Fall 2025 Book Author Spotlight

Starting with this issue, NEJH will run a brief interview with the author of one of the books under review. Our inaugural interview guest is Prithi Kanakamedala, author of Brooklynites: The Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities that Shaped a Borough. Kanakamedala has been teaching in the City University of New York (CUNY) system since 2014, where she is Professor History at Bronx Community College. Before starting on the tenure track, Kanakamedala was a public historian, which is where this book project originated.

Erin Redihan (ER): Where did the idea for this book come from?

Prithi Kanakamedala (PK): This came from a very significant public history project for which I was the lead historian or project historian, called “In pursuit of Freedom.” It was done by three cultural organizations, all based in Brooklyn: Brooklyn Historical Society (now the Center for Brooklyn History at Brooklyn Public Library), Irondale Ensemble Project, which is a theater company in Fort Greene, and Weeksville Heritage Center. These three organizations were tasked by the [Mayor Michael] Bloomberg administration to tell the story of Brooklyn's anti-slavery movements, to piece together Brooklyn's past. It isn't just a sub-chapter of Manhattan's history. Kings County and Brooklyn have their own unique and peculiar history that needs unpacking.

Out of that public history project, we had K-12 curricula walking tours, an exhibition, and an original theater production, so there was quite a lot that came out of it. …As a public historian, my commitment is always to speaking and sharing and honoring this history outside of the traditional classroom, but people kept asking me, where’s the book?

Long after the exhibits came down, by which point, I had tenure at CUNY [as an associate professor] I think I just felt as though it was my responsibility to put this finally down in the written word.

ER: One of my favorite aspects of this book are the maps you include throughout because they let your readers see how the city expanded throughout the period you cover and how it was once a pretty rural place, so unlike Brooklyn today. Were you mindful of that as you wrote?

PK: Absolutely. I'm often asked about the families in the book, but I am always very clear that Brooklyn is the other family in the book, the other character, and what I'm really tracing is how Brooklyn came to be. … I was thinking about my students in a CUNY classroom and what would they want to know? They want to know the visual language around it. What am I looking at? You're telling me Brooklyn is going to grow from one of six towns [that comprised the city] to the third largest in the United States in those 60 years?

ER: Historians often go into the archives expecting to find one item and end up learning something completely different. What was the most surprising or unexpected thing that you learned from this project?

PK: It didn't surprise me, but it was just the extent to which black women in 19th century Brooklyn have been erased from historical narratives. And that comes as no surprise, of course, to trained historians, but I think the joy of this research was recovering their stories and placing them back. And my goal as a sort-of public historian is always to commemorate New York's past, to give them their flowers. So, I was very deliberate and very intentional for every archival piece, whether it was a census record or city directory. …

I was always very clear that my goal was to also humanize these families and make them whole and make sure black women were also commemorated.

Again, it’s not surprising to somebody who has studied this history, but I think I wanted to make very clear that we have a lot of work to do in terms of the way we tell our histories, including black women. All weren't enslaved and they weren't all working menial jobs. Some of them actually owned their own businesses. They were teachers. One of the black women in the book, not to make the exception the norm, but Elizabeth Gloucester is one of the richest women in the United States because she owns so much real estate. So, I think [I wanted] also to just challenge readers and audiences around what they think 19th century Brooklyn might have been, and the ways in which these women were actually writing their own sort of stories.

ER: What was the most challenging part of sorting through and organizing all of this information?

PK: I think the challenge was coming down to four families (the Crogers, the Hodges, the Wilsons, and the Gloucesters), which works beautifully in terms of structure and in terms of just honoring those descendants and those families. But there were so many people that really built Brooklyn and [it was a matter of] just not having enough space or room to be able to honor sort of each family that made it what it was.

I never wanted to give fragments to the person's life, as if they are a supporting character for somebody else. But to actually say, look, they had their own history. So, my hope is always in the writing of the book that I've given enough information where another person can come along, scholar or non-scholar, and say that was an interesting story; let me go research that more and take their story forward.

ER: Many students come to college with the idea that slavery was solely a southern story, which we know is not the case. You talk about slavery here, but it’s never the center of your story. How did you decide exactly where slavery fits in here?

PK: Slavery is absolutely central to Brooklyn's history. There would be no Brooklyn, none of six towns, had there not been the labor of enslaved people working agricultural jobs. I want to be very clear about that. I think my focus on its free Black community [was] twofold: one was honoring the decades of work that stewards at Weeksville Heritage Center have been doing. … but also there was a thriving free Black community, and that deserves its own sort of focus.

ER: You've talked about how you're it's so hard to kind of just focus on four families and not wanting to present fragments. Is there anything that you wish you could have included here?

PK: I wish I had more time, and I think Carla Peterson does this beautifully in Black Gotham. She takes Collect Street [today Centre Street], and she goes through every single family that lived on that street and the amount of deep research and time that must taken her is both inspiring and mind-blowing. You realize how much time it would have taken us, so I wish I had been able to do that for Brookl yn nights. I wish I'd been able to take that Pearl Street, which is where the Croger family lived and really analyzed. Who are the families living on this street? What do they do? What are their stories? Let's just go super hyper local so that you understand what Brooklyn is. It's an integrated neighborhood, even as structural racism and racial violence exists. For reasons of time and reasons of “I need to get everything else down,” I wasn't able to do that. So, I think I made a promise to myself to definitely do it in the second book project.