic name.

Riker was at the “apex” of a network of white people who collaborated in the capture of Black New Yorkers, including children, and their transport into the hands of Southern slave owners, said Jonathan Daniel Wells, a historian at the University of Michigan. He wrote “The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War,” which chronicled Riker’s role.

Wells said Riker wielded “immense power” over Black New Yorkers in his capacity as the city’s recorder during the first half of the 19th century. This included the power to determine whether someone had been born free or had fled slavery in the South and was required under the federal Fugitive Slave Act to be returned to their slaveholder.

Wells, however, said Riker “didn’t really care” where the facts led.

“ He was more interested in making sure that the white South knew that New York City would be its ally when it came to returning so called runaways,” Wells said.

“By the 1830s, cotton had emerged as the nation’s premier export crop, and New York merchants dominated the transatlantic trade in the ‘white gold,’” wrote historian Eric Foner in “Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad.”

J.D.B. De Bow, editor of the era’s premier Southern monthly, wrote in 1860 that New York City was “almost as dependent upon Southern slavery as Charleston.”

Although New York completely outlawed slavery in 1827, Riker and others ensured that life in the ensuing decades remained precarious for thousands of Black New York City residents, said Wells.

“All of this wealth and power made Black lives cheap in the minds of white leaders,” wrote Wells in “The Kidnapping Club.”

“Black residents were being stolen from the streets, torn from families, kidnapped from the footpaths and docks around the town, all in the name of making New York rich.”

The mayor’s office rejects the analogy

Historians and Black activists have long cited Riker as the embodiment of New York’s troubled racial history.

But Mack took matters a step further, arguing that the same forces that subjugated Black New Yorkers in the 19th century also apply to immigrants in the Adams era.

Adams' spokesperson Liz Garcia rejected the analogy, calling it “an egregious, uninformed comparison.”

"Under Mayor Adams’ leadership, New York City has compassionately cared for over 232,000 migrants and helped over 100,000 migrants apply for Temporary Protected Status, asylum, and work authorization,” said Garcia in a statement.

“Mayor Adams has also been clear that we must address the small amount of migrants committing violent crimes in our city,” she added.

Historians said Richard Riker was unambiguous in his views.

Riker made his pro-slavery views very clear, said Hall, telling one acquaintance in a written correspondence, “we Northern judges damn the abolitionists.”

Riker’s chief antagonist was David Ruggles, a Black New Yorker and abolitionist who helped lead hundreds of formerly enslaved people to freedom, including Frederick Douglass. Ruggles coined the phrase “the Kidnapping Club,” said Wells.

Jacob Morris, the director of the Harlem Historical Society, said he learned of Riker’s exploits more than 20 years ago, while advocating for an official city commemoration of the waterfront location where Douglass arrived in New York after escaping from slavery.

“ Ruggles was basically the head of the Underground Railroad in New York City,” said Morris.

Morris said he initially puzzled over the fact that the committee headed by Ruggles to oversee the work of the Underground Railroad was called the New York Committee of Vigilance.

“Why?  Because Black women, Black mothers had to be vigilant for their children getting kidnapped,” said Morris.

Morris said Riker got “kickbacks” from agents representing slave owners, but Wells said there’s no evidence that Riker financially profited from the system.

Wells said it’s hard to know how many Black New Yorkers were victims of “the Kidnapping Club,” but his book states that during stretches of time in the 1830s, reports of missing children alone emerged weekly or more often.

“ It's probable that they would never be seen again,” said Wells, “and that they would live their lives enslaved.”

To close or to rename Rikers

Efforts to close Rikers Island by 2027, as stipulated under a plan the de Blasio administration announced in 2017, have faced considerable obstacles. That includes pushback from communities opposed to a borough-based jail system envisioned as the complex's replacement, according to proponents of the plan.

The Rev. Chloe Breyer, who is also part of the Close Rikers campaign, said it felt like efforts to shut down the jail had stalled several years ago.

“ There was a plan, there was a report, all was going well,” said Breyer, “and then the pandemic hit, and it all went backwards.”

But Breyer said based on her conversations with city officials and influential faith leaders, momentum was building again.

“It's not a question of if, but a question of when Rikers will be closed,” she said.

Adams said in a statement earlier this month he wants federal immigration enforcement officers to return to Rikers Island to help city investigators target gang members and violent criminals. He has not yet put forth a promised executive order laying out his wishes.

In the meantime, Morris said he was disappointed in the public response to his 2015 petition calling for the complex's renaming, recalling that “several thousand” had signed the petition.

He said he was moved by the deaths of detainees on Rikers Island, including Kalief Browder. Browder spent three years on Rikers after being accused of stealing a backpack at age 16. He spent much of that time in solitary confinement before charges were ultimately dismissed. He died by suicide after his release in 2015.

“When that kid committed suicide,  after he had been locked up for a long time on Rikers for supposedly stealing a purse, that tore it completely,” said Morris. “I said, we’ve got to take this [expletive] guy's name off of Rikers Island.”

Morris said he continues to believe Rikers Island should be renamed, arguing that “the symbolism has meaning.”

“ The chief judge (Riker) of New York City's legal system going along with the kidnapping of children?” he asked. “And his name is on this island, the largest penal colony?”

“ That's disgusting,” said Morris. “That's a disgrace.”

But Mack said if Rikers Island is ever renamed, it should only happen after the facility is shut down, not before.

“To change the name now while the Rikers is still functioning as a penal colony doesn’t move the work of ending the torture forward,” said Mack, who was incarcerated at Rikers in 1992 at 17, and spent 19 months there before serving a 20-year prison sentence for serving as an accessory to a robbery.

“The Rikers name is directly connected to bondage and inhumanity,” said Mack. “Therefore the name should remain until the bondage and human rights crisis completely ends.”