DTR-ESSAY

_Dare to Remember: A Digital Essay_ is non-linear. Be sure to click links to page through. * Go to [[the beginning|Rationale]].

<h4>What is Missing in this History of Arrivals</h4> The absence of black thought, experience, landmarks, and legacies in historical writing about Brooklyn, New York requires us to reconsider the workings of power and silence. Since "decisions about what to remember and protect involve the grounding of historical scholarship as well as the possibilities of public history," the gaps in these sources ground equally exclusionary commemorative works in the material environment. Many thinkers invoke 'transgenerational haunting' or detail the suppression of black existence, livelihood, contributions, and voices.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">1-3</a> _Brooklyn is Black?_ Scholars have long chronicled demographic shifts and immigration waves in Brooklyn, NY. At the most rudimentary level, many pay attention to European immigration and residency in Brooklyn but completely evade the history of the black community, silencing black existence. In _Brooklyn By Name: How the Neighborhoods, Streets, Parks, Bridges, and More Got Their Names_, Jennifer Weiss and Leonard Bernardo detail and unveil the history of Brooklyn by way of landmarks such as streets, courts, bridges, neighborhoods, and parks, which memorialize everyone from tribes and settlers, to landholders and Civil War commanders. Their examples of how these names link back to former inhabitants of Brooklyn include "Canarsie (originally Canarsee, an Algonquin-speaking tribe), the Dutch as European settlers (Lotts, Remsen, Bergen)" and soon after, the British whose influence on landmarks largely existed as the "linguistic corruption" or anglicization of pre-existing designations. <a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">4</a> Bernardo and Weiss fail, however, to acknowledge how much of the European settlers' wealth came from the labor of enslaved Africans, which reduces black people's contribution to Brooklyn. Furthermore, as Craig Steven Wilder notes, it also detaches Brooklyn's "reputation as a major commercial and industrial city" from "its path to wealth [which] tied it to slavery for the rest of that institution's history in the United States."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">5</a> Likewise, although _Brooklyn By Name_ was published after the Great Migration, the Second Great Migration, and the Immigration Laws of 1965 that drastically increased the black community, Bernardo and Weiss also fail to mention the contributions of African Americans and West Indians. Much like _Brooklyn By Name, When Brooklyn Was the World_ chronicles what Elliot Willensky considers Brooklyn's heyday, but does not note black people except to mention their presence in least desirable neighborhoods and "during the Depression and into the forties [when] a 'slave market' developed near the Bedford Avenue intersection, where those who could afford household help would drive by to choose among black women who congregated there looking for jobs."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">6</a> Moreover, Willensky omits one of the main reasons why whites were leaving Brooklyn in the late 1950's. In his version, the end of Brooklyn as "the World" coincides with the year the Brooklyn Dodgers left for Los Angeles, 1957. He ends his book with an amusing exchange: <blockquote>"Me and Francine wanna go out to Levittown to see her cousin. She says it's terrific out there for the kids, and we wanna see for our ourselves." ... "Yeah... maybe so... maybe I should." And for a lot of us, that's how Brooklyn ended.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">7</a></blockquote> The 'us' here refers to white residents. The town to which they fled is Levittown--one of the first new predominately white suburbs that prohibited black homeownership.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">8</a> Like _Brooklyn By Name_, _When Brooklyn Was the World_ effectively omits traces of black influence on Brooklyn. Because they focus their academic inquiry on white ethnic enclaves, they relegate the back community to silence. _Brooklyn is Black. But How Black?_ Other scholars who have contributed to the historical writing about Brooklyn explicitly recognizes the demographic shifts and immigration waves within black communities, and even how other writers have failed to address black history in Brooklyn. Yet, they still minimize the importance of black communities. Therefore, even when included, we do not hear them. In _Brooklyn!: An Illustrated History_, Ellen Snyder-Grenier discusses how large events and cultural staples have created and continue to shape the legacy of Brooklyn but by way of major developments such as the Brooklyn Bridge, Brooklyn-Queens expressway, and the Verrazano Bridge, all of which were signs of modernity and productivity and provoked public dissatisfaction. Unlike Weiss and Bernardo, and Willensky, however, Snyder-Grenier explicitly describes the Immigration Laws of 1965 and recognizes the way black immigrant communities built their presence in the neighborhoods they inhabited--a slew of "bakeries, businesses, and vegetable stores bright with island produce" that mirrored their home countries and indicated a switch in ownership of these neighborhoods.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">9</a> By recognizing their contributions to Brooklyn in the forms of bakeries and produce shops, Snyder-Grenier signals the inherent difference between those who either built or denounced the building of major developments and the black community. Black Brooklyn's contributions, in relation to grandiose structures like the Verrazano Bridge, would be considered minor developments in the neighborhoods they inhabited. Snyder-Grenier's inclusion of the new black immigrants through passing references to their shops silences black communities by marginalizing them. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot points out in _Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History_, this is a "formula of banalization."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">10</a> History-makers follow this formula to "sweeten the horror or banalize the uniqueness of a situation by focusing on details." Snyder-Grenier relegates black people to the level of the colorful backdrop of their "island produce." _Of Cabbages & Kings County: Agriculture & the Formation of Modern Brooklyn_, written by Lawrence S. Zacharias, also details black communities' absence in the historical record, but has not identified this silence as a recurring and inseparable element of their history in Brooklyn. Providing a trajectory of Kings County (now considered Brooklyn) from an agricultural capital to an urban borough, Zacharias made a conscious effort to incorporate the black community, including their earliest existence in Brooklyn and their influence on Brooklyn's former agrarian culture. "The transition to intensive agriculture in Kings County would have been impossible without the requisite labor force."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">11</a> Yet, he does not provide substantive information about black communities after Brooklyn transforms from agricultural center to an urban municipality. Unlike the authors who silence black communities through omission, he does recognize the silence and acknowledges how commonly other writers fail to address white people's reliance on enslaved black people to accrue wealth. Undoubtedly, "premodern slave society in Kings County was closely linked to the forces shaping modern Brooklyn."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">12</a> However, by ignoring black communities after Brooklyn transitions from an agrarian capital to an urban metropolis, he effectively silences them by failing to recognize black life after the transition. How did the slaves sustain themselves in this transitioning market? Both Snyder-Grenier and Zacharias make honest efforts to incorporate black narratives but, overall, fail to address the complexity of the black communities. Unlike the white enclaves that they make explicit mention of, they overlook the vastness of black communities and how they have been affected by turning points in Brooklyn's history. _Brooklyn is Black. Since When? And for How Long?_ Scholars have also pointed out the importance of large scale demographic shifts, immigration waves, and the silence of black communities, but fail to recognize this silence as a mechanism of understanding history. In _Battle for Brooklyn_, a documentary chronicling the adverse effects of the Barclays Center's construction, Daniel Goldstein details the divide between the protestors and supporters of the Barclays Center along a color line. The developers disillusioned a large portion of the black community with a promise of job opportunities and affordable housing: "of the 15,000 construction jobs promised, there were 114 people at the site as of March 2011, with 14 of them local residents," and only two affordable housing buildings that have gone forward as of 2017.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">13</a> Likewise, gag orders, designed to discourage the voices of people who know crucial information, were issued to former residents and business owners in the way of the proposed project. Though Goldstein and the directors recognize the literal silencing of black people through gag orders and disillusionment, and dwell on yet another addition to the material environment that does not take the name or heritage of Brooklyn inhabitants, they fail to recognize the pattern and value of silence in Brooklyn's black community. Alongside the documentary film, _Battle for Brooklyn_, which provides a close view of the Barclays Center from the very moment developer Bruce Ratner announced the project, Mark Jacobson's "Haunts; What Does the Brooklyn of the New Barclays Center Have to Do with the Brooklyns That Came Before It? A Native Son Walks among the Ghosts" comes the closest to understanding this silence. "Haunts" details immigration waves and demographic shifts, explicitly acknowledging race and culture while highlighting the pattern of "demographic upheaval": "the arrival of the New has been a vexing constant since members of the Canarsee tribe squinted up from the Flatlands to see strangers on the horizon."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">14</a> Jacobson also quotes Ratner, "You might be dead, but your buildings live on after you."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">15</a> Much like Trouillot's "formula," Ratner's perspective carries forward the problematic pattern of legacy, particularly for the material environment. The construction of the Barclays Center, which disillusioned and displaced so many people, now immortalizes someone who did not grow up in Brooklyn and who only thought of the "big box stuff."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">16</a> It provides an interesting addition to Brooklyn's legacies and landmarks, further immortalizing the contributions of European descendants and perpetuating the silence of Black Brooklyn. Bearing the name of a British bank, owned by a Russian tycoon, and initiated by a white American real estate developer, the Barclays Center does not reflect those silenced by it. The same reigns true for Howard Rock and Deborah Moore's _Cityscapes: A History of New York in Images_. _Cityscapes_ emphasizes the memorializing essence of photography and explicitly mentions three very important things--one, the "many New York cities," implicitly recognizing the variety of population enclaves within the five boroughs; two, the enduring presence of black people in Brooklyn's history; and three, the editors' effort to incorporate "as much of the new scholarship as feasible, paying attention to issues of race, gender, and sexuality."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">17</a> However, the three are not inextricably bounded together. Put simply, black life and black history interwoven in the written narrative (slavery, African American artisanship and employment, protests, housing, race riots, etc.) were not reflected in the photos beyond the 1980s in the same way photographs reflected written stories for other ethnic enclaves. The lack of photography to document this in the same way it was done for Europeans and their descendants placed black existence on the periphery. For example, a statistic presented in the section "Immigrant Metropolis: 1885-1939" states that black women worked for wages at twice the rate of white women.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">18</a> Yet out of all the photos of the workers, none were black women. _Brooklyn is Black and Silent_ Several more recent texts showcase the same phenomenon of silence in black history, for instance "Brooklyn's African American History Remains Largely Forgotten and Unmarked" written by Alan Singer, detailing efforts to erect highly visible historical markers. Singer hearkens back to enslaved African Americans as one third of Brooklyn's population at the time of the American Revolution and "their contributions to clearing the forests, dredging the harbors, and building the infrastructure of Brooklyn [that have] largely been erased from history."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">19</a> By providing context for their forced migration, their contributions, and deficiency of public commemoration, Singer details the silence of Black Brooklyn and works to fill it with landmarks that help narrate a comprehensive history to the public. Others like _The West Indian Americans_ and _A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn_ narrate contributions English-speaking West Indians and the general black population, respectively, have made to develop Brooklyn upon their migration to the borough, making deliberately clear "the mark" they have left on U.S. history and culture.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">20</a> _A Covenant with Color_ by Craig Steven Wilder addresses the effects of bondage, discrimination, and exclusion of black people in Brooklyn history. His acknowledgment of how "loudly" Brooklyn fell echoes Willensky's _When Brooklyn Was the World_.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">21</a> However, his skillful composition of black history in Brooklyn directly opposes Willensky's naive, veiled, one-dimensional, approach. Much historical writing about Brooklyn has erased black history and often promoted the notion of black inferiority. Black silence therefore tells the story of white supremacy, of how black people and their contributions have been suppressed in larger historical records and public commemoration. Acknowledging how black people have been silenced in the historical record also requires making people accountable for patterns in what they choose to display. Likewise, it introduces how black people have negotiated their own voice and silence for their survival. At the same time, filling the silence can also be a form of erasure, as it does not account for a multifaceted unit, or allow everyone an opportunity to grapple with it directly. Therefore, contemporary scholars and creatives often do a phenomenal job of reclaiming history and centralizing black people's presence and contributions but do not articulate the silence as [[an element of investigation itself.|Thesis Statement]]

