Chapter 3 - Black Entrepreneurship, Economic Self-Determination and Early Print in Antebellum Brooklyn

Summary

This chapter examines the print culture that emerged from successes in black entrepreneurship in early nineteenth-century Brooklyn, New York. Through a close analysis of a newspaper notice, a city directory advertisement, and a patent, the author considers how three free Black men determined their own modes of political, economic, and cultural self-expression in spite of their oppression. Moreover, the chapter situates their economic protests into a larger contextual struggle. In the antebellum decades, Brooklynites, like many other early free Black communities across the North, pursued a variety of ways to secure their humanity. In Brooklyn, residents built their communities by establishing schools, churches, mutual aid societies, and businesses. Their activism resulted in vibrant and mobilized communities in areas known today as downtown Brooklyn, Williamsburg, Fort Greene, and Weeksville, New York (the second largest free Black community in pre-Civil War America).