We Are Still Discovering the Tracks of the Underground Railroad

In a historic early nineteenth century building, in a bedroom on the second floor, you can find a large white dresser built into the wall. Opening the dresser’s heavy bottom drawer, there is a small hatch door in the bottom, leading into a narrow shaft with a steep, wooden ladder leading downward. The wax drippings of long-extinguished candles dot the confines of the dark shaft. Historians and conservationists have long known about this strange secret passage stretching down to the ground level. The building had been preserved for decades, but for other reasons. It is known today as the old Merchant’s House, just a few blocks east of Washington Square Park in Lower Manhattan’s NoHo neighborhood. For almost a century, from 1835 to 1933, the Merchant’s House was the home of the Tredwell family, who made their fortune in the hardware business. It was built by a hatter named Joseph Brewster during the first two years of the 1830s.

The beautiful brick building is beloved by New York’s architecture buffs; the Federal and Greek Revival style mansion was, according to the museum that now occupies and administers the site, Manhattan’s first designated landmark, following the passage of 1965’s Landmarks Preservation Law. But what no one knew until this week is that the secret door and passage were a stop on the Underground Railroad that helped rescue an estimated 100,000 people from slavery (many historians say this estimate is much too low). The discovery is the first new Underground Railroad site found in Manhattan in over one hundred years.

For millions of Americans of all backgrounds and skin tones, the story of the Underground Railroad is among the most inspirational and emotionally resonant stories of our history as a country, one of true heroism in a life-or-death struggle for freedom. It is a story of America striving to become what it promised to be. This history and these sites are sacred to all Americans who love liberty and equality, and they’re more important than ever now, at a time when the country has a president intent on stirring up old racial hatreds for political gain and power.

Last March, Donald Trump signed an executive order taking aim at what it called “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” In particular, the order takes exception to the idea that “[r]ace is a human invention.” Trump explicitly objects to “the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct.” Let that sink in. This is to say that the current presidential administration believes race is an objective, scientific fact. This view, of course, is among the defining, foundational features of racism and white supremacy, the view antecedent to the establishment of a hierarchy that treats some races as superior to others. Donald Trump and the style of racist around him don’t admit this, though. What he and the people around him want is the privilege of being openly and odiously racist in public, but without any social repercussions whatsoever, without even having to be called a racist. Earlier this month, Trump refused to apologize after he posted a clip that includes the depiction of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as apes to his personal social media account.

Ironically, it is the Trump administration that has eagerly undertaken the project of erasing and rewriting our history, running around the country to remove exhibits and monuments that honor the history and struggle of Black Americans. Also ironically, its stated goal of combatting “historical revision” notwithstanding, Trump’s executive order throws the truth into sharp relief: whether in 1850, with the Fugitive Slave Act, or in 2026, with federal agents racially profiling people, the law has always been shot through with the ideas of white supremacy, the toxic lies that Black people and other racialized groups are inferior, that they must be ruled and controlled by their betters, that this order is somehow natural and neutral. There is a certain small group of Americans who get off on this kind of poisonous superstition, wallowing in its filth because it justifies their anger and allows them to feel superior without their having to do anything at all. But the demonstrable scientific fact is that the concepts and categories the modern age associates with “race” were and are socially constructed, developed after the fact as a justification for a brutal and exploitative economic system of slavery. There is no evidence whatsoever that racial categories map onto anything fixed and identifiable in biological or other scientific terms.

I am an anti-racist not only because I understand the most basic facts about the lone human species remaining on Earth and its genetic material, but because I reject the malevolent idea that some people are better than others because of how they look. Trump and his ilk are trying to convince you that it is possible to be a benign racist and white supremacist, that a racial hierarchy is built into the very nature of the universe. No part of this is true or ever has been. But if we must, let us review some basic facts about “biological reality.” To begin with, the Wikipedia article on human genetic variation summarizes the core of the scientific findings:

The lack of discontinuities in genetic distances between human populations, absence of discrete branches in the human species, and striking homogeneity of human beings globally, imply that there is no scientific basis for inferring races or subspecies in humans, and for most traits, there is much more variation within populations than between them. (emphasis in original)

The completion of the Human Genome Project made it clear and concrete that “humans are 99.9% identical at the DNA level and there is no genetic basis for race.” In our very recent history as a species, humans spread across the planet and evolved specialized superficial traits rather rapidly, and some of these involve characteristics like, for example, skin pigmentation, the capacity to easily digest milk, and certain differences in body size. But consistent with the fact that all of us emerged from the African continent, most such variations are actually found within African populations. And this is more generally true: most of our genetic variation as a species occurs within groups, not between them. Simply, there are no identifiable, specific genes or traits that are present in every single member of a supposed “race” and not present in the members of a putatively different one. The notion of race was invented by humans and human culture, developed socially out of the need to justify the domination and subjugation of certain groups for free labor in a class-based political economy.

The idea of race that we have today does not predate modernity or make any sense outside of modernity’s unique configurations of class power. It is regrettable that we must continue to have this conversation in 2026, but racist and white supremacist thinking (if indeed we can call it thinking) must be confronted head on. The new discovery at the old Merchant House reminds us that all of this history is not overwith; it’s a current we’re still caught up in, and it is winds we’re still often tacking against to fight for our friends and neighbors. The fictional narrative drawn by Trump and his friends represents the worst aspects of American history, but the Underground Railroad is still moving along in our hearts, homes, and neighborhoods.

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