<h4>Dare to Remember: A Memorial of Black Brooklyn</h4> "The forces I will expose are less visible than gunfire, class property, or political crusades. I want to argue that they are no less powerful." - Michel-Rolph Trouillot<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">22</a> _Dare to Remember: A Digital Memorial of Black Brooklyn_ examines the nuances of silence that constitute the legacy of Brooklyn's black community. Despite the paucity of material markers in the landscape and in the literature, and despite the eerie silence that follows when black people are displaced from neighborhoods, there is a haunting element in that silence that dares us to commemorate the black community's past, present, and future in Brooklyn. Unlike the very public works that commemorate various ethnic enclaves that have occupied the borough, this silence seizes the air, leaving an often inaudible and hidden trace of the black community. Often, its unseen and unheard nature gives the impression that this history does not exist. However, this silence "has the power to shake the social and metaphysical forms against which it breaks," announcing its resistance to being forgotten.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">23,24</a> Scholars have recognized this silence and its detrimental impact but have not explored the potential of this silence as a valuable mechanism to chronicle the memory of Black Brooklyn. We need not undermine our past, present, and future presence by considering tangible landmarks and other manifestations of materiality as the only form of legacy. Although these public works provide ease in recalling a history, we should not ignore the "haunting feel" that accompanies and validates our silence. Silence is functional. The very tool history-makers have used to hide our history is the same tool I use to illuminate it--silence. With this unconventional understanding of silence in Brooklyn, _Dare to Remember_ is a memory project as opposed a history one. Silence, the catalyst of Black Brooklyn's memory, seeps through public works, the pallbearers of history that both exclude black contribution and diminish black existence. These very public, tangible, and official commemorations set forth by dominant cultures that trivialize silence as a private, nonofficial commemoration of the black community is, in fact, selective memory solidified as history. Acknowledging and reconstructing the myths presented through public works, that the history white people commemorate is the only history, "we indicate that we no longer identify fully with its heritage."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">25</a> And so after detecting the shortcomings of "history as a critical method whose purpose is to establish true memory," I return to history before it is bureaucratically materialized.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">26</a> I turn to photographs, manuscripts, census tracts, advertisements, church pamphlets, and even protest posters to map blackness in Brooklyn through the geography of memory. They embody silence and reveal sites of memory that "have no referents in reality; or rather, they are their own referents--pure signs."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">27</a> Instead of silence immediately signifying death, or public works automatically signifying historical commemoration, the deconstructive power of the methodologies present silence as pure. They do not fit into the traditional mold of American achievement--tangible landmarks or memorials that commemorate one's presence. Therefore, they break these restrictive bonds between the signifier and its referent and reverses the violent obstruction of our actual knowledge of black people in Brooklyn. _Dare to Remember: A Digital Memorial of Black Brooklyn_ takes on the challenge of expanding public imagination. Its methodologies acknowledge how memory erupts from silence as a fundamental element of Brooklyn's black history. It explores how we memorialize our presence without replicating traditional means of commemoration (museums, street signs, neighborhood names, etc.) typically designated by white peoples; and how we pay respect to silence as an integral piece of black history. These photographs, manuscripts, census tracts, advertisements, church pamphlets, and protest posters actively formulate the three methodologies of _Dare to Remember_: GIS mapping, a photo series, and immersive virtual reality panoramas. They jointly help visualize the presence of Black Brooklyn while deconstructing historiography through a close examination of silence. The texts I have produced, though they help grapple with this silence, do not fit into the traditional mold of American achievement--tangible landmarks or memorials that commemorate one's presence. As Dolores Hayden states in _The Power of Place_, "It is not enough to add on a few African American... projects, or a few women's projects, and assume that preserving urban history is handled well in the United States... Instead, a larger conceptual framework is required to support urban residents' demands for a far more inclusive 'cultural citizenship.'"<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">28</a> My texts challenge the typical commemorative framework and introduce a new contextual one to support whole scale inclusion. They "encompass larger common themes, such as the migration experience, the breakdown and reformation of families, or the search for a new sense of identity in an urban setting."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">29</a> They work together to display the haunting element in that silence that dares us to commemorate the black community's past presence and future presence in Brooklyn, jointly bringing forth memory as history's immaterial form. _Dare to Remember_ re-envisions ways to represent black histories. It welcomes everyone to witness the revival of information relegated to the underbelly of history. This underbelly is in the census tracts and in the archives and in the sites of memory. This underbelly may not always be common knowledge, and thus, works doubly to shape the collective imagination. [[This underbelly is silence.|Methodology]]

