The story of the Black ‘Brooklynites’ and their fight for freedom in NYC

For any New Yorkers still wedded to the notion that slavery was a story that unfolded squarely in the South, the recently released book “Brooklynites” should be eye-opening.

In "Brooklynites," history professor Prithi Kanakamedala of Bronx Community College and CUNY's Graduate Center examines the histories of Black Brooklyn residents in the 19th century and their quest for freedom — for themselves and others.

Their history is Brooklyn’s history, spanning from the borough’s era as a slaveholding capital in New York and through the end of the Civil War. Narratives of the Black families who harbored fugitives in their homes on the “Underground Railroad" are woven throughout.

These activists also created Weeksville, the second-largest free Black community in the United States before the Civil War. Only a few of the site's original houses remain.

We spoke to Kanakamedala about the main takeaways from her book. The conversation below has been edited for clarity and length.

As far as Black history in Brooklyn goes, if you had to choose a few main highlights, what would you pick?

The first thing everybody needs to know is that Brooklyn was a slaveholding capital. It held onto slavery much longer than any other county in New York state, even as slavery was beginning to wane even in Manhattan.  So we owe a debt of gratitude to enslaved people of African descent who built Brooklyn.

By the eve of the Civil War in 1861, Brooklyn had its own economy, and that economy — which was sugar — tied it to slavery.  You may know the Domino Sugar Factory today. That was previously the Havemeyer sugar factory.  The profits from that really made Brooklyn the third-largest city in the United States.

The third thing that I would want people to know about Brooklyn's history is that free Black communities existed across Brooklyn. They lived in places like Dumbo, what we call Downtown Brooklyn,  Williamsburg, Weeksville, and they started to move out to places like Fort Greene.

How did Black Brooklynites help enslaved people in the South and those coming North?

Black Brooklynites had a very sophisticated understanding of their own freedom, of contouring what freedom meant for themselves and their Black brothers and sisters.  They were constantly making connections, both with the South, where slavery was still legal, and across the Caribbean and Atlantic world.

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.

Their homes were often doubling up as stations on the Underground Railroad, which was neither a railroad nor was it underground, but just a network of folks who could transport freedom-seekers from the South to the North and have them re-establish their lives.

Black Brooklynites were also making connections in the Caribbean.  They were looking to Haiti to see: What does this first example of Black liberation look like?

You write in the book that education was vital to freedom. What was unique about the system of schooling for Black children in Brooklyn?

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.

By the mid-19th century, you had an African school in what we would call today Downtown Brooklyn, you had one out in Weeksville — which is that border between Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights today — and you had one up in Williamsburg.

Those schools will be renamed the Colored School System when the Brooklyn Board of Education takes over. But at the center of it always were Black educators, really demanding a curriculum and an education that suits their children and really challenges their children to become citizens of the world and to prepare them as the next generation of activists.

There were more Black children attending these schools than there were white children attending the district schools.  Schooling was not compulsory, meaning families were making incredibly difficult choices about whether to lose an income, because children were in the workforce, or whether to send them to school. That political commitment to education, I think, is so deeply ingrained in Brooklyn's history.

What was Weeksville, and how did it come to be?

Weeksville is founded just 11 years after slavery ends in New York State. There will be seven original land investors who will come together to buy land in what will become Weeksville. And they do so intentionally. Again, thinking about real estate or land being such a New York story.

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.

Prior to 1821, any man, regardless of race, as long as they had $100 worth of property, could vote. In 1821, New York state makes an amendment to the New York state constitution, and it states that any Black man now needs to own $250 worth of property to vote, whereas a white man had no property qualification.

By the 1850s, Weeksville is thriving. It's the second-largest community free Black community in the United States. It is the only one with an urban base and it boasts really high levels of home ownership. It has churches, schools, a newspaper, an old age home.

You also mention in the book that being kidnapped back into slavery was a constant threat for Black people in Brooklyn. So how did they work to address that threat?

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.

Just weeks after that Fugitive Slave Law is passed in September 1850, the first person to be arrested under that legislation will be James Hamlet. He is a free Black man living in Williamsburg. He's working in Manhattan. He is arrested and taken to a Baltimore jail, and returns to New York a week later.

In order for that to happen, Black New Yorkers, Black Brooklynites are organizing. They are fundraising constantly. And so they “buy” him out of slavery and return him. In Brooklyn, they form committees thinking about what radical interventions would look like in terms of people being kidnapped.

What were the Draft Riots, and how did Black Brooklynites recover in their aftermath?

While New York was not formally in the Civil War, meaning we don't have a battle site here in New York, it is definitely part of that Civil War story.

There had always been racial tensions between two of the most marginalized groups in New York: Irish and Black New Yorkers. In the summer of 1863, those tensions explode. Irish New Yorkers, Irish Americans have huge resentment about fighting in a war for which they will argue they have not benefited from this system of slavery. To add to that tension, if you were a wealthy person, you could pay $300 and buy your way out of fighting. So it really was left to very ordinary working-class men to do it.

In 1863, it's the summer, it's July, it is hot. It is this city, which means everybody is crowded and living on top of each other, no air conditioning, nowhere to go cool down. There are rumors flying around that the draft is going to be called again and that another set of folks will get called into battle. It erupts into a 19th-century example of white domestic terrorism in which white New Yorkers, most or some of them Irish, will go through the streets of Manhattan blaming and murdering their Black neighbors. During that time, Black New Yorkers, severely traumatized, will flee for their lives across the East River.

The book never means to suggest that Brooklyn was a bastion of safety. But it certainly represented a good choice in that sort of horror. Black people we know escaped to Weeksville, which by 1863 has long established itself as a place of safety and refuge. They will escape to Williamsburg, where German Brooklynites are welcoming them into their local community hall, just to keep them safe.

After the draft riots across New York and Brooklyn, the Black population dwindles. They are so understandably traumatized by the kind of horror that they've seen in their own streets, that they will leave New York, and those numbers will not recover until the Great Migration.