Historian Dominique Jean-Louis:

Tracing Black Families Back to Slavery in Brooklyn

Fern Gillespie
Slavery in New York City began 400 years ago in 1626 when 11 enslaved African men were brought here by the Dutch West India Company. By 1786, Brooklyn had 2,669 white residents and 1,317 Black people enslaved. Although New York State’s abolition law was passed in 1799, human bondage remained until 1827. The exhibit “Trace/s: Family History Research and the Legacy of Slavery in Brooklyn,” on view through August 30, is curated by Dominique Jean-Louis, Chief Historian of The Center for Brooklyn History (formerly the Brooklyn Historical Society) at Brooklyn Public Library.

It explores the current descendants of Black Brooklynites who were enslaved and the wealthy white slaveholders who built Brooklyn. Our Time Press spoke with Jean-Louis about the exhibition and the impact of slavery in Brooklyn.

OTP: The “Trace/s” exhibit focuses on Black Brooklynites whose ancestors were enslaved in Brooklyn. What do you want the public to understand about the historic impact of slavery in Brooklyn?
DJL: There are three big takeaways from the exhibition. One being there was slavery in Brooklyn, which I think a lot of people don’t know. It’s not as though we have monuments announcing that there was slavery in Brooklyn or that it’s taught in the schools. I wanted to bring that awareness to people. Takeaway two was that so much of the Brooklyn that we’ve recognized is a result of 200 years of slavery.

That slavery was incredibly prevalent in Brooklyn. A lot of our street names and subway stops that we maybe don’t give a second thought to–Bergen and Lefferts and Vanderbilt. All of these places that you encounter just moving around the borough. These are from a legacy of slave owning specifically from those old Dutch families.

When you look at Brooklyn’s growth– the ports, waterfronts and the land– all of it is super tied to slavery. And so with this exhibition, we really wanted to demonstrate how the borough we recognize today was really shaped by these 200 years of enslavement. And then the third take away and the other piece of the exhibition is really highlighting how important family history is for doing the research about Brooklyn’s history of slavery.

Also just making it meaningful that so many Brooklynites have this kind of a legacy in their ancestry, whether that’s being descended from enslaved people or maybe even being descended from slave owners. On display are two large scale oil portraits.

OTP: Mildred Jones, a retired Bed Stuy teacher, is the great-great-granddaughter of a man who was enslaved in Flatbush. How did she get involved the Trace/s exhibition?
DJL: When we decided to do an exhibition on slavery in Brooklyn, we thought how interesting and useful it would be to connect a family story. So, we started working with the Afro American Historical and Genealogical Society and reached out to Stacey Bell at the local New York chapter, and asked if they encountered folks that trace their ancestry back to slavery in Brooklyn. The legacy of enslavement is a very present thing for Mildred Jones.

She has heirlooms from her family that belonged to her enslaved ancestors. Mildred’s brother Gus had been a genealogical member before he passed. He had uncovered his ancestor, Samuel Anderson, who was enslaved in Brooklyn and was the subject of an 1898 newspaper article. We have his firsthand account of what he remembers of slavery.

The story was so compelling. It was really sad that Gus had passed away before we started the work on this exhibition. His sister, Mildred, stepped up and was willing to do the portrait. We also did an oral history with her as the portrait was being painted.

So we got not only her image to put in the exhibition, but her whole family story. It’s not just being descended from enslaved people, but about that family’s journey through a changing Bed Stuy, a changing Brooklyn. She talks about her childhood in Bed Stuy and her work as an educator really fleshes out the story of generations since slavery.

OTP: Why did you decide to have a major portrait painted of Mildred Jones?
DJL: In our collection, we have quite a number of oil portrait paintings of slave owners in Brooklyn. That’s one of the things that this exhibition really underscores: who has access to generational wealth and privilege in Brooklyn. When we connected with Mildred, we were able to identify a portrait from our collection of John Lott, from the family who had enslaved her ancestor. John Lott has a large scale portrait.

It’s almost life-size. So, we wanted to paint one of Mildred Jones at the same scale to address the disparity in who has access to this kind of representation and who doesn’t. These are two stories and two shared histories. John Lott’s portrait has been preserved and conserved by this institution for more than a century.

His portrait also hangs at Borough Hall and in Albany. If you think of an oil portrait, a face like his is what comes to mind. A well-dressed older white man. Mildred’s portrait by artist Rusty Zimmerman is with her AKA pearls and her more contemporary apartment with Afrocentric statues she’s acquired from West Africa.

It says a lot about determining who built Brooklyn, whose stories that we should be looking to for the history of the borough. Having it painted in the same medium and in the same scale was important to visually level the playing field between these two family’s stories before we get deeper into the documents, bill of sale and other materials from the collection.

OTP: When you were researching for the exhibition, what were some of the outstanding situations and experiences of enslaved Brooklynites that you discovered?
DJL: I think people to the extent know that slavery took place in northern states like New York. They know domestic slavery. Like maybe you had a household servant, enslaved person. The thing about Brooklyn is that Brooklyn is New York City’s breadbasket. That the slavery that took place here in Brooklyn was plantation slavery.

You had larger farms where crops were being grown to be sold at market to turn a profit. This wasn’t just enslaved people belonging to one household and upkeeping the household. These are plantations. We were lucky enough to have a painting in our collection. It shows one of these plantations. The farm of a man named Cornelius Van Brunt in what today would have been Gowanus.

The painting shows Black laborers on the farm. We’re kind of introducing people to visually, and also with the archives that we have on display, that it was hard agricultural work that these enslaved people were doing here in Brooklyn on the ground where we stand. And of course, it’s very hard to imagine our kind of like concrete high-rise in Brooklyn as rolling hills of farmland. But that’s precisely what it was. Also, the important role that slavery played in building Brooklyn as a striving urban center.

“Trace/s: Family History Research and the Legacy of Slavery in Brooklyn” is at the Center for Brooklyn History at the Brooklyn Public Library through August 30. Dominique Jean-Louis hosts a weekly tour every Friday at 3:00 pm. On August 21, there will be a special genealogy research program. For information on the exhibit visit www.bklynlibrary.org/exhibitions/traces