Long before it became the go-to borough for hipsters and commuters, Brooklyn was once America’s third largest city, independent and separate from Manhattan and the City of New York, explains Prithi Kanakamedala in “Brooklynites: The Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities that Shaped a Borough” (NYU Press).

But it was also a place where, at the end of the American Revolution, one in three black inhabitants were enslaved, a statistic that, inevitably, drove a wave of activism in the years to come.

“Brooklyn was a slaveholding capital,” writes Kanakamedala. “And it was within this context that a free Black community at the town’s most northwestern tip would begin to contour the landscape and imbue the land with the radical possibilities of freedom.”

Gavin Newsham September 29, 2024

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