NYU - New York University
NYU - New York University
12/09/2024 | News release | Distributed by Public on 12/09/2024 18:39
How Freedom Grew in Brooklyn
Brooklyn has been the centerpiece of popular novels from Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to Herbert Selby Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn and films such as Spike Lee's Crooklyn and John Badham's Saturday Night Fever. It is also famously the birthplace of and home to countless celebrities and characters, perhaps most notably Bugs Bunny, in addition to the long-departed Brooklyn Dodgers.
But before Brooklyn was a celebrated borough-it joined with the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island to become the City of Greater New York in 1898-it was the nation's third largest city, and in many ways a radical one.
Brooklyn's free Black communities created an "intellectual, political, and activist framework" that reached far beyond the city in an effort to end slavery and bring about "equality for all," historian Prithi Kanakamedala writes in a new NYU Press book, Brooklynites: The Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities that Shaped a Borough, that explores this often underappreciated history.
"Nineteenth-century Brooklynites and 19th-century New Yorkers in general, and especially Black New Yorkers, were asking what does justice look like and what does equality look like in areas that also affect us today: housing, voting, schools, jobs," says Kanakamedala, a professor of history at Bronx Community College.
In the book, Kanakamedala traces the stories of four families-the Crogers, the Hodges, the Wilsons, and the Gloucesters-who organized and advocated for racial justice during slavery, which continued to thrive in New York even after it was officially abolished in 1827.
Kanakamedala connects the work of these activists to that of those who followed in the 20th century and finds lessons for the next generation of advocates too.
"The period I've researched was about ordinary people acting in what was then considered radical ways-an echo into the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s," she observes. "I'm always clear to tell students that big legislation, whether that is the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, or the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which gives citizenship to those born on US soil, doesn't come from above. These laws always result from decades, if not centuries, of ordinary people pushing forward an agenda to create a fairer world for all. That's when elected officials take note and it becomes those hallmark pieces of legislation in our country."
NYU News spoke with Kanakamedala about Brooklyn's past and present-and how we might honor its overlooked heroes in the future.
Brooklynites focuses on Brooklyn during periods when many New Yorkers might not recognize it. What are some of the biggest differences between 19th-century Brooklyn and the borough now?
There are three major differences. The first is a visual one. The skyline was not as high as some of the super condominiums that are going up in downtown Brooklyn today. In terms of green space, it looked different. And I'm not talking about the kind of manufactured green space we have with parks. Rather, there was natural geography because the land had not been developed yet. So Brooklyn had valleys and ponds and hills.
Bronx Community College History Professor Prithi Kanakamedala. Photo credit: Deivid Valdez, Bronx Community College Communications & Marketing
A second difference would be the economy, which was largely agricultural then. However, as the waterfront starts to develop, it becomes a very industrial location-and that's what will propel Brooklyn to become the third-largest US city prior to the Civil War. I think of the waterfront today as still busy and still active, but certainly not that kind of industrial waterfront that we associate with big-port cities in the 19th century.
The third one is population. In a 19th-century context, Brooklyn was definitely growing, but the numbers were certainly not in the millions that we have today.
But I would also highlight the similarities. This was a diverse borough of people who are learning how to live alongside each other and what it means to be neighbors. Also, it had then as now that can-do, entrepreneurial local attitude. Brooklynites take being a Brooklynite extremely seriously, and necessarily so, that they're not from Manhattan. That sort of attitude has always existed in Brooklyn.
The area surrounding Brooklyn's MetroTech Center is a thriving commercial and educational community today. What was it like 200 years ago-when the AME Church was built?
I actually don't think of it as being vastly different. It just had a different context. Certainly, in the very early 1800s it was developing from agricultural land to becoming more urbanized. But by the 1840s and 1850s it had all of the same ingredients that you see today in downtown Brooklyn. It was a commercial district. It was a cultural district-this time period saw the creation of the Long Island Historical Society and the early days of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
You also had a network of churches-not just Black churches, but also Dutch churches, Methodist churches, and Episcopal churches. It was also a city in which residents were thinking about what they needed in terms of infrastructure, so you had a great deal of banks growing in that area.
The height of the buildings was different then, but the diversity and culture was similar to what we have today.
Eugene L. Armbruster, "Bridge Street African Methodist Church," 1923, black and white photograph (V1974.1.1342, Eugene L. Armbruster Photographs and Scrapbooks, Center for Brooklyn History, Brooklyn Public Library). The Tandon School of Engineering's Wunsch Hall. Photo credit: David Song/NYU.
Was that typical of urban life around the globe at that time?
Absolutely. By the 19th century, most cities, both in the United States and in the Atlantic world, look similar. They're positioning themselves as windows to other places. And so they have a cultural area and a commercial area and the city's residents are focused on housing, education, and faith.
What makes Brooklyn just slightly different is that it's not Manhattan and its economic center is not Wall Street at that point. So if you think of Manhattan or Wall Street as the center of capitalism and Atlantic commerce, Brooklyn was not that. And Brooklyn did not see itself in that vision, either. I highlight in the book that local entrepreneurs understood that racial capitalism was here to stay, so they thought about how to engage with it in their own vision and what that then meant to own a business in the 19th century.
Eugene L. Armbruster, black and white photograph of Borough Hall, ca. 1880 (v1974.1.1299, Eugene L. Armbruster Photographs and Scrapbooks, Center for Brooklyn History, Brooklyn Public Library). Borough Hall present day. Photo credit: David Song/NYU.
Is Brooklyn this period comparable to another city at the time?
I would say it was similar to most large cities. Like Philadelphia and like Boston, and even like Manhattan, it had a thriving, free Black community that was creating through self-determination their own institutions and shaping what democracy and racial justice in everyday life would look like.
However, when Brooklyn becomes the center of the sugar industry, I would say it mimics so many 19th-century cities, including my home city of Liverpool, where I grew up. That is a city that looks gorgeous today. It wins all the cultural and architectural awards, but that money originally comes from slavery-that is from the oppressed labor of people of African descent. So I would say that the way in which capitalism works in Brooklyn is a story of the 19th-century Atlantic world. It's making its money through oppressed labor in other places, and then is refining that sugar, and eventually creating Domino Sugar whose building remains today along the Williamsburg waterfront.
"Fulton Street, from the Ferry, Brooklyn, N.Y.." 1857, engraving (M1975.763.1.1, Prints and Drawings Collection, Center for Brooklyn History, Brooklyn Public Library). Fulton Street today. Photo credit: David Song/NYU.
Before becoming home to significant antislavery activity, Kings County in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was considered a "slaveholding capital." You note that today, more than 80 of Brooklyn's streets bear the names of slaveholding families, including Voorhies Avenue, Van Siclen Avenue, and Remsen Street. Is it time for a change? Who should be reflected in these street names instead?
I would love to see some of these streets renamed. There was a woman back in the 19th century who used to sell hot corn in what we know today as Brooklyn Heights. Her name was Margaret. How moving would that be to get rid of one of those street names and call it Margaret's Way? Something that honors the labor of the people who really created Brooklyn's streets and neighborhoods back in that era. And some of that work is happening, which is brilliant.
But, on the other hand, when we have X number of streets named after slaveholders, this is also a meaningful way to have conversations about our complex and painful past and explore what restorative justice looks like.
So I don't know that erasing all of the slaveholder's names is necessarily the only answer. But we can, and should, be having honest conversations about who gets commemorated in our streets. Some of that difficult dialogue is already underway. Understanding the politics of commemoration in urban landscapes is vital to our everyday lives, especially in a borough like Brooklyn and a city like New York.