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
Blacks were one of the first groups to arrive in Brooklyn during the Dutch colonial period, usually as slaves, though there were also freemen. To provide an overview of some early Black history, PortSide commissioned this article by Charles Foy...
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...
Interviewed in 2013 at age 19, Rasheed Johnson, a resident of NYCHA’s Red Hook houses, talks about how the neighborhood has changed in the past 8 years since he got here. Development has eliminated all his “hang out spots” except for Valentino...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
During a tuberculosis scare in 1934 a New York Health Commissioner study disproved the belief that people of color suffered in greater numbers than whites. The New York Age: National Negro Weekly reported that the study which compared Harlem...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
" We have mostly men here - very few women. No unattached women permitted at the bar. That’s a simple way of preventing trouble." One of the best known watering holes in Red Hook was the Shaft Alley saloon. Fortune magazine, in a 1937 essay...
By The Red Hook WaterStories team
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 Brooklyn Eagle reported in 1903 that: The race question...
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...
