Recovering and Celebrating a Legacy Of Activism and Determination
Urban Matters: First, congratulations on the publication of Brooklynites. You came to write it already familiar with the subject; more than a dozen years ago, associated with the Brooklyn Historical Society, you researched 19th century anti-slavery activities in the borough. In the course of writing this book, did you uncover anything that was new, startling, revealing to you?
Prithi Kanakamedala: The book has indeed taken a very long time to write. The research originally began in 2010 as part of a project called “In Pursuit of Freedom,” for which I served as historian and curator. It was a partnership of Brooklyn Historical Society (now the Center for Brooklyn History at the Brooklyn Public Library), Weeksville Heritage Center, and Irondale Ensemble Project. The goal was to recover the story of Brooklyn’s abolitionist movement. We produced exhibits, walking tours, original theater productions, a content-rich website, and a K-12 curriculum, all of which you can still find here.
As historians, we talk about the abolitionist movement bringing together Black and white activists for the first time in U.S. history, with the goal of eradicating slavery and ensuring political and legal equality for all. But in Brooklyn, there was a slightly different story – very grassroots, in which its free Black community led this movement. White allies would come much later. It was a self-determined movement.
Even with the work we did a decade and a half ago, there were also so many more stories of ordinary Black girls and women who called Brooklyn “home” still to be told. Brooklynites recovers and celebrates their lives. It intentionally centers and honors their activism.
UM: In the 1970s, preservationists reclaimed Weeksville [pictured above], a long-thought “lost” 19th century free Black Brooklyn community that your book describes. Twenty years later, excavation for a new courthouse unearthed early Manhattan’s African Burial Ground, now a National Monument. Do you think other sites important to Black history here may be rediscovered?
Kanakamedala: We are constantly walking over the lives and remnants of New Yorkers past. So yes, there are lots of critical sites rooted in Black history waiting to be recovered. There are burial grounds and former neighborhoods that once had thriving communities of people of African descent that are being “discovered” fairly frequently. I’m thinking of the activist work ongoing to recover and honor Centerville in the Bronx (today’s Parkchester neighborhood), Newtown in Queens (today Elmhurst), and the ongoing work around Sandy Ground, Staten Island. You also have the Black Gotham Experience, led by Kamau Ware, leading groups, walking our city, recovering these sites, and showing how past connects to present.
UM: You also write about how personal memorabilia – family Bibles, photo albums, letters saved in attics and garages – can help in reconstructing the kind of community history you’ve written. Was that part of researching Brooklynites?
Kanakamedala: Traditional archives mostly based at the Center for Brooklyn History actually have a fascinating provenance. For example, there’s a charcoal portrait of Sylvanus Smith, one of the early land investors in Weeksville. How did it end part of the collections at what was then the Long Island Historical Society, created for and by white landed men?
Family memorabilia, keepsakes, and archives have ended up in our city’s formal repositories. One of the families [featured in the book] – the Hodges – is very well-documented. We can recover their lives precisely because family members did preserve family Bibles, photo albums etc. In that way, there is no neat distinction between traditional and informal archives.
My hope is that Brooklynites is an invitation to continue these stories and recover newer ones.
UM: Is there a living legacy in 21st century Brooklyn of the 19th century, schools, churches, political and social organizations, and businesses that Brooklynites brings to life? And why should modern Brooklynites make an effort to remember a time that can seem so remote today?
Kanakamedala: There are lots of living legacies. First, some of those institutions still exist today and are thriving in 21st century Brooklyn. I’m thinking here specifically of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, the first Black church founded in Brooklyn in 1818, that now stands in Bedford Stuyvesant. Bridge Street AWME Church, while it has long since moved from downtown Brooklyn, is still at the center of matters of faith and politics in our borough and city. I would argue that extends to other churches such as Siloam Presbyterian and Concord Baptist.
Second, the ideas that were fostered in 19th century Brooklyn are still central to how we make and organize life in this city. In the period the book covers, men and women of African descent were creating their own institutions, and fighting for the type of city they wanted to see across issues that still impact us today – housing, voting, education, jobs, and safety.
The first mutual aid society, the Brooklyn African Woolman Benevolent Society, founded in 1808, was designed to create a safety net for its members and their families. During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, those legacies of mutual aid organizing really flourished during a devastating time –whether that was through Crown Heights Mutual Aid, Bushwick Ayuda Mutua, or South Bronx Mutual Aid.
I also want to shout out the work of Black Owned Brooklyn, created by Cynthia Gordy Siwa and Tayo Giwa, who have been celebrating small Black-led businesses in the borough for years. That entrepreneurial spirit, which has a long history here, is celebrated in the book, and is the backbone of modern-day Brooklyn.
UM: Final question. Brooklynites ends in the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. But there’s another 150 years of history between then and now. I won’t ask if you’re thinking about a sequel. But if you were, what questions might you be trying to answer?
Kanakamedala: Exactly the same questions that fueled Brooklynites. Such as: What did this borough look, smell, and sound like? Who would we have met on its streets who were shaping this borough? And the much larger question – how did we get here? I would encourage readers to look out for historian Brian Purnell’s forthcoming book, currently titled The Capital of Black America, which I’m really excited about. Newer stories about our collective past are always being produced – so we always have a richer understanding of this borough and city, and of course, its people.
Prithi Kanakamedala is a full professor of history at Bronx Community College, City University of New York. Brooklynites is published by NYU Press.
Photo by: Village Preservation
