Weeksville is a historic neighborhood founded by free African Americans in what is now Brooklyn, New York, United States. Today it is part of the present-day neighborhood of Crown Heights.
Weeksville is a historic neighborhood founded by free African Americans in what is now Brooklyn, New York, United States. Today it is part of the present-day neighborhood of Crown Heights.
Weeksville was named after James Weeks, an African-American stevedore from Virginia. [1] In 1838 (11 years after the final abolition of slavery in New York State) [2] Weeks bought a plot of land from Henry C. Thompson, a free African American and land investor, in the Ninth Ward of central Brooklyn. Thompson had acquired the land from Edward Copeland, a politically minded European American and Brooklyn grocer, in 1835. [3] Previously Copeland bought the land from an heir of John Lefferts, a member of one of the most prominent and land-holding families in Brooklyn. [4] There was ample opportunity for land acquisition during this time, as many prominent land-holding families sold off their properties during an intense era of land speculation. [3] Many African Americans saw land acquisition as their opportunity to gain economic and political freedom by building their own communities. [4]
The village itself was established by a group of African-American land investors and political activists, and covered an area in the borough's eastern Bedford Hills area, bounded by present-day Fulton Street, East New York Avenue, Ralph Avenue and Troy Avenue. [1] A 1906 article in the New York Age recalling the earlier period noted that James Weeks "owned a handsome dwelling at Schenectady and Atlantic Avenues."
By the 1850s, Weeksville had more than 500 residents from all over the East Coast (as well as two people born in Africa). Almost 40 percent of residents were southern-born. Nearly one-third of the men over 21 owned land; in antebellum New York, unlike in New England, non-white men had to own real property (to the value of $250) and pay taxes on it to qualify as voters. [5] The village had its own churches (including Bethel Tabernacle African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Berean Missionary Baptist Church), a school ("Colored School no. 2", now P.S. 243), a cemetery, and an old age home. [6] Weeksville had one of the first African-American newspapers, the Freedman's Torchlight, and in the 1860s became the national headquarters of the African Civilization Society and the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum. In addition, the Colored School was the first such school in the U.S. to integrate both its staff and its students. [7]
During the violent New York Draft Riots of 1863, the community served as a refuge for many African-Americans who fled from Manhattan.
After the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge and as New York City grew and expanded, Weeksville gradually became part of Crown Heights, and memory of the village was largely forgotten.
The search for Historic Weeksville began in 1968 in a Pratt Institute workshop on Brooklyn and New York City neighborhoods led by historian James Hurley. After reading of Weeksville in The Eastern District of Brooklyn, a 1912 book by Brooklyn historian Eugene Armbruster, Hurley and Joseph Haynes, a local resident and pilot, consulted old maps and flew over the area in an airplane in search of surviving evidence of the village.
Four historic houses (now known as the Hunterfly Road Houses) were discovered off Bergen Street between Buffalo and Rochester Avenues, facing an old lane—a remnant of Hunterfly Road, which was at the eastern edge of the 19th century village.
Weeksville is currently a working-class neighborhood with African-American and Hispanic residents as well as Caribbean immigrants from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, Grenada, among others.
The 1968 discovery of the Hunterfly Road Houses led to the formation of The Society for the Preservation of Weeksville and Bedford-Stuyvesant History (now the Weeksville Heritage Center). Joan Maynard was a founding member and executive director for the Preservation of Weeksville and Bedford-Stuyvesant History. The preservation of the Hunterfly Road Houses became her life's work. [8]
In 1970 the houses were declared New York City Landmarks, and in 1972 were placed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Hunterfly Road Historic District. [9] [10] The houses were purchased by the Society in 1973, [11] and in 2005, following a $3 million restoration, the houses reopened to the public as the Weeksville Heritage Center, with each house showcasing a different era of Weeksville history. [2] Construction of an 19,000-square-foot (1,800 m2) education and cultural center adjacent to the houses was completed in 2014. [12]
Clinton Hill is a neighborhood in north-central Brooklyn, a borough of New York City. It is bordered by the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Flushing Avenue to the north, Williamsburg to the northeast, Nostrand Avenue and Bedford–Stuyvesant to the east, St Marks Avenue and Prospect Heights to the south and southwest and Carlton Avenue and Fort Greene to the west.
Bushwick is a neighborhood in the northern part of the New York City borough of Brooklyn. It is bounded by the neighborhood of Ridgewood, Queens, to the northeast; Williamsburg to the northwest; East New York and the cemeteries of Highland Park to the southeast; Brownsville to the south; and Bedford–Stuyvesant to the southwest.
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Bedford–Stuyvesant, colloquially known as Bed–Stuy, is a neighborhood in the northern section of the New York City borough of Brooklyn. Bedford–Stuyvesant is bordered by Flushing Avenue to the north, Classon Avenue to the west, Broadway to the east, and Atlantic Avenue to the south. The main shopping street, Fulton Street, runs east–west the length of the neighborhood and intersects high-traffic north–south streets including Bedford Avenue, Nostrand Avenue, and Stuyvesant Avenue. Bedford–Stuyvesant contains four smaller neighborhoods: Bedford, Stuyvesant Heights, Ocean Hill, and Weeksville. Part of Clinton Hill was once considered part of Bedford–Stuyvesant.
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Ocean Hill is a subsection of Bedford–Stuyvesant in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. The neighborhood is part of Brooklyn Community Board 16 and was founded in 1890. The ZIP code for the neighborhood is 11233. Ocean Hill's boundaries start from Broadway and the neighborhood of Bushwick in the north, Ralph Avenue and the neighborhoods of Bedford-Stuyvesant proper and Crown Heights to the west, East New York Avenue and the neighborhood of Brownsville to the south, and Van Sinderen Avenue and the neighborhood of East New York to the east.
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The Weeksville Heritage Center is a historic site on Buffalo Avenue between St. Marks Avenue and Bergen Street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York City. It is dedicated to the preservation of Weeksville, one of America's first free black communities during the 19th century. Within this community, the residents established schools, churches and benevolent associations and were active in the abolitionist movement. Weeksville is a historic settlement of national significance and one of the few remaining historical sites of pre-Civil War African-American communities.
Stuyvesant Square is the name of both a park and its surrounding neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan. The park is located between 15th Street, 17th Street, Rutherford Place, and Nathan D. Perlman Place. Second Avenue divides the park into two halves, east and west, and each half is surrounded by the original cast-iron fence.
Bedford Avenue is the longest street in Brooklyn, New York City, stretching 10.2 miles (16.4 km) and 132 blocks, from Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint south to Emmons Avenue in Sheepshead Bay, and passing through the neighborhoods of Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, Flatbush, Midwood, Marine Park, and Sheepshead Bay.
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Rashida Bumbray is an American curator, choreographer, author, visual and performing arts critic who lives and works in New York City. Bumbray's choreographic work Run Mary Run was included in The New York Times list of the Best Concerts of 2012. In 2014, she was nominated for the distinguished Bessie Award for “Outstanding Emerging Choreographer," and in the same year she was recipient of the Harlem Stage Fund for New Work. Bumbray is currently the Senior Program Manager of the Arts Exchange at The Open Society Foundations the Open Society Foundations.
The Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation is a community development corporation based in Brooklyn, New York, and the first ever to be established in the United States.
African Americans constitute one of the longer-running ethnic presences in New York City, home to the largest urban African American population, and the world's largest Black population of any city outside Africa, by a significant margin. As of the 2010 Census, the number of African Americans residing in New York City was over 2 million. The highest concentration of African Americans are in Brooklyn, Harlem, Queens, and The Bronx. New York City is also home to the highest number of immigrants from the Caribbean.
Joan Bacchus Maynard was an American artist, author, community organizer, and preservationist. She was one of the founding members of a late 1960s grassroots group to preserve the legacy of Weeksville, a pre-Civil War African American community in Brooklyn, New York.
Wilhelmena Rhodes Kelly was an African-American genealogist who traced her American lineage to the April 5, 1614 union of Pocahontas and John Rolfe. She was also a member of the Jamestowne Society. In 2019 she became the New York State Regent and a member of the National Board of Management, highest ranking woman of color in the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution (NSDAR), since its founding in 1890. She was a pioneer of African-American genealogy. Born and raised in Brooklyn, she was a local Brooklyn historian and member of the Society of Old Brooklynites (SOB), one of the borough's oldest civic organizations. She was the author of books on Bedford-Stuyvesant as well as the Crown Heights and Weeksville sections of Brooklyn, and family genealogy books tracing her family's American roots.
Stefani Zinerman is an American Democratic Party politician who currently represents New York State Assembly district 56, which includes Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights in Brooklyn, New York.
The African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund is a program formed in 2017 to aid stewards of Black cultural sites throughout the nation in preserving both physical landmarks, their material collections and associated narratives. It was organized under the auspices of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The initiative which awards grants to select applicants and advocates of Black history has been led by architectural historian Brent Leggs since 2019. It is the largest program in America to preserve places associated with Black history.
Almira Kennedy Coursey was a community activist and organizer based in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for advocating for the renovation and redevelopment of Herbert Von King Park.
| External videos | |
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 A Day in Weeksville: Brooklyn's Historic, Free Black Town | |
| WEEKSVILLE WAS A FREE BLACK COMMUNITY IN BROOKLYN, NEW YORK |
| Authority control databases: National |
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