Come to the Center for Brooklyn History’s grand Romanesque Revival building in Brooklyn Heights looking for staid portraits of 19th-century burghers, and you’ll find them.
But on a recent evening, Mildred Jones, an 87-year-old retired schoolteacher born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, was pondering a less expected large-scale oil portrait — of herself.
It was hanging alongside the image of John A. Lott, a prominent judge whose family had enslaved her great-great-grandfather Samuel Anderson. Her thoughts on the likeness? Jones paused, looking a bit sheepish, then smiled.
“I just love the whole idea,” she said. “It has opened up a whole new set of information and possibilities for telling the story of Black folks in Brooklyn. We’ve been here a long time. And it’s a story that needs to be told.”
The twinned portraits of Lott and Jones are the anchors of “Trace/s: Family History Research and the Legacy of Slavery in Brooklyn,” a new exhibition looking at the borough’s long-neglected history of slavery — and the work ordinary people have done to help recover it.
The show, on view until August, draws on fresh research in the collections amassed at the center (formerly the Brooklyn Historical Society) since its founding in 1863 by men like Lott. But it also builds on the dogged efforts of amateur genealogists and family historians to track down people whose lives may have been only fleetingly recorded.
Dominique Jean-Louis, the center’s chief historian, said the exhibition helps illuminate — and begin to repair — one of the cruelest realities of slavery: that enslaved people had no right to keep their families intact.
“There’s something really powerful about how the descendants of those families now have the tools to stay together, but also to find each other and make those connections,” she said. “That’s really beautiful.”
It’s been nearly two decades since the New York Historical’s landmark 2005 exhibition “Slavery in New York,” which shocked many visitors who (wrongly) saw this city as a progressive bastion of abolitionism, and slavery as a mainly Southern phenomenon. In Brooklyn, many historical sites have added material on slavery, while activists have highlighted how many of the borough’s major streets — Bergen, Nostrand, Lefferts — are named for slaveholding families.
But the topic can still carry an explosive charge — particularly when the national political moment has suddenly made talking about Black history feel to many like an act of defiance.
“Some of us started doing genealogy to find out something about ourselves individually, but in doing that, we’re finding out about the history of us as a group of people,” Jones said. “In this time and age, it’s more important than ever to continue.”
The exhibition, which is funded in part through the Netherlands Consulate’s commemoration of the 400 years of Dutch presence in New York, sketches out the big picture of slavery in Brooklyn. That includes dispensing with some common myths, starting with the idea that Dutch slavery was somehow more “humane” than that practiced by British settlers in, say, Virginia.
In 1811, in a rare published firsthand account, John Jea, who was born in Africa and enslaved in Brooklyn, put it bluntly. “The horses usually rested about five hours a day, while we were at work,” he wrote. “Thus did the beasts enjoy greater privileges than we did.”
Nor was it just a matter of a handful of household servants here and there. A 1786 census document for Brooklyn’s seven townships counts 2,669 white inhabitants and 1,317 slaves.
Slavery in New York also lasted far longer than many people realize. Under the state’s 1799 gradual abolition law, some people remained in bondage until 1827. And after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, not just runaways but free Black New Yorkers were in danger of being captured and sold into slavery elsewhere.
In preparing the show, researchers dug through the collections in the center’s grand upstairs library, looking not just for references to enslaved people in property records, but for documents that provided clues about their actions, personalities, dreams.
Among the documents in the show is an 1814 bill of sale for a young girl named Mercy, owned by a member of the Lefferts family. The contract mandated she be taught to read and write. And above one sentence, the seller added a promise: that she would “behave.”
“You can really look at this document and recreate the moment,” Jean-Louis said.
The Samuel Anderson story came not from the center’s research, but through the New York chapter of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, which contributed to the show.
The group was founded in 1977, in the wake of Alex Haley’s “Roots,” which inspired a boom in family history research among Americans of all ethnicities. Several members were at the exhibition’s opening, where they talked about the enterprise with equal parts passion and wonky command of both 19th-century archives and 21st-century databases.
“People used to say Black people didn’t have a history, but we knew that wasn’t true,” said Stacey Bell, the group’s president, who has traced her ancestry to before the American Revolution. “Then people said it was impossible to document. And it is hard, because you don’t find our ancestors hitting the records the same way as people who were not enslaved.”
Today, the Lott family name is commemorated in an elaborate oversize family tree in the center’s collection; a historic house in Marine Park; and a three-block street in Downtown Brooklyn. Samuel Anderson’s name, by contrast, was all but forgotten.
Growing up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Jones only knew that, unlike friends who spent summers with relatives down South, all her ancestors were “from Brooklyn.” She first learned about Samuel Anderson decades later, when her brother, an avid genealogist, was researching people in a family burial plot and found a remarkable nugget: an 1897 interview with him in The Brooklyn Eagle, billed as “Uncle Sammy’s Reminiscences of Slavery Days.”
The article included a drawing of his tidy two-story cottage, and of Anderson himself. It described him, at age 88, as “resembling Mrs. Stowe’s image of Uncle Tom,” with a “sunny disposition” and eyes that suggested “more than the usual intelligence possessed by those of his race.”
The interviewer, Jean-Louis noted, emphasized his experiences in slavery. “But he kept talking about his life after he was free,” she said.
The show also documents the way slavery was remembered — and misremembered — by white society. A newspaper clipping from 1895 describes “Black America,” an open-air exhibition that recreated a Southern plantation in a park in Brooklyn, complete with hundreds of performers picking cotton, singing songs, rocking on the porch and otherwise demonstrating “the versatility of the Southern negro.”
At the same time, the memory of slavery in New York was being erased. In 1946, when The Eagle published a photographic feature about the surviving houses of Brooklyn’s old Dutch families, including the Lotts, not a word was said about the Black people who had also lived and worked in them.
Filling the gaps of the past is a continuing labor, and not just for Black New Yorkers. As part of the exhibition, the center is holding workshops to help people of all backgrounds research their family history.
And whatever the political winds, several members of the Black genealogical society said, that desire to know where and who you come from cannot be suppressed.
“No one people’s story in this country is more important than others,” Bell said. “We can’t erase what was here. It’s our history, and we have to face it.”
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