Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

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

  • from Part I - Black Organizational Life before 1830
  • Edited by Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Duke University, North Carolina
  • Book:
    African American Literature in Transition, 1800–1830
    Published online:
    11 March 2021
    Print publication:
    13 May 2021, pp 71-90

  • 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).