<h4>What Does it Take?</h4> What does the liberation of our imagination sound like, look like, or feel like? The answer is work--deconstructive work to broaden our understanding of silence and space outside of violence, and reconstructive work to recreate and retell stories and histories. Public historical works in the material environment shape our imagination. These memorials, particularly literature and landmarks, frame our understanding of the past. In Brooklyn, this commemorative practice has violently silenced Brooklyn's black community and inhibits our ability to imagine ways to commemorate ourselves. For example, the name of and "plaque in Schenck Park commemorates the family's contributions to the history of Brooklyn" without mention of the Schenck's being a notorious slaveholding family.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">30</a> The plaque describes the family as descendants from Holland whose "members of the family served in political office over several generations," and further describes the park as the site of Public School 72.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">31</a> Detailed but not comprehensive, the plaque fails to "mention the enslaved Africans who lived there and built the early farms, roads, and homes of Brooklyn."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">32</a> Many other memorializing public works, be they street signs, neighborhood names, buildings, or bridges, elicit the same form of selective exclusion of black people while highlighting the positive achievements of Europeans and their descendants. This is silence. Scholars have broken down the language of silence in psychology, trauma theory, and public commemoration. Detailing the psychological benefits of public commemorative practices, Steven D. Brown's "Two Minutes of Silence: Social Technologies of Public Commemoration" provides insight on how collective silence--"a strategy for managing collective memory"--constructively impacts the mental state. He outlines the power of acknowledging but not absorbing oneself in the past (through recognition of the "diverse range of commemorative practices developed in the wake of the First World War").<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">33</a> This practice of collective silence gives way to an intergenerational aspect of memorialization. It reworks the silence so it does not only center those who have gone on, but allows participants to validate and center their feelings through an enactment of their own empathy and sorrow. "Silence ultimately reveals to us the sounds made by the functioning of our bodies, from which we never escape. Silence brings us back to ourselves."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">34</a> This directly informs the digital structure of the memorial of Black Brooklyn and transfers effortlessly over to those partaking in it. It completes their involvement by providing recognized space for them to mourn the eerie connection they feel to the black people who have gone before them without tampering with that memory. Or in the language of the article, without opening the past up for interpretation and debate. Though intense, it is important as it leaves silence as an indication of trauma; a remnant of historical violence as a pure sign without refining it. Likewise, it justifies the decision of past, present, and future Black Brooklyn's to hold onto their silence. Regardless of one's relationship to Black Brooklyn's silence, the switch from what is mourned to one's self and one's involvement, negative or positive, cannot be avoided. Though scholar Steve D. Brown places real emphasis on material environments, he also acknowledges that "it will not do to imagine that embedding memory in a concrete form will suffice to do justice to the past because remembering is an activity rather than a substance."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">35</a> And so, I use digital technologies to model the activity of remembrance. Dolores Hayden provides the blueprint for overcoming the narrow scope of historiography and memorialization: <blockquote>To reverse the neglect of physical resources important to women's history and ethnic history is not a simple process... Restoring significant shared meanings for many neglected urban places first involves claiming the entire urban cultural landscape as an important part of American history, not just its architectural monuments. This means emphasizing the building types... that have housed working people's everyday lives. Second, it involves finding creative ways to interpret modest buildings as part of the flow of contemporary city life.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">36</a></blockquote> Michel-Rolph Trouillot also provides a framework for the deinstitutionalizing of historical production in order to confront these silences. He informs his readers that "silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance.)"<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">37</a> Working backwards, I have already retrieved the silences that entered Black Brooklyn's moment of retrospective significance, otherwise known as historical accounts of Brooklyn in the forms of literature and landmarks. The other three steps have informed my methodologies by reversing the moment of fact retrieval, the moment of fact assembly, and the moment of fact creation. In that order, I introduce GIS Mapping as a methodology that encounters silence at the moment of fact retrieval (particularly in the the making of census data as a narrative), photography at the moment of fact assembly (particularly in the making of the archives), and virtual reality at the moment of creation (particularly in the making of the landscape as a primary source). _Dare to Remember: A Digital Memorial of Black Brooklyn_ attentively adheres to Dolores Hayden's insight on creatively incorporating the entire urban landscape, including the modest buildings and not just monuments, and Trouillot's sense of where silences enter historical production. My digital methodologies work together to deconstruct narrow historical production, literally unraveling silences at each moment of its entering. Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping is a visual system "designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of spatial... data."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">38</a> More specifically, GIS mapping helps frame Black Brooklyn from slavery to the arrival of the Barclays Center. GIS mapping perfectly captures and preserves the haunting element of silence by providing a look into the migration patterns of the black community often forgotten due to a dearth of landmarks and literature that would have told their stories. It teases out silence as a relatively undervalued element of history, visualizing it through the emergence and disappearance of the black community over time. In the process of fact retrieval, I develop these GIS maps using variables such as race, slave and slaveholding status, free population, and total population available through the United States Census Bureau. I also georeference older maps onto the current day map to align census data of the past into sensible, visible information. The photo series accompanying the GIS maps illustrates what Pierre Nora describes as sites of memory--former homes, places of worship, community centers, and businesses--of black Brooklyn residents, as well as some of the current sites threatened by displacement.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">39</a> The majority of the older images are sourced from the archives of The Brooklyn Collection of the Brooklyn Public Library and The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture with knowledge that "memory has begun to keep records: delegating the responsibility to the archive, it deposits its signs as the snake deposits its shed skin."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">40</a> I involve community members to be present in these photos, as these sites of memories are not limited to physical institutions but rather the people that occupy and sustain them. As I encounter older images of the same places I photograph in the present, I have community members pose with enlarged and framed images of former structures or locations to create an intergenerational framework. I recapture the haunting feel of the shifting makeup of the community and the resounding silence of the black community. This preservation of memory sites tease out what Nora considers "archival memory," relying entirely on the specificity of the trace and the materiality of the vestige.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">41</a> Lastly, I use virtual reality and immersive 360 degree panoramas, which are photography based simulations and reproductions of three-dimensional environments that can be interacted with in a seemingly real or physical way. I depict the present landscape of Black Brooklyn and simulate the experience of the powerful silences of Black Brooklyn through graphics, 360 degree images, and 360 degree videos. This method serves as a more three-dimensional, immersive, and interactive element building off of the intergenerational style of the photographs. It will be featured on the website and via iOS devices. With a focus on the landscape, I address silence while transforming it into the digital sphere. Culminating in virtual reality, for all of its merits in visceral reactions, my thesis will not only make the silence visual but also perceptible. Again, the "haunting feel." Likewise, it provides a practical and accessible means of engaging with Brooklyn while in a completely different location. All three methods honor the silence yet provide a perceptible presence not offered by traditional accolades. They substantiate my claim that silence is a mechanism for understanding a lineage of blackness in Brooklyn. They pay homage to the millennial old silence by retaining inaudible elements. "The memory we see tears at us, yet it is no longer entirely ours... We feel a visceral attachment to that which made us what we are, yet at the same time we feel historically estranged from this legacy, which we must now coolly assess."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">42</a> They tease out silence as a relatively undervalued element of history and historical production, visualizing it through the emergence and disappearance of the black community over time. Unlike "single, preserved historic places," these digital media are networks that "reconnect social memory on an urban scale" and reveal stories of blackness all over the borough. Lastly, they literally utilize silence at its entry into historical production--census data, archived images, and the literal landscape--which has effectively muted public memory of black presence. I use digital platforms to house all three digital methodologies and the written component of _Dare to Remember._ Twine neatly incorporates the essay component, hyperlinking out to full screen and providing greater opportunities for interactivity and full immersion with the complex design of my thesis, and supporting the visual element of impermanence and transitions throughout the entire project. With scattered observances of commemorative silences throughout, a symbolic act that disrupts time and concentrates memory, this website helps break the traditional mold of American achievement--grandiose and ubiquitous landmarks or memorials that commemorate presence.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">43</a> Using digital platforms also helps me to publicly engage the people who are the focus of my thesis--who may not readily use the language of urban planning, social change, or legislative decisions (i.e. redlining, rezoning, white flight, upzoning, gentrification, Immigration Laws of 1965, etc.) when asked about the moving landscape of their neighborhoods. Simultaneously, those who have not visited Brooklyn, know its black history, nor recognize its ever-shifting composition, can also bear witness to the lives that once inhabited the borough and experience the haunting feeling Brooklyn's black residents, property owners, or passerbys may feel in search of Black Brooklyn in the material landscape. So I ask the question again. _What does the liberation of our imagination currently molded by memorializing public works sound like, look like, or feel like?_ It sounds like rebellion and survival in the form of silence. It looks like a digital fusion that births a new understanding of black history in Brooklyn by unearthing silences from slavery well into the contemporary moment. It feels visceral and haunting.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">44</a> It reminds its participants of the historical peripheral existence of black people while insisting on centering their lives in public consciousness. It does not sound like the noise Europeans have traditionally created to overpower the contributions and memorializations of black people. It does not mirror the physical forms of memorialization. To place them into the confines of these "memorials" would limit them to the memorializing practices that they have traditionally been left out of. It does not feel incomplete or exclusive. [[To reproduce those sensations would encourage a violent cycle of omitting critical details and deeming parts of history superior to others.|Race and DH]] And with clarity on what it is and what it is not, it reconstructs the vastly unique [[soundscape|Silence]] of Black Brooklyn.

<h4>Race and DH: Pre- and Post-Production of Digital Work</h4> "As scholars of the digital humanities, we must also acknowledge the complicity of technology in creating and magnifying inequalities." - Roopika Risam<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">45</a> In a space where black people have leveraged digital platforms to reclaim stories of societal contributions and cultural production (Black Twitter, chat rooms, blogs, web pages, all the rising and shining stars on YouTube, etc.), I knew the digital sphere was where I needed to go for the work of _Dare to Remember: A Digital Memorial of Black Brooklyn_.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">46</a> It has been upheld that through free access, the Internet affords "those previously cut off from intellectual capital to gain materials and knowledge that might be leveraged to change the social position of people of color."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">47</a> This initial presumption of the Internet, amongst others, stands firm in the creation of this project. _Dare to Remember_ allows "those who had been silenced to have a voice" and those who have chosen silence to have space.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">48</a> Spatializing and memorializing Black Brooklyn in the digital sphere allows us to combat and move through this silence and erasure. Accentuating the geography of memory, a web-based environment also allows users to visualize movement (and displacement) in the urban geography and even encourages "the abandonment of the ideal of high culture" due to its faults in public history making. This is revelatory simply because this digital space permits Black Brooklyn to exist outside of the violent definitions imposed on them in the material environment while acknowledging their importance in critical discourse.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">49</a> However, in the pre- and post-production of digital work, it is important to acknowledge existing critiques of the digital, which mirrors exclusions in literary and historical worlds. As Amy Earhart notes, this exclusion contradicts the initial imagination that "the open digital environment was unpoliced and unregulated, open to all who wanted to participate."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">50</a> I was fortunate enough to receive grants in order to bring _Dare to Remember: A Digital Memorial of Black Brooklyn_ to life, and I pay particular attention to and evade the reproduction of the exclusionary one-to-one relationship between physical commemoration in the material environment and digitization on the web. At the same time, producing a project like this is expensive, and it also requires equipment, an ability to find and pay for expertise, in my case an academic structure that allows projects like this, and the time to do it. Move on to [[Silence]]

<h4>Silence: Immateriality and Recovery</h4> "No silence exists that is not pregnant with sound." - John Cage<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">51</a> _Silence in Black Brooklyn_ Though reckoning with silence can seem counterintuitive, it is also imaginative. Silence is not nothingness, and ultimately each source is interwoven with "silence, solitude and contemplation... restoring the realm of personal understanding of the Self and of one's authentic experience of the Other."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">52</a> This project takes a first and foundational step to representing silence by invoking memory. And in Brooklyn, these sites of memory (as coined by Pierre Nora) are derived from places and groups of people who have been traditionally silenced or have chosen silence for their survival and generations of black people to come. To understand these iterations of silence is to understand the black "Self" through an acknowledgement of the historical black "Other," and even those who oppressed them. It is to exist within the haunting and heavy feeling very indicative of the black experience in Brooklyn without waving it away. What are these silences? Where do they lie in Brooklyn's landscape? How can we access them? The work of _Dare to Remember: A Digital Memorial of Black Brooklyn_ marries scholarship on Brooklyn, history, memory, and silence to create a digital structure conducive to the explicit recovery of silence. It acknowledges where all these studies on silence as a powerful and important mechanism of memory run alongside the generational silence of Black Brooklyn, where that silence speaks for itself and also transforms a largely underprivileged population into a community with agency. Where that silence does not only signify erasure at its worse, but could be commemorative and immortalizing and its best. _A Thin Line_ Black Brooklyn has had an undeniable courtship with silence. To find the nuanced silences that live both in adverse and elevated spaces, this project requires an understanding of silence's bifurcated relationship with the "defined." _Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture_ by Marisa Parham best describes the intricacies of oppressive and optional silences, and aptly captures the thin division between the two. Stating, "neglected histories may sometimes go untold not only because "history is for winners," or because history operates in the service of a national political majority, but also because, sometimes, people cannot bear to tell such stories or to re-live such lives."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">53</a> By introducing the reality of neglected histories, Parham acknowledges the silence of unsung narratives. She continues on to diagnose disregarded stories as existence peripheral to those of the 'winners' or 'definers' and in the same breath, sheds light on an overlooked path that nurses silence: survival. She identifies silence as both oppressive and also as a choice some might make, as optional silence. By no means does the silence that enables survival render it inaccessible. In fact, "memories are discrete representations stored in a cabinet, the contents of which are generally accurate and accessible at will."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">54</a> However, "remembering is not always a process of summoning representations of what happened."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">55</a> Rather, the choice to remain silent highlights the power of their option not present in oppressive silence. This centering of the "defined" through their blackness and their silence unfastens a rigid latch of history production and commemoration that has barred black people from a range of spatial phenomena, from homeownership to being memorialized in statues and street names. This centering defies the standards for immortalization as the acquisition of materials and the planting of landmarks. An examination of this silence centers Black Brooklyn. And though whiteness has undermined the material goals of black people and relegated us to silence, our commitment to silence signifies a warped and active form of freedom. We have chosen to live. The line between oppressive and optional silence gets thinner as we examine the power dynamic of the defined and the definers. This analogy of the "defined" versus the "definers" comes from Toni Morrison's _Beloved_, when Sixo, a slave, answers schoolteacher, the person hired by Mrs. Gardner after Mr. Gardner dies to be in charge of the slave plantation, Sweet Home. Asking questions that demanded answers that would have been met violence regardless of their perfection, schoolteacher taunts Sixo with a blatant display of his power. After a slew of questions and answers, Morrison writes, "Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers--not the defined."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">56</a> Within the very denotation of the defined is an inextricable tie to oppression and a visual cue of the bottom, or maybe even the underside, of a hierarchy. Therefore, even when the defined generate power (ie. optional silence) it is done in relation to the definers; within a structure that functions off of a cyclical draining of their ability to control and/ or negotiate their lives. And black existence in the midst of both oppressive and optional silences signify the incredible feat of [[choosing to live.|Oppressive]]

