Says Bloomberg political allocations left office with the former billionaire mayor
By Stephen Witt
The Weeksville Heritage Center, which documents and preserves the history of the free, self-sufficient 19th century African-American community of Weeksville, is looking to get a little help from City Hall – namely to gain entrance onto the city’s Cultural Institutions Group (CIG) list.
And all it takes is a swipe of Mayor de Blasio’s pen, according to Weeksville Board Chair Timothy Simons, who also sits on the board of the Brooklyn Historical Society and Bed-Stuy’s Restoration Plaza.
Simons explained that Weeksville, like other smaller cultural institutions around the borough, depended on the political purse strings of former Billionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s philanthropic arm for the past several years. However, when Bloomberg left office, he took his proverbial money ball with him and the funds dried up for Weeksville and various other cultural institutions (like Texas) in the summer.
“During the Bloomberg Administration, he didn’t add any institutions to the (CIG) list,” said Simons, adding the CIG gets annual city funding through the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA). “We would like to see the new mayor add us to the list much sooner than later.”
Calls to the mayor’s office were referred to DCA, who offered a “No comment”.
Meanwhile, Weeksville does have the strong support of newly elected City Councilman Robert Cornegy, who is just starting to navigate his way through the corridors of power. Borough President Eric Adams also said he will keep Weeksville in mind once the capital budget is set.
Weeksville did get sizable help from the city through DCA, former Borough President Marty Markowitz and various elected officials in securing $34 million in capital funds to build Weeksville’s new 23,000-square-foot Education and Cultural Arts Building, which opens this spring.
The Arts Building will enable Weeksville to significantly expand its education, programming and research capabilities and elevate its standing as one of the nation’s leading centers for African-American history and culture.
Simons also announced Weeksville will name the organization’s new executive director in the next few weeks. Shortly thereafter, the board will begin a search for a new development director, he said.
Simons said the priorities for Weeksville n the coming year are to both maintain and find new funding streams and to partner with other cultural organizations. This is the case as Weeksville is currently partnering with the Brooklyn Historical Society and the Irondale Theater on the four-year Brooklyn Abolitionists/In Pursuit of Freedom project.
“We want to make sure our programming is robust, exciting and constantly changing and evolving,” Simons said.
Longtime residents fight to keep the African-American legacy alive in Central Brooklyn
By Stephen Witt
African-American residents, property owners and activists of Bedford-Stuyvesant are pushing back against the long-held collective society belief that little can be done to stop white gentrification.
This despite the fact that battle lines are being drawn along fronts like Tompkins Avenue, where the proliferation of storefront real estate agencies are suddenly competing for space with the many storefront churches that have long been a part of the strip.
“We’ve been renting this storefront for the past 12 years and I don’t think the guy that owns the building will sell it, but there is a new real estate agency next to us on the right and another across the street,” said Rev. Nerissa Bradshaw, pastor of the New Beginning Pentecostal Church of God.
Further south along Tompkins Avenue, Common Ground Coffee Shop owner, attorney and lifelong Bed-Stuy resident Tremaine Wright said there are alternatives to selling long-held property despite speculators offering vast amounts of money.
“My grandparents came here in the 40s and a part of the conversation is how (longtime property owners) can become educated to make real estate and property work for them versus believing they must liquidate immediately and relinquish rights in order to cash out,” said Wright.
“We don’t need people to remain static, but if we understand how things work we can transfer wealth to future generations so that families can move where they want to move and be empowered in the way that they do it,” she added.
Among the activist organizations examining how to keep neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights predominately black is the Brooklyn Movement Center on Stuyvesant Avenue.
In a landmark article published on their www.BrooklynMovementCenter.org Web site, author Marly Pierre-Louis makes a case for black gentrification, citing the Brickton Neighborhood in Philadelphia as a case study written in 2009 by K. S. Moore and published under the title: Gentrification in blackface?: The return of the black middle class to urban neighborhoods.
Moore argues in her article that there is a distinction between black gentrification and white gentrification.
“Gentrification led by black middle-income residents has a social justice motivation based on the residents’ experiences of racial exclusion and an explicit desire for racial solidarity. Unlike traditional gentrification, the outcome of neighborhood change is not the creation of a wealthy neighborhood to replace a lower-income community,” Moore writes.
