Inside the free Black communities that helped build Brooklyn before the Civil War

By Brian Braiker

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If it were to stand alone as its own city, Brooklyn today would be the third largest city in the country — tied with Chicago.

In fact, before Brooklyn was incorporated into New York City in 1898, Brooklyn was already the nation’s third largest city. Of course it would have been utterly unrecognizable to people who live here now — a vast expanse of farmland, a burgeoning port, a city of churches. And as part of New York State, it was one of the last remaining northern states where slavery remained legal, until 1827.

In spite of that stain on its history, Brooklyn was also home to a vibrant free Black community who worked together to build their corners of the city in their own communal, radical anti-slavery vision. They agitated for justice, they wrote in Black and white-owned newspapers, they marched, they raised money and they acquired property.

“We say that slavery really did underpin the economic, political, cultural fabric of this country, but I would argue you could not see a more jarring or a more traumatic example of that than right here in King’s County,” says Prithi Kanakamedala, an associate professor of history at Bronx Community College, City University of New York, “It shaped everything about that county in the late-18th, early-19th century and the legacy of it too. And that is what that free Black community really are fighting in terms of their long struggle through the 19th century.”

Kanakamedala is the author of a new book, “Brooklynites: The Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities that Shaped a Borough,” out in September, courtesy of NYU press. In it, she tells the story of Brooklyn’s free Black population between 1790 and 1870, eight decades of unfathomable change in the borough and the country at large.

And she is this week’s guest on “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast.” “Brooklynites” is a cultural and social history told through four extraordinary families from Brooklyn’s nineteenth-century free Black community. Theirs are stories of activism, support, struggle, community, education, entrepreneurship and perhaps most importantly, real estate. Their stories continue to resonate today, some 200 years later.

“We’re constantly walking over the ghosts of New Yorkers past,” says Kanakamedala. “And so the point of this book was really to think about and honor the legacy that they’d left us, but to think about the ongoing work that is happening today.”

The following is a transcript of our conversation, which airs as an episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast,” edited for clarity. Listen in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.

We can start with the time span you chose to explore because I think it’s a really interesting window of time, the 1790 to 1870s, the end of the revolution to the beginning of the Civil War. Why that stretch of time?
The reason for choosing those two periods is because they are major chapters in U.S. history. What I really wanted to do in this story is explain how Brooklyn is building to become this great American city, and that happens at the end of that major chapter of U.S. history. And I was interested in absolutely its colonial legacy coming into the early 1800s, but I was really just fascinated by how do you grow this new city called Brooklyn in this new democratic experiment called the United States and who the players are going to be, what the ordinary people of Brooklyn are going to do to really shape that city in a vision of what they want to see in terms of their streets and neighborhoods.

You tell that story specifically through the free Black communities that shaped the borough, and you make a really jarring point at the outset that one in three Brooklynites were enslaved at least at the beginning of your book. There are more enslaved people here than there were in other northern cities, which is something that I don’t think a lot of people would necessarily realize being this is New York, this is Brooklyn. How do you account for that anomaly?
At the end of the American Revolution, most northern cities that we know today have either abolished slavery or they’re on their way to abolishing slavery. That’s not the case in New York state. It’s the second to last northern state to abolish slavery.

Yeah, we beat New Jersey at least. They were the last.
Yes, we did. I don’t know if that’s a point of pride though, being the second to last.

No, it’s not. It’s not at all, but at least we beat New Jersey.
Yes. That was part of my interest in thinking about what is happening here in New York state. And more specifically when we tell the history of what happens at the end of the American Revolution, much of our history in terms of general audiences or just the way it’s been popular memory, is that slavery is on the decline in New York City. And part of the problem with that story is it’s a Manhattan-centric story.

