Breuckleen!

From New York Amsterdam News

By Debbie A. Officer and Karen Juanita Carrillo

06/29/2000

The word Breuckleen (Brooklyn) means "a place of many streams," and today Brooklyn is known as a place of many cultures, languages and peoples. On a warm summer afternoon, a walk down several streets here will yield the diversity of the nation's third largest city. There is Senegalese and Cambodian food near Fort Greene and Clinton Hill; Jamaican bakeries on Flatbush Avenue; kosher pizza in Mid- wood; Mexican, Puerto Rican and Dominican restaurants in East New York and Cobble Hill; won ton soup in Sunset Park; Southern soul food in Bedford-Stuyvesant; Italian food in Bensonhurst; and Islamic and Middle Eastern spice shops along Atlantic Avenue. But Brooklyn's' rich and colorful history, like that of most places in the United States, was also marked by a history of bondage.

Slavery began in New Amsterdam, as New York (named for the Duke of York) was then called, in 1626. Many Africans lived their lives as chattel, but one of those who bought his freedom was Francisco de Negar, the founder of Boswyck (which is current-day Bushwick). The six settlements in Brooklyn in 1652 were Flatbush, Bushwick, Flatlands, New Utrecht, Breuckleen and Gravesend. By the 1790s, a third of the population of the city of Brooklyn were enslaved women and men.

The Long Island Courier was Brooklyn's first newspaper (1799). Bridge Street Church, in 1818, served as a sort of Underground Railroad. James Weeks, an African-American man, bought land from the Lefferts family in 1838. The liberal social poet, Walt Whitman, who was born on Long Island, was editor of the Brooklyn Eagle in 1846.

Slavery as an institution was officially abolished in 1863. Susan Smith McKinney, the first Black woman physician in New York state, began her medical practice in Brooklyn in 1870. In 1892, Moses P: Cobb was the borough's first Black policeman, the same year the Smith Street trolley began service from DeKalb Avenue to Coney Island.

Many years before Jackie Robinson pitched for the Brooklyn Dodgers (1945), Dr. Emily Charlton (1930s) was the first Black woman to graduate with honors from the First Podlarry Institute. She lived in Fort Greene. Shirley Chisolm of Brooklyn was the first Black woman legislator elected to the New York State Assembly in 1964

For generations, many who lived in Brooklyn were farmers. Sheepshead Bay was mostly a farming and fishing community until the advent of the subway system. Today, places like Gravesend, although far from homogenous, are still home to a large Italian population. Bedford-Stuyvesant, on the other hand, saw many transitions and migrations. It was home to many Jewish, Norwegian and Italian families before they moved out of the area. With migration and immigration, Bed-Stuy, as it is commonly called, is now home to thousands of Black people from around the world.