#230 Before Harlem: New York's Forgotten Black Communities

The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Tom Meyers

Society & Culture, History, Documentary, Places & Travel

4.8 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 8 June 2017

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today we sometimes define New York City's African-American culture by place – Harlem, of course, and also Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant, neighborhoods that developed for groups of black residents in the 20th century. But by no means were these the first in New York City. Other centers of black and African-American life existed long before then. In many cases, they were obliterated by the growth of the city, sometimes built over without a single marker, without recognition. This is the story of a few of those places. From the 'land of the blacks' -- the home to New Amsterdam and British New York's early black population -- to Seneca Village, a haven for early African-American lives that was wiped away by a park. From Little Africa -- the Greenwich Village sector for the black working class in the late 19th century -- to Sandy Ground, a rural escape in Staten Island with deep roots in the neighborhood today. And then there's Weeksville, Brooklyn, the visionary village built to bond a community and to develop a political foothold. Greg welcomes Kamau Ware (of the Black Gotham Experience) and Tia Powell Harris of the Weeksville Heritage Center to the show! boweryboyshistory.com blackgotham.com weeksvillesociety.com Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Bowry Boys Episode 230 before Harlem, New York's forgotten black communities.
0:06.9	Hey, it's The Bowry Boys.
0:08.4	Hey.
0:09.6	Support for The Bowry Boys is provided by our listeners.
0:13.2	Join us for as little as a dollar a month by visiting patreon.com slash Bowry Boys.
0:22.1	Hi there, welcome to The Bowry Boys. This is Greg Young. Tom Myers is a way,
0:26.6	this episode, but for a very, very good reason, I swear, and one that we'll tell you all about
0:32.7	in a future episode. The stories of history, of American history, are often summaries.
0:39.6	Immigration is spoken about in terms of the primary cultures of those who came over
0:44.8	in the greatest numbers, the Irish and the Germans in the mid 19th century, for instance.
0:50.4	History tends to be written by those with the megaphone, given a voice either by the accident
0:56.1	of their birth, or by the sheer force of their number. Mostly in primary sources, those without
1:02.5	voices, those outside the main bullet points of the historical record, these voices are often
1:09.7	ignored or even erased. Today, I'll be looking at one of those communities, often shut out of
1:16.6	mainstream retellings of the city's history. The black residents of New York from the 17th,
1:22.2	18th and 19th centuries. Now, this is obviously a monumental story for many reasons,
1:28.9	not only impacted by the institution of the American slave trade, and later its violent and
1:34.7	contentious abandonment of that institution, but the shameful treatment in New York of both
1:40.5	formerly enslaved and free black people. So I'm going to narrow the focus here specifically
1:47.4	on place, the physical spaces themselves, the settlements, the neighborhoods, were early black
1:53.9	New Yorkers lived their lives. Today, we sometimes define African American culture by place,
2:00.7	most notably Harlem, and also Bedstuy, neighborhoods that developed as mass centers for black
	...

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