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WEEKSVILLE    BANKS

and apparently thrived in the community even though most Blacks lived in downtown New York at the time. Even more important, Weeksville seems to have played a rather significant role in the draft riots that accompanied the Civil War. The combination of Emancipation and the increased urgency of the War effort heightened Irish fears of economic competition and they wanted no part of the "nigger war." Sporadic attacks on individual Black citizens grew to riot proportions. In August of 1862, a white mob attacked and burned the Lorillard and Watson Tobacco factory in Brooklyn but the twenty-five Black employees, mostly women and children, escaped injury. In July 1863 riots erupted in Manhattan on a larger scale. The Colored Orphan Asylum was razed and Blacks were beaten and killed in the streets. Although Irish mobs came to Brooklyn, Weeksville and the Blacks who sought refuge there were never attacked. According to the Brooklyn correspondent of the Christian Recorder, "In Weeksville and Flatbush, the colored men who had manhood in them armed themselves, and threw out their pickets every day and night, determined to die defending their homes. Hundreds fled there from New York... So in every place where they were prepared they escaped being mobbed."10

weeksville versus the brooklyn board of education

But Weeksville, like all Black communities, had daily battles to fight. As a community seeking to define its needs it had difficulty relating to the decision-makers who controlled some of the institutions in their community. One such ongoing battle was waged with the Brooklyn Board of Education and its Local Committee, the representative body empowered to make policy for Colored School No. 2. In the beginning of the year 1869 a white teacher had been hired by this Committee to replace a Black teacher who had resigned. There was an immediate reaction from the community. Circulars went out from the African Civilization Society Building to announce a protest meeting. The results of this meeting were sent to the Board in the form of a petition stating, "...the subject of appointing a white teacher in a colored school was discussed at the public meeting in all its educational and social bearings [sic] that it was openly and strongly condemned as a seemingly wanton disregard for the feelings of colored people and conceived in the spirit of the Dred Scott decision...."11 It is interesting to note that the petition included

10 McPherson, p. 70-73.
11 Brooklyn Board of Education, March 2, 1869.

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