CultureWatch Books: Black Gotham and Gods Without Men, Judge John Deed DVD
In This Issue
Books:
If you respect well-researched history, and crave an open account of the footwork, persistent digging, and sometime serendipity required to create it, Carla Peterson's Black Gotham should be one of the next books that you read. Trying to keep up with the various characters and periods in Gods Without Men is more than a little daunting, but the pure quality of Kunzru’s writing is brilliant.
DVD Tip: Judge John Deed's fifth season is now available, with a sixth soon to be released. It's become another addiction of ours for both the appealing couple Jenny Seagrove and Martin Shaw present on screen and the legal issues explored by the BBC.
Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City
By Carla L. Peterson; c. 2011
Published by Yale University Press; Hardback; e-book; paper; 446pp.
Reviewed by Jill Norgren
Despite door-stop histories of New York City including Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace’s prize winning Gotham, there remains a great deal to chronicle about this great American city. In Black Gotham Carla Peterson has written a soul searching account of the city’s African-American elite. The book grows out of Peterson’s quest to uncover the lives of her nineteenth century ancestors. Researching the book required extraordinary detective work, sleuthing that paid off in her own prize winning, “truth” changing narrative. Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates, Jr., director of Finding Your Roots, a PBS project, writes that Peterson’s book “reminds us that in all of our families lies the story of this country.” Her book represents the new way of looking at the “full sweep” of African American history that Gates has championed.
Black Gotham is a game changer. Peterson’s book negates earlier histories that do not acknowledge or fully chronicle the existence of a black elite in nineteenth century New York. The book demonstrates that an outsider’s lens might suggest the existence of a “black community” although African Americans in New York, in fact, constituted multi-class and culturally diverse groups.
The book also re-positions black communities geographically, describing the racially mixed neighborhoods in which African Americans lived, first in Lower Manhattan and then after the Civil War in Brooklyn, “at a time when Harlem was a mere village.” New York’s black intellectual and cultural life, Peterson argues, began in this pre-Harlem world. Through painstaking research Black Gotham, which won a 2011 New York City Book Award from the New York Society Library (founded in 1754), lays out the story of Peterson’s ancestors, men and women of the middle and upper middle class who made their living as doctors, pharmacists, teachers, and ministers. She documents their personal lives, work, and politics — complete with triumphs and tragedies. The story comes together as social history born out of the author’s desire to find out more of her family’s background and to write “what really happened, how it really was for black New Yorkers in the nineteenth century.”
The history unwound by Peterson takes us through nineteenth century Manhattan and Brooklyn. Initially, her camera shot focuses on the Mulberry Street School many of whose alumni went on to become African-American leaders and professionals. In a narrative containing many individuals, and changing venues, the choice of beginning with this school and the role of education was a wise one. It provides an anchor as the book moves along.
Peterson, professor of English at the University of Maryland, uses the lives and achievements of two of her ancestors to structure the narrative. She begins with her great-great-grandfather, Peter Guignon, and then brings onto the stage her great-grandfather, Philip White, who was also a pharmacist. Peterson considers White “the hero“ of her book, his individual achievements “amazing.” Peter, however, was no slouch. He loved book reading, with others experimented with black political organizing, held membership in literary societies and, at the age of forty-five, became a pharmacist. He was a man of stature.
Pages: 1 · 2