<h4>Oppressive Silence</h4> "Previous dismissal as a 'tragic' or 'peculiar' aberration was part of the construction of America as an 'innocent future' in which 'the past is absent or... romanticized.'" - Nicola King<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">57</a> Oppressive silence is lived and accumulated as experience over time. The silence originates from racist and exclusionary practices. It lingers in the United States' production and documentation of history, where black people (and of course other marginalized folk) have largely been the defined and white people, the definers; or more directly, where white people have been the storytellers and black people, the told. This structure has produced what Keith Gilyard has referred to and Parham has referenced as "the devoicing and identity-eradicating imperatives of masters and overseers."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">58</a> Michel-Rolph Trouillot breaks down this hegemonic structure through two formulas of silence in history production: formula of erasure and formula of banalization.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">59</a> Where one is entirely exclusionary, the other reduces the value of black life, but both formulas rest on the Black Brooklyn's "uneven power in the production of sources, archives, and narratives."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">60</a> This differential exercise of power, specifically wielded in historical production, has real consequences. To understand the gravity of oppressive silence, and how it exists in every layer of being, production, and interpretation is to "suspect that their concreteness hides secrets so deep that no revelation may fully dissipate [them]."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">61</a> This oppressive silence, a "bottomless silence" as coined by Trouillot, has resulted in a material environment that does not regard black stories as worthy of being told or commemorated.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">62</a> Because these stories are typically controlled, reduced, and distorted by the definers, _Dare to Remember: A Digital Memorial of Black Brooklyn_ focuses memory more than history per se. It is clear that historians, much like Jennifer Weiss and Leonard Bernardo, employed the formula of banalization when shaping public knowledge. They produce a book full of details on Europeans and their landownership but neatly conceal slaveholding as if it had to be silenced to cleanse the legacy of white men. [[The very real examples of oppressive silence include the countless slaveholders commemorated through street names and neighborhoods in Brooklyn.|Street Names]] These commemorations are a direct affront to Black Brooklyn, and a particularly sharp insult to those living in predominately black neighborhoods. Unmistakably an oppressive silence, the intimacy of slavery can not be neglected in the memorialization of Black Brooklyn. With "more than 60 percent of Brooklyn white families [who] owned slaves" in the 19th century at one point, this system of oppression tied the most renowned Brooklyn residents to violence."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">63</a> Multiple aspects of these two disparate lives were intertwined and close in proximity. "Owners and servants usually slept in the same houses, although neither in the same nor comparable quarters; ate the same food, although not at the same table; and worked side by side, although not for the same reasons."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">64</a> This subaltern existence even when living feet away from one another reinforced oppressive silence. This belittling reality provided daily reminders that their work would never be considered worthy of reward, nor their noise comparable to white folks. Oppressive silences do not only come in the form of the harsh repetition of [[slaveholder names|Street Names]] in our lived environment or quite literally the oppressive silence of slavery as a lived experience. They also encompass the remarkable absence of recognition for black people who have contributed immensely to Brooklyn's development. From the enslaved Africans who did substantial agricultural and domestic work to those formative to the anti-slavery movement and other forms of resistance. Fighting for their own liberties, Reverend Alexander Crummell, a black refugee who returned during the War on May 23, 1861, was pastor of an abolitionist epicenter, Bridge Street A.M.E.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">65</a> When juxtaposed against his heavily recognized white counterparts (i.e Reverend Henry Ward Beecher) who "viewed abolition as a dialogue between white people, a discourse that objectified and excluded people of color," this silence is loud.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">66</a> Where is the street name for Dr. Philip White, a Brooklyn resident and the first Black appointee to the Brooklyn Board of Education who was trained in pharmacy?<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">67</a> Or Dr. Peter W. Ray who served in the army as a surgeon and "kept a Brooklyn pharmacy for fifty years and was a founder of the Brooklyn College of Pharmacy?"<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">68</a> Or the blind Reverend William F. Johnson "who almost single-handedly established Brooklyn's Howard Colored Orphan Asylum" to care for African-American children, and at one time, supported more than 50 children without government aid.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">69</a> If the material environment does not even hold place/ space for "accomplished" black people, everyday black people remain a mystery. The oppressive silences that cradle and reinforce Black Brooklyn's absence of material memorialization have also barred people's access to participation in social and political life. Both entryways for black disenfranchisement, landownership and homeownership had a one-to-one relationship with privilege in Brooklyn and the United States at large. The right to vote depended on whether or not you owned $250 worth of land, a precursor to the extensive history of black voter disenfranchisement and prohibitor of wealth.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">70</a> Unless black people succeeded exceptionally, their property-owning ambitions were silenced, as was their political voice. This oppressive silence is recurring, as gentrification effectively puts various black enterprises out of business and crushes dreams of property ownership. And yet we have "have accepted conflict and bitterness as part of the story necessary to [[understand|Optional]] [our] communities."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">71</a>

Here is a list of street names that commemorate slaveholders _all throughout_ Brooklyn. So much for slavery's "ignominous roots." (_Brooklyn By Name_, 2) A. M. Suydam Aaron Underhill Abraham Beekman Abraham Vandervoort Abraham Vandeveer Adrian Van Sinderin Bergen family C. Von and George and John Bergen Captain John Underhill Captain William Clark Charles Doughty Charles Doughty Clarence Sackett Clark Cornelis Janszen Vanderveer David Chauncey Drenten Englebart Lott Gabriel Furman Garret Bergen General Jeremiah Johnson Henry Boerum Henry Pierrepont Hezekiah Pierrepont Holland Isaac Chauncey Jacob Hicks Jacob Middagh Hicks Jan Aertsen Vanderbilt Jan Martens Schenck John and James Van Nostrand John and Jeremiah Lott John DeBevoise John Furman, John Middagh John Schenck John Vandaveer John Vanderbilt Joshua Sands Joshua Sands Judge William Furman Leffert Lefferts Lefferts Losee Van Nostrand Meserole family Norman Van Nostrand Nostrand family Peter and Nicholas Wyckoff Quaker Thomas Everit Samuel Sackett Simon Boerum Ten Eyck Ten Eyck Teunis Bergen Thomas Everit Tunis Bergen William Covert William Meserole Wyckoff family _A Covenant with Color 47_, Table 3.1: Slaveowning Families Among the Founders of Kings County [[Back to "Oppressive Silence"|Oppressive]]

