Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power behind the Civil Rights Movement
Review By Dominique Jean-Louis
Tanisha Ford describes Mollie Moon, and social power brokers like her, as “the glue that connected Black social clubs, church groups, sororities, fraternities, and professional organizations into a national network of contributors who gave of their time and money to keep the movement afloat,” forming a “Black Freedom financial grid [that] established the economic base that supported the frontline activism of Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and John Lewis.” Mollie Moon was perhaps best known for her role as head of the National Urban League Guild, the social and volunteer auxiliary arm of the National Urban League, connecting a national grid of donors, activists, strategists and philanthropists
“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
Basketball was especially popular in New York City and by the turn of the century, nearly every public school were sponsoring teams. The Public Schools Athletic League (PSAL), founded in 1903, was initially a private organization whose primary function was to supervise physical education and interscholastic athletics in all New York City public schools. With about fifteen high schools throughout the city, the PSAL sponsored its first formal basketball tournament in 1905. In that inaugural championship game on March 4, 1905, DeWitt Clinton defeated Boys High in Brooklyn to lay claim to the first ever PSAL tournament champion. In other words, Clinton was crowned the first king of basketball.
The Eight tells the story of the Lemmon slave case, a dramatic legal battle over the freedom of eight enslaved people who were brought to New York City while sailing from Virginia to Texas, at which point New York abolitionists initiated a freedom suit on their behalf. The eight-year legal saga that followed reflected escalating political tensions over the fate of American slavery and highlighted the legal contradictions that complicated a half-slave, half-free nation.
Black Loyalists in the Evacuation of New York City, 1783
By L. Goulet and Mary Tsaltas-Ottomanelli
From 1776, the city stood as the stronghold of British operations in the thirteen colonies. The last British officials departed on November 25, ending their seven-year occupation of the city. We remember this event today as Evacuation Day. It was once a celebrated holiday but has since been largely forgotten by the public. Public commemorations primarily concentrated on the return of Patriot forces. It is crucial to move beyond the narrow focus and highlight the importance of expanding public memory to include the experiences of Loyalists who evacuated and the thousands of Black Loyalists who sought their freedom.
Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York
Review By Emily Holloway
Set from the original founding of the NYPD in 1845 and concluding around the first World War, Guariglia’s book situates the NYPD as a medium of American imperial ambition and statecraft. Police and the Empire City is not merely a history of the country’s largest and most influential police department; it also positions the NYPD as a repository of scientific knowledge about race, gender, and sexuality that is mobilized and iterated to assert state authority and preserve order.
The “Puerto Rican Problem” in Postwar New York City
Review By Kenneth M. Donovan
Perhaps most significantly, the book sheds light on how ideas about Puerto Ricans and Puerto Rico itself were constructed and incorporated into public policy and popular culture. According to Meléndez, those ideas have had staying power. As the island of Puerto Rico faces ongoing challenges in the present, from crippling debt to the privatization of its electric power, it seems that, to quote Melendez, “the ‘Puerto Rican Problem’ has not disappeared. It has simply changed shape.”
A Pathfinder in the Village: Buffy Sainte-Marie on Building a Career in New York’s Folk Music Revival
By Christine Kelly
Even as the Village proved a less inclusive environment than its outward appearance suggested, Buffy Sainte-Marie effectively harnessed the resources available to her as an up-and-coming artist in the heart of the national folk scene in order to craft a stage persona that resisted gender and race-based stereotypes, garner and maintain creative and commercial success, and use her popularity to raise awareness of dire needs among Indigenous communities across North America in an era of racial reckoning and social change. By making the most of her time in New York – an experience marked by the artist’s fascination with the rock and rhythm and blues shows of 1950s Brooklyn as much as the Village performances of the 1960s folk era – cultivating allies among fellow artists, and supporting Indigenous causes, Buffy Sainte-Marie charted a rare path forward as an influential artist and activist whose story paints a complex portrait of New York’s folk revival and the creative influences, cultural locations, and power brokers that shaped it.
Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Midcentury New York
Review by Daniel Morris
In an homage to a space and time that have passed, but that remain as traces in the vivid depictions on display in this handsome and informative volume, Moore offers a love letter to photographers who looked past ideological doctrine (worker strikes and political protests are set aside) to teach viewers and to remind themselves how to regard their fellow New Yorkers with the dignity of concerned attentiveness.
Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-Imperialism
Review By Edgardo Meléndez
For Power, Puerto Rico’s colonial status greatly undermines the honesty of America’s “Good Neighbor” policy towards Latin American countries in the 1930s. She recounts the PRNP’s continued efforts to obtain support for its cause into the 1940s and argues that it was crucial in getting important sectors in several Latin American countries to challenge US policy towards the region.
