Brooklyn Abolitionists/In Pursuit of Freedom

Abstract

309 Exhibition Review Brooklyn Abolitionists/In Pursuit of Freedom. Brooklyn Historical Society, in partnership with the Weeksville Heritage Center and Irondale Ensemble Project. Long-term exhibition, opened January 15, 2014. Reviewed by William S. Walker, Cooperstown Graduate Program, SUNY Oneonta The Brooklyn Historical Society has created a deeply engaging exhibition filled with compelling stories of activism and societal change. Brooklyn Abolitionists offers intimate portraits of individuals, mostly African Americans, who fought not only against slavery but for educational opportunity, land and community, and legal and political rights during the half century before the American Civil War. Taking the history of social justice as its focus, the exhibition explores how Brooklyn activists defined freedom in a city and nation characterized by a dominant ideology of white supremacy and rife with racial discrimination. With clever interactive displays and meticulous research, the exhibition succeeds in bringing the past vibrantly to life and prompting visitors to see the histories of both Brooklyn and abolitionism in a new light. Perhaps more important, it makes history relevant to our contemporary problems of inequality. This relatively small exhibition includes a lot of information without overwhelming visitors. It effectively balances larger context about Brooklyn and the United States with detailed narratives about particular individuals who served as leaders in various struggles. The exhibition’s design makes this balancing act possible. Around the perimeter of the gallery is a large timeline, which traces Brooklyn’s development from “an agricultural slaveholding capital” to an “industrial center” and “the third largest city in the United States.” The timeline highlights Brooklyn’s history of large-scale slavery in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as its eco- 310 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY nomic ties to the plantations of the American South and the Caribbean. Interwoven with the local story are national events such as the Panic of 1837, secession crisis, and New York City Draft Riots, and Brooklyn’s connections to these events are clearly elucidated. One particularly interesting connection is made between the aftermath of the Panic of 1837 and free black communities in Brooklyn. The availability of cheap land after the panic enabled blacks to purchase real estate and build communities in Williamsburg and Weeksville. Appropriately, the Weeksville Heritage Center, which showcases a series of restored houses from that historic free black community, is one of the historical society’s partners on the exhibition . Overall, the timeline provides both visual and textual narratives— words and images—that complement one another well. This reviewer would have appreciated more original images (paintings and photographs) and three-dimensional objects—one area in which the exhibition is sorely lacking. Nevertheless, the curators have created a well-researched and coherent story. The focal point of the exhibition is not, however, the timeline. It is the brilliant, yet remarkably simple, interactive displays, which combine visual, tactile, and digital elements in a novel and inventive manner. At four stations scattered through the center of the gallery—“Literacy as Liberation,” “Communities of Freedom,” “Law and Liberty,” and “Securing Freedom”—visitors encounter illustrated narratives of individual abolitionists , activists, and civic leaders. These individuals’ stories cascade down large banners suspended from the ceiling. Visitors manipulate the scrolling of the narratives using manual pull ropes; consequently, text and images appear at whatever pace the visitor chooses. And, unlike a touch screen, it is easy for multiple visitors to view the text and images at the same time because they are projected onto a large banner. The narratives highlighted in the interactive displays are models of concision . They manage to be detailed and complex without being overwhelming . Visitors learn about such notable individuals as Peter Croger who started an “African School” in Brooklyn for black children who were not permitted to attend the public school, James W.C. Pennington who escaped from slavery in Maryland and studied at Yale Divinity School even though he was denied formal admission there, and David Ruggles whose “practical abolitionism” promoted actively freeing blacks who had been illegally Exhibition Review 311 detained. Each narrative ends with an open-ended discussion question— e.g. “Is education important to your own sense of freedom?” and “What is the relationship between community and freedom?”—that encourages visitors to make...