From Montgomery to East New York

Episode Transcript

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Edwin Maxwell All the way down here. ... Sampson County, the one I was looking for.

Adwoa Adusei On a hot March day in Montgomery, Alabama, Edwin Maxwell, a librarian from Brooklyn, walked around the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. On the ground in front of him were large stone markers, laid out like tombstones. There was a marker to represent every county in America where black people have been lynched. Edwin stopped in front of a marker for Sampson County, North Carolina.

Edwin Maxwell I did some genealogical research on my family. The slaves were sold to the Maxwell family or they inherited them. I know my great great great grandfather went back and forth between Sampson and Cumberland County, but not — the family never really moved outside of that. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Edwin read the names of people who had been lynched in the county where his ancestors were enslaved and then lived for many generations. It was a lot to take in, and it brought the history of racial terror home for him.

Adwoa Adusei And, that’s really the aim of this national memorial: to bring the era of racial terror home for all Americans, by documenting and memorializing Black Americans who were lynched by white mobs between 1877 and 1950. The Memorial for Peace and Justice was built by the Equal Justice Initiative, or EJI, the organization founded by lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson. So far, EJI has memorialized 4,400 Black people who were lynched in this country, often combing through local records to find previously unacknowledged lynchings.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Edwin and a team of other staff from Brooklyn Public Library were in Montgomery that day in March, before the pandemic and New York City’s shut down, to gather information about how other cities have created monuments to acknowledge the history of racial violence.

Edwin Maxwell The ultimate goal of this is to figure out how we can properly memorialize and bring this back to Brooklyn. It resonates for people when they have a connection to it, when it’s in their neighborhood. 

Adwoa Adusei So, today on Borrowed, we’re going to be bringing this story home. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras From Montgomery, Alabama to East New York, where one of our own library branches has an important story to tell about the history of racial inequality right here in Brooklyn. I’m Krissa Corbett Cavouras.

Adwoa Adusei And I’m Adwoa Adusei. You’re listening to Borrowed: stories that start at the library.

[Music]

Adwoa Adusei The Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama is one of the only public monuments to lynching in America.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras The memorial itself is made up of hundreds of suspended markers identical to the ones laid out like tombstones that Edwin encountered. Each marker has the name of a county and below that the names of Black Americans who had been lynched. 

Adwoa Adusei Along one of the walls are brief narratives about the events that led to the lynching. They range from relationships with white women to casual social transgressions like finding a lost wallet and keeping the money or speaking to a white man in a way thought to be disrespectful — all of those acts were enough to be murdered. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras In order to have a family member or an ancestor who was lynched added to the memorial, family members or descendants have to provide documentation, proof that a lynching occurred. And sometimes, that’s hard to do. These crimes were not always recorded by police, or even reported in local papers. Sometimes, all the family has is a story, passed down verbally through generations.

Adwoa Adusei Toward the end of the memorial, there’s a large wall with water cascading over it. It’s cooler there, and the sound of the water is calming. Behind the waterfall, there’s an inscription that Lameane, another Brooklyn librarian, was drawn to. She read it out loud.

Lameane Isaac "Thousands of African Americans are unknown victims of racial terror lynchings whose deaths cannot be documented, many whose names will never be known. They are all honored here.” And I feel like this is impactful because, as we consider the project at New Lots, built on the African Burial Ground, many of their stories, many of their names may never be known. But, I feel that their legacies will live on, because they probably left behind children and grandchildren. And their stories are still being written and still being told. They don't end there. It’s just the beginning and a way that we can honor them.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras The reason all these BPL staffers visited the Memorial for Peace and Justice was to help us re-design a library branch here in Brooklyn, the library that Lameane just mentioned: New Lots Library. It was one of our last branches to be built — it went up in 1955. It’s a fairly standard building, but the land underneath and around the building has a very interesting history.

Adwoa Adusei This part of Brooklyn is the native homeland of the Canarsie people and, starting with European settlement, it became farmland. Enslaved and free africans labored on the land, and in 1827, slavery was abolished in New York state. Starting around 1680, the white Dutch settlers started a cemetery on the plot of land where the library now sits. Both white slaveowners and, likely, enslaved Africans and free Black people in Brooklyn were buried there throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. And, just a note on the prevalence of slavery in Brooklyn around this time, because it’s not something we really talk about: In 1790, about one in three Brooklynites were enslaved. That’s a higher percentage of enslaved people than North Carolina at the time.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras And then, in the 19th century, the roads were straightened in the area, and part of the cemetery was likely plowed over. I’m going to read from a Brooklyn Daily Eagle article written in 1900 about that process: “It being necessary to cut down some depth, many of the graves with their contents were removed. That is, the graves were removed, but in many cases the bones were left lying on the side of the bank. Some residents of the neighborhood say that the bones might be seen there until within the last five years. If this is true, it shows on the part of the responsible persons a lack of veneration amounting almost to vandalism.” The article goes on to say that pieces of tombstones could be found broken and scattered on surrounding streets.

