What We Are Reading Today: The Kidnapping Club by Jonathan Daniel Wells

Taking readers into the bustling streets and ports of America’s great Northern metropolis, The Kidnapping Club is a dramatic account of the ties between slavery and capitalism, the deeply corrupt roots of policing, and the strength of Black activism.
In The Kidnapping Club, historian Jonathan Daniel Wells tells the story of the powerful network of judges, lawyers, and police officers who circumvented anti-slavery laws by sanctioning the kidnapping of free and fugitive African Americans.
Nicknamed “The New York Kidnapping Club,” the group had the tacit support of institutions from Wall Street to Tammany Hall whose wealth depended on the Southern slave and cotton trade.
“But a small cohort of abolitionists, including Black journalist David Ruggles, organized tirelessly for the rights of Black New Yorkers, often risking their lives in the process,” said a review in goodreads.com
“There are plenty of familiar names and landmarks in this book to connect the present with the past,” said the review.
The reader will gain a greater perspective of what the country was like preceding the Civil War, it added.
“The institution of slavery is revealed in a way most texts avoid, and this heightened exploration sheds even greater light onto the motivations that perpetuated this atrocity for so long.”