Among the strategies Brickton utilized in keeping the community black was the recruitment of more middle- to upper-income black residents who can afford a more expensive neighborhood, make the choice to remain in the community without promoting the displacement of current low-income residents.
Another critical strategy was encouraging asset accumulation (e.g., homeownership, entrepreneurship) amongst low-income residents.
Pierre-Louis argues that in Brooklyn the gentrification discussion has become stale as more and more black people are being forced out of the borough.
“The work doesn’t have to be anti-change, anti-development or even anti-white. But it can and should be pro-neighborhood improvement, pro-strategizing and organizing, and absolutely pro-black,” she writes.
But strategies aside, the battle to keep Central Brooklyn as a hub of black culture and life remains challenging and relentless.
Antioch Baptist Church Pastor Rev. Dr. Robert Waterman noted in his recently losing City Council race that the real estate industry poured in over a half-million dollars to back another losing candidate.
“Even though their candidate didn’t get in, real estate market prices have skyrocketed and real estate taxes are going up. That affects longtime homeowners on set incomes, and that becomes a burden. There’s also the aftereffects of predatory lending, where homeowners are still struggling with mortgages,” said Waterman.
Meanwhile, the storefront real estate agents along Tompkins Avenue – many of them with sign displays that they specialize in short sales – continue to exploit the forces of urban capitalism.
“I’m not the one changing the market,” said one. “I’m just a player in the market.”
Part 1: We Came Before Columbus – Evidence of Africans in the Americas before Europeans.
Part 2: Slavery – What were the economic benefits to Europeans for owning African-Americans as chattel property? Slavery as Big Business.
Part 3: Slave Labor Supports the U.S. Economy.
Part 4: Enslaved African Revolts-Civil Rights and Black Militancy
(From Part 4)
Civil Rights and Black Militancy
Over the decades, African-Americans lived and traded among themselves, building communities and recovering strength. Gradually, national organizations were created from the ground up. Remembered names from the 60’s were the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress of Racial Equality (with James Farmer) and the Mississippi delegation, to name a few. There were the Black Panthers and the US organization. There was Fannie Lou Hamer, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. There were many more with creative energy pushing battles on many fronts. This civil rights era achieved integration and the right to vote. Former Professor Clarke says, “I’m one of the people who believes that our losses were greater than our gains. Before the civil rights movement, we had entrepreneurship in the black community. Right now, in Harlem, if I wanted to get a shoe repaired I would have a hard time finding a black shoe repairman …. We lost a sense of just basic communityness”. But the right to vote was achieved, and there was a quickening sense of impatience at the white supremacist culture of the United States.
Part 5
COINTELPRO
The anger began to erupt in the street rebellions of the 60’s. These were first met with troops and tanks and then with a counterintelligence program. Known as COINTELPRO, this operation combined city, state and federal law enforcement agencies in a joint effort to destroy the increasingly militant activism of the African-American community. Groups like the Black Panther Party were infiltrated and destroyed. Misinformation was sown and African-American dissenters were treated by law enforcement agencies in the same way as dissenters are in any lawless country. They were murdered in their beds, shot down in the streets and jailed on false charges. This history continues to live in prisons where many are held today.
The COINTELPRO had to use these gross methods of control until a more elegant form could be brought to bear. And it was during the Sixties that highly addictive and debilitating compounds, heroin and cocaine, became readily available in African-American communities across the country.
CIA Headquarters on Langley Virginia “The mother crack house of them all.”
The CIA and Drugs in African-American Communities
If you want to know where in the world the drugs (at the corner) were coming from, look to where in the world the CIA was active at the time. In the Sixties, the heroin epidemic came in from CIA cohorts in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. This is extensively documented in Al McCoy’s book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia.
Going into minute detail, McCoy shows how the CIA’s connection with its covert allies led directly to the heroin epidemic of the 1960’s.
The crack explosion coincided with the CIA’s work on behalf of the Reagan Administration in support of the Nicaraguan Contras in the mid-Eighties. In Dark Alliance, investigative reporter Gary Webb reveals the connections between the Contras, the CIA and the crack epidemic of the 1980’s. In one instance, Danilo Blandon, a CIA “asset”, was reported to have brought in “easily” 55 tons of cocaine between 1980 and 1991. This is only one of the people controlling deliveries destined for African-American communities. As one convicted deputy put it in Dark Alliance, “I didn’t pump 500 tons of cocaine into the ghetto, the United States Government can’t say that.”
