Brooklynites

Prithi Kanakamedala's study of the free Black communities of Brooklyn is a welcome and compelling addition to scholarship exploring social activism in African American communities in the nineteenth century. Her work delves into the ways free Black people fought for equality in education, housing, and voting rights, “even as their own freedom was threatened by a magnitude of injustices including racial violence, systemic and structural racism, racial capitalism, and the potential for kidnapping into slavery in the South” (p. 1). By focusing on Brooklyn, New York's second-largest borough (and the third-largest city in the United States for nearly fifty years, surpassed only by New York City and Philadelphia), Kanakamedala illuminates an area often overshadowed by Manhattan in histories of African American activism. She argues that Brooklyn played a prominent role in free Black activism in its own right and situates this activism within broader contexts of racial violence and systemic oppression, making the book deeply relevant to both historical and contemporary discussions.

Black history · Borough · Object (grammar) · Work (physics) · Animal Law and Welfare · Race, History, and American Society · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies