“Our Brooklyn Correspondent”: William J. Wilson Writes the City
By Britt Rusert
William J. Wilson may very well have been New York’s first Black culture critic. A self-stylized flâneur, cultural aesthete, and frequent contributor to Black periodicals throughout the 1840s and 50s, he wrote under the name “Ethiop” and as “Brooklyn Correspondent” for Frederick Douglass’ Paper. In these columns, he provided readers across the nation with on-the-ground reports of New York’s people, places, and happenings based on his frequent “ramblings” around the city. Wilson was particularly interested in the sights and sounds of Broadway as it emerged as a hub of culture, entertainment, and conspicuous consumption in the middle of the century. Wilson would make his own contribution to the city’s cultural scene in 1859 with his publication of the Afric-American Picture Gallery, an experimental text that imagines the first museum of Black Art in the United States (See Image 1).
Stereoscopic view of Broadway in 1859, the year Wilson publishes his Afric-American Picture Gallery in the Anglo-African Magazine; Edward Anthony and Henry T. Anthony, Broadway on a Rainy Day, 1859, Albumen silver prints from glass negatives, E. & H. T. Anthony, Anthony’s Instantaneous Views, No. 5095, Collection of the New-York Historical Society.
In this wide-ranging and lively series, Wilson transforms his nom de plume, Ethiop, into a docent who guides readers through an imaginary collection of portraits, landscapes, sketches, and prints. The Picture Gallery is especially fascinating insofar as it is a deeply visual work that reproduces no actual images. Instead, Ethiop’s descriptions are ekphrastic – or written descriptions – of art, some of which have real-world referents and others which have been invented by the author. The gallery’s collection includes, for example, a “Head of Phillis Wheatley,” based on the famous frontispiece portrait of Wheatley from her Poems on Various Subjects (1773), a gothic landscape of Mount Vernon, and a dramatic visual rendering of a slave ship anchored near Jamestown. The Picture Gallery appeared in seven installments in The Anglo-African Magazine, a monthly Black intellectual magazine published in New York by the printer, editor, and bookseller, Thomas Hamilton. Hamilton and Wilson were both members of a tight-knit coterie of Black cultural elites and intellectuals who lived and worked in late antebellum New York.
Marking himself as a quintessential Brooklynite, Wilson was not shy about his belief that Brooklyn was superior to the rest of New York. In his very first column as Frederick Douglass’ Paper’s Brooklyn Correspondent, he wrote, “New York is a great city. When I say New York, I of course include its environs. - New York, proper, may be considered the body, of which the adjacent towns around it, are the limbs, or members thereof. Brooklyn, from its quietness, serenity, morality and intellectuality, may be regarded the head.” [1] Here, Wilson seeks to draw attention to Brooklyn’s growing status, portraying it as New York’s intellectual and moral “head,” and thus also as the city’s center of culture. More than that, Wilson’s growth into adulthood converged with Brooklyn’s own coming of age in the mid-nineteenth century, only officially incorporated as a city in 1834, around the time when Wilson probably immigrated to the city as a young man. We might think more about Wilson’s development as a writer and cultural critic tracking alongside Brooklyn’s own consolidation into a bustling hub of industrial and cultural activity in the period. In his writings, Wilson often anticipates Brooklyn’s future as a city motored by cultural capital and even its courting of a “creative class,” while always reminding his readers that the sphere of culture – like the sphere of industry – was rooted in the machinations of both slavery and capitalism.
Although biographical details about Wilson are scant, some details about his life in New York can be stitched together from periodicals, census data, and records of Black organizational activities in the period. Wilson’s own periodical correspondence offers some additional insight into his life and milieu. It becomes a bit easier to trace him after the Civil War, when he and his family moved to Washington, DC to join other African American leaders and activists who wanted to be at the center of politics in the wake of Emancipation. We know that Wilson moved from New Jersey to Brooklyn sometime in the 1830s or early 1840s, following the regional movement of many African Americans into the city in the period. Born in or around 1818 in the state of New Jersey, Wilson can be found in Brooklyn city directories beginning in 1842. That year, he was appointed principal of Brooklyn’s Colored School No. 1, one of three schools for Black students in the city. [2] Wilson’s wife, Mary, was born in New York, and she also taught at the school and served for a short time as principal of its primary department. [3] William and Mary had one daughter, a girl they named Ann and called Annie.
City directories, atlases, and census data can help us to locate Wilson in the city with more geographical specificity. Census data and city directories show Wilson and his family living at a number of different addresses in Brooklyn in the 1840s and 1850s, including residences on Chapel Street, Nassau Street, and Atlantic Street. The Nassau Street residence places Wilson around the corner from Duffield Street, a famous street of Black abolitionist activity that included homes of activists who were known to shelter fugitive slaves (See Image 2). We can also locate Wilson in Manhattan. His newspaper columns often find him strolling on Broadway and we can also place him in close proximity to the historic free Black community in Lower Manhattan that Carla Peterson traces in detail in her deeply researched book Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City. Thomas Hamilton published his Anglo-African Magazine on Bleeker Street, in that historic Black community, and just two blocks from New York’s Printing House Square. [4]
Atlas showing Wilson’s residence in proximity to Duffield Street, a hub of abolitionist organizing and political activity. For a time Wilson and his family lived at 140 Nassau Street. Atlases of New York City, Collection of the Center for Brooklyn History, Brooklyn Public Libraries.
In some ways, it feels strange to try to pin down Wilson’s coordinates, especially given his interest in wayward movement and flâneuring in the city streets as a form of freedom. In an early short story, “Terance Ludlam” (1854), Wilson’s narrator recounts a recent trip he took to a village north of New York, probably in the Hudson Valley. Setting out on this journey, the narrator says that “the pleasure of the undertaking lies in the absence of any arrangement how or where to go, time and liberty being the only requisites.” Strolling and wandering gives Wilson’s narrator occasion to comment on a changing, industrialized landscape based on his own observations on the ground. Recalling a familiar language of queer movement and practice beginning in the twentieth century, Wilson’s narrator refers to his retreat upstate as a country “cruise.”
Like his narrator in “Terance Ludlam,” rambling, thinking, and thinking about rambling were strategies that Wilson used to maintain and express liberty in a context of racial exclusion and a powerful culture of anti-black bias and harassment in antebellum New York. Throughout his work, Wilson almost always positions himself as an observer and as a critic vis a vis his movement on foot. The Picture Gallery was itself a product Wilson’s interest in strolling the city and absorbing the visual field as it presented itself to him on the street, in museums and other public institutions (that would allow him access), and in spaces of consumerism that increasingly dominated a commercializing city. The Picture Gallery also registers how the city was being transformed by the popularization of photographic technology. By the late 1850s, Wilson’s Broadway was lined with Daguerreian studios. In these establishments, non-elite Americans could, for the first time in history, sit to have their portrait taken; they also doubled as informal gallery spaces where members of the public could view portraits, landscapes, and other works while they waited for their daguerreotypes to develop (See Image 3). It’s tempting to think of Wilson himself sitting for his portrait in a Broadway studio, but of course such establishments were subject to the same forms of de facto racial segregation and exclusion that marked the entire city in this period. New York was notorious for its anti-Blackness and was considered by many to be the most racist city north of the Mason-Dixon line. [5] Wilson’s own life as an educator was marked by anti-Black violence and harassment: in 1863, he reported to the Board of Education that his school faced constant vandalism and “mobbing” from antagonistic white residents who did not want a Black school in their neighborhood. White youth and adults threw stones into the school’s windows at night and on their way to school, students were harassed, bullied, and even beaten. As a result of these incidents, attendance at Wilson’s school dwindled. Many parents kept their children at home because they didn’t feel safe sending their children to a school constantly being attacked by white supremacists. Other parents pulled their children out of Colored School No. 1 and sent them elsewhere. [6]
One of the many Daguerrean studios that lined Broadway in the 1850s and 60s. “M. R. Brady’s New Photographic Gallery, Corner of Broadway and Tenth Street, New York,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, January 5, 1861.
Wilson’s life and life’s work also helps us to glimpse the work of a group of Black cosmopolitans and aesthetes in New York whose work would largely come to a halt with the shifting priorities of the Civil War. In 1863, Wilson joined a group of Black educators, including the writer, activist, and fugitive intellectual Harriet Jacobs, who moved South to teach former slaves and refugees in Union camps and later, in independent schools. Black New Yorkers who moved South during and after the Civil War made important contributions to the Freedman’s Bureau and to efforts led by African Americans on the ground, but their exodus also left something of haunting absence in New York itself. Indeed, the Civil War radically transformed the landscape of Black activism and politics in Brooklyn; it also transformed the terrain of Black creativity and expression.
Taken together, Wilson’s periodical correspondence and his Afric-American Picture Gallery offer us a unique window into mid nineteenth-century New York in a moment of profound historical transition, one that: highlights a panoramic views of the city and its rich tapestry of people and culture; insists on the recalcitrant presence of both slavery and capitalism on an emerging sphere of arts and culture; and privileges forms of embodied movement and freedom-in-seeing as they take shape within and against systems of racial surveillance and control in the city.
Note: Readers interested in learning more about William J. Wilson can access an annotated edition of the Afric-American Picture Gallery, along with additional historic, political, and visual context, through a digital project edited by Leif Eckstrom and the author, and hosted by the American Antiquarian Society’s Just Teach One: Early African American Print Initiative: https://jtoaa.americanantiquarian.org/welcome-to-just-teach-one-african-american/afric-american-picture-gallery/
Britt Rusert is Professor in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst and a 2023-24 W. E. B. Du Bois Institute Fellow in the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. She is currently finishing a book titled The Afric-American Picture Gallery: Imagining Black Art, circa 1859. She is also at work on a manuscript, “The Care Underground: Black Mutual Aid Organizing in the Long Nineteenth Century.”
[1] William J. Wilson writing as “Ethiop,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 11 December 1851.
[2] William J. Wilson, “Public Schools for Colored Children,” Letter to Henry R. Styles, circa 1863, Henry Stiles Papers, Center for Brooklyn History, Brooklyn Public Library.
[3] Ibid. Wilson wrote that Mary took up this post after the previous principal of the department and possible family relation, Almyra Wilson “from Boston Mass,” passed away in 1862.
[4] For a meticulous mapping of the offices of the Anglo-African Magazine vis a vis New York’s Printing House Square as well as other black printing offices in the city, see R.J. Weir and Elizabeth Lorang, “‘Will not these days be by thy poets sung”: Poems of the Anglo-African and National Anti-Slavery Standard, 1863-1864,” Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing 34 (2013); https://scholarlyediting.org/2013/editions/intro.cwnewspaperpoetry.html
[5] On the virulent racism of nineteenth-century New York, and the collaboration of city police, judges, merchants, and bankers to kidnap black New Yorkers after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1851, see Jonathan Wells, The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War (New York: Bold Type Books, 2020).
[6] Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 8 July 1863.