These amounts are not carried in purses or swallowed in condoms. They are packed in crates and stuffed in duffel bags. These chemicals were targeted at African communities.
There is a dismissive attitude in the major media that whatever CIA involvement there was, was by “rogue officers”. But that’s not the case at all. Recently convicted traitors Aldrich Aimes and Harold Nicholson were rogue officers. We know this because they were investigated, captured and imprisoned. Manuel Noriega was a CIA asset, now he’s in jail. The “rogue” officers and assets who conducted, condoned, protected or supplied the drug running into the African-American communities of the United States were either paid government salaries for their work, or were allowed to profit from their drug dealing in return for doing national security favors for the CIA. These people live as though nothing happened at all. It is not difficult to believe that one of those favors was to keep the African-American communities drugged, disrupted and demoralized. As a result of this activity, people speak in terms of lost generations.
Post-traumatic Slave Syndrome
In June, July and August of 1999, Our Time Press brought you the work of researchers Joy DeGruy and Professor Amos Wilson. They say there has been something that has weighed on Black folks’ mind, and it has been used by others to manipulate and maintain control. DeGruy and Wilson say the trauma of the slave experience has stayed with us, has not been dealt with, and must be dealt with now if we are to rise and compete as equals in the world.
At a presentation at St. Paul’s Community Baptist Church Joy DeGruy explains, “Now we get very directly into what is Post-traumatic Slave Syndrome. How many are familiar with Post- traumatic Stress Disorder? That’s a disorder that came about as a result of some of the work looking at shell shock. These were war veterans who would have certain behaviors after having been involved in war. The symptoms had to do with certain kinds of injuries, certain kinds of traumas that people would experience. Now let me tell you who has been identified as
having Post-traumatic Stress Disorder… ‘Victims of rape. War veterans, victims of incest. Heart attack victims. Victims of natural disasters, victims of severe accidents. ‘ Now, … consider slaves. They didn’t put slaves on the list. I thought that was odd. I’m going to put a mark down for every one of these particular predictors that actually creates this illness. ‘Reaction to a distressing event which may have occurred months or years before.’ Well, we know that. ‘The most common trauma involves a serious threat of harm to one’s life or physical integrity.’ Got that one. ‘A threat to one’s children, spouse or close relative. Sudden destruction of one’s home or community. Seeing another person injured or killed as a result of accident or violence. Learning about a serious threat to a close friend or relative.’ In other words, someone kidnapped, tortured or killed. Stressors experienced with intense fear, terror and helplessness. Disorders considered to be more severe and will last longer when the stressor is of human design. The slaves had all of them. They had all of them”.
We have to ask ourselves now, “What are some of the symptoms of this? Now listen to this: ‘Feeling of detachment or estrangement from others. Restricted range of affection. Unable to have loving relationships. Sense of a foreshortened future.
Child does not expect to have a career, marriage, children or a long life. Irritability or outburst of anger. Unpredictable explosions of aggressive behavior. Hypervigilance. Exaggerated startle responses.’ These are the symptoms of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. We know the slaves had all the trauma. We know they had them for close to three hundred years. Do we know they had Post-traumatic Stress Disorder? Yes, we do. Now here’s a question: After slavery ended, did white folks do that group therapy thing? Did they say, ‘Okay, now that you’re free, just sign up for the clinic. We’re going to help you heal.’ Did that happen? Of course it didn’t
happen”. Ms. DeGruy contends that the symptoms of these traumas have been passed down generation to generation and remains with us to this day.
Leader of the Illinois Black Panther Party, Fred Hampton was killed in his bed by a task force composed of the Chicago police and the FBI.
African-American Consciousness
Professor Amos Wilson explains another aspect of the continuation of slave vibrations into the twenty-first century.
Professor Wilson: “We still share the slave consciousness of our great-great-grandparents… We have not advanced beyond these people…. You say that slavery has nothing to do with you and that slavery was back there. I ask you what language do you speak? When did you learn that language? Was that the language African people were speaking when we were taken into slavery in America? In other words, the language we speak at this moment is a slave language. The language that our slave ancestors were forced to learn. … What kind of food do you eat? You say ‘soul food’? Was that the food of African people? Slave food …. A food that we learned to eat in the quarters. And yet we dare say that we have escaped slavery …. What kind of clothes are we wearing? Were these the clothes of African people? … What kind of names do we respond to? What kind of names do we identify with? Why is it that African names sound strange to us now as a people? And yet we dare say we have a different consciousness from our great-grandparents…. We are still in the same consciousness and we are still in the same position. Because we are still servants of the white man, and our reason for being in America is to serve white folks and to generate wealth for them. And there has been no change (at all) in terms of our relationship to these people….