I would absolutely agree with you, in Manhattan or what was then the city of New York, slavery was certainly on the decline. They were finding other ways to create this great metropolis that would become the window to the United States in the Atlantic world. That’s not the case in Brooklyn. In Brooklyn and Kings County specifically, it’s extremely agricultural still. You have some development starting in 1800 around that kind of Fulton Ferry, the Northwestern tip of Kings County, but otherwise, most of Kings County is very agricultural. It’s undeveloped. And those farmers who are of Dutch and British descent are looking to hold onto slavery because of course it is laborers of African descent who are sustaining that agrarian economy.

And those names of those farmers are still very much with us today. If you lived here at any point of time, you’ll recognize these white family names like Bergen, Ditmars, Lefferts, Vanderveer, Van Siclen, Voorhees. Slavery is so entrenched in Brooklyn’s history that 82 streets, according to your book, are still named after slave-holding families, which is probably a whole separate topic for a podcast. Like, what do we do with that legacy? But it just underscores your point how part of the fabric of early Kings County it was.
As historians, we say that slavery really did underpin the economic, political, cultural fabric of this country, but I would argue you could not see a more jarring or a more traumatic example of that than right here in King’s County. It shaped everything about that county in the late 18th, early 19th century and the legacy of it too. And that is what that free Black community really are fighting in terms of their long struggle through the 19th century. How are we a free city and how are we going to really shape this city to reflect our own antislavery ideals and our more radical ideals of what a democracy should look like?

The book is a cultural and social history, but you put a very human face — several human faces — on it, and that’s I think the best way to make history digestible for people like me who are not as smart as you. You focus on four Brooklyn families in the 19th century in the free Black community, the Crogers, the Hodges, the Wilsons. The Gloucesters. You call them “ordinary” families, but when you read the book, they’re really anything but ordinary. I’m sure there are a lot of examples, but how’d you narrow your sample size to these four families?
As you said, it was a narrative choice. Historians really are storytellers. I do strategize or design that story around four families. I am obsessed with community and families and what they represent.

And chosen families, right? You make a big point of that.
Absolutely, yeah. And about the human bonds we make outside of those biological ones, i.e, chosen family. It was hard to be honest. I could have gone with any number of families. So many Brooklynites that were part of that free Black community really were agitating for a fairer and more just world. I settled with the Crogers as an example of a family that were building a better place in this thing that was called the Village of Brooklyn at that time. Brooklyn was not yet a city and to think about the kind of institutions they were building. And then moving up to Williamsburg, thinking about the mid-19th century, and the Hodges family and what a family who’s coming to Brooklyn for the first time and the choices that they’re making about where they want to live like so many folks who moved to New York City have to make when they first get here.

And then moving to the Wilsons and thinking about Brooklyn at this point in the 1850s, 1860s, it is clear that it is growing rapidly. The streets that we take for granted today like Atlantic, like Fulton, those major arteries are becoming economic hubs in the same way that you think of Broadway in Manhattan. And so you have this family, the Wilsons, who are both educators, but are thinking deeply and thoughtfully about what Black-led business might look like. If Black people really think about the impact of what racial capitalism will be, then how do Black people get involved in this thing and really shape what business is going to look like on Atlantic?

I really enjoyed your depiction of the radical transformation of Atlantic Avenue because I’m very familiar with Atlantic Avenue. [It evolves] from a dirt road surrounded by corn fields to a busy thoroughfare in less than a decade, and then ultimately this broad avenue that we know today. It’s almost a cinematic evolution. And you put Mary Wilson of the Wilsons walking down the block there.
I think we have all sorts of misconceptions and bad ideas about what we think Black women were doing in the 19th century. And just to say there was Mary Wilson with her store, Atlantic looks slightly different just because the BQE doesn’t exist yet. But she was a Black woman who held her own business and she did not depend on her husband or her partner for her livelihood.

And the last family that I look at are the Gloucesters, thinking about what militant radical action looks like in Brooklyn as you sort of get on that road to the Civil War and thinking again about Black women not being passive or the other stereotypes that happened with race and gender especially in the 19th century. But here is Elizabeth Gloucester buying real estate. She’s a quintessential New Yorker, even if she’s not born here, who understands by buying real estate, that is how you gain power in this city and is also thinking very deeply about how slavery will end in the United States. So we’re sending money out to other militant abolitionists like John Brown.

