Andrew Jimenez - Bedstuy, Brooklyn - April 2017.

Andrew Jimenez is a freelance writer and editor living in Brooklyn, NY. His nonfiction work has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Luna Luna, and F(r)iction. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School and is currently working on a novel about the early life of Abraham Lincoln. His essay, “Bed-stuy as a Model for Social-Democratic Reform in the United States,” which combines a dive into the social history of the neighborhood with a review of Michael Woodsworth’s The Battle for Bed-stuy, appears within Issue No. 1 - Summer 2017. An excerpt is included below.

- Portrait by Emily Fishman

Bed-stuy as a Model for Social-Democratic Reform in the United States

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“In the years leading up to Occupy [Wall Street], the US left seemed influenced by strains of anar- chism. Many of these tendencies rejected structural critiques of capitalism and traditional forms of left-wing organization. It may be safe to say that post-Sanders the general moment is more informed by social democracy . . . Would you agree with that characterization of a shift?

MATT KARP: The Sanders campaign was also a return of the US left to electoral politics in a seri- ous way, which opens up opportunities and challenges of its own. I’m hoping that Sanders’ surpris- ing success is a reminder that elections are something the Left should take seriously and participate in. I’m not saying that the struggle should be restricted to elections, but it’s hard to imagine any kind of meaningful left victories occurring without an electoral component.

There’s an opening for social-democratic politics at all levels. But at the same time there are many challenges that come with that kind of strategy. How do you enact social democracy on a state
or local level? You really can’t. To even win the barest essence of social democracy, like a national healthcare system, you can’t do that by winning city council seats. We need to engage in lower-level electoral politics while continuing to build a national movement.”

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As a historian of slavery’s relationship to power in Nineteenth Century America, Matthew Karp is no stranger to critiques of capitalism. But what of his assessment of social-democracy at the local level?

It’s easy to be cynical about the effectiveness of grassroots organizing and the power of lo- cal politics when participatory democracy is measured in small donations facilitated by multi-national banks (who are happy to charge service fees on each transaction) and the recent liberal successes of marriage equality and healthcare were fought on the federal level (and won only after receiving moral blessings from corporate America). But social democracy relies on local energies to envision real-world policies, which monolithic structures by their very nature can support but not enact. To see what social-democratic policies look like locally, we need only to look at the work of politicians, community groups, and activists in Bedford-Stuyvesant, beginning in the mid-twentieth century.

Michael Woodsworth’s comprehensive The Battle for Bed-Stuy: The Long War on Poverty in New York City, details the effects of capital flight (joblessness, price-gouging, redlining, urban renewal and decay) that threatened the neighborhood in the early twentieth century; and Bed-Stuy’s strug- gles against these effects — for better primary schools and basic city services, for a community college and hospital, for jobs, and for representation in local government — exemplify local-level social-democratic ideology in action.

As demographic changes began to settle in the nineteen-forties, and blacks and Caribbeans joined the ranks of homeowners in Bed-Stuy, block associations sprang up among the stoops and steeples of north-central Brooklyn’s handsome brownstone streets. Untethered to any political party or area of academic study, the associations were comprised of small groups of Bed-Stuy citizens concerned with issues like beautification and juvenile delinquency. Initially, members were more likely to organize a garden club than a protest, but nevertheless, the seeds for Bed-Stuy’s future activism were planted here.

When these efforts gained federal attention in the 1960’s, it seemed for a brief moment that the Great Society might be able to merge the demands of the Civil Rights movement with the promise of the New Deal. Despite. In the end, failure resulted more from a self-interested bureau- cracy, concerned with preserving social order over ceding power to the poor, than from the inherent weaknesses of either local American political structures or the initiatives themselves.

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“Bed-Stuy fascinates,” Woodsworth writes, “because it was simultaneously emblematic and exceptional. It epitomized the processes by which urban black communities in the mid-twentieth century grew in population, were ravaged by capital flight, and organized to take political action.” Far from the “monolithic zone of suffering and blight” the term “ghetto” implied, Bed-Stuy was a diverse community composed of both the desperately poor and the upwardly mobile, “and those socioeconomic contrasts often overlapped with the cultural cleavages between people whose roots were in the American South and those who hailed from the Caribbean.”

In the late Nineteenth Century, the abutting neighborhoods of Bedford and Stuyvesant Heights had been converted from farmland into upper-middle-class bedroom communities of most- ly German, Irish, and Italian families. During the Great Depression many residents, unable to afford their property taxes and eager to get out before they owed more than the houses were worth, sold their homes. Still others defaulted altogether.