Adwoa Adusei Around the time of the cemetery’s destruction, so the mid 1800s, a new cemetery opened across the street, next to the Dutch Reformed Church. There is documentation that many white residents were reinterred across the street. But the remains of enslaved and free African Americans were likely left behind, and it may have been their bones that were unceremoniously dug up and left on the street. In 1922, residents complained that the former cemetery was in disarray. The city decided to build a playground for school children on top of the land. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras And this is where the story gets tricky — because from this point onward, for many decades, the story of that burial ground fell out of the history books.

Catherine Mbali Green-Johnson I was told about the burial ground back in 2009. A woman in the community just had heard a rumor about it and asked if I knew anything about it as well.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Catherine Mbali Green-Johnson is the executive director and founder of Arts East New York, a non-profit organization in the neighborhood that uses arts for social and economic change.

Catherine Mbali Green-Johnson It was just pulling at my heart, this quote on quote rumor, and we went down to Brooklyn Historical Society and spent hours combing through books and trying to get information on it. Couldn't find anything. We were just about to leave and I said, you know what, maybe let's look at maps and maybe the maps will tell us something. So we turned around, put our things down, went through some maps. And sure enough, we saw the cemetery that was on both sides. The one that is in existence now, and the one that was underneath the library in the park behind it. And so we went back to the shelves, because it just said cemetery, it didn't say who was buried there, right. And sure enough, we found a quote from, I believe his name was Johannes Schank. And it stated in that book that the white bodies were removed from the cemetery across the street to the one that’s there now because Black people were overcrowding that cemetery. They wanted to separate the bodies. And that gave us the information that we needed to confirm the existence of that burial ground.

Adwoa Adusei That removal of white bodies from the old cemetery that Catherine just mentioned, happened from the late 1600s up until the 19th century.

Catherine Mbali Green-Johnson The first thing I felt was sadness that a historic site and a very important and sacred site has been disregarded and that no one knew. No one knows about it in the neighborhood, and that the people who were buried there, their stories … they’re just lost in the wind. So, sadness, anger and just really a passion to make sure the history gets told.

[Music]

Adwoa Adusei Catherine pulled together a group of neighbors to figure out how to honor the space in some way. They got a number of local officials on board, and in 2013, the area was re-named “African Burial Ground Square” to acknowledge its history. And, there’s a plaque on the site now. It reads, in part: “For those who were taken from their homeland and laid the foundation for the East New York community, we honor you forever.”

Catherine Mbali Green-Johnson We want to make sure that people know the real history of what has taken place in the community. So, we know that the Africans who came here with the Dutch and before the Dutch came as, you know, came as free, right. They were working, there was some exchange of resources for their work. And, so it's very likely that the people are buried in this space were not enslaved. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Today, East New York has a population that is 50 percent Black and 40 percent Hispanic, with about 35 percent of the neighborhood is made up of people born outside the United States. So altogether, it’s significantly higher proportion of people of color and of immigrants than the rest of New York City. So the burial ground and its message has special resonance for this neighborhood.

Adwoa Adusei But the streets surrounding the library are named after Dutch settlers, many of whom owned slaves. The playground on top of the former cemetery was called Schenck park, after the Dutch Schenck family who farmed the area in East New York using the labor of enslaved people. That’s a biased view of history, Catherine says, the fact that so many places are named after the Dutch. It erases the labor of Black people, both free and enslaved, who had just as much hand in building that area of Brooklyn.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Just last year, Catherine and a large group of community members in East New York got the playground renamed from Schenck Park to Sankofa Park, a word from the Akan language in Ghana that means “looking back to go forward.” 

Catherine Mbali Green-Johnson When you are in a neighborhood and you realize that, wow, like, my people actually built this … but I’ve been told that we were, you know, less than. That we were not capable of. And that is an untruth. And then we internalize those untruths, it is very destructive. And so, it's very important for the burial ground to be amplified, to be taught and have curriculum taught in school about it, especially in the East New York community, tours etc. have to be done. It truly makes a difference in the lives of community residents and more importantly the youth.

