Connecting to the Archive: Counter-gentrification in Central Brooklyn

Weeksville was founded in 1838 by formerly enslaved persons and freedmen who sought to create a self-sustaining utopian community in Brooklyn, New York. Distinguished by its urbanity, size, and relative physical and economic stability, the community provided sanctuary for self-emancipated persons from Southern slave plantations, and for free Black people escaping the violence of New York City’s Draft Riots in 1863. The second largest African American community in the U.S. was absorbed by the forces of real estate development in New York City. After almost fifty years of community led persistence and vision, in 2014 the Weeksville Heritage Center (WHC) introduced a new Cultural Arts Building and interpretive landscape on the same campus as the original community. “Connecting to the Archive: Counter-Gentrification Tactics in Central Brooklyn,” strengthens community development activities as a counterforce to gentrification through several processes that center around the ongoing development of archival and oral history collections held by the Center. Through academic partnership with Pratt Institute in the Pratt Weeksville Archive students and faculty work together with the Center’s staff and community members on the ongoing archiving project, which seeks to support the Center’s efforts to preserve and add to the archive, provide access to, and interpret the archival microhistory of community development and documentation activities that led to the formation of the Society and its growth. Historic Black nineteenth century self-supporting communities can become a model for empowerment in twenty first century shrinking Black communities rendered apolitical and ahistorical and little hope for a future. Central Brooklyn is arguably the largest African American community in the U.S., with a population that is shrinking in numbers due to white gentrification and beset by the traumas caused by anti-Black racism, generational displacement and poor access to public services. To assist in this effort, the project engages with local residents in oral history and critical ethnography practices so as to decentered the privileged position of the ethnographer. Based on the multidimensional method of Edgar Morin and everyday life practitioners, the goal is to empower residents to utilize the archive through interviewing, self-documentation, storytelling, and appreciation of archival and oral history methodologies. The project connects the Center to its immediate community and the immediate community to the Center through the effort to document the memory and experience of the neighborhood in the past, present, and future, to engage with and expand the archival collections held at the Center so as to create a place of refuge, delight and individual and collective history as a counterforce to the forces of global neoliberalism that continue to degrade, marginalize and challenge BIPOC community building.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.110.78

Volume Editors
Robert Gonzalez, Milton Curry & Monica Ponce de Leon

ISBN
978-1-944214-40-1