Brooklyn's Progress
February/March 2007

Against the odds and the politics of New York State just after it outlawed slavery, free blacks created a thriving community of entrepreneurs, artisans and more in a swathe of Brooklyn where parts of that history remain on display today. That site is known as the Weeksville Heritage Center. And, if the keepers of that small compound at Bergen and Buffalo streets have their way, the center will stand not merely as a marker of what was achieved in a prior era but also as a catalyst in the present.

“Weeksville is located in the heart of an underserved, disadvantaged area full of people at-risk,” said Pamela Green, executive director of the center, situated across the street from a public housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

“This center talks of the strength of black folks,” Ms. Green added, “Twenty years after slavery, they had their own newspapers, a school, an orphans’ asylum, social services. That’s a strong and powerful story that people need to know.”

James Weeks, one of the first black stevedores to work New York’s waterfront, in 1838 bought the land holding what now are the four surviving Hunterfly Road Houses comprising Weeksville. The area was settled by blacks fleeing Lower Manhattan riots started by whites who opposed a Civil War draft and slavery’s abolition. Weeksville’s inhabitants included teachers, ministers, the state’s first woman doctor and first African-American police officer. It flourished for several generations along Hunterfly Road, first a Native American, then a Colonial pathway.

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the center receives 10,000 visitors annually, Ms. Green said. While the majority of visitors are schoolchildren, there is a racially mixed assortment of adults curious about the Weeksville story.

So that Weeksville continues to have meaning beyond its physical place in history, the center has partnered with other organizations to have youth from the adjacent housing project create murals on the site; and, will be helping tap two low-income scholars from those very projects as inaugural winners of a new college scholarship.

Weeksville’s board of directors and staff also are forging ahead with the creation of a cultural center next to the Hunterfly Houses. Among other events, the new facility will house Weeksville’s annual summer salon series of music and art by performers rooted in African and African-American performance traditions. The additional space will also allow the center to expand its educational and research component.

“It will be a place for teachers to teach history in an engaging and exciting way, a performance space, an exhibition space,” said Ms. Green, whose organization is also collecting history beyond the borders of the Hunterfly structures. The African-American past in broader Bedford-Stuyvestant and neighboring Crown Heights is being recorded and collected through photographs and other archival materials, oral histories, even the details of what locals have grown in their backyard gardens.

Apart from the Brooklyn Chamber, which is helping to underwrite Weeksville’s family education project, the center’s list of donors include the National Endowment for the Humanities, New York State Council on the Arts, Carnegie Corp., Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the American Express Foundation.

“Weeksville is for everyone,” Ms. Green said. “It’s American history.”

For more information about the Weeksville Heritage Center and its programs visit the Web site, http://www.weeksvillesociety.org/, or contact Executive Director Pamela Green at 718-623-0600 ext. 302, or at pam@weeksvillesociety.org.

This year the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce partnered with the Weeksville Heritage Center to host a cocktail reception in celebration of Black History Month. To read about the event, see story from cover or visit http://www.ibrooklyn.com/.