<h4>Optional Silence</h4> Black citizens of Brooklyn sometimes also produce a deliberate silence--silence found favorable for its collective resistance and psychological benefits, as David Wood addresses in "On Working with Opaque Silence in Group Psychotherapy."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">72</a> "Opaque silence" describes trauma and loss. Opaque silence is particularly deep and impenetrable and when not handled appropriately, could threaten the existence of the group. David Wood explicitly states that this silence occurs outside of clinical psychology, existing in various different groups, "particularly with those who have been traumatized or who are living in contexts in which trauma has been a feature."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">73</a> Wood's work with describing opaque silence hints at how the silences of Black Brooklyn are deep and indestructible. The silence is haunting, the air uncomfortable, our history unaccounted for. And if it were to be filled it would be too much. But it is our reckoning with oppressive silence that helps us understand Black Brooklyn as including many people who live in a context of trauma. Existing in a space of negation, with very few commemorative works in the material environment and facing generally traumatic racial experiences, these silences have a specific unifying nature for members of the black community. As Woods describes, in group therapy sometime needs silence. If the silence is broken before the right time, it can ruin a session or create a negative atmosphere. But if he takes time to let them sit with the silence, it can create a space that develops acceptance of security and safety of the group.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">74</a> Only time and negotiation with that silence, that which "cannot be fully articulated," could afford therapeutic transformation.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">75</a> That time can help participants effectively choose which silences to fill and which to air out, as some filling can count as violent, aggressive, and intrusive.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">76</a> Likewise, this kind of therapeutic silence engenders this negotiation of black noise and sparks innovation in silence. This kind of silence has not only existed for Black Brooklyn across generations, but has also been a diasporic silence as black people have found loopholes in what an oppressor tells you can and cannot do.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">77</a> Albeit sensitive, this silence is therefore not inaccessible. Toni Morrison's _Beloved_ best exemplifies this sensitivity. "Silent, except for social courtesies, when they met one another they neither described nor asked about the sorrow that drove them from one place to another."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">78</a> In this moment of the book, Paul D refuses to ask Beloved about where she came from, or where she wanted to go, or how she got to the house. He respects her silence because he knows that whatever accompanied her travel was traumatic. In the context of the book, Paul D assigns this same silence to any movement of black people during and shortly after slavery. In greater context, Beloved is the physical embodiment of silence--"'unspeakable' experience of the Middle Passage" and beyond.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">79</a> By regarding so many people with this silence affords the survival of the group. Loss of other is the loss of self.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">80</a> That silence works well into 2017. Black people, a traveling and often traumatized people, often choosing to be silent as the redemption of their livelihoods; a survival mechanism. Optional silence warrants respect without tampering with trauma, such as expecting explanation or designating obnoxious commemorative work. Because if progued before time or punctured at all, this silence can erupt in a deadly trauma. In other words, noise is not the only form of resistance. Optional silence is resistance as well. The desire not to leave a trace and not to break group identity and not to lose self that Morrison imparts through Paul D is real.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">81</a> One of the most powerful examples of optional silences in Brooklyn is Brooklyn's free black communities involvement in the Underground Railroad. Maritcha Remond Lyons, a descendent of one of Long Island's oldest black families, recalls places like Brooklyn's Bridge Street AWME and Concord Baptist churches, schools, and homes as staple "stations" on the Underground Railroad. She says, "children were taught then to neither see, hear not talk about the affairs in which grown ups were concerned."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">82</a> This forewarning for children to keep silent about the "affairs in which grown ups were concerned" runs deeper but does not exclude an assumed casual conversation that happened at home. This silence is specific to safeguarding the lives of runaway slaves categorized as "harboring fugitives." Had this silence been broken, entire lives would have been at risk, returning to plantations or situations wherein enslaved black people would have been brutalized for knowing/ realizing/ believing they had a choice, and even more radically, for choosing freedom. So this silence unified black people, covering the tracks that could have sent them back to an even more wicked reality. To lose the other would be to lose self: In fact, this silence has followed black people everywhere since slavery as evident in contemporary iterations of the aforementioned maxim: "see and don't see, hear and don't hear"; "Children are to be seen and not heard"; "What happens in this house, stays in this house"; "Loose lips sinks ships"; and "Sometimes you have to see like you don't see and hear like you don't hear." As gentrification proves the current stimulus behind the forced, large scale migration of black people out of Brooklyn, this silence follows. Very subtle yet deeply important are the breadth and depth of this silence. Because the safety and survival of their fellow black people prompted children, amongst other members of the black community, to keep silent about the inner-workings of the Underground Railroad, traces of the black community have inevitably been lost. Black Brooklyn's choice also turned into an inability to reel off names of people or places of the past, which serves as a perfect embodiment of "bottomless silence"--a silence we must learn to recognize and take very seriously.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">83</a> The silence has been so deep that no other trace of these people remain but silence itself. This particular silence pushes the margins of memorialization. Out of the company of slaveholders and their descendants who have perpetuated the oppression of Black Brooklyn through voting, property ownership, political ambitions, etc. In honor of this stunning display of courage, resiliency, and resistance, _Dare to Remember: A Digital Memorial of Black Brooklyn_ pays homage to those who chose not to make noise and those who were saved by [[silence.|Memory]]

<h4>Importance of Memory</h4> "The past still exists, 'somewhere' to be rediscovered by the remembering subject." - Nicola King<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">84</a> As the sources on reclaiming and respecting silence detail, silence is multifaceted. Silence is a form of resistance. It is a communication strategy focused on body language, brilliantly juxtaposed against the repressive noise emblematic of exclusionary material commemoration across Brooklyn. It accounts for the fullness of communication (not just verbalized noise), which opens the senses to immaterial and often overlooked commemoration. Most importantly, it has collective psychological benefits for traumatized populations by centering their sorrow and managing collective memory. Writing, "To kill one's ancestors is to kill oneself," Marisa Parham imparts the importance of passing on even painful memories.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">85</a> It is important to do so because it allows people "to anchor the living present in any conscious community of memory."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">86</a> That without a collective memory of the past--the whole story--the present generation is severed from the formative elements of their identity and the origins of their existence. Parham employs the origins and use of the 'n' word to illustrate this phenomenon. Because of a collective (mis)understanding that this particular sound of racism has disappeared, <blockquote>"it is assumed that the racist structures that engendered the term have already passed away, thereby removing the visible razor from the world's edge. Such assumption is motivated by a belief in forgetting, a belief that the dismantlings that serve as the best recognized valences of social and political progress... were in fact complete demolitions, and that the relative absence of racism's visible structures signifies demolition?... Without a full, personal experience of the kind of event that would fulfill the word's material possibility, is my discomfort merely an echo of the past? And if such is indeed the case, how do I account for what my body experiences in the depths of this discomfort? How do I relive my suspicion, or my anger at being left to sift through the rubble, playing with things sharp and hard, yet ghostly? The moment passes. Nothing happened, but I remember."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">87</a></blockquote> Parham elucidates that the "visible razor," the literal sound of the n-word, has experienced a dismantling. However, the reverberations of that sound and therefore the reverberations of racism, have not completely disappeared. Generational silence in Black Brooklyn has a profound connection with this phenomenon. Though the visible markers, be they for positive or negative remembrances, have disappeared and some sounds have passed away, we still remember. How do we formulate a "conscious community of memory," where people are guided through their suspicion and discomfort and anger?<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">88</a> Where do we find the optional and oppressive silences important to the memory of generations of Black Brooklyn? Pierre Nora gives us an answer. They are a collective in the landscape, and a familiarity with their presence at sites of memory anchor us in community through our pasts. He introduces 'lieux de mémoire' or 'sites of memory' as "fundamentally vestiges, the ultimate embodiments of a commemorative consciousness that survives in a history which, having renounced memory, cries out for it."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">89</a> We explore oppressive and optional silences as vestiges prominent in these sites of memory. Departing from a central focus on the grandiosity of "museums, archives, cemeteries, collections, festivals, anniversaries, treaties, depositions, monuments, sanctuaries, private associations" as "relics of another era, illusions of eternity."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">90</a> This is why in _Dare to Remember: A Digital Memorial Black Brooklyn_, I focus on a range of sites that at first seem ordinary, but that are important to the daily lives of black people. Likewise, this thesis departs entirely from the priority of physicality. Instead, the main focus is on silence as it is a immaterial vestige and central feature of Black Brooklyn's existence, and it does the work of revealing past structures that can potentially narrate the stories of these black communities. A school for instance, is ordinary, but for many generations even the act of walking to school was an act of resistance that might be memorialized differently. All of the sites in the photo series visualize these kinds of places, with the subjects holding the photographs a way to call forth memory that allows viewers to conceptualize the space now and then. This departure from very grandiose, physical structures and prescribed celebrations is important because it decolonizes the 'history is for winners' recipe and the "definitions belonged to the definers--not the defined" blueprint.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">91</a> It is the "necessary and political act" of centering the memory of minorities while simultaneously concentrating on present members of Black Brooklyn whose connection to the past feel real and imaginary at the same time.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">92</a> Silence as an endangered reservoir of memory threatened by diminishment, threatened by complete erasure, threatened by emphasis on material environments, threatened by uncertainty, threatened by storytellers and history production, threatened by history, produces this limbo. And this thesis places an urgency on recognizing and protecting it. <blockquote>When certain minorities create protected enclaves as preserves of memory to be jealously safeguarded, they reveal what is true of all lieux de mémoire: that without commemorative vigilance, history would soon sweep them away. These bastions buttress our identities, but if what they defended were not threatened, there would be no need for them. If the remembrances they protect were truly living presences in our lives, they would be useless. Conversely, if history did not seize upon memories in order to distort and transform them, to mold them or turn them to stone, they would not turn into lieux de memoir, which emerges in two stages: moments of history are plucked out of the flow of history then returned to it--no longer quite alive but not entirely dead, like shells left on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">93</a></blockquote> Whether oppressive or optional, all of these silences are important and worthy of being remembered. As I try to show in _Dare to Remember_, it is always [[there.|GIS Process]]

<h4>Behind Map-Making</h4> "Theories of history actually privilege one side, as if the other did not matter." - Michel-Rolph Trouillot<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">94</a> _Theory_ In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel Trouillot outlines the silences of history production. A prominent part of history production is the shaping of material environments, and more particular to this project, shaping the landscape of Brooklyn. As aforementioned in the introduction, the final commemorative work may look like neighborhood names, street signs, monuments, museums, bridges, and even sports arenas. However, these memorializing structures are not spontaneous in the least. Trouillot's steps of history production makes that very clear. Prior to settling on a methodology capable of penetrating history production where silence first enters, some of my governing questions included: Did Harlem have all the black people? Did the slaves who created capital in Brooklyn by way of their agricultural labor leave Brooklyn after slavery? Or after Brooklyn transformed into an urban city? How could I visualize the demographic shifts of the black population influenced by slavery, First and Second Great Migrations, white flight, the Immigration Laws of 1965, and gentrification? By utilizing past census information, an intentional process to survey the population and various other details about individuals, I provide a visual narrative of Black Brooklyn's emergence and disappearance that addressed the aforementioned questions and enter historical production at the first place silence enters: fact retrieval. This sequence of maps shows the percentage of the black population from the first census collection in 1790 to the latest census in 2010 through a collation of information such as race, slave and slaveholding status, free population, and total population available through the United States Census Bureau. Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a visual system "designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of spatial... data," and its reliance on archived census data serves three purposes: one, to juxtapose the absence of the black population from conventional commemoration (in the material environment) with a haunting, visual representation of existence and movement of Black Brooklyn dating back to the year of the first census; two, to contrast the grandiose structures in the material environment with census data, a more inconspicuous trace of the past; and three, to unveil the places silences have entered fact retrieval which have inevitably exacerbated a silence that extends into the [[contemporary|GIS Analysis]] moment.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">95</a> Look at the [[Mechanics]] of GIS map-making.

