Brooklynites: An Interview with Prithi Kanakamedala
Interviewed By Katie Uva
Today on the blog, editor Katie Uva interviews Prithi Kanakamedala about her new book, Brooklynites:The Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities that Shaped a Borough. The book tells the story of Brooklyn’s nineteenth-century free Black community and argues for the centrality of this community in understanding Brooklyn’s past, present, and future.
How does the experience of Brooklyn’s free Black community differ from and how does it intersect with that of the free Black community in Manhattan in the nineteenth-century?
Free Black communities of nineteenth-century Brooklyn and Manhattan had one core thing in common, and that was creating self-determined institutions and neighborhoods that would allow them to create community, thrive, and live their lives with dignity. Groundbreaking work by scholars such as Leslie M. Harris, Leslie M. Alexander, Craig S. Wilder, and Clarence Taylor unpacks so much of this history. So on both sides of the East River, those communities were creating schools, mutual aid organizations, and independent Black churches.
The critical difference was where there was some white philanthropy in Manhattan (specifically in the creation of the African School by the white-led New-York Manumission Society), but this was entirely absent in Brooklyn. Brooklyn’s free Black community was certainly smaller in numbers compared to Manhattan’s, but their intention to create institutions “for us, by us” still had a powerful impact. And of course, there is plenty of evidence that the East River — even in the absence of the bridges we know today, the subway, etc. — was no barrier for New Yorkers past from Manhattan and Brooklyn. Mutual aid organizations from Manhattan and Brooklyn were often seen marching together in celebration of milestone events such as Emancipation Day.
Brooklynites: The Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities that Shaped a Borough
by Prithi Kanakamedala
NYU Press
2024, 288 pp.
You make a point of countering the trope of “discovery” and “uncovering” archival items, noting instead that your book “intentionally seeks to amplify the archives’ long existence.” What archives were key for your research? What were you able to discern from them and what wasn’t there?
The book comes out of a public history project that began fourteen and a half years ago called "In Pursuit of Freedom.” It was a partnership between the Brooklyn Historical Society (now the Center for Brooklyn History at Brooklyn Public Library), Weeksville Heritage Center, and Irondale Ensemble Project. So the bulk of the archives that the book amplifies still exist at CBH, and visitors can request them today. They include maps, contemporary newspapers, letters, pamphlets, engravings, city directories, etc.
CBH remains one of the largest repositories for archival material about Brooklyn. So my framing in Brooklynites of how archival research works was a necessary shout out to our archivist and librarian friends and colleagues who are doing the kind of work that makes accessing these types of nineteenth-century archives possible. And they are addressing a great deal of embedded racism in past archival practices by revisiting metadata, for example. However, there are still silences. There are no portraits for any of the women who are at the center of the narrative, or their letters, with the exception of Elizabeth Gloucester — part of the fourth family featured in the book. The archival items may exist in the personal archives of the descendants of these four families that the book centers — which are just as legitimate as the collections as CBH, but it remains the right of those families to decide whether to share those archives and stories with a wider public or not.
What does a focus on Brooklyn in this era help us understand about New York City history more broadly?
All of our five boroughs have their own distinct history, and need to be unpacked separately in order to tell the rich history of this city. Brooklyn was the third largest city at the start of the U.S. Civil War. That alone merits focus — as Ruth Wilson Gilmore would ask, why is Brooklyn? How did this globally recognized borough come to be? At the end of the American Revolution, even as slavery was on the decline in places like Philadelphia, Boston, and neighboring Manhattan, slavery’s numbers strengthened in Brooklyn. And that traumatic history is intricately tied to the land. The economy in Kings County was still largely agricultural, and so it was the labor of enslaved people of African descent who made this land a capitalist possibility. Simply put, there would be no Brooklyn without the labor of unfree Brooklynites. That history deserves to be honored; we owe Black Brooklynites a debt today as New Yorkers. In addition, the idea of Brooklyn that we know today — a brand in its own right, with its own attitude and its own entrepreneurial spirit — all of that is deeply embedded in the history of its free Black communities. Like today, none of them wanted to be mislabeled as coming from Manhattan. They were proud to be from Brooklyn, and shaped its streets and neighborhoods in a radical, grassroots fashion.
