Black New Yorker David Ruggles, who spent his young and all-too-brief life battling against police violence in the 1830s, was just one of these ordinary people whose determination led to real change. As his biographer Graham Russell Gao Hodges points out, Ruggles was born in Connecticut in 1810 when the glow of the American Revolution and its fight for freedom and independence was still very powerful. Ruggles’ own parents, who were probably recently freed slaves, were born in the midst of the Revolution and he grew up hearing stories of the bravery of the fighters for liberty, including the mixed-race hero Crispus Attucks. From this early, formative exposure to the rhetoric and ideas of the Revolution, Ruggles understood well the importance of freedom and equality.
As Ruggles’ writings show, his early experiences in the open and free communities in eastern Connecticut, combined with his immersion in the lore of the Revolution, rendered him unable to accept the racism, segregation and abuse that he saw white police officers inflict on Black people in his adopted home of New York City. Though he left behind few private letters, Ruggles was a prolific contributor to newspapers, including his own paper Mirror of Liberty.
Ruggles set himself up as a one-man army who would combat injustice and inequality in all its forms. When a group of policemen, judges, lawyers and merchants loosely formed a group he labeled “The New York Kidnapping Club,” Ruggles knew that he would need all of his considerable mental and physical abilities to fight the coming contest. That fight would take its toll on Ruggles physically, with his eyesight fading at a prematurely young age, until he was nearly blind by his 30s.
At the apex of the kidnapping club were two members of the New York police force, Tobias Boudinot and Daniel D. Nash. Both had grown up in or near Manhattan and they shared a deep disdain for Black people. Like all members of the the police force, Boudinot and Nash were poorly paid, inadequately trained and largely uneducated. Boudinot in particular was constantly in debt, sued by creditors and desperate for the extra money he could make by capturing runaway enslaved people who had managed, against tremendous odds, to escape southern bondage and forge new lives in New York. The nation’s founding document, the Constitution, required free states to return runaways to southern masters, and Boudinot and Nash were all too willing to comply.