<h4>Inside the Heart of Black Brooklyn: A Pattern of Disenfranchisement</h4> _During Map Construction_ During the process of making GIS maps, there are a few adjustments you have to make. Since census data spanning from 1790 to 2010 is organized and available in an inconsistent manner. Therefore, a great deal of problem-solving happens to map the population density of black people in Brooklyn over time. The first hurdle was sifting through information on the ancestrylibrary.com, as census taking was not streamlined. Summaries appeared in different places or were not available and townships changed consistently as Kings County was still developing.[96] The second hurdle was understanding how the census identified black people. Since we had to collate census data for years 1790 through 1900 at the township level ourselves, the closest we could get to accounting for the black population was through the amount of people enslaved by free white men. As Craig Steven Wilder makes explicitly clear in _A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn_, this conflation is a flaw. Although "Africans were the vast majority of the enslaved,... Native and "Christian" unfreedom persisted."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">97</a> Since the census data does not specify which portion of the enslaved population were Africans, the enslaved population as reported by the census data would have been taken as the population of black people in the GIS maps. Given the time constraints of this project, it was inefficient to collate census data. Therefore, the current maps exclude census data prior to 1910 because national census tracts for those years were not centralized and therefore, unavailable on the National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) website. However, that does not change the reality of the population density of Black Brooklyn where Black Brooklyn was a third of the population in 1790, the first year census data collection.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">98</a> Another mishap that affected the results of the map was the consistency of census tracts. Similar to what prevented me from creating maps from 1790 to 1900, census data was not streamlined. Therefore, in years like 1920 and 1940 census tracts move around, appearing two or three times the size of the census tracts from the previous census. During the construction of the 1910-2010 maps, we used digitized data from NHGIS.org and because that information was centralized, it required less problem-solving to complete them. However, while searching for census tracts, I noticed that prior to 1930's, the census broke up into six major factors: foreign born, nativity, citizenship status, age, sex, and race. After 1930, a vast majority of race data was associated with housing, and post 1950, descriptors of land- and property-ownership (head of household, dwelling units, income, occupancy, year of construction, contract rent, appliances--heating, refrigeration, television, water supply, plumbing facilities) became much more prevalent in census recordings. Given the acceleration of white flight and a solidification of suburbia after 1950, collecting this information seems sensible.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">99</a> In other words, homeownership is distinctly "American." However, racism and segregation are too. Even before the construction of the Interstate Highway System or white flight, voting eligibility depended on whether or not you owned property.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">100</a> Hence, the history of legalized black voter disenfranchisement and prohibitor of wealth. _After map construction_ Surveying the maps we did create reveals that black people lived throughout Brooklyn in 1910 and more specifically, there was an even distribution of black people everywhere. The light yellow indicates that the black population consisted of about 5-10% of the total population in almost every neighborhood. This is indicative of black and white people having always lived in close proximity to one another. This noticeably changes from 1920 to 2010. White and light yellow spots start showing up more frequently in Southern Brooklyn, and red appears highly concentrated in North and Central Brooklyn. The light yellow and white indicates highly populated region but a black population of 0-5%. Translation--little to no black people resided in Southern Brooklyn. The scarlet and deep red indicate a dense population of black people (around 60-95%) in the central and northeast regions of Brooklyn. The increase of white and light yellow spaces in the southern region of Brooklyn and the surge of red in north and central Brooklyn provides a visual account of increasing segregation. Now that we can visualize when this begins to happen, the question then switches to why did it happen? Was it prior to the rise of suburbia and white flight? Our [[timeline of movement|Movement Timeline]] in combination with the GIS maps color the reasoning, telling us the rise of suburbia and white flight influenced the large scale segregation of Black Brooklyn in North and Central Brooklyn. But as professor and urban sociologist John Logan communicates through his work on maps of and prior to 1880, the rise of suburbia and white flight only widened segregation.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">101</a> Despite living in close proximity to one another, segregation actually happened at such micro-levels. For example, even if you lived on the same street, that street would be polarized by the buildings, partitioning the block into half black and half white.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">102</a> When viewed at the city or borough level, particularly with no historical context, it gives the impression that close proximity meant camaraderie. But zooming into street level reveals this division. Though extremely revelatory, maps can only zoom into life at the street level. And though we have the impression that black and white people lived together in the same neighborhood, on the same block, or even in the same house, there has always been a marked distance the two have had from one another. It is important to note that this widening distance happened less abruptly than we are used to seeing it. Yes, black people lived in the same house as white people, but the quality of their living quarters were never the same. Yes black people cooked food for white people, but they did not dine together. Yes black children cleaned and maybe even played in the rooms of white children, but they dared not to share a bed. This distance birthed the concepts and movement patterns we can reel off, and what becomes visible at the street level: redlining, redistricting, white flight, and the rise of suburbia from the 1920s to the 1950s and its intensification during the Jim Crow Era. These maps confirm black existence. The dynamic visualization of these maps permit people to witness territorial exclusion in the form of spatial segregation and movement patterns, and understand it as a form of silence. The fluctuation of colors that lapses over time raises collective memory through generally silenced (census) data in a way that does not marginalize key members of the borough's community. Even a brief introduction to this graphic resource implores additional information like how "the Fair Housing Act, which finally made it illegal for landlords, builders, and lenders to discriminate based on race, wasn't passed until 1968, after black families had already missed out on decades of growth."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">103</a> The exposure to this digitized data conceptualizes the reason why "today, only 43% of black households own their own home, compared to 72% of white households," and why "Flatbush, East New York, Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Brownsville were [deemed] problem areas."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">104,105</a>... Continuing to color our findings and rationale, we can understand how homeownership translates into generational wealth and how black people were legally left out. Furthermore, mapping spatial segregation on the streets and neighborhoods that bear the names of white ethnic enclaves, begs for a visualization of "schools, hotels, stores, fire stations, swimming pools, and cemeteries" critical to the [[everyday occasion|Photo Series Process]] of living in Black Brooklyn.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">106</a> Did you miss the Map-Making [[Mechanics]]?

<h4>Mechanics of Map-Making</h4> The maps can be understood in two parts. The second one is a bit more difficult than the second, given the ever shifting definitions of "blackness" and shifting markers on the terrain. *Overview of An Evolving Kings County (Brooklyn)* 1817 Village of Brooklyn formed 1824 Village of Williamsburg incorporated within the Town of Bushwick 1834 Village of Williamsburg and Town of Bushwick joined to form the City of Brooklyn (Brooklyn Wikipedia) 1838 builds (rural) Greenwood Cemetery 1840 Village of Williamsburg becomes Town of Williamsburg 1851 Town of Williamsburg becomes the City of Williamsburg 1852 (what became) Town of New Lots ceded from Town of Flatbush 1854 City of Williamsburg and the Town of Bushwick were absorbed into the City of Brooklyn Learned from Weeksville Tour (1963, 1883, 1900, 1930s) 1863 New York Draft Riots, numerous predominately black institutions burned down 1866 Southern end of Prospect Park taken out of Town of Flatbush and added to the City of Brooklyn 1883 Brooklyn Bridge built 1886 Town of New Lots absorbed into the City of Brooklyn 1894 Town of New Utrecht, Flatbush, and Gravesend absorbed into the City of Brooklyn 1896 Town of Flatlands absorbed into the City of Brooklyn January 1, 1898 Brooklyn became a borough of New York City<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">107</a> 1900s Lynchings at an all time high, post-Industrial Revolution 1930s Large-scale lack of funding, causing the devolution of predominately black institutions in Brooklyn Post 1945, World War II, the construction of Interstate Highway System With this in mind, the maps prior to 1910 followed these steps: - Open ancestrylibrary.com to obtain census information, as digitized versions of them before 1910 do not exist. Collate the data on the total population and total amount of black people for every township. This is important since census data became ward-based within cities. - Find an older map from the same time period as the census data in order for it to have the correct boundary markers. This step may require several maps as townships annex others quite frequently before 1900. For example, "Brooklyn" has developed from a village, to a city, to a borough, expanding its markers and increasing in terrain previously designated for other townships. - Relate the internal coordinate system of the older map to the basemap's geographic coordinates to align census data of the past into sensible, visible information. This process, formally called georeferencing, simply means positioning streets (or other visible geographic markers) with a map of the contemporary street grid (or a contemporary map of the actual landscape). - Trace the boundaries from the older map - Set a scale for the population density of black people as compared to the total population For every decadal census from 1910 and on, the US Census Bureau used subdivisions of cities called tracts. This data and geographic boundary files are available from the National Historic Geographic Information System (NHGIS) website: - The table data can be joined to the geography boundaries on a tract-by-tract basis and mapping in ArcGIS. Lastly, we set a scale for the population density of black people as compared to the total population. We then labeled and symbolized the maps for maximum comprehension: highways, interstates, major roads, ramps, ferry crossing, and a general key for population density. When labeling parks, cemeteries, and industrial area, we decided on the color green. Though green immediately gives the impression of manicured parks and wildlife, we had to make the color uniform across these particular open spaces because sporadically, census data would account for homelessness in open spaces like parks or cemeteries. When recorded into census data and translated onto GIS maps, there is a large difference between unpopulated area and areas that have no black population. An unpopulated region may show up white, but if there are eleven homeless people living in the park and ten of them are black, the park would appear with the darkest color. This dark color indicates a high black population as opposed to being designated a 'green' space. If documenting homeless people in industrial or park spaces were consistent and/ or uniform, we would have been able to differentiate them, but sometimes it shows up green indicating a population of zero, and other times very red. So to avoid confusion, we designated area that have thirty or fewer people as unpopulated. In 1920, the lowest was thirty nine instead of thirty because census tracts were bigger and some of the park/ industrial/ cemeteries included some populated areas. In 1930, industrialized areas increase as low population areas expand, i.e. north and south of Flatlands Avenue between Utica Avenue and Remsen Avenue. And in 1940, the lowest was seventy three instead of thirty because, like 1920, census tracts were bigger and included some populated areas. This designation was not to erase people. However, in the aim to ensure consistent symbology and map comprehension, I acknowledge where I have excluded members of Black Brooklyn. Return to [[Behind Map-Making|GIS Process]] or move on to [[Inside the Heart of Black Brooklyn|GIS Analysis]]

