How did Brooklyn go from being a slave capital to having a free population? Who ignited the change?
These are among the questions Prithi Kanakamedala, a professor of history at Bronx Community College, examines in her new book, “Brooklynites: The Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities that Shaped a Borough.”
In the years after the American Revolution, Brooklyn was a slaveholding capital. But there was a small, thriving Black community that established schools and churches, advocated for voting rights and increased its own financial power. Free Black Brooklyn underwent rapid change and growth while living under a veil of white supremacy and violence.
Kanakamedala’s book traces the history of free Black Brooklyn over an 80-year period, from the 1790s to the 1870s. It focuses on four families: the Crogers, the Hodges, the Wilsons and the Gloucesters.
The free Black community “was small in comparison to Manhattan, but it was mighty in its own right,” Kanakamedala said .
She spoke with WNYC’s Alison Stewart on a recent episode of “All of It.” An edited version of their conversation is below.
Alison Stewart: What was the original village of Brooklyn? How much land did it encompass?
Prithi Kanakamedala: The original village was about the area we think of today when we think of Dumbo. It was that very Northwest tip that was the village within the town of Brooklyn, and it’s only about a square mile.
Oh, my gosh.
Kanakamedala: Yes, but it was just as culturally diverse then as it is perhaps today, in that you had people of Dutch descent, English descent and African descent, all trying to figure out how to live alongside each other. Small, but certainly still packed.
How prominent was the free Black population at this time?
Kanakamedala: The free Black community was small, and it was small in comparison to Manhattan, but it was mighty in its own right. It was growing slowly, and part of the reason was because Brooklyn was largely agricultural at this time. It was people of African descent who were enslaved, who were doing most of the labor.
That free Black community is smaller to begin with, for many reasons, but it grows exponentially over time, and at the heart of it is that Black radical tradition in thinking about self-determination and how this community will grow their own institutions.
How did Brooklyn go from being a slave capital to having a free population?
Kanakamedala: That’s the law. In 1799, New York State will pass the first Gradual Emancipation Act, but it’s not in any way immediate. By that, I mean it will take 28 long years for slavery to end in New York State. The reason Brooklyn deserves to have its own story is because, in Brooklyn, it will do something slightly different: Slavery will actually strengthen in numbers at the end of the American Revolution, where it starts to wane in, say, Manhattan or other parts of New York State.
That original free Black community came about through, historians think, a variety of methods. One might be that they’ve come over from Manhattan and that they were free. It could be that their elders or ancestors fought in the American Revolution as Black loyalists and gained their freedom, and so their children would have been free. There were other Northern states in which slavery had ceased to exist. It could be folks coming in from Pennsylvania or Massachusetts, but certainly, this was a free Black community.
You look at these four different families. Let’s talk about the Crogers. Peter and Benjamin are brothers. How do the Crogers make their money?
Kanakamedala: The Crogers are listed in the Census records as a very necessary job in the village of Brooklyn: white washers. Back in the day, people would use a lime compound to basically wash their walls rather than painting it constantly. That’s how you would get your buildings clean from all the environmental pollution. That’s their official job, in terms of the Census.
But actually, within the village of Brooklyn, they were building a mutual aid society, building the first Black church in Brooklyn.
We know so much more about Peter and Benjamin than we do about their wives. How common is the disparity between Black men and Black women in historical archives?
Kanakamedala: Huge. Always. Early 19th-century archives are so difficult to recover the lives of ordinary Black women, and I think it’s very intentional that I raise that constantly in the book. It doesn’t mean as historians or as New Yorkers that we need to honor or celebrate them any less, I think it just means that we need to think in more creative ways about the ways in which Black women existed in Brooklyn.
Black women were always at the center of organizing. Peter Croger, officially in the newspaper, the school opens at his home. Well, he shares that home with his wife. So in my mind, who was inviting all these folks into the home? Who was making them comfortable? Who was creating space? That would have been Eleanor Croger. Just because the archives are silent about their contributions, it doesn’t mean we have to be in terms of historians and the books that we write.
The Crogers were free Blacks in Brooklyn when slavery was still legal in New York, and it was called a “gradual emancipation.” What does a gradual emancipation look like?
Kanakamedala: Yes, it’s a mouthful, and it was intentionally designed to protect or help slaveholders rather than enslaved people. That Gradual Emancipation Act, passed in 1799, is complicated by intention. It states that anybody born to an enslaved mother after July 4th, 1799 will be free at the age of 28 if male and 25 if female. That, of course, ensures you get the best working years out of that person who is enslaved. Just a lot going on.
I think the message, or the hope, of that community is that the free Black community isn’t waiting for that emancipation moment to happen on July 4th, 1827, when slavery will eventually end. They’re already organizing and mobilizing and thinking of ways in which this community needs institutions and it needs something in order to ensure political and legal equality, which, of course, nobody was talking about during the gradual emancipation period.
You mentioned they built mutual aid societies, schools, churches, but they did so independently of Northern white abolitionist philanthropy. Why is that an important distinction?
Kanakamedala: Absolutely. As historians, when we teach the history of Manhattan, or even Boston, which were huge hotbeds of abolitionism, some of those roots come from white philanthropy. I think what makes Brooklyn’s story so unique, is that it comes from the Black community and I think the roots of that are still felt in Brooklyn today.
We’re going to talk about another part of Brooklyn: Williamsburg. It’s not yet a part of Brooklyn yet, but it was thought to be rural, a small town, the home to the second free Black community in Kings County. That’s where the Hodges family was from?
Kanakamedala: They’re not from there. They moved there.
They moved there from Virginia.
Kanakamedala: Yes.
What was it about living in a smaller village that made it easier for free Blacks?
Kanakamedala: Thank God Willis Hodges left his autobiography, and he tells us himself. He says the racism is easier to bear in smaller villages. The Hodges, like so many people who will eventually become New Yorkers, move here to fulfill their own ambitions and dreams. They move to Williamsburg because they have lived in Manhattan, and the place is now a city unto itself. They find the racism too intense, and so they move to Williamsburg to think about how they can really grow that village in an anti-slavery vision.
They do a lot of the same things that the Crogers are doing 20 years earlier, which is they’ll create a school, they’ll establish a Black church, and then they’ll start to grow their small businesses – thinking about the ways in which they can grapple with the city before it becomes a city and really shape the streets and neighborhoods.
The Hodges were part of an effort to take on big political issues in New York, the owning of land to get the right to vote. How easy was it for free Black people to own land?
Kanakamedala: Oh, it was impossible. I talk about it in the book that somehow, if you can just buy property, you can vote, and then you could claim you were a citizen. We all know, as New Yorkers today, owning property is the most impossible thing in this city. You had to own, according to the New York State Constitution – which makes an amendment in 1821 – $250 worth of property in order to vote. That was about an annual salary for the average working Black man.
If you think about your annual salary and how much you’re actually able to save, the idea of saving a full year’s worth just to be able to buy enough property and then tell the state you are eligible to vote is huge. That’s a huge obstacle.
The reason for the formula of citizenship is it is pre-1870, so there is no 14th and 15th Amendment. If I’m born on U.S. soil, I am an American citizen, and if I am an American citizen, I therefore have the right to vote. Those amendments don’t exist yet. Again, it is free Black people who are pioneering these kinds of arguments around what citizenship looks like in the United States.
Let’s hop to the other side, the Underground Railroad. Where were the most used properties in Brooklyn?
Kanakamedala: It’s hard, Alison, because so much of this wasn’t documented. We do know that in New York, specifically in Brooklyn, there was a young girl called Anna Maria Weems who will stay in Brooklyn Heights because she stays at the home of Lewis Tappan, who is a white abolitionist. There’s also various places dotted around.
In the book, I invite readers to think about the Underground Railroad, those spaces not necessarily being about attics and tunnels. If you think about it, these are ordinary American residents coming from the South, freedom seekers, who want to make a life for themselves. The last thing they want to do is hide. What they can do in Brooklyn is come here and stay with somebody and start to figure out, “Well, how do I get a job? How do I have a piece of that American dream? How do I own a home?”
You see lots of freedom seekers coming to Brooklyn, where they’re starting businesses.
Around the 1860s was a time of increased violence in New York, the Draft Riots of 1863 in Manhattan led by mobs of Irish immigrants. But the violence also came to Brooklyn’s Black community in 1862. What happened on Aug. 4 of that year? Where did the violence take place?
Kanakamedala: Like all New York summers, it was probably oppressively hot, and everybody is angry and fed up with it all, but there’s also the Civil War happening in the background. The tobacco factory, which is today that bit of Brooklyn that’s cut off by the BQE, had a number of free Black people that worked there — men, women, and children. In that summer, Irish mobs would go through.
Basically, it’s the first recorded act of white terrorism in that part of Brooklyn, and it devastates the community. Most of those workers are so traumatized they don’t want to return to work.
The summer of 1863 was incredibly traumatic, but I would never want Brooklyn to seem like it was some sort of bastion of liberty and freedom. It had its own problems and racist violence. That was the reason for bringing in 1862 and showing that, actually, Brooklyn was as complex as Manhattan.
I did want to get to the Gloucester family, led by Elizabeth Gloucester, before we wrap up. She’s buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, to give you a hint that she amassed a certain amount of wealth. How did she make it in Brooklyn?
Kanakamedala: She made it – like really smart New Yorkers – through real estate. She bought lots and lots of real estate. The brilliant Brent Staples has also written about Elizabeth Gloucester. She will die one of the richest women in the United States when she dies in the late 19th century. I hope the book invites people to think, for every Elizabeth Gloucester, there were dozens of ordinary Black women also sustaining the economy in much more informal ways.
She was amazing in that she was super rich and she owned lots of real estate, but also, she was an ordinary human being who suffered all of the same kind of losses that we do as human beings. At one point, she’s giving money to John Brown to go raid Harpers Ferry. Badass. She’s like, “Go start the revolution.” It’s the same year that her 2-year-old, Alfred, will pass away, and so thinking about pediatric outcomes for Black children and certainly also for Black women.
Where does most of the research for researching free Black Brooklynites exist?
Kanakamedala: All over the place, but the majority, in terms of archives, still exists at the Center for Brooklyn History, which is part of Brooklyn Public Library, and freely available to see for anybody who wants to.
If someone were walking around Brooklyn today, what clues remain of the free Black Brooklynites?
Kanakamedala: I’m not sure there is much in terms of landscape. The Black churches still exist, absolutely. They just don’t exist in the original locations. As an educator who takes my students on walking tours all the time, I think one of the greatest gifts is to be a New Yorker who is constantly reminded that we are walking on the achievements and the contributions of New Yorkers past – even if that specific building is not there.