So the choice of four families I would say was slightly intentional, but the reason I sort of caution folks and say, “There were other people, they had neighbors, they had friends, is because what you never want to do as a historian is recreate that idea of the entire civil rights movement is one man called Martin Luther King and one woman called Rosa Parks.” But actually what these four families are committed to with their own chosen families is radical community building and some of the lessons that could teach us today.

And that starts in some degree with the Crogers. These brothers, Peter and Benjamin, established the village first mutual aid organization called the Brooklyn African Woolman Benevolent Society, which doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. Talk about the organization’s significance. It’s a vital local network of self-care and economic self-reliance and creates cultural safe spaces. They’re whitewashers. It was the architectural trend of the time to have these bright white facades on houses. And so they were entrepreneurs in that respect, but they start the first mutual aid organization.
In the absence of unemployment, sick benefits, all of those benefits that we take for granted today if you have a particular career or profession, there was no safety net for ordinary working people in Brooklyn. Free Black people were creating their own ways to survive in this city. You mentioned that they were whitewashers. These are really ordinary working class professions that they were engaged in. None of these professions, when you look in the census, are ever a reflection of anybody’s talents or capabilities. It is what you do to literally pay to keep a roof over your head. And so what they were doing was creating mutual aid organizations like the Brooklyn African Woolman Benevolent Society, which I’m sure they probably call themselves BAWBS or just something, the Benevolent Society.

Or The Woolmen, yeah.
The Woolmen. So intentional in their naming, shouting out to who they saw themselves as self-representation and who they were in solidarity with. But the point of that mutual aid organization was to make sure that the children and the partners of members, once that member passed away, that they were provided for the dues to that organization would then be paid out in the absence of life insurance policies, thinking about how those remaining family members could keep afloat because it was so easy in 19th century, not just Brooklyn but New York City, to fall below the poverty line in the absence of any government schemes or city schemes that keep you afloat, thinking about how we care for one another.

The society even predates the AME church. The Benevolent Society itself doesn’t even really appear in print for almost a decade after it’s founded, nine years later in 1819. They take out an ad to announce a meeting and a march, which strikes me as pretty brave and expensive probably. Talk about the significance of this ad and the march itself as it’s advertised.
The first time we see the mutual aid organization in print is that newspaper advertisement that you’re talking about and appears in the Long Island Star, which is the longest-running newspaper in Brooklyn in the 19th century. And it’s amazing they print the route that they’re going to take where they will start from and end up at, what it’s for. And it is for recognizing or really making a point that this free Black community will not be hidden. They are visible on the main streets of Brooklyn and that they are there.

And the fact that printing the route is itself like an act of maybe not defiance, but, “Here we are. Come find us.”
Just ordinary things being incredibly political and incredibly brave. The reason they’re printing the route and saying that they will be marching as a band is because they are actually celebrating the end of slavery in New York state and they’re thinking about the ways in which they’ve been organizing for decades prior to slavery ending in New York State in 1827, but now they are very much part of that fabric of the village and they will be included. I also think it says something so savvy about Brooklynites at that time that Black Brooklynites are seeing that the written word is the thing that carries power.

They’re using the media as a tool.
Exactly. Brilliant media literacy. And that’s not to say the Black press doesn’t exist at this time. You have Freedom’s Journal, which is the first Black newspaper in the United States coming out of Manhattan. So it’s incredibly intentional and brilliant that these ordinary Black Brooklynites are printing the route and saying, “We’re here. We exist.” And again, part of that argument being that they consider themselves very much a part of this new political project called Brooklyn that is in this new country called the United States.

