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Longlist, 2025 Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize
Finalist, 2025 Gotham Book Prize
The 2024 Victorian Society Book of the Year
Meet the Black Brooklynites who defined New York City’s most populous borough through their search for social justice
Before it was a borough, Brooklyn was our nation’s third largest city. Its free Black community attracted people from all walks of life—businesswomen, church leaders, laborers, and writers—who sought to grow their city in a radical anti-slavery vision. The residents of neighborhoods like DUMBO, Fort Greene, and Williamsburg organized and agitated for social justice. They did so even as their own freedom was threatened by systemic and structural racism, risking their safety for the sake of their city. Brooklynites recovers the lives of these remarkable citizens and considers their lasting impact on New York City’s most populous borough.
This cultural and social history is told through four ordinary families from Brooklyn’s nineteenth-century free Black community: the Crogers, the Hodges, the Wilsons, and the Gloucesters. The book illustrates the depth and scope of their activism, cementing Brooklyn’s place in the history of social justice movements. Their lives offer valuable lessons on freedom, democracy, and family—both the ones we’re born with and the ones we choose. Their powerful stories continue to resonate today, as borough residents fill the streets in search of a more just city.
This is a story of land, home, labor, of New Yorkers past, and the legacy they left us. This is the story of Brooklyn.
"Prithi Kanakamedala’s deeply-plumbed chronicle of four singular, albeit unsung, African American families —whose lives were ensconced in the decades between the American Revolution and the Reconstruction Era — is both a vivid generational biography and an illuminating, long-overdue social history of 19th-century Brooklyn."
— Eric K. Washington, author of Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal
"Kanakamedala offers a noteworthy and necessary atlas of Black Brooklyn that gives new insights into the trajectory of the nation. Bookshelves have been waiting for such a historic walk through the famed Borough. A refreshing prism to view the Republic of Brooklyn."
— Kamau Ware, Founder of the Black Gotham Experience
"Through deep research and fantastic images, Brooklynites presents a powerful portrayal of racism and Black struggles for freedom, written by a leading public historian and scholar of nineteenth century America. Read this book and you will never again think the same way about Brooklyn, and America's complicated, contradictory, hard-edged, and hopeful history."
— Brian Purnell, author of Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings: The Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn
"Vigorous history of a free Black community in Brooklyn and its contributions to the making of modern New York."
"In the years after the American Revolution, Brooklyn was a slaveholding capital. But there was a small, thriving Black community that established schools and churches, advocated for voting rights and increased its own financial power. Free Black Brooklyn underwent rapid change and growth while living under a veil of white supremacy and violence."
"Incredibly informative about Brooklyn's history, and the writing is LUSH!"
"There is much to admire about this meticulously researched study. Its rich narrative style brings Brooklyn to life, often making us feel as though we can see, hear, and smell nineteenth-century Brooklyn’s streets, parks, buildings, streetcars, and people. Enriching this sensory experience are a plethora of historic maps and images along with a timeline and several family trees...Brooklynites makes a strong and powerful contribution to the historiography on antebellum Black life."
"At once a detailed scholarly reconstruction of Black life in Brooklyn—through the lens of four Black families—and an analytic history of the depredations of racism and the counterweight of self-determination, Brooklynites is a book that will appeal to varied audiences, from civic groups to academic specialists, who are interested in either the local history of the borough or the larger patterns revealed in this compelling case study."
"Richly sourced and flawlessly written, a welcome addition to the fields of urban and Black history. And while Kanakamedala describes the families she profiles as ordinary, her analysis of the legacies they have left and the paths they forged to social activism today is relatively extraordinary."
"Brooklynites is an effort to restore the names and humanity to those who are too often erased from the historical record."