Johnson-Cunningham: Talking very specifically
about Black Spaces
allows us to get a better understanding
of the historical narrative
and why gentrification has been problematic
for black and brown communities.
Fields: The historic site is a site of memory.
Then memory helps build identity.
Identity builds community.
Community and institution building
is really a form of resistance.
Revolution is not necessarily a white male American concept.
♪♪
Hi, my name is Stephanie Johnson-Cunningham
and we are discussing Black Spaces today "On Display."
Even though we don't define spaces as white,
black, or brown, the spaces that we live in America
unfortunately are not race neutral.
Weeksville Heritage Center is a historic site
here in Brooklyn, New York.
It used to be a bustling neighborhood created by,
and for, black people who needed a space of their own.
It's one of the first known free black communities
here in Brooklyn, here in New York City,
and also throughout the country.
♪♪
Fields: Weeksville is important
because it was a site of black self-determination
and a place of refuge for black people.
And when it was formed in 1838,
James Weeks and a group of other black investors
purchased land from the Lefferts family,
the idea was to have a space
where black people could just live their lives to the fullest
and in search of the American dream,
just like other Americans.
They were creating a community,
a place where they could live, grow, and achieve.
Black people weren't invited to own homes everywhere.
That still happens today.
So Weeksville provided a space for black people to own homes
and to own businesses, and, during that time,
it was especially important because land ownership for men
meant that you could also vote.
A historic site is a site of memory.
That memory helps build identity,
identify builds community.
Community and institution building
is really a form of resistance.
So much of what we tend to learn about black history is
sort of a catalog of overcoming wrongs
that have been done to black people in this country,
and that's all valid history and it should be known.
Weeksville is the flip side of that --
it is a story of self-sufficiency
and self-determination and entrepreneurship.
The fact that we have these houses,
and we're sitting in one of the houses right now,
just shows you that, in fact, black people were here,
they had an idea and a vision of the future.
You know, that these institutions and this community
would carry forward their memories.
And all the while they're here, you have some great firsts.
You have the first black woman to be principal
in a New York City public school, Sarah Garnet.
You have the first black female doctor
in New York State, Susan Smith McKinney Steward,
and Weeks was not unique in that regard.
You know, there were these black towns
all over the country, well, you know, again,
where black people were trying to live
and prosper and just thrive.
Black Spaces provide people
not an opportunity for isolation,
but again, insulation,
where they are able to grow and develop
and to be confident and to have spaces that they feel welcome,
that they feel is their own,
that they feel safe and that they feel
is a reflection of who they are as well.
And we know that every group wants that.
Every group craves that, and so we see there are needs
for spaces for LGBTQ communities.
Absolutely.
There needs to be spaces for women, black people.
We need spaces for brown people, because we are not a part
of the white cisgender men narrative and culture.
By 1930, Weeksville ceases to exist,
and it wasn't until 1968 where these houses were rediscovered
and that started this community-wide
archaeological dig
and effort to save these houses
and prove that they had historic value.
Johnson-Cunningham: So now there's another side of Weeksville,
and so how does the visitor center
and the new educational building
kind of speak to the vision and history of Weeksville?
What the visitor and education center does
is it gives us space to convene.
Where you not only get to learn the history
and convene to discuss issues,
you know, everything from how to deal with your student debt,
to black maternal, you know, mortality rates
and what could be done about that,
to food justice, to reparations.
But you can also just come and celebrate and just be black.
In an evolving Brooklyn, things can get lost,
and so it's important that we have this site that is,
again, a site of memory here that people can come to
and know that there's real black history here.
♪♪
Weeksville was actually one of
the first places that I interned,
and that space is really important to me
and this summer that just passed, 2019,
they almost closed their doors for good.
I remember how that almost crushed me,
to see this institution that meant so much to me
and had so much of my history there,
that was going to be closed.
These are challenges that are not,
you know, unique to Weeksville, you know?
There's been many reports about
sort of the disparities and investment
by the philanthropic community to institutions of color.
What we see now, the shrinking of Black Spaces
throughout the country, speaks to that issue.
And I think so important for us to,
you know, send the call out to everyone that we know
so that people can contribute in a real way,
so that we're not waiting for some sort of savior,
but we can save ourselves.
