By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Four years before the American Civil War, a legal battle emerged from a situation that occurred aboard a steamship from Savannah to New York. One of the passengers, Thomas Steele, a light skinned man, was accused of being a fugitive slave by another...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
A pivotal event in the ending of slavery occurred on December 5, 1860, in Atlantic Basin, Red Hook when the slave ship ERIE was sold at government auction. Its captain and owner, Nathaniel Gordon, was then executed for engaging in the slave...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
In the summer of 1850, an African-American woman was abducted and brought to Red Hook Point - just below the Atlantic Dock - to be put on a schooner and brought to a Southern slave state. The captors told suspicious workers in the area that the...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Sketch of Thomas Williams, a Black Sailor, by London portraitist John Downman (1750–1824). The sketch, in the collection of the Tate Museum , was drawn in Liverpool in 1815. According to the Tate, Thomas Williams had a connection with MP...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Industries that would have never considerred hiring women for any sort of job quickly changed their tune during WWII. While men were overseas fighting, women of Brooklyn were contributing to the war effort, and their own financial needs, by making...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
“The race question is extending itself upon the seas." At the beginning of the 19th Century, one out of five American sailors were black; at the start of the 20th Century, Black sailors in Brooklyn were facing severe job discrimination. The...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Philip Kasinitz and Jan Rosenberg in their paper, Missing the Connection: Social Isolation and Employment on the Brooklyn Waterfront (1996) conclude that: "few local residents hold local jobs in the private sector. A survey of local employers...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
Blacks were one of the first groups to arrive in Brooklyn during the Dutch colonial period, usually as enslaved people, though there were also freemen. To provide an overview of some early Black history, PortSide commissioned this article by Charles...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
This map was published in 1938, the same year that PortSide's historic ship MARY A. WHALEN was launched. On this map, Red Hook is mostly in red except for industrial and commercial areas. The practice of 'redlining' is now illegal. ...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
The New York City Draft Riots took place between July 13 and July 16 of 1863. The violent insurrection was a reaction to conscription into military service during the Civil War. African Americans became the target of the rioters' anger and an...
