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FREEDOMWAYS   FOURTH QUARTER 1972

Freedom's Journal, in 1827.2 Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, James McCune Smith, Samuel Ringgold Ward, J. W. C. Pennington and Sojourner Truth, all New Yorkers, were leading figures in that movement.

A short ferry ride across the river in Brooklyn and away from the center of Black life in downtown Manhattan, stood the village of Weeksville, characterized by the local white newspaper, the Brooklyn Eagle, as a "terra incognitas."3 The tiny community, apparently named for James Weeks, a freedman who bought land in the 1830's, consisted of small frame houses surrounded by gardens.4 Each morning Weeksville's residents could be seen walking the three and one-half miles to the ferry that would take them to their jobs—walking because they were not allowed to ride the stage that ran through their community to the ferry.5 Occupations ran the gamut from laborers to cigarmakers, "speculators," preachers and teachers.6 The numerous organizations and institutions in and around the village attest to a fully active community life. Colored School No. 2, the local school staffed and attended by Blacks housed over one hundred pupils and three teachers.7 Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, incorporated in 1847, the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, the Zion Home for the Colored Aged, Berean Baptist Church, and the African Civilization Society were all located within the community. Residents of Weeksville could also be found on the membership rolls of the Colored Political Association of the City of Brooklyn and Kings County.8 Just outside the settlement's borders stood the Citizen's Union Cemetery, "designed more particularly as a burial place for the colored, upon whom is placed the ban of the white man...forbidding the commingling of their dust in death."9

Although Blacks lived in all the various sections of nineteenth century Brooklyn it is probable that Weeksville's existence had a special meaning to New York's Black community. For example, the African Civilization Society, a New York based organization dedicated both to missionary and emigration efforts, maintained a building


2 Ottley, Roi and Weatherby, William J., The Negro in New York, 1969, p. 89.
3 "Weeksville," The Brooklyn Eagle, July 30, 1873.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 United States Census, City of Brooklyn, Ninth Ward, 1860.
7 Brooklyn Board of Education, Minutes of the Proceedings, February 4, 1873. 
8 The Brooklyn City and Kings County Record, Brooklyn, New York, 1855, p. 200-202.
9 Ibid., p. 166-167.

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