A Digital Memorial of Black Brooklyn

Van Sicklen. Stuyvesant. Canarsie. Remsen. Bushwick. Flatbush.

The roll call of Brooklyn street names, churches, sports arenas, bridges and neighborhoods recapitulates the borough’s rich history. It memorializes the Native American, Dutch, English, Italian and Jewish settlers who built and lived in Brooklyn. Yet this form of memorialization has been largely absent for the black population—particularly the populations that arrived to Brooklyn in droves as a result of forced removal from their homelands, the First and Second Great Migration, and the Immigration Laws of 1965.

So what form has this immortalization taken for blacks who do not have enough capital or influence to leave a prominent landmark or legacy?

Silence.

Post-emancipation, when the farms of Kings County were converted from an agricultural area to an urban metropolis in the 1890s and the population of non-farmers increased, what of the black slaves?⁠ What does the record tell us about how the former slaves found work or housing once the farms on which they labored disappeared?

Silence.

If the “end” of Brooklyn was in 1957 but cityscapes present a surplus of photographs that depict black people in New York City after the 1960s, what represents the thriving lives of the black community?⁠

Silence.

As gentrification sweeps African Americans and Caribbean immigrants out of the neighborhoods to which they once were relegated, since they were “limited by discrimination from freely moving to other districts or the suburbs,” what sounds will memorialize their racial and ethnic presence for future Brooklynites?⁠

Silence.

The silence is daunting. Yet that silence is what we have left. It is a silence that we can call our own. Although it may not be considered an achievement in the way landmarks or public works materializes, it is ours. This haunting discomfort in the silence dares us to remember the rich history and diversity of black people in Brooklyn. It is an unofficial commemoration that evades the limitations of historiography and stops time to recover memory.

For those who have achieved nothing, who have not built, and who have forgotten all, work, dream, dance, and dare to remember.

Who is Black Brooklyn?

Black homeowners. Black business owners. Black residents. Black school children. Black squatters. Black revelers. Black enslaved people. Free black people. Black migrant workers. Black immigrants. Black Africans. Black African-Americans. Black West-Indians. Black people who have achieved all and have achieved nothing. Black dreamers. Black builders. Blacks who have forgotten all and have been forgotten. Black dancers. Black people who have dared to remember. The past, the present, and the future populations of black people and all the shifting definitions of ‘black’ in between. Black people who have survived in the borough of Brooklyn.