Adwoa Adusei Catherine remembers the re-naming ceremony. She remembers walking the streets, roughly along the perimeter of the demolished cemetery. It was a powerful day for her, she said.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras And we’re telling this story now because New Lots Library is long overdue for a makeover. The branch is home to one of our adult learning centers, where Brooklynites can learn english or work towards a high school diploma, and as we plan a renovation for New Lots Library, as well as equipping the branch for the technology and space it needs to be a modern branch, we also want to acknowledge the injustice that was done to the memory of those enslaved and free people whose graves were partially paved over, and whose names were not recorded, but who are a part of our history.

Edwin Maxwell It’s a monumental place, right. The African Burial Ground touches the library there. So whatever design we come up with, it has to acknowledge the legendary history, the grounds that we're standing on.

Adwoa Adusei That’s Edwin Maxwell again, the librarian who found the names of people who had been lynched in the county where his family is from at the Memorial for Peace and Justice back in Montgomery. Edwin worked in East New York, as the branch manager at New Lots Library from 2014 to 2016. So, the library renovation and the African Burial Ground have special meaning for him.

Edwin Maxwell There are many people in that community who are making life transitions and trying to better their lives. And that's where the library comes into place.

Kerwin Pilgrim You know, one of the things that I take away from from being in that community is this idea that they want better. Right. They are trying. They're fighting. They are committed to improving their lives and the lives of the young people that are going to come up after them.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras That last voice is Kerwin Pilgrim, the Director of Adult Learning at BPL. Kerwin also started out at New Lots Library, in 2000. 

Adwoa Adusei In order to design a building that reflects what the community wants, BPL set up feedback sessions for East New York residents to come and talk about what they wanted from their library, and how they wanted the African Burial Ground to be acknowledged. Kerwin was at one of those feedback sessions, and he talked about what he heard from community members who used the Learning Center at New Lots Library.

Kerwin Pilgrim They don't want to be left out. Right. Sometimes, unfortunately, when gentrification happens, as it's been happening throughout the borough, sometimes community feels like, wow, they're making space for new people to come. They're building these new structures for the new community people. Right. Because, you know, they haven't done it for us. Right. And they want to make sure that they're not forgotten in any type of building or restoration or a renovation that's happening.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras East New York is a neighborhood with a vibrant community, but it’s also a neighborhood that doesn’t often get to tell its own story. If you do a Google search for East New York, a lot of the first clicks that come up are reports of violent crimes in the neighborhood. And it’s true that East New York has one of the highest rates of crime and poverty in New York City, but the neighborhood is so much more than that.

Adwoa Adusei East New York is home to a thriving urban farm, a strong arts culture and many local small businesses. It has strong grass-roots organizations, too, made up of community residents who have been advocating for themselves for generations. Edwin says that’s another thing that community members want to emphasize in their new library space.

Edwin Maxwell One telling thing that they said that they want a space that celebrates all its triumphs, and desn't want to necessarily put a highlight on the suffering and the trauma that has been endured through the years there.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras In order to do build a library that really reflects what the neighborhood wants, we’ve been trying to listen to the voices of people who are in East New York now, or who have deep roots there.

Adwoa Adusei So we’re picking up where we left off in the story of that particular plot of land in East New York in 1955, when New Lots Library was built. It turns out that it was East New York residents who advocated for the construction of the building in the first place. At the time, in the 1950s, East New York was 98 percent white, a mix of recent immigrants including Jews and Italians. 

Richard Rabinowitz The women of the community mobilized during the 50s, and they took this neighborhood of being a kind of outpost of, basically, working class, lower middle class, and they fought very hard to get the new library across the street from New Lots Avenue built in the mid 1950s. They built the library and got 50,000 books in and a week later the shelves were empty because there was such high demand.

Adwoa Adusei That’s a clip from an oral history conducted in 2014 with Richard Rabinowitz, a former resident of East New York.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Later, in the 1980s and 90s, when crime, violence, and drug use was becoming a big problem in the neighborhood and throughout New York City, members of a grass-roots advocacy group, the United Communities Center, or UCC, advocated for New Lots Library once again. Here’s long-time East New York resident Mel Grizer speaking in a 2014 oral history interview. 

Mel Grizer The workers there were about to ... they didn’t want to work there, and they were talking about closing it because there was too much violence inside the library. So we had a big rally, UCC brought all the three and four year olds out and had a big rally. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras There it is. This is a community that fights for itself, and fights for its library, again and again.