And they have every right to be here, yeah. So it’s interesting you said that slavery ended in New York in 1827. But it’s not like it just ended. It was a gradual emancipation, which is a term of phrase that I don’t think I had heard before. New York may have been the second to last northern state to end it. And still this is 36 years before the Emancipation Proclamation, but you unpack how this idea of gradual emancipation actually fed into and allowed structural racism to flourish, which I thought was really fascinating.
Gradual emancipation, it takes 28 years for slavery to end in New York state. So I know today some folks like to pat ourselves in the back thinking about us being a liberal state or that we are a really liberal city, but we have an incredibly complicated and oppressive history.

The first legislation is passed in 1799 by New York State, and it’s actually the third attempt to pass it, meaning they’ve tried twice before and New Yorkers weren’t having it, especially up in the state legislature that they were saying it’s not time. Even though we’ve had this huge American Revolution about liberty and freedom and independence, it is not time for slavery to end. So when it does end in 1799, that law is absolutely about protecting slaveholders. There’s nothing in there about the welfare of enslaved people of African descent. And so the law will say that you will be free if you were born to a Black woman who was enslaved at the age of 28 if male, and at the age of 25 if female. And the reason for that really is to make sure that you get the best out of that person’s working life in terms of that oppressive and brutal system of slavery, which was all about uncompensated labor.

The ages are not accidental. There’s a structural racial oppression around why it’s happening at 28 and 25. It’s not until 1817 that New York state will turn around and realize they really are one of the last northern states to hold onto slavery, and again, New Jersey will be the last. Thinking about who does this benefit, in 1817, they will pass a law saying on July 4th, 1827, slavery will finally end in New York State. And so what that means is for that 28 years of gradual emancipation, free Black communities both in Brooklyn and New York are taking that opportunity to build to think about, “Well, when this moment eventually arrives, we have to be ready. There is nothing around this in terms of our schools, in terms of that mutual aid organization or our faith, churches, our homes, that is going to be guaranteed just because liberation happens.” True liberation includes our political and legal rights, and none of that was being said or guaranteed in any of those laws.

And a lot of it, to an earlier point you made, comes back to land ownership and property. You talk in the book about [the community of] Weeksville. You frame it as a political project from the outset, and it was designed to create a landowning community. Black people were not obviously recognized as full citizens and they couldn’t have voting rights unless they owned a large amount of property. So this was a project to get them land, but also to get them enfranchised, which I thought was very interesting. And to your point, the families that you mentioned all strove to obtain property as well.
Some things that we take for granted today: If we are U.S.-born, folks have voting rights. And of course that’s not a guarantee for everybody in this country.

And even if it is, it’s not a guarantee it gets counted, but that’s a whole other…
Oh, absolutely. So these reconstruction amendments come much later in terms of this narrative for this book. So 1865 is that the 13th Amendment, which will end slavery. 1868 is the 14th Amendment, which finally says, “If you’re born on U.S. soil, you are an American citizen.” And then 1870 is the guaranteed right to vote.

In the absence of those three reconstruction amendments, you have a community right here in Brooklyn who are creating these exceptional arguments around what it means to be a citizen of the United States. And that is entangled absolutely with the right to vote and how you get the right to vote. So not only did New York State drag their heels on ending slavery, the other thing they do is in 1821 there is an amendment to the New York State Constitution. And again, no accident. By 1821, everybody is aware in six more years, slavery will end. And so prior to 1821, all men, regardless of race — no women yet — had to own $100 worth of property in order to vote. But after 1821, the New York State Constitution changes so that white men need to own no property in order to vote. There’s no property qualification. But the New York State legislature increases the property qualification for Black men, meaning they now need to own $250 worth of property in order to vote. And just to give you some context, that’s about a year’s wages, an annual salary for the average working person in this city.

So it is not a small amount of money that they are being asked to jump through that loophole in order to be able to vote. But absolutely the argument of that book is across Brooklyn, whether that was in what we know today’s neighborhoods such as Dumbo, Fort Greene, Williamsburg, Weeksville, which today is on that border between Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant, Black families are buying houses, yes, as part of their own security and safety and refuge, but it’s actually to be able to vote and to be able to say, “If I can vote, if I can say who is on that ballot and who wins, then how can you not say then I’m a citizen of the United States?” So there is a really sophisticated political argument happening as well.

