Long before it became the go-to borough for hipsters and commuters, Brooklyn was once America’s third largest city, independent and separate from Manhattan and the City of New York, explains Prithi Kanakamedala in “Brooklynites: The Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities that Shaped a Borough” (NYU Press).
But it was also a place where, at the end of the American Revolution, one in three black inhabitants were enslaved, a statistic that, inevitably, drove a wave of activism in the years to come.
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“Brooklyn was a slaveholding capital,” writes Kanakamedala. “And it was within this context that a free Black community at the town’s most northwestern tip would begin to contour the landscape and imbue the land with the radical possibilities of freedom.”
Told through the stories of four ordinary families from Brooklyn’s nineteenth-century Black community — the Crogers, the Hodges, the Wilsons, and the Gloucesters — it reveals not just of their extraordinary lives but also how neighborhoods like Fort Greene, Williamsburg and DUMBO became hotbeds for social justice movements, laser-focused on a new emancipated future.