Jamestown and Chautauqua County have always been home to people working toward human rights for everyone. They include abolitionists like William and Sarah Storum as well as 20th-century civil rights leaders like Vivian and Lula Taylor. The Senecas, meanwhile, have been there longer than anyone.
Read on to learn about their lives and accomplishments and consider the lessons that can be applied in the fight for equality today.
The Senecas, or Onöndowa’ga:’, were in southwestern New York for hundreds of years before Europeans began to settle there. They belonged to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, one of the earliest democratic governments in the world. They resisted white settlers and the American government’s efforts to take their land, including an order from President George Washington to “destroy” their villages.
The Seneca and the rest of the Haudenosaunee lost most of their land through a series of unfair treaties, despite the efforts of Seneca leaders such as Red Jacket, Cornplanter and Ely Parker. In the 1960s more than 10,000 acres of their land around Cattaraugus was permanently flooded when the government built the Kinzua Dam. Seneca people continue to live, work and practice their culture in Salamanca and elsewhere in southwestern New York.
Enslavement existed in the southwestern New York starting when white settlers first arrived. James Prendergast, founder of the city of Jamestown, was an enslaver, and so was his brother. There were eight people held in enslavement in Chautauqua County in 1817.
There were also many people, Black and white, who worked to help end slavery. They included Catherine Harris in Jamestown as well as William and Sarah Storum, an interracial couple in Busti who helped many people to freedom. After slavery was outlawed in New York in 1827, they remained and made up a small but thriving Black community.
Federal housing policy starting in the 1930s transformed the way people lived in Jamestown, Fredonia, and elsewhere. The federal government worked with bankers and realtors to create redlining maps that cautioned against investment in Jamestown neighborhoods with Black people or ethnic minorities.
The government provided tens of millions of dollars in loans for white people to buy houses in the suburbs. Black people were considered negative influences and could not receive loans. Racially restrictive covenants prevented Black people from living in some white neighborhoods, or in lakefront resort areas, unless they were working as servants. Some of the most powerful people in Jamestown, including future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, agreed to these covenants.
It took decades of work by everyday citizens – people like Vivian and Lula Taylor in Jamestown – to make Chautauqua County a more equal community for everyone.