<h4>Movement Timeline</h4> <div class="center">_A timeline of overlapping movements of Black Brooklyn that contextualizes the movement in the automated GIS maps._</div> _Slavery (1636-1827)_ British governors saw slavery as "an avenue to colonial success, and Brooklyn's Dutch farmers benefited from the thrust toward unfreedom."[108] By the beginning of the American Revolutionary War, a third of Kings County's population was enslaved and by its end, the number of enslaved Africans increased.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">109</a> "The dominance of Dutch farmers in Kings County explains, in part, the growth and resilience of African slavery in that locale. Kings was by far the most heavily Dutch county in all New York--more than 45 percent of the white population--but daily life was equally influenced by the size and ethnic diversity of its black population. Some bonds people knew African languages, Spanish or French, and many spoke English and Dutch because of their daily labors, and it is likely that, in the heavily Dutch areas of the county, enslaved Africans were more fluent in English than their masters. Africans daily moved tons of produce and livestock to the commercial markets on the shores of Brooklyn, Williamsburg, and Manhattan, and they served as a cultural buffer between the parochial Dutch and their somewhat urbane customers... Butchers dressed meats and had Africans cart them into Brooklyn Heights or Williamsburg and then ferry them over to their stands in New York's Fly Market. Bondsmen, often trained as butchers themselves, were a regular sight at Fly and carried on much of its business. Markets even served as the sites of black people's celebrations. The Old Market was the scene of Kings County's annual Pinkster celebration, an African-American holiday that coincided with, and played off of, the Dutch Paas festival in the week of Easter."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">110</a> _American Revolution (1765-1783)_ _Post 1785_ "Property qualifications were strengthened and nonwhite voters were required to show certificates of freedom."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">111</a> _1800_ "By 1800, 70-80 percent of the households in the towns outside Brooklyn included an enslaved African, and since lending, leasing, and hiring Africans continues, virtually all freeholders experienced mastery."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">112</a> Because Brooklyn was then a small village of Kings County, the towns outside of Brooklyn existed in today's conception of the borough of Brooklyn. Of course runaways influenced small movement patterns--"Absconding became epidemic in the decades before emancipation."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">113</a> _End of Slavery (July 4, 1827)_ All enslaved peoples emancipated. "As rapidly as slavery produced a sizable African-American population, the end of slavery unleashed a tide of immigration that drowned Brooklyn's black community... In 1800 one of every three residents of Kings County (32 percent) was black; six decades later, on the eve of the Civil War, barely one of fifty (1.8 percent) Brooklynites was of African descent."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">114</a> _New York City Draft Riots (1863)_ The New York City Draft Riots "precipitated a wholesale migration" of black people into Brooklyn.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">115</a> "Better-off black Manhattanites began moving to Brooklyn in the 1850s and that movement increased after the Draft Riots. African-Americans purchased land and homes, organized themselves through clubs and societies, educated their children, and attempted to live the "American dream" in spite of many white people's objections."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">116</a> _1865_ "In 1865 only 5,000 of Brooklyn's 250,000 citizens were of color; by the end of the century, the total population had quadrupled to a million but the black population numbered fewer than 20,000."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">117</a> _1890s_ Given the overcrowding in Barbados after British Emancipation, a small community of people from Barbados fled to the New York. They were amongst other affluent black British West Indians who emigrated to Bedford and St. Marks district of Brooklyn.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">118</a> _First Great Migration (1910-1970)_ "The Great Migration was the movement of African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the [industrial cities of the] Northeast, Midwest, and West."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">119</a> _1910_ "By 1910 half of New York State's black population was Southern born."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">120</a> _1915-1928_ "The National Urban League estimated that 1.2 million black migrants moved to the North from 1915-1928. Between January and June of 1917 alone, argued the Crisis, a quarter million African Americans left the South."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">121</a> This movement was influenced by floods, mob violence, and the failure of Reconstruction. _1930_ By 1930, Brooklyn, the most populous borough, had seen its "nonwhite residency triple to nearly 70,000" with a total of nearly 2.5 million citizens.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">122</a> "42 percent of all black Brooklynites were born in the South Atlantic states--in fact, Virginia and the Carolinas alone provided 34 percent of the borough's black population--and 16 percent were foreign born. West Indians were the vast majority of Brooklyn's foreign-born black communities."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">123</a> _Post-World War II (post 1945)_ The construction of the Interstate Highway System _Racial Segregation and White Flight (1920-1960)_<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">124</a> "White New Yorkers rarely noticed ethnic distinctions among people of color, instead they viewed these disparate migrations as a single formidable wave that had to be controlled. Social segregation became the rule."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">125</a> _1901_ "In 1901 statutory school desegregation as achieved in New York State following Governor Theodore Roosevelt initiatives... Attempts to re-segregate the public schools gained momentum as Brooklyn's black population increased."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">126</a> Churches, residential areas, and employment all experienced this heightened wave of segregation only hired for crude labor positions as opposed to general office jobs, and other public areas<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">127</a> _1930s_ "By 1950 it made sense to speak of "Negro neighborhoods" and "Negro housing," for both had been created in the Roosevelt years."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">128</a> "Between 1940 and 1990 Kings County had a net loss of 1.5 million white people and a net gain of 1.3 million people of color."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">129</a> "Brooklyn was not racially segregated until the federal government armed banks, insurance companies, and developers with public money and government authority."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">130</a> When separating themselves from racial minorities in Brooklyn ceased to be enough, white people began "chasing government subsidies in outlying communities."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">131</a> "Much of this damage took place under the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC)," which implemented redlining, barring loans from black people to relocate to newer areas.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">132</a> "Discriminatory lending practices drew middle-class white people to South Brooklyn and the suburbs and forced African Americans and Caribbeans into North Brooklyn, drawing a line of racial separation across the heart of the borough."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">133</a> In accordance with their discriminatory loan policies, HOLC predicted population density of black people in Central Brooklyn.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">134</a> As Wilder explains in A Covenant with Color, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy so by the Immigration Waves of the 1960s occurred, the black West Indians settled where they had family, yes, but also the only places they were accepted and could afford if they were poor immigrants. _1960s_ Widespread urban decay in Brooklyn Immigration Laws of 1965/ 1965 Immigration and Nationality Amendments Post urban decay as a result of white flight. Yet these West Indians flock to the city - "New York City" as their "preferred place of settlement"<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">135</a> - fleeing economic hardship and political oppression in their respective regions<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">136</a> - the black population of Brooklyn, NY that has risen "from 24 percent in 1940 to 66 percent in 1957" and grew consistently after the Immigration Laws of 1965 when the neighborhood transformed from 85 percent Caucasian to 80 percent non-Caucasian.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">137</a> _Gentrification (present)_ Witnessing this phenomenon of forced migration, again. Instead of being pushed into the heart of Brooklyn by discriminatory lending practices, black people are not being pushed outside of Brooklyn. Beautification projects and the implementation of large infrastructure such as the Barclays Center raise the cost of living, inevitably disallowing black people to inhabit spaces they have begun to call home. These economic and political decisions begin to make decisions on behalf of black people. "At the nexus of race and labor, at the nexus of race and housing, and the nexus of race and education is power. Having demanded that African Americans be ghettoized in housing, subordinated in employment, gerrymandered in politics, and isolated in social space, white residents necessarily knew that their life chances were antagonistic to those of black people."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">138</a> "Preservation at the local level, in most cities and towns, tends to the adaptive reuse of historic structures by local real estate developers, with little public access or interpretation, and often involves gentrification and displacement for low income residents."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">139</a> Return to [[GIS Analysis]]

