This article explores the fascinating history of Black Brooklynites in the 19th century, highlighting the borough's role as a slaveholding capital and the vibrant community of freed people who fought for their own and others' freedom. The author discusses the importance of education, the Underground Railroad, and the intentional creation of safe spaces like Weeksville.
For any New Yorkers still wedded to the notion that slavery was a story that unfolded squarely in the South, the recently released book “ Brooklyn ites” should be eye-opening.
As far as Black history in Brooklyn goes, if you had to choose a few main highlights, what would you pick? While they were also organizing around sort of their own right to space, their own right to safety in the city that they called home, we have what was called the Underground Railroad. In Manhattan, you do have the African school system, and you had the African school system in Philadelphia and in Boston. The critical difference was in Manhattan, that was a white philanthropic-led initiative, meaning liberal white people living in 19th-century Manhattan would give the first lot of money to the African school system. In Brooklyn, it was a Black-led initiative.
Weeksville is always a political project. They're buying it as a mode of safety and freedom, safety and refuge. They're moving away from Downtown Brooklyn or the city of Brooklyn in order to create intentional spaces in which they can just be themselves. But they're also doing it as a political statement.
After 1850, when the federal government passes the Fugitive Slave Law to appease southern slaveholders who were in Congress at the time, it allows federal special commissioners to cross state lines into the “free North,” and kidnap any person of African descent that they assumed might have been a fugitive or freedom-seeker. And you had a system that was sort of rigged or stacked up against anybody accused of being a freedom-seeker.
BLACK HISTORY BROOKLYN SLAVERY FREEDOM EDUCATION
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