BROOKLYNITES

Vigorous history of a free Black community in Brooklyn and its contributions to the making of modern New York.

In the late 18th and 19th centuries, writes Bronx Community College professor Kanakamedala, Black people constituted a large percentage of the population of Brooklyn, then an independent city. Unlike Manhattan, most of the land around the settlement was agricultural, and many of those Blacks were enslaved as farm workers. Even after their “gradual emancipation”—a charged term that speaks to the fact that it took three full decades after the end of the American Revolution for New York to end slavery—the Black workers of Brooklyn were confined to manual labor as “blacksmiths, boot blacks, cartmen, dock workers, general laborers, and whitewashers.” Some free Black people formed communities away from Brooklyn itself, places now enfolded by Williamsburg, Vinegar Hill, DUMBO, and other locales. Brooklyn proper also saw the formation of urban villages that were “part of a sophisticated Northern anti-­slavery space rooted in, and integral to, Brooklyn’s own steady growth.” These communities were the sites of sui generis public libraries, schools, churches, and other institutions that resisted the structural racism of the era. Examining archival records and focusing on several Black families, and especially Black women, Kanakamedala charts changes in that community over the decades, with Brooklyn serving as a key transit point in the Underground Railroad network that was “by no means, a bastion of liberty.…But it did offer pockets of safety and refuge to its resident free Black communities—­anchored by Weeksville—­and to others seeking freedom in the North.” Brooklyn was a center of military recruitment for Black troops during the Civil War and, during Reconstruction, a place from which several Black activists relocated to the South, “where they could help newly freed people.”

A solid contribution to the history of Black New York.