Another family that we meet are the Hodges brothers, William and Willis. They’re entrepreneurs there in Williamsburg, which is a separate village. It’s not incorporated into Brooklyn yet. They worked with neighbors to build local institutions in a way that sort of echoed the work of the Crogers in two decades earlier. Talk about what the Hodges did.
The Hodges tell a slightly different story, but again, a very typical New York one in that they come from Norfolk, Virginia, so they’re not from ‘round here as it were, and yet they look at various places to live in Brooklyn. They are looking for space like all of us are. So Manhattan’s already out. By the 1840s, Manhattan is crowded. And they go towards Weeksville, but they decide that Weeksville is too far out from the city because it is just outside the borders of Brooklyn by that point, intentionally so. So the Hodges are thinking about, “For a typical New Yorker, how am I going to live somewhere where I can build that’s affordable for me and my family and I can grow, but also actually get to work?” Because most of them worked in Manhattan. And so they moved to the village of Williamsburg, which is then the town of Bushwick. Again, not part of the city of Brooklyn yet. And they buy property and they buy really nice property. It’s on Bedford, a bastion of gentrification today.

Lots of good restaurants. I’m sure they moved there for the clubs and the bars.
Exactly. At that point, they’re looking to do exactly what the Crogers were looking to do, which is, “Hold on a second. This is starting to grow as a village or as a city. How do we get involved? How do we shape this before it becomes a mirror of Manhattan?” And Willis Hodges, one of the brothers says, “Manhattan’s really racist. We are here, we can build and maybe we can build a slightly different space for ourselves.” So that’s what they do.

And to me it is such a simple equation and it’s still one that I think we think about when we look at community building today. What do we need to thrive as a community? Well, we need a school. We need businesses maybe that are locally owned. We need a church. And a church back then was the center of everything because it was about so much more than faith. It was a meeting space that some of these arguments and mobilizing could happen around voting. Some of those schools that I keep talking about began in the church even if the instruction was not religious based in any way. And so they start to build these communities in the same ways that I think we think of our communities and our neighborhoods today.

There was a stat in the book that jumped out at me around this time, I guess 1847, only 4,300 out of 13,000 white children in Kings County went to school, and yet 255 out of 387 registered Black children went to African schools in Brooklyn. So while that sounds like a much smaller number, percentage-wise there were many more Black students enrolled in schools at this time due to this activism work of the free Black community.
There were more Black children attending school at that time. And I don’t give that statistic to kind of say, “Look how well they were doing.” It is to say against the forces of white supremacy and structural racism, just that ordinary task of attending school becomes politicized and just so much more remarkable. And structural racism is part and parcel of Brooklyn’s educational history. The reason those African schools exist is because when the first school is created in that town of Brooklyn, which will become the city of Brooklyn, the council for the area will say, “Our school isn’t big enough. So we’re not accepting Black students at this time. Our space is not big enough.”

And so Black people, again, thinking two steps ahead through self-determination, “Well, how do we create these spaces for ourselves so that we thrive and so that we are not relying on white benevolence or this white savior narrative to create things for us?” And so it is a remarkable statistic because there was an African school in what is today Downtown Brooklyn. There’s one in Williamsburg and there’s one out in Weeksville and then one in Carrsville. So if you think about it, children had a great way to commute in order to attend any of these schools. Not all children lived in those villages and towns. So the fact that they’re boasting these high levels of education to me shows how exactly those first ways of activists are ingraining in their future generations that education will be crucial to their liberation and crucial to the struggle in Brooklyn.