The completion of the A train in 1936 connected Harlem with Brooklyn. At the same time, blacks from the American South and the Caribbean were moving to the city, where work — though not plentiful — was still to be found more readily than in rural areas.*1

By the nineteen-fifties, New York City was home to almost seven-hundred and fifty thousand black people ––– more than in any other American city ––– half of which lived outside Manhattan. Still, it was difficult to figure out how many called Bed-Stuy home because nobody could define exactly where Bed-Stuy was. A neighborhood whose borders “were defined by racism,” the name Bedford-Stuyvesant hadn’t even come into popular usage until around 1939. One war on poverty--era study went so far as to say that Bedford-Stuyvesant is “wherever Negroes happen to live.” So when local community groups in the nineteen-sixties defined “Bedford-Stuyvesant” as a singular “community,” they were “tacitly acknowledging that racism set the parameters for their efforts.”

World War II created enormous job growth at the Navy Yard, offering the black working class of Brooklyn a rare opportunity at economic equality. But when the war ended, the Navy Yard closed down much of its operations. While most of the country was enjoying a post-war boom, white flight kept black Brooklynites from most of the spoils; capitalism followed the money to the suburbs, while racism kept black workers out of the city’s social-democratic contract with the unions that protected what few blue-collar jobs remained. An estimated forty-five percent of black employ- ees lost their jobs, and unemployment among black Brooklynites rose to double that of whites.

“Underlying it all,” Woodsworth points out, “was redlining: the process by which banking and mortgage institutions, with guidance from the federal government, conspired to withhold credit from neighborhoods considered to be risky.” The practice, somewhat ironically, was the result of a New Deal effort to revive housing by performing risk assessments for each segment of the market.

Racism, like any ideology, manifests itself through a series of common practices; and though by itself morally neutral, Capitalism turns a profit through the commodification of common practices. Thusly, areas of the housing market where black residents resided were valued lowest. In Bedford and Stuyvesant Heights, whites who had remained through the Great Depression saw the value of their homes drop, and their eventual departure further contributed to the devaluation of Bed-Stuy’s housing stock.

However, it wasn’t hard to find among the poverty pockets of affluence — particularly on the leafy east-west residential streets in Stuyvesant Heights. Woodsworth describes the residents of these spacious — if a little rundown — brownstone and limestone row houses in three broad groups.

The first was twentieth-century black elites, whom W.E.B. DuBois called the “talented tenth.” Doctors, lawyers, realtors and small-business owners, they were long-established northerners who, while preaching black solidarity, often maintained classist attitudes about the influx of poorer, less-educated southerners. This dynamic would later complicate the struggle for improvement and services during the War on Poverty.

These southerners comprised the second group. Intellectuals and thought-leaders who had attended black universities and earned masters degrees, many were career social workers or highly-influential preachers.

Lastly, there was a growing number of West Indians, who would often work two or three jobs in order to “buy house.” Among them were the parents of Shirley Chisholm, a Barbadian who was the country’s first black member of Congress. Chisholm remembered that, due to their work ethic and obsession with their children’s education, Barbadians were known throughout Brooklyn as “Black Jews,” a stereotype they were proud to adopt.

Many West Indians, upon arriving in America, were surprised to find themselves, despite their vast cultural differences, lumped in with African Americans. Chisholm herself wrote in her memoir that there was “no such thing as a black community” in Brooklyn while she was growing up. These differences carried over into politics; while African Americas were still wary of the Democrat- ic Party, the first nonwhites to make political headway in New York City were of Caribbean decent, and they did so as Democrats.

Caribbeans in Bed-Stuy also formed Paragon Progressive Credit Union, which by nineteen seventy had over five million dollars in holdings and with five thousand members was the largest credit union in the country. Establishing funding for scholarships, home loans, and renovations, it provided the financial impetus for the restoration, preservation, and anti-poverty programs to come.

And so, despite obvious racial barriers, Bed-Stuy, boasting a fifteen to twenty percent owner-occupancy rate, “represented the fulfillment of many aspirations among the upwardly mobile families in the Central Harlem ghetto. Because many of these homeowners rented out one or more units within their brownstones, an estimated twenty-five to thirty percent of local families lived in an owner-occupied building. Another ten percent were owned by people who lived nearby.” There still existed plenty of buildings with too many tenants or (in the case of those that had been abandoned) too little, but “the high home ownership rates in Bedford-Stuyvesant marked a stark contrast with Harlem, and indeed with most other areas that earned the ‘ghetto’ label in the wake of the Great Migration.”*2

References:

1. Matias Echanove, “Bed-Stuy on the Move: Demographic trends and Economic Development in the heart of Brooklyn” (Masters Thesis, Columbia University, 2003)].

2. Pratt institute Planning Department, “Stuyvesant Heights: A Good Neighborhood in Needs of Help” (1965).

Continue Reading - Issue No. 1 - Summer 2017.