“Traitors In Our Midst”:
“The Colored People Have Dispersed”:
Race, Space, and Schooling in Late 19th-Century Brooklyn
By Judith Kafka and Cici Matheny
“The doing away with the distinctively colored schools and … bringing about mixed classes,” wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in September of 1899, “has done more toward the education of the race than any other individual effort.” Brooklyn’s Board of Education had officially ended racial segregation in schooling in 1883, by requiring all district schools to admit any student living within their enrollment boundaries.
Read More“Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Liberty”:
Resistance to Segregated Seating in New York City’s Theaters
By Alyssa Lopez
In 1924, Walter White, the assistant secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), sent a letter of warning to several New York City-based black newspapers. “There have been... numerous complaints regarding the denial to colored people,” he explained, “of service in various places of public accommodations,” especially theaters on 125th Street, Harlem’s main thoroughfare.
Read More"Sorry Junior, Recess is Over":
Integration, White Backlash and the Origins of Police in New York City Schools
By Rachel Lissy
On the morning of September 19, 1957, 17 year old Maurice Kessler walked into an American History class at Thomas Jefferson High School in East New York, Brooklyn and tossed a bottle of lye. The bottle exploded, splattering 18 pupils and the teacher with corrosive liquid. The attack was aimed at 16 year-old David Ozersky, whose face was described by other students as "melting off," and who was reported to be partially blinded in the attack.
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The Show that Saved the Amphitheatre
By Daniela Sheinin
On a summer evening in June 1945, 200 performers took to the aquatic stage at the former New York State Pavilion at Flushing Meadow Park. Spread throughout the 8,500 seats at the northern tip of Meadow Lake, spectators watched swimmers and a choreographed “water ballet” fill the pool, while divers sprung from the diving towers at each end.
Read MoreIsland Gospel: Pentecostal Music and Identity in Jamaica and the United States
Review by Ray Allen
Writing about musical performance during the time of COVID-19 gives me pause, as it does, no doubt, for all of us who revel in live music. Whether we choose to raise our voices in praise of the deities or to drum and dance to the most sensual rhythms, the act of communal music making is, at its core, a celebration of our deepest humanity. Michael Butler’s Island Gospel is a keen reminder of this reality, and leaves us longing for the day when we can again gather in places of worship, dance halls, clubs, concert venues, and street fetes for the simple joy of making music together.
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“The Lungs of the City”: Frederick Law Olmsted, Public Health, and the Creation of Central Park
By Lucie Levine
As the nation’s first great urban park, Central Park was conceived as “The Lungs of the City,” and built in 1858 as an oasis for “the sanitary advantage of breathing.” A half-century later, a letter to the editor of the New York Times glowed that “thousands visit the park daily just to breathe.” But today, “I can’t breathe” is the defining cry of the moment, as the city and the nation confronts both a global respiratory pandemic and the ongoing scourge of police brutality against black people.
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Refuge in the Heights: Migration, Memory and Authoritarianism in the Twentieth Century
By Robert W. Snyder
Immigrants travel with baggage, and some of the most important things they carry are their memories of life in their original homes. In Washington Heights and Inwood, where immigrants include German Jews, Dominicans, and Jews from the former Soviet Union, personal and collective memories embrace an unusual cast of characters: some of the most brutal dictators of the 20th century.
Upper Manhattan is haunted, you might say, by memories of Hitler, Trujillo, and Stalin.
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In Pursuit of Knowledge: An Interview with Kabria Baumgartner
Interviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, editor Katie Uva speaks to Kabria Baumgartner, author of In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America. In her book, Baumgartner explores the origins of the fight for school desegregation in the 19th century Northeast by focusing on the stories of African American girls and women.
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NYC Parks as Historical Battlegrounds between Black Equality and White Supremacy
By Marika Plater
When Amy Cooper threatened Chris Cooper’s life by calling the police with the wildly fabricated claim, “There is a man, African American…threatening me” in Central Park, she joined a long history of white New Yorkers who have made public parks unsafe for black people. Looking back to the early 19th century lays bare the connection between this tense moment in the Ramble and the question of who constitutes “the public” entitled to use public spaces. Between the 1820s and 1860s, the city’s parks were battlegrounds — sometimes literally — between black New Yorkers who asserted their equal right to relax, play, and protest there and whites who fought to keep these public spaces for themselves.
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