Brooklynites: The Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities that Shaped a Borough

by Prithi Kanakamedala

Meet the Black Brooklynites who defined New York City’s most populous borough through their search for social justice

Before it was a borough, Brooklyn was our nation’s third largest city. Its free Black community attracted people from all walks of life—businesswomen, church leaders, laborers, and writers—who sought to grow their city in a radical anti-slavery vision. The residents of neighborhoods like DUMBO, Fort Greene, and Williamsburg organized and agitated for social justice. They did so even as their own freedom was threatened by systemic and structural racism, risking their safety for the sake of their city. Brooklynites recovers the lives of these remarkable citizens and considers their lasting impact on New York City’s most populous borough.

This cultural and social history is told through four ordinary families from Brooklyn’s nineteenth-century free Black the Crogers, the Hodges, the Wilsons, and the Gloucesters. The book illustrates the depth and scope of their activism, cementing Brooklyn’s place in the history of social justice movements. Their lives offer valuable lessons on freedom, democracy, and family—both the ones we’re born with and the ones we choose. Their powerful stories continue to resonate today, as borough residents fill the streets in search of a more just city.

This is a story of land, home, labor, of New Yorkers past, and the legacy they left us. This is the story of Brooklyn.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, New York, Biography

288 pages, Hardcover

Published September 24, 2024

Reviews

[Jessica]

Focusing on Black communities in Brooklyn in the nineteenth century, this was enlightening and very interesting. Extremely well researched.

[Kathy Piselli · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the earlier parts best, especially since the book contained my favorite thing: lots of maps, maps that show the original contours of land, often now obliterated by development. There is the usual, frustrating lack of information about marginalized individuals, yet some fascinating stuff is still unearthed. The West India Emancipation Day celebrations, the Tobacco Factory riots, the electoral struggle prior to the 14th amendment that led to Weeksville, the incredible variations in practice as New York moved toward abolition. "In the more developed village and town of Brooklyn, freedom and unfreedom still coexisted in its public spaces in a bundle of contradictions during gradual emancipation...when an end date [to slavery] was finally given in 1817, it would take another decade of chaos and uncertainty until absolute emancipation." Stories like that of William Johnson Hodges remind us there is no one-size-fits all to history, and of the dangers of generalizing, even though for those people erased from the records we can access, some generalizing is required to tell any story at all. I enjoyed this book because I know a little of the backstory, and love this kind of historical detail, because Kanakamedala delved into so many sources for me, and because the maps and other illustrations are excellent. Readers who know no backstory might find it disjointed. In which case I recommend they take a look through some of the books in the bibliography for more about the City of New York, to which Kanakamedala dedicates her book "in all its maddening beauty and its glorious people."

[isaac dwyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had the pleasure of meeting Prithi at a community event hosted by the Weeksville Heritage Center for a talk on this book, and what came through then-as what comes through in the text-is her dedication to representing the lives and stories of the working class Black families of Brooklyn in a full, humanistic sense. This book makes use of a fair few buzzwords that, when tossed around to frivolously, lose their meaning--namely "racial capitalism" and "Black radical tradition"--yet Kanakamedala does a fair job of locating these very airy theoretical terms into the granular facts of everyday working life. No need to go running for your tomes of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, David Harvey, or Cedric Robinson to attempt to understand what is being said.

This book is at its best at its most descriptive and emotive: describing the crockery shops, ropewalks, corn-hawkers that populated 18th and 19th c Brooklyn's streets, and framing the centrality of freed Black communities' organizing within that space. The Tobacco Factory Riots and the Draft Riots are addressed in the final chapter, and while P.K. does not portend to deliver a book addressing the full tragedy inherent in those events, I was certainly wanting for more.

I'd be lying if the style of this text didn't occasionally drive me up the wall (why are we starting sentences of a history monograph with the words "and" and "but"?). The things that irked me, however, are reflective of how this work is trying to appeal to a few audiences--those already deep-in with academia (like me) and those outside of it. It mostly succeeds.

[Nightwitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really excellent read - dense and information-packed and sometimes academic to the point of being difficult to get through (as a casual reader), but so informative that it was worth it. Kanakamedala does a great job of providing the necessary background information to make her account understandable and her research was absolutely exhaustive. Not a light read by any means but incredibly informative about a little-known aspect of a much-studied city and time period, which in turn is going to color my perspective on future reading and thinking about nineteenth-century New York (and US) history in the years to come.

I received an ARC for free (and took a long time to finish it!) but these are my honest opinions.

[Ivy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent research and work, though the prose sometimes strains to escape the style of an academic treatise--sometimes failing to overcome dry recitation, and sometimes verging into sentimental asides that don't mesh where they're placed. In part, I think part of this is because it's a relatively short book--it packs a LOT of history into about 200 pages, which I think is why Kanakamedala sometimes has to really underline what she's trying to express. One excellent touch is the inclusion of dozens of maps of Brooklyn--it's great to see the city grow!

[LearningMum · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am in absolute awe over the tremendous scholarship that went into the writing of this remarkable history book. This quote, from Lorgia Garcia-Peña, captures some of the spirit of the Black Brooklynites: “Black life is rebellion. It is the ultimate contradiction to the isms destroying humanity: colonialism, racism, capitalism. It is the affirmation of possibility through collective, ancestral, radical joy.”

[K · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brooklynites is a well-researched and interesting history of slavery in the City of Brooklyn before, during, and after emancipation in New York State. What was most interesting was the author's contrasts between the Cities of Brooklyn and New York. It is a bit repetitive, and several historical figures were not examined like others in the book, but overall it is a fascinating and necessary book.

[Yashoda Sampath · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderfully vivid, unknown history of streets I have walked for many, many years. I have some quibbles with the structure of the book (it purports to tell the story through the lives of four characters who never really came to life for me), but the facts themselves are splendidly researched and conveyed.