Adwoa Adusei So we’re going to turn this last part of the episode over to the residents of East New York, and let them tell the story of their neighborhood, starting in the 1950s, when Black and Hispanic New Yorkers were moving to East New York from more crowded neighborhoods like Crown Heights and Brownsville. The following clips are excerpts from the Sarita Daftary-Steel collection of East New York oral histories.

Johanna Brown My name is Johanna Brown, and I live here in Starett City. I moved to East New York when I was six years old. We were the third Black family to move on the block, Hasidic Jews lived on either side of us.

Conrad Piggott Boulevard Projects were just built in 1950. So, when I moved in I was five years old and the project was five years old. People were moving out to a better neighborhood. Housing was looking a whole lot better at the time and they were making more projects. A lot more Blacks were moving in, a lot more Spanish, and most of my Jewish and Italian friends were moving out.

Richard Rabinowitz As I see what was happening was that there were various kinds of programs that encouraged bankers and realtors to turn this neighborhood over. You know, my parents were the last people on the block to sell their house to a Black family. There was no concerted effort to resist this, the phone calls, my parents remember the phone calls coming all the time, you know, and post cards, and “Don’t be the last person on the block, you’re going to lose everything…” And they probably did lose something of what the house was worth. It was a terrible loss. My mother, in New York, never again had a kind of community. She had no place to shop. She had no neighbors she could see every day. The rug was pulled out from under that whole generation of people. 

Carmen Yeancades If you were a tenant with those, that’s where you really got the shaft because all of a sudden, you think you’d have a lease or whatever and then you were asked to leave. One of the last houses on that whole row you could see was the one we lived in, at 620. And eventually, the same thing happened to our landlord. She was ready to sell, someone offered her a great price and she sold and gave a month or two notice to get out and that’s it. Very disruptive to people’s lives. And that’s I think the sad part of it. Everyone became a revolving door. And that seems to be the whole story of the whole neighborhood. Everyone started revolving.

Edwina Joseph As Linden got darker, then more people fled. And as that happened, you’d see the maintenance in the building start to change to the point, you could call with a problem with your toilet -- I remember calling because the toilet was backing up, and I was told it was not an emergency, make an appointment and we’ll be there probably next week. 

Isaiah Montgomery I moved out here, it was August 1963. It was a lovely neighborhood at the time, too, and in 1967 I left. And I was gone, I went to Vietnam, did three years in the service and when I came back to East New York it was the biggest shock I ever had. There were buildings at one time, in three years it went down. And I was surprised, they really knocked the block down. The block was, there was houses and then there was nothing but abandonned buildings, then vacant lots, fires and everything. 

Mary Barksdale It wasnt until later that I recognized that there was red lining going on, and that was purposeful. I didn’t know anything I was young. All I know was I was going to be able to buy a house. You know, it divides people. And it did. It was a real division. I remember we use to hear these stories about the North side and the Italians on this side, and Blacks and Hispanics on this side, and, you know, the conflict that would take place. And also the services. The 75th Precinct became notable for being, you know, racist and all the rest of it. It was just a mess. You just think how these things are pushed, how it’s organized, almost, to create this kind of conflict. 

Adwoa Adusei That was Johanna Brown, Conrad Piggot, Carmen Yeancades, Edwina Joseph, Isaiah Montgomery, and Mary Barksdale. Those are excerpts from oral histories conducted by Sarita Daftary-Steel between 2014 and 2015. You can listen to the full interviews at the Center for Brooklyn History, which is now part of Brooklyn Public Library. We’ll put a link to that in our show notes page.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Now, as we consider how to build a library branch that honors these experiences, that is honest about the racist policies that led to the block busting and red-lining in the 1960s up through the 1980s, we are listening back to this story.

Adwoa Adusei And, East New York is on the cusp of change once again. People are moving in. From 2000 to 2010, the population increased by 10 percent. Clearnly, East New York is a desirable neighborhood. The 3 train ends out in New Lots, and the L train ends not too far away. Newcomers to the neighborhood are often people who have been priced out of nearby neighborhoods like Bushwick and Brownsville, which are already experiencing significant gentrification themselves

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Two years after these oral histories were collected, Mayor de Blasio rezoned East New York — opening up the neighborhood for massive development and housing. About 3,500 apartments are expected to be built in the next 10 years. But, the plan has already received criticism for not allocating enough of those housing units as affordable and for moving too slowly on the affordable housing developments and jobs for people in the neighborhood, which was promised in the rezoning. And now the development has stalled because of the pandemic. East New York is one of the worst-hit neighborhoods in New York City. It has the highest death rate for COVID infections. So, with the pandemic causing the city to slash budgets overall, that might make it hard for the neighborhood to get the housing equity it needs, along with all the development.