Right, and I think that the important, you know,
sort of message for people is there are many incredible
black and brown institutions out there.
Find the institution you care about
and give them money because they need it.
Growing up, honestly, seeing the neighborhood change
right in front of my eyes has been traumatizing,
and having no control is really troubling.
We know that our communities have been targeted,
have been impoverished,
have been left behind and ignored for many, many years.
Are black people owed reparations?
Absolutely, 100%.
The history is here to show you that America became a superpower
because it had free labor.
So, the justice claim that black people have,
is with the United States government.
That's fair, and when we see that there is money
that can be appropriated for all kinds of things,
and it could be done if there were the will
and I believe there is a growing sense of,
like, how do we make right what is, you know,
in a lot of ways been baked into this country, you know?
So, like, when you think about the inequities,
the school and prison pipeline,
you know, the incarceration rates,
you know, you think about housing.
The conversation's moving in the right direction.
Major presidential candidates are talking about...
How it can be done. ...the need for reparations
and how do we address centuries long inequities,
you know, in what is supposed to be the greatest country
in the world. Right.
♪♪
Talking very specifically about Black Spaces
allows us to get a better understanding
of the historical narrative
and why gentrification has been problematic
for black and brown communities.
The Black Gotham Experience re-imagines
the spaces directly impacted by the African diaspora,
as human stories explore through interactive walks,
talks, events, and art.
Ware: The Black Gotham Experience is situated now
as a media company.
We started by doing walking tours
and highlighting the black diaspora
in New York City,
that you can't tell which streets,
street names or monuments or memorials.
New York City has a lot of deep history
embedded in the transatlantic slave trade
that has been redacted for over 100 years.
And so to have a psychic sense of where you are,
and how those patterns set in the past affect you now,
like before we discuss justification
and the 99% verse the 1%,
those systems come from an operating system
that go back to the 1600s.
There's a reason why New York City
has one of the most segregated school systems in the country.
It has one of the biggest wealth gaps.
That's right. Mm-hmm.
So, I think it's important to know where you are,
because it affects real people.
You can walk around New York now
and find statues and street names
after people who were either founding fathers
or fought in the American Revolution,
but there is people of African descent
that were early uprisers to the British,
but they weren't all white men fighting over money.
They're often a pregnant black woman
fighting over her child, fighting over her soul.
But that person is unknown to most New Yorkers
and the built environment doesn't show that story.
So, part of what we do, by coming to Maiden Lane
and discussing that rebellion and celebrate the fact
that the first people to grab a rifle
and fight the un-winnable war was not white men
that owned enslaved people who were mad about their taxes.
It was Africans upset about being enslaved.
Some people just kind of think that the Harlem Renaissance
is ground zero for black culture
and black culture investment into the city.
And part of what I'm looking at teasing out
is that's just not supported by the facts.
If you look at the creation of New York in 1664,
before there was a New York,
there already was an African neighborhood.
So, landownership is a bedrock of power,
which is why black people have continually
had efforts to take away the ground on which we stand,
even right now. Right.
Even if we think about Central Park right now,
before Central Park, it was Seneca Village,
where it was a thriving black community.
And so that community was removed
because they wanted to create Central Park.
Even in the Bronx, large highways
are built through those communities,
through eminent domain.
You can't take black people out of the American story
and have anything left.
There are certain stories that need to be
highlighted more than others.
Now's the moment to just be in tune
with celebrating those redacted narratives,
and so I think that the work that we're doing,
we have found ways to make sure we're investing into the culture
and into the community.
Everybody's welcome, but the content are topics
that black folks should be talking about,
like discussions about black masculinity,
about entrepreneurship, about travel.
These are conversations that give people opportunity
to be amongst a room that might not be all black,
but you're talking about these topics
and the panel are often people of African descent.
Ta-Nehisi Coates said it recently,
he said that we aren't going to see full equality
until people start seeing us as full human.
And so it's really important that we have the opportunity
to create our own narratives and to create our own industries,
to create our own growth in business and economics,
so that we are seen as just as powerful
as any other group as well.
Fields: Because you need the inspiration of the past
if you're going to build a bright future.
Let's take that inspiration and go out
and do some good in the world.
♪♪