The social relations that we create and interact with were built and developed during the period of slavery. We have not escaped it at all…. When we claim that we have escaped slavery and that slavery was something back there, which has nothing to do with us today, and then I ask you the question, ‘What kind of God do you worship?’ What’s the name of Him? Who taught you to praise Him? Was this the God you were praying to before you were brought to these shores? Is this the religion you had before you were brought to these shores? Can you name one African God? How can you then define yourself, the very essence of yourself and the very essence of your soul and organize the very nature of your life here on earth based on a God handed to us by our slave masters and claim that you have no slave consciousness and are not related to slavery? In other words then ladies and gentlemen, we are not Africans. We are possessed by spirits and demons. We have let another people’s spirit take possession of our bodies and take possession of our minds.”
It is a state of mind that must be thrown off quickly because others, instead of paying reparations, are taking Africa a piece at a time and planning to own all of it.
(The Never Forget series is derived from articles which have appeared in Our Time Press and that were reprinted in the writing of the December 1999 issue, A Millennial Look at African-America.)
Seven years working in the County of Kings – most recently as a journalist – has solidified my conviction: Sankofa! Knowing the paths we’ve walked sharpens our perspective as we move forward. This article is about Brooklyn’s African-American journey in print. A book like this has the power to connect the nostalgic whispers of neighbors with the assorted historical facts of our minds. Perhaps you’ve wondered about the displaced American Indians whose land was taken by 17th century Dutch imperialists while walking through the Schenck Houses (think Schenck St. in East New York) on permanent view at the Brooklyn Museum. Who farmed the land? Who cooked the meals? Maybe you worship at one of the churches featured in last week’s Underground Railroad article…which lives online if you missed it! Perhaps you’ve wondered about the deeper meaning of the mid-twentieth century push for school community control. Do you wonder how a city–once known as a model of the best elements of the welfare state–became one gripped by the disproportionate power of real estate? This book is for you!
A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn. By Craig Steven Wilder (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. xii plus 325 pp).
Craig Wilder, native son of Brooklyn, frames three and a half centuries of local history in a class analysis that demands to be read. He writes on the freedom impulse that secures family, builds community, widens opportunity and allows us—today—to look back on earlier times from the vantage point of long-established local institutions (e.g., civic clubs, churches, etc.). By naming the neighborhoods and historical periods in which barriers were broken, Wilder remaps local territory from Canarsie to Crown Heights in the most alive way. He situates history’s famous Brooklyn names in the context of national movements and economic forces. This is how Covenant with Color acts, both as our time machine—showing us who we were—as well as a mirror to all America. We come to see Brooklyn as the nation in miniature through his words.
These pages read like an index to Black America from Anglo-Dutch colonialism to modern times (1636-1990). Read for yourself: Abolitionism, African-American leisure activities, Black Reconstruction, Brooklyn Coordinating Committee on Defense Employment (1940s), Churches, Citizenship, Congress of Racial Equality, Cotton Industry, Credit Unions, Father Divine, Frederick Douglass, Draft Riots (1863), Education, Emancipation, Fugitive Slave Law, William Lloyd Garrison, Great Depression, Greater New York Urban League, Housing, Subway, Industry, Irish, Italians, Jim Crow, Labor Strikes, Latinos, Liberia, March on Washington, NAACP, National Negro Business League, Native Americans, New Deal, Sugar, Trade Organizations, Underground Railroad, United States Justice Department, Urbanization, Voting, Warehouses, West Indian Cricket Club, Women, World War II, YMCA, YWCA and so much more!
Many passages locate Black Brooklyn in less obvious places. On page twenty-two, we learn that each of the several Meserole family farms in Greenpoint was equipped with “field” and “kitchen Negroes”. A list of old Brooklyn bank founders (on page forty-seven) reveals C. Von Bergen and two Meserole family members reinvested slavery-generated wealth in the founding of Greenpoint Savings Bank in 1868. That’s right, Greenpoint. Each page you turn reveals more surprises from the beginning to end.
