South Street Seaport Museum to Explore the African American Oystermen Who Helped Shape New York Harbor

 South Street Seaport Museum announces Black Oystermen of New York Harbor on Friday, June 26, 2026, at 6:30pm at 213 Water Street. Advanced registration is suggested for this free event. Book free tickets here.

South Street Seaport Museum to Explore the African American Oystermen Who Helped Shape New York Harbor

Before New York became a city of skyscrapers, finance and ferry commutes with coffee in hand, it was a maritime city — and oysters were among its great engines of labor, trade and survival.

On June 26, the South Street Seaport Museum will present a free lecture examining the lives of African American oystermen and their families who helped build that world. The program, presented in partnership with the Sandy Ground Historical Society, will take place at 6:30 p.m. at 213 Water Street.

The lecture will be led by Julie Moody Lewis, director of the Sandy Ground Historical Society, who will explore one of New York City’s earliest free African American communities and the oyster industry that helped it thrive. Through historical context, family stories and objects from the Society’s collection, the program will consider what liberty looked like in a maritime city during the decades before the Emancipation Proclamation — after slavery had been abolished in New York, but while it remained legal in much of the United States.

At the center of the evening is Sandy Ground, the Staten Island community that grew rapidly in the 1840s when free African American families migrated north from Snow Hill, Md. In Maryland, increasingly restrictive laws had limited African American participation in the oyster industry. In New York, the oyster-rich waters of Prince’s Bay and Raritan Bay offered possibilities: work, enterprise, land and a measure of independence.

Sandy Ground became a thriving farming and maritime community, rooted in labor, entrepreneurship, and resilience. Founded in 1828 by free African American men Moses and Silas Harris, it is recognized as the oldest continuously inhabited free African American community in the United States. Historically known as Harrisville, Africa, and Little Africa, the community also played a role in the Underground Railroad.

The program is connected to the museum’s exhibition The Promise of Liberty: Words That Shaped a Nation, which includes a First State Department Printing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Before the lecture, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m., attendees are invited to view the exhibition; admission is included with the free event ticket.

The pairing is pointed. The Emancipation Proclamation is often discussed as a national document, but the Seaport program brings the conversation closer to home, asking how freedom was lived, worked for, and defended by African American New Yorkers long before it was fully guaranteed by law.

Preregistration is encouraged, and walk-ups will be accommodated as space allows.

The South Street Seaport Museum, founded in 1967, preserves the history of New York as a port city through exhibitions, historic vessels, working 19th-century print shops, education spaces, and a maritime library. Its mission is rooted in the idea that the seaport is “Where New York Begins.” This program makes clear that African American maritime labor belongs at the center of that beginning.