How the Catholic Church Drove Suburban Expansion Within and Outside New York City
By Stephen M. Koeth, C.S.C.
Often overlooked, therefore, is the role that Catholic leaders, associations, and media played in spurring suburbanization, shaping the pattern of suburban development, and establishing the necessary infrastructure to sustain suburban communities. The Catholic bishops of metropolitan New York cooperated with urban planners and developers in order to maximize the Church’s real estate holdings and to anticipate where the Church would need to expand in order to serve its suburbanizing flock. They also moved financial resources from well-established urban parishes to newly established suburban parishes and oversaw massive building campaigns in suburban areas.
The Case of Ernest Gallashaw: Achieving Justice in an Earlier Era of White-Backlash Politics
By Robert Polner and Michael Tubridy
The episode proved to be a revelatory moment in a city whose conceit of tolerance was belied by stark economic inequality as well as segregation in housing, employment and schools. Now virtually forgotten, the eruption on poor and working-class streets 15 miles from City Hall was—and still remains—historically significant for signaling New York City’s seething racial tensions and the potential for intense right-wing reaction.
New York’s Forgotten Pioneers: The National Basketball Association’s first all-Black Team
By Adam Criblez
In 1979, the New York Knicks — a storied organization with roots dating to the creation of the National Basketball Association (NBA) decades earlier — became the first franchise to field an all-Black NBA team. And, at least at first, almost no one seemed to notice.
Thinking Black, Collecting Black: Schomburg’s Desiderata and the Radical World of Black Bibliophiles
By Laura E. Helton
In this circle, Schomburg also explored the concept of collectivity, engaging in a method he and Bruce each called the practice of “thinking black.” Subverting the narrow, stifling ways that the United States codified racial segregation, this method looked elsewhere—in both time and space—to harness the power of “thinking black” in diasporic and global terms. Schomburg saw the stakes of his project as at once mapping the contours of an explicitly Black modernity—embodied in objects like the earliest books printed in Africa, paintings by Black Renaissance artists, or the proceedings of free Black institutions in the Americas—and rethinking the writing of history more broadly.
Joyful Resilience: Celebrating Untold Stories of Civil Rights History in New York City
By Judy DeRosier, Jas Leiser, and Errol C. Saunders II
The New York City Civil Rights History Project (NYCCRHP) aims to document the crucial and often neglected histories of Black, Brown, and Disability Rights activists who worked tirelessly to promote conversations and policy changes that are diverse and in line with the city’s population. […] By presenting these narratives, the NYCCRHP offers an invaluable resource for understanding the multifaceted nature of civil rights activism and expands beyond the commonly recognized figures and events to include a broader range of activists and movements. This diversity reflects the true breadth of the struggle for rights and equality in New York City.
The World of Dubrow's Cafeteria: An Interview with Marcia Bricker Halperin
By Robert W. Snyder
In the middle decades of the twentieth century in New York City, Dubrow’s cafeterias in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and the garment district of Manhattan were places to get out of your apartment, have coffee with friends, or enjoy a hearty but affordable meal. They were grounded in the world of Jewish immigrants and their children, and they thrived in years when Flatbush and the Garment District each had a distinctly Jewish character. […] before Dubrow’s cafeterias were shuttered, Marcia Bricker Halperin captured their mood and their patrons in black and white photographs. These pictures, along with essays by the playwright Donald Margulies and the historian Deborah Dash Moore, constitute Marcia’s book Kibitz and Nosh: When We All Met at Dubrow’s Cafeteria, published by Cornell University Press and winner of a National Jewish Book Council prize for Food Writing and Cookbooks.
Policing the World from New York City: How Policing Changed from 1880 to 1920
A Collaboration with Public Books: Matthew Guariglia, interviewed by Emily Brooks
From the 1880s to the 1940s, New York City was transformed—and so too was the New York City Police Department. This is the second of two interviews—published in collaboration with Public Books—where Matthew Guariglia and Emily Brooks discuss this pivotal era, through their exciting new books on the NYPD. The first interview was published on Public Books. You can read it here.
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.