It’s funny that you mentioned the white savior thing did not play a role here. And in fact you go out of your way to point out that white philanthropy did not play a role in Brooklyn’s early Black activism and institution building. It was entirely independent Black-led movement. And then later you provide some nuance and context into famous and largely beloved white abolitionist, Henry Ward Beecher, whose reputation today is unimpeachable. But talk about the ways in which he was maybe a little more complicated than we may remember.
Those abolitionists have all the familiar faces, whether that’s William Lloyd Garrison up in Boston, Henry Ward Beecher for us in Brooklyn. One of the features of the abolitionist movements in the 1830s and ’40s is that it represents the first time in U.S. history Black folks and white folks get together to really show solidarity and demand an immediate end to slavery in the United States. And that is how I, as an educator in my classroom, absolutely teach the history of abolitionism in the United States, but again, asking to pay close attention to Brooklyn because Brooklyn has its own story and seems to always be doing something different. Where the African schools in Manhattan might’ve been founded by philanthropists, white New Yorkers who were committed to a much more racially diverse city, we don’t have those instances in Brooklyn. Free Black communities in Brooklyn really were thinking about what their own freedom and liberation would look like and so are funding a lot of these institutions through grassroots building and creating their own institutions with their own agenda.

I don’t want to forget the women. We did mention Mary Wilson briefly. There were also Eleanor and Elizabeth Croger who the historical record may have almost entirely erased. As a historian, talk about unearthing these stories of women who are largely invisible not just because they were women, but because they were Black women and there’s very few records of them. How do you recreate their lives for us?
You recreate the lives of Black women in 19th century Brooklyn, I think, by being in community yourself as a historian with all the Black feminist scholars that have come before you. There is a way in which you take an archive, you analyze the power structures within an archive. And instead of replicating that archive, meaning, “Here’s all the folks I found in Brooklyn that existed, and so I will tell their story,” you start to think about the silences in those archives and who’s missing and the ways in which they’re missing.

Black women in Brooklyn are center stage in terms of activism. It’s just that they don’t appear in the records in the same way. So you’ll find them in the census records, but they may not have a profession next to their name. It might be their husband who’s the head of household. So you see that. But then when you look in the Black press, you see that women like Mary Wilson or Elizabeth Gloucester are absolutely, again, front and center fundraising for institutions, not just in Brooklyn, but also in Manhattan. And they’re doing so in order for these institutions to thrive and become part of this city’s history.

Elizabeth and Eleanor Croger were far more, I think, difficult to recover from the archives partly because that early 19th century Brooklyn history, it really is the history of who had power in the village at that time. It is a lot of those streets that you were talking about early on, the descendants of slaveholders, the descendants of property owners. We get instances in which Benjamin and Peter’s name appears early on in city directory or in census records, but we know from probate records later that they were married and that they had these women in their lives, Elizabeth and Eleanor Croger.

So, thinking about community in terms of my own profession, if they were building and mobilizing in terms of community, what would those women doing in terms of opening up private spaces, meaning households. If they weren’t meeting in the churches and they’re not meeting in these schools, there was an African Hall on Nassau Street, what was the kind of activism that was happening inside people’s homes? I think that to me is of great interest that we honor those spaces. If you come to me and say, “Well, where does it say that they opened their home on James Street and allowed folks to enter?” I would say to you, “Think about the way in which life works today. Not everything is written down.” And I think it is an invitation to us as historians to think around the written word and the way in which archives work.

Speaking of those archives, you mentioned earlier your time at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Today it’s the Center for Brooklyn History at the public library. You pop up as a character very briefly in the book where you go to Yale and you dig through the archives. Talk about the archives at the Historical Society, either as an asset to the community or your own work or maybe where the archives might be lacking.
Brooklyn Historical Society, which was originally founded as the Long Island Historical Society, is a repository with the largest collection of Brooklyn-related materials in the United States. I would therefore say the world as well. It is now, as you said, part of Center for Brooklyn History at BPL. When the two institutions merged, you also got the Brooklyn Collection that used to be at Brooklyn Public Library. So I would think that idea of them having the largest collection has only grown more as a result of Long Island Historical Society being founded in the 1860s when it is essentially I would say property-owning white men’s club. There were certain types of things that that historical society collected. They have really rich materials, lots of slave bills, lots of property records that can, I think, piece together quite quickly the history of slavery in Brooklyn.

And they obviously have enough materials that allowed us to launch the original project that this book comes out of, which was In Pursuit of Freedom. It was a public history project. And it really did center BHS’s archives. But again, thinking about the ways in which there are silences in the archives and that repository might not have everything you need. There are enough gifted colleagues who are archivists and librarians right now at CBH, at BPL who are doing that kind of work. How do we mend this archive? How do we start to tell the stories of folks who are not traditionally in these archives?

So we ended up going to Yale that has the Beecher family papers. And the reason for that was like so many Brooklynites, we’re told the story that Plymouth Church was a radical church in the 19th century that really did fight to end slavery and Henry Ward Beecher was its face. He was the radical abolitionist. I think as a woman of color myself, I was just keen to scratch at that slightly and think about what were the dynamics that allowed him to be the most famous man in America as his biography is titled. And who would these women if we reorient that story that he is “emancipating”? He had a very theatrical style in the 19th century and he was very acutely aware of what marketing does. He’s endorsing all sorts of products, lozenges, bars of soap.

He was like the P.T Barnum of abolitionists.
Exactly. In a way in order to raise money, because he’s raising money for something that is not super popular. I think it is so easy to say today, “Well, of course slavery was bad. Of course everything was.” But to understand that slavery was so much part of our political cultural landscape at that time, that actually what he’s doing is quite radical.

Are you going to get to the reenactments? Because this is what makes me go, “I don’t know about that.”
Yeah, exactly. But to say also that a lot of the women when I started doing the research that he is “emancipating,” were actually Black women that were often on their own way to raising the money themselves. And that is what is missing from a lot of Beecher’s narrative. These were, again, ordinary Black women that had figured out where to get money from.

Up at Yale is Pomona Bryce’s fundraising book. And that right there undoes that entire story, that Beecher was doing it all by himself. She has at least 15 organizations in Brooklyn that she’s helping fundraise with so she can emancipate her remaining family members who are in slavery. I think what honestly struck me about it all was the mundaneness of it. It’s such a traumatic part of our history in terms of having to fundraise to emancipate your family members. But the fact that she’s having to raise that money and she has to open a bank account and she has to write down how much from who and how much is being deposited, and then she has to hire a lawyer in order to do the legal stuff. I think it’s that everyday ordinariness, but that is so deeply embedded in a much darker chapter of our history that I also wanted to bring out in terms of, “Let’s get rid of this Beecher larger than life famous person,” but actually the mechanics by which these women are fundraising is entirely ordinary.

But then Beecher would also bring young women and girls and have them reenact their auction, relive their trauma, in order to put on a show and evoke empathy and sympathy out of potential donors, which struck me as gross.
We talk a lot about the philanthropic industrial complex today, or scholars do, and I really think it was part of that narrative. I feel pity for these very young, honorable girls who are incredibly light skinned as to appeal to a sense of whiteness. This could be your daughter or this could happen to you tomorrow. And it is so interesting to me. The most famous example, Pinky, who of course will reclaim her own name when she becomes much older, Rose Ward Hunt, her husband will say, “We never spoke about that chapter of her life.” And myself as a parent to a very young child, I think about what must have been for that 8-year-old at that point to be on that stage to have this adult next to her asking everybody to pity her and that many eyes looking at you. The whole thing just seems so deeply traumatic to me that I just wanted to honor the complexity of what was happening in Plymouth Church.

Even with the best intentions. And back to the question of archives, Brooklyn was a prominent stop on the Underground Railroad, which understandably, historically, there’s not a lot of primary source material around because that would be very dangerous. But you did uncover quite a bit, did you not?
Thinking about popular culture and the way in which we’re taught some of this stuff, the Underground Railroad is often taught as folks coming from the South looking for freedom following that North Star and ending up maybe in New York State or Canada and hiding in tunnels and attics. And actually again, thinking about why we need to tell the story of Brooklyn is that it tells a completely different story.