I cannot review this “story of us” in the conventional format with catchy quotes and more eye-popping details because its greatest value comes in its totality. Wilder’s deep research, penetrating insights and above-average storytelling recommends Covenant more highly than I ever could.
Morgan Powell is a horticulturist, landscape designer and a blogger at Outdoor Afro. This article completes his series of nature and science features at Our Time Press as he switches careers.
New Community Partnerships to be Forged; Strategic Plans for Thousands of Job Opportunities in Development
The Brooklyn Navy Yard is enjoying unparalleled success and worldwide visibility, thanks to the efforts of its development corporation, strong anchor tenants like Steiner Studios and the unique creative spirit of Brooklynites “to make a way”.
Now, community leaders are banking on other Brooklyn western waterfront sites to shore up interest in doing business in Brooklyn. For state Senator Velmanette Montgomery, whose finger is always on the pulse of the community, says that means “more jobs, jobs, jobs” and helping forge creative, sustainable partnerships between community-based entities — schools, programs and small businesses– and major industries and community builders.
She called a meeting to discuss Waterfront/Industrial Economic Opportunity, and attendance nearly tripled the number of guests expected.
The top tier industry presenters included: Andrew Kimball and David Meade, representing Industry City Associates and Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Development Corporation; David Ehrenberg, speaking for the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation and East Williamsburg Valley Industrial Development Corporation; and Leah Archibald for the St. Nicks Alliance (EWVIDCO).
At the forefront of opportunities at Brooklyn’s western Waterfront: New York State Senator Velmanette Montgomery (third from right) linked Central Brooklyn community leaders with heads of Brooklyn waterfront industries, last month. Seen here with her, from left, are community development activist Mr. Reginald Swiney; Tremaine Wright, the new chair of Community Board 3 (CB3); Ms. Jacqui Woods, Special Arts Project Manager and chief curator for the Skylight Gallery of Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation; Mr. Henry Butler, the District Manager for CB3; and Tacumbo Anafalaji of Restoration Corp. (Photo: Jim Vogel)
The speakers cited their experiences and their goals, presented their respective plans for future development, announced their desire to forge new partnerships with the community and described community-based partnerships already in progress. The messages were capped by a stunning prediction of a total combined 800,000 people working in jobs along Brooklyn’s western waterfront areas within several years. Which means for Senator Montgomery, “real jobs for real people”. She also reminded that despite the bumps and boulders of transportation, affordable housing and other issues, “there is now a return to industry and commerce” at the waterfront and “real people” seeking a way to make a way, may be able to see a ship coming in at the shoreline.
“Over the last few decades, much of our traditional waterfront industries have almost disappeared: shipping, storage, fishing and more,” Senator Montgomery wrote in her January 16 letter of invitation. “A significant portion (of the waterfront areas) has been given over to housing and parkland. This makes our remaining available waterfronts even more important as potential centers for industry and economic development. This kind of progress can lead to places where homes can be built and a workforce developed.
Sen. Montgomery makes a point, with (L-R, Councilmembers Stephen Levin, Carlos Menchaca and Robert_Cornegy; Marilyn_Gelber; Jeremy Laufer, District Manager CB7.
Adam Friedman of the Pratt Center for Community Development presented the agency’s findings of several studies about industrial and manufacturing “purposing”. He also suggested to the leaders that there needs to be more purposed messaging or, as this writer understood him to mean, a change in language when they seek new community partnerships.
Since it was reported that entertainment, fashion and culture – not to mention real estate — are the list-toppers for new business growth along the waterfront, it was a pleasure to see in attendance some of Central Brooklyn’s top cultural and trend leaders: Jackie Woods of Restoration’s Skylight Gallery, Brenda Brunson-Bey of the international but locally-based Tribal Truths design and fashion house; and Tremaine Wright, chair of Brooklyn’s powerful Community Board 3, and realtor pioneer Richard Flateau. These community leaders were proactive at the meeting, asking questions and openly expressed a desire to forge partnerships with the leaders.
The meeting co-sponsors were Deputy Borough President Diana Reyna representing Borough President Eric Adams, and City Council members Stephen Levin, Brad Lander, Laurie Cumbo, Carlos Menchaca, Antonio Reynoso and Robert Cornegy, Jr. (BG)
For more information, visit: www.nysenate.gov/senator/velmanette-montgomery