How did you identify and decide to focus on the four families–the Crogers, the Hodges, the Wilsons, and the Gloucesters–at the center of your narrative?
It was partly based on what archival material was available, and partly to do with narrative structure. There are actually many, many families featured in Brooklynites. All of whom put Brooklyn on the map, so to speak. But in terms of what I could cobble together, these four families had the most material where you could tell the story of their lives in its richness and complexity. And then the other consideration was how to tell the story of six decades of Brooklyn’s phenomenal growth without losing the reader. So again, these four families in terms of the generation that you’re invited to follow takes you through that urban growth — the Crogers in the early nineteenth century when they live in the village of Brooklyn, the Hodgeses who will live in the village of Williamsburg in the early to mid-nineteenth century, the Wilsons who live in the City of Brooklyn and move to the new neighborhood of Fort Greene in the mid-nineteenth century, and finally the Gloucesters who also live in the City of Brooklyn, the third largest city in the U.S., on the eve of the Civil War.
What were some major conflicts and disagreements within Brooklyn’s Black community about how to secure freedom and fight for justice?
The two throughlines from the early to late nineteenth century in Brooklyn are to do with respectability politics, and then whether folx should remain in Brooklyn or create home elsewhere. All of this was under the ubiquitous glare of white supremacy, which came from their own neighbors and beyond.
That first generation of anti-slavery activists that the Crogers are a part of were known for their freedom parades along the village of Brooklyn’s “main” streets. There’s an article in Freedom’s Journal, the first anti-slavery newspaper in the United States that frowns on their behavior — that claims that they’re celebrating too loudly, and too often. And thankfully they paid no attention to that kind of judgment, because Black Joy was at the center of so much public celebration in Brooklyn including the later West Indian Emancipation Day celebrations in the mid-nineteenth century.
The other was whether free Black Brooklynites had a future in the United States as long as slavery, a lack of coherency around citizenship (in the absence of the 14th Amendment) and structural racism continued to be the political, social, and cultural backbone of the country. One of those responses comes in the racist form of the American Colonization Movement. It was a white-led organization with multiple auxiliaries including one in Brooklyn that basically sought to deport free people of color whose ancestors had built this country to what will become Liberia, and in turn strengthened slave-holding interests here. Augustus Washington, who is the main educator at the African School in what we call today downtown Brooklyn will leave the U.S. and relocate to Liberia and is an early example of pan-African consciousness. His contemporaries, including the Croger family, however, will argue through a wave of anti-colonization protests that home is precisely here in Brooklyn. You see that debate come up again in the 1850s, when a string of anti-Black legislation from the Fugitive Slave Act to the Dred Scott Decision forces many in Brooklyn and beyond to reconsider whether there is a future here in the city, and in the U.S. It will be the Wilson family this time who will argue that while the city is growing (it isn’t the third largest city yet), while these commercial arteries called Fulton and Atlantic are on the rise, this is the opportunity for Black Brooklynites to confront racial capitalism and shape their own city.
You discuss in the epilogue that the history you’re recounting in this book is “living and breathing” today–through the archive, through descendants, through place, and through ongoing relevance to the present. How do you hope more widespread knowledge of and recognition of this history might shape the city of today?
Like so many other New Yorkers, I don’t recognize huge parts of Brooklyn today. Even in the nearly fifteen years since this research began, that borough has changed so much through gentrification and displacement. As residents we are constantly walking over the lives and contributions of New Yorkers past. But we owe such a great debt to them. There are so many lessons they have for us — how to organize in areas of our lives that still impact us today such as education, voting, and jobs, how to create safety for ourselves especially in neighborhoods that have historically been the target of police brutality, how to create spaces of joy — in essence how to create neighborhoods that serve our communities and its future generations. That starts with learning about our past so that we might be able to shape our present and eventually future.
Prithi Kanakamedala is Professor of History at Bronx Community College, City University of New York.