Freedom seekers from the South were seeking the same thing that all of us seek, which is a better life. “How do I get a job that either reflects my talents or capabilities or compensates me for my labor?” And so there are incredible number of folks who come from the South in the 19th century and actually will end up in Brooklyn and they will stay in Brooklyn.

And I think the other part of the myth that it undoes in terms of the Brooklyn story is that they’re hiding. [They] really do make a commitment to this city in terms of, “All right. I’m here. How do I get a house? How do I bring my family here? How do I get a job? How do I become part of this Brooklyn thing?”

You will find people like Isaac Nelson who is a shoemaker, and again, he’s come from the South and he’s right there outside the Fulton Ferry mending people’s shoes, and he takes a huge ad out in the newspaper. So thinking of Brooklyn without sounding Pollyanna-ish about it, but thinking about it as a destination for people seeking a better life and one of freedom, that story doesn’t always look like Canada, but actually it starts right here in Brooklyn.

I want to shout out two funny things from the book, two funny little anecdotes which you may not even clock is funny, but I did, and then we can start to wrap it up. But you have one anecdote from 1679 when a Dutch traveler and colonizer stops through Brooklyn and he says, “Gowanus oysters are the best in the country.” I dropped the book. Cracked up because I couldn’t imagine eating a Gowanus oyster in 2024. And then the other one was when presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln comes to speak and he gets mixed reviews. One commenter says, “He possessed few oratorical graces.” I love a 1-star review of Lincoln’s speech. 
I’m just always keen to explain to folks whether that is students instead of traditional classroom or whether that’s through public programs when I’m speaking to general audiences, our city did not look the way it always did. And believe it or not, Superfund sites were once the source of really gorgeous food for folks. Again, normalizing people. I’m obsessed with making these larger-than-life characters like an Abraham Lincoln entirely relatable to all of us. Like you said, he got the 1-star review and then history would happen. But there’s a few [examples] of that. The Black press is hysterical or hilarious at this point.

You end on a very nice note where you talk about how the book seeks to restore history to the public eye. But history’s not dead. A lot of this history continues to live on and it’s in descendants. It’s in the places and the place’s names. I wonder if you could talk about the idea of this history not being history.
Past is present, especially in a city like New York. We’re constantly walking over the ghosts of New Yorkers past. And so the point of this book was really to think about and honor the legacy that they’d left us, but to think about the ongoing work that is happening today. I never wanted it to feel like, “Close the book. We’re done. The story’s over. You’ve got the history of Brooklyn.” But to actually think about the ways in which we honor that history still. So going back to that family model and thinking about the ways in which the descendants of those folks that are mentioned in the book still doing the work or the archives are being revisited, just different ways in which that history lives on. Brooklyn is still rapidly transforming.

When I started this research in 2010, I wandered around all of the places that I mentioned in the book just to see what it looks like today. So 13 years later and the phenomenal development that has happened just in that decade and a bit alone — never mind a book where I’m talking about something that was happening almost 200 years ago in Brooklyn — I think it is so important to honor and know what has been on that land and that soil that came before us. Otherwise, it’s just gone. I hope that it ends on a hopeful note to think about the work that we could continue to do to honor those spaces.

You anticipated my last question, which is, when you walk around Brooklyn today, how has this changed the way you see it? And are there any spots you want to shout out? Do you have any favorite restaurants, coffee shops, bookstores, whatever? Where do you go when you’re walking around?
I love nothing more than Atlantic [Avenue], truly, to think about the development of Atlantic. And I have my little triangle that I do. Go to Sahadi’s, go next door to Damascus, and then go opposite street to Trader Joe’s. Like most New Yorkers, I love going to Dumbo and getting the ice cream and looking across the river in the middle of summer. I hope this is just a love letter to the great borough of Brooklyn. It’s a huge shout-out to all of the places. And although obviously for issues of length and time, there are only a few neighborhoods mentioned, to think of Brooklyn with the kind of confidence and attitude that most people in Brooklyn have, which is we have our own story and we have our own history here.

Check out this episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast” for more. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts.