Session Abstract

In his book Brownsville, Brooklyn, Wendell Pritchett wrote that Brooklyn “has received scant attention relative to its significance in New York and United States history.” Pritchett’s book was published in 2002. Twelve years later, work on Brooklyn is thriving.

Many studies of 20^th-century Brooklyn still focus on prominent figures and famous flashpoints: Jackie Robinson, Shirley Chisholm, and the controversy over the public schools in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district.

In this roundtable, the participants wish to offer some new perspectives on race in 20^th-century Brooklyn. We hope that our roundtable discussion will spark a lively interchange with the audience. We want to attract an audience of scholars interested in cities, race, African American history, and New York.

Joshua Guild places race in Brooklyn within a trans-Atlantic perspective. He will speak about New York City’s Trinidadian-style Carnival, which moved from Harlem to Brooklyn after World War II. He argues that Carnival helped to forge a distinctive “West Indian” identity in Brooklyn. In the 1970s – after more Caribbeans had immigrated to Brooklyn, and after African Americans had begun to exercise political power – Carnival became central to the making of this new black ethnic identity.

Hasan Jeffries is working on a new book project about the residents of the Ebbets Field apartment complex – built in 1962 on the ground of the hallowed stadium in Crown Heights. He turns the emphasis away from Jackie Robinson’s mad dashes on the baseball field, and wishes to refocus attention on issues of housing, race, and racism in the borough. Prof. Jeffries will speak about how Ebbets Field and the Dodgers still frame the way we talk about race and racism in Brooklyn.

Brian Purnell offers a fresh take on the meaning of Black Power. All too often, Black Power in Brooklyn has been conflated with the demands of activists during the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school controversy. Purnell highlights other strains of Black Power in Brooklyn: economic development, political power, and the formation of new cultural identities. He argues that these forms of Black Power also took shape in the late 1960s, amid the fires of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis.

Shirley Chisholm’s 1972 bid for the presidency has been the subject of many inquiries. Julie Ann Gallagher unearths a longer history of black women in New York City politics, beginning even before the New Deal. In particular, she will introduce the audience to two black women who made careers in Brooklyn politics: Maude Richardson and Ada Jackson.

Jason Sokol explores the racial and ethnic makeup of Brooklyn’s 12^th Congressional District, and how Shirley Chisholm built a multiracial coalition on this terrain. The district lines were redrawn in 1968, shortly after Chisholm announced that she would run for Congress. In the Democratic primary, Chisholm ran against William Thompson. She focused not only on black voters in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Chisholm also reached out to white voters in Bushwick and Greenpoint, and Puerto Rican voters in Williamsburg. She beat Thompson by the slimmest of margins.