Adwoa Adusei Some East New York residents are excited about the development that has been happening in the neighborhood, but often it means that more and more longtime East New Yorkers are being pushed out. Here’s Catherine Mbali again, the executive director of Arts East New York. She used to live in the neighborhood, but she can’t afford it anymore. 

Catherine Mbali Green-Johnson East New York is rich, rich with history. I love East New York, although I am priced out.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras For one resident, Johanna Brown, whose oral history we heard earlier, the cycle of gentrification is history repeating itself.

Johanna Brown I love New York City. I love what it has to offer, culturally. I know my way around, but I will not grow old here. New York is no place to grow old. And I have a big mouth and I will speak out when I feel that something is unjust. And I cannot sit back and watch something and not say or do anything about it. So, if you want to call it running or flight, you know, I’m going to leave too. I’m not running to suburbia I don’t think. But it dosen’t matter. My motivations are different. But people are running back now. 

Sarita Daftary-Steel And how does it feel to see that process happening?

Johanna Brown If we were included, it would be okay. But no one is really concerned about including us. They're not, really. They’ll live among us and they’ll tolerate us, but eventually we will be priced out. We wont be able to afford to live next door.  

[Music]

Johanna Brown I’m wondering about the fate of East New York. And I never give up hope. I see, if they’re willing to live next door,if they’re willing fight for affordable housing for everyone ... people who are going to fight for that, they can make a difference, they can make things change.

Adwoa Adusei Whatever the new New Lots Library looks like, we know it has to fit the community that has been there and that is there now, and the history that has led up to this point. The project is moving forward, and we’ll be sure to keep you updated on its progress.

[Music]

Krissa Corbett Cavouras And it wouldn’t be a Borrowed episode without books! We asked one of our Center for Brooklyn History archivists to recommend a few titles about the history of East New York. 

Maggie Schreiner So I'm Maggie Schreiner and I'm the Collections and Digital Access Manager at the Center for Brooklyn History. So, Brooklyn Historical Society, which is half of what is now the Center for Brooklyn History, had a multi-year collaborative project with the Weeksville Heritage Center and Irondale Ensemble called "In Pursuit of Freedom" that looked at the history of slavery and abolition in Brooklyn. And as part of that project, in the reading room of the Othmer Library at 128 Pierpont, the Center for Brooklyn History, we have a browsing area of books about the history of slavery and abolition in Brooklyn specifically. So, I took all of these recommendations from that area of the library and those resources that were compiled and they're all also available circulating at BPL.

So the first book that I wanted to talk about is In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 by Leslie Harris, which was published in 2003. It starts with the arrival of the first enslaved people in 1626 through the years before emancipation in 1827 and ends with one of the most terrifying displays of racism in American history: the New York City Draft Riots in 1863, and it draws on lots of different kinds of archival sources, including travel accounts, autobiographies, newspapers, and records of institutions and organizations.

So another book that I wanted to talk about that is specific to East New York is called How East New York Became a Ghetto by Walter Thabit. He was a city planner who was hired in the mid 1960s to work with the community of East New York to develop a plan for low and moderate income public housing. And he really approached his work as an activist and wanted to create projects that would benefit the actual residents of the neighborhoods he was working in, not just politicians and developers. And in his work, over the course of many decades in East New York, he really witnessed how racist city policy led first to the disinvestment from East New York and then continued to work against its revitalization. I think, you know, there's lots of connections between the history of slavery and African American communities in New York and what development and displacement and gentrification looks like in New York City today. 

Adwoa Adusei You can check out both those titles — In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 by Leslie Harris and How East New York Became a Ghetto by Walter Thabit — as well as others Maggie selected for this episode at Brooklyn Public Library. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Borrowed is brought to you by Brooklyn Public Library and is hosted by me, Krissa Corbett Cavouras, and Adwoa Adusei. You can find a transcript of this episode as well as a full list of book recommendations at our website, B-K-L-Y-N Library [dot] org [slash] podcasts.

Adwoa Adusei Borrowed is produced by Virginia Marshall and is written by myself and Virginia Marshall, with help from Fritzi Bodenheimer, Jennifer Proffitt, Meryl Friedman and Robin Lester Kenton. Our music composer is Billy Libby.  

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Borrowed will be back in a few weeks. Until then, get out and vote or mail in your ballot!

NOTE: A previous version of this transcript incorrectly identified the source language for "Sankofa" as Swahili. It is a word from the Akan language in Ghana.