<h4>Hybrid Places</h4> "The lieux of which I speak are hybrid places, mutants in a sense, compounded of life and death, of the temporal and the eternal... the fundamental purpose of a lieu de mémoire is to stop time, to inhibit forgetting, to fix a state of things, to immortalize death, and to materialize the immaterial." - Pierre Nora<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">140</a> _Theory_ Drawing from the GIS maps that visually affirmed the reality of black existence from the formation of Brooklyn to the current day, the photo series enhances the visualization of silence from digital waves to actual people. GIS mapping permeates historical production where silence first enters, whereas the photography series (due to the utilization of the archives), infiltrates it at silence's second point of entry: fact assembly. Photographs in the archives, much like everything else, have been selectively chosen to preserve moments in time. I have selected photographs that reflect sites of memory visually chronicling Black Brooklyn as they work, worship, live, attend school, chill, protest, dance, dream, and dare to remember. I sought out these images from local archives, as the material environment barely reflects significant elements from the mundane to the historically extraordinary Black Brooklyn. Herbert J. Gabs makes this clear in reference to building architecture--"since it tends to designate the stately mansions of the rich and buildings designed by famous architects, the commission mainly preserves the elite portion of the architectural past. It allows popular architecture to disappear"--and yet it is relevant beyond building preservation. These landmark policies and other history production norms "distorts the real past, exaggerates affluence and grandeur, and denigrates the present."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">141</a> Hence, fact assembly in the form of photography as the second point of entry for silence. A term coined by French historian Pierre Nora, 'sites of memory' or 'lieux de memoire' are material or non-material significant entities rooted in space that have become symbolic elements of the memorial heritage.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">142</a> Sites of memory is a broad term, including but not limited to physical structures like monuments, museums, street signs, etc. However, "only certain works of history are lieux de mémoire, namely, those that reshape memory in some fundamental way or that epitomize a revision of memory for pedagogical purposes."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">143</a> For _Dare to Remember: A Digital Memorial of Black Brooklyn_, this imaginative reshaping takes form with the de-prioritization of loud, grandiose structures as the only forms of commemorative works that can narrate history. The emphasis on commemorative structures in the material environment during history production causes the project of memorializing Black Brooklyn to demand silence as a non-material entity in the archives. It is particularly important because the silence pays respect to black people in Brooklyn who have not always invested or have been allowed to invest in the preservation of physical memorials. Therefore, the intentional revealing of sites of memory reframes historical "truths" spread by the commemorative works in the material environment. By having "no referents in reality; or rather, they are their own referents--pure signs," these sites deconstruct our understanding of where history is, what it is shown, and how it is taught or spoken about.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">144</a> In tracking sites of memory (and ultimately silence in its extricable and complicated relationship with power), we hold history-makers, the "storytellers" and the "definers," accountable for their "the devoicing and identity-eradicating imperatives" and not attending to everyone's past.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">145</a> This intergenerational silence collated from different time frames and lives of Black Brooklyn is represented by the intergenerational essence of the photo series. Simply put, the subjects of the older images and the images of Dare to Remember: A Digital Memorial of Black Brooklyn includes black people of all ages with varying years in Brooklyn. Each photograph freezes a moment, disrupting time and allowing us to concentrate the memory. Standing in the same location where the photograph was once taken with the intention of photographing the 'Self' and the 'Other' in that same space joins the memory of Black Brooklyn of the present and Black Brooklyn of the past--"to resurrect old meanings and generate new ones along with new and unforeseeable connections."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">146</a> _Practice_ In efforts to address fact assembly through the archives, I visited The Brooklyn Collection of the Central Brooklyn Public Library and The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The Brooklyn Collection is a local history division with a "rich assortment of research materials and archival documents [that] includes maps, historic Brooklyn photographs, ephemera, and prints."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">147</a> The Schomburg Center is a National Historic Landmark dedicated to the "vast collection of materials that represent the history and culture of people of African descent through a global, transnational perspective."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">148</a> Each place provided a plethora of great contextual information as well as well kept photographs, city plans, manuscripts, and more. And so I began with my eyes set on sites of memory that would, "in each case... look beyond the historical reality to discover the symbolic reality and recover the memory that is sustained."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">149</a> I easily found extraordinary buildings with really critical history to the advancement of Black Brooklyn but given "the importance of ordinary buildings for public memory has largely been ignored," the true task was highlighting "common urban places like union halls, schools, and residences" that were and continue to be critical to everyday life, and "have the power to evoke visual, social memory."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">150</a> This commitment to buildings that did not only glorify monumental architecture, but the ordinary buildings as well, helped evoke place memory which includes "personal memory of one's arrival in the city and emotional attachments there, cognitive memory of its street names and street layout, and body memory of routine journeys to home and work."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">151</a> Escaping the unsustainable and exclusive template that has favored the history of a small minority of white, male landholders, bankers, business and political leaders, and their architects," I reverse this framework in favor of a critical and creative structure that is sustainable, inclusive, reasonably priced, non-obstructive, and yet still calls attention.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">152</a> _Dare to Remember: A Digital Memorial_ concentrates on the ordinary houses, multi-arts centers, shipping companies, schools, and churches, but also heavily focuses on the people that utilized the services offered by these places. These include enslaved peoples, members of free communities, students, revelers, worshippers, employees, protesters, artists, and more. Focusing on members of Black Brooklyn to subvert peripheral historical representation, this photo series required volunteers of the current Black Brooklyn. And moreso, homage to black women and girls as encouraged by Dolores Hayden's line of questions: "Why are so few moments in women's history remembered as part of preservation? Why are so few women represented in commemorative public art? And why are the few women honored almost never women of color?"<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">153</a> In efforts to not reproduce the history production and and its emphasis on men in the digital sphere, I look to Lisa Nakamura who addresses the place of people of color, differently-abled people, women, and gender nonconforming folk in the digital sphere--"far from saying people of color are not engaged in digital humanities, [who's] work begs for a recentering of the conversation on the parts of the field that are messy."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">154</a> And so when enlisting friends and family and even my former public school as members of Black Brooklyn to participate in my thesis, I specifically recruited black women in commemoration of former women of Black Brooklyn and as immortalization of themselves. In collaboration with residents, I set out to make the silence and memory of Black Brooklyn recognizable. What does it mean to digitize these women in connection with the importance of memory? Women who have been left out of the archives as made clear by _Cityscapes: A History of New York in Images_, which documented black women as heavily employed in some of the crudest positions and labor markers but had no photos to provide a visual representation of it. Once I had gotten all of my volunteers together, I assigned them to a site of memory with specific attention to who they were as individuals and how they connected to the site. The photography process spanned a bit over three months. Before photographing, I gave each person a refresher of my thesis (as one that reimages ways to commemorate the past and present Black Brooklyn through digital media), the photo series segment, and the memory of the site they would be photographed in. Each participant had the liberty to decide how they wanted to hold the photo frame with the older image of Black Brooklyn, if they wanted to hold it at all, what to wear, and how to pose with or around the photo frame. I handed them the photo frame. More often than not, they looked around with varying degrees of caution and comfort because it could not have been more in place yet out of place at the same time. And there was something important about this photo frame and each volunteer not being perfectly stitched into the material environment, but belonging nonetheless. [[We had put silence on front street.|Photo Series Analysis]]

<h4>The Archives Point North</h4> "A 'postcolonial' archive is one which examines and questions the creation of imperialist ideology within the structure of the archive." - Adeline Koh<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">155</a> _Up North_ The sites of memory sit in Northern and Central Brooklyn, noticeably separated from the borough's southern region. This seems odd and quickly raised a bewildered, "Why are there no images of black people in Southern Brooklyn?!" But a greater understanding of black movement in, out, and around Brooklyn rationalizes this cluster. As the GIS maps and analysis have indicated, there has been a consistent concentration of black Americans in Northern Brooklyn as a result of the First and Second Great Migration, and a centralization of Afro-Caribbeans in Central Brooklyn in response to the Immigration Laws of 1965. Housing discrimination in the 1930s furthered this separation. "Discriminatory lending practices drew middle-class white people to South Brooklyn and the suburbs and forced African Americans and Caribbeans into North Brooklyn, drawing a line of racial separation across the heart of the borough."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">156</a> Furthering my inquiry, I ask "Did black people ever live in Southern Brooklyn?" and "Was there ever a considerable concentration of black people there?" With a review of the census and the visualization presented by the GIS maps, I can answer, of course black people have lived in Southern Brooklyn. However, there has never been a considerable concentration of black people there. As enslaved people, or people offering labor for compensation, black people lived in close proximity to white people. Therefore, they were often spread throughout the borough prior and its not until intense segregation begins around in 1930?, that we really see Black Brooklyn centered in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Flatbush, Crown Heights, and Downtown Brooklyn. Therefore, I fully acknowledge the presence of sites of memory all throughout Brooklyn. In the same breath, I fully acknowledge my human error which may have made me gravitate to names I have been familiar with, a complete manifestation of history production and who or what is intended to be remembered. If afforded more time, I could have interrogated my own biases and dug deeper to pull these silences out. Likewise, with more time, I could have visited other places aside from The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Brooklyn Collection, and utilized the resources in the Brooklyn Historical Society or even the New York City Municipal Archives. _Silence in the Archives_ The most astounding reasoning for sites of memory being primarily in North Brooklyn lends itself to a considerable reckoning with silence; in particular, archival silences that interrogate history-making and deepen both oppressive and optional silences. Because the need for evidence as credibility sets fiction apart from history, we default to our learned process as the standard and yet it is not necessarily correct. Sites of memory not being visible or heard in the south of Brooklyn does not mean black people did not live there, or work there, or dance there, or dream there. This is evidenced by the GIS maps. Instead, this absence of photographs or elegiac objects that permit us to visualize silence of Black Brooklyn unveil another layer of silence. This silence creates a consequential narrative restraint but it does not destroy the memory. If photos were taken and somehow they were not archived, feasible in a world where black existence can be deemed unworthy of preservation and therefore silenced, it is a reproduction of oppressive silence. If photos were not taken or an elegiac object not left behind for the archives even to collect, as some people of Black Brooklyn (ie. formerly enslaved people and all of those integral to the maintenance of stations on the Underground Railroad) did not leave a trace to be recalled in order to ensure their safety and survival, then it is a reproduction of optional silence. Surely both oppressive and optional silences are amplified here. These are the very people I want to highlight; the ones who have not been archived, who have not been chosen by history-makers, and who have not left a trace of themselves. The very silence that this project aims to amplify are the ones which are impossible to fill. "Myth of full and immediate recovery," particularly by one subject.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">157</a> Cognizant that "archives aren't representations of historical reality, but rather political compositions," the decision to feature a majority of black girls and women address archival silences head on.[158] Black girls and black women typically exist on the peripheral. The archives do not deviate from this precedence. As _A Covenant with Color_ states and _Cityscapes: A History of New York in Images_ verifies, "by 1900 most of Brooklyn's adult African-American women were in the job market and 85 percent of black working women were laundresses and domestics."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">159</a> And yet _Cityscapes: A History of New York_ in Images, a book predicated on archived images to narrate the story of New York City, does not have images of black women working to accompany their text on employment in New York City. Maybe the fault of overlooking black women in the archives, maybe the responsibility of history-makers who have not incorporated black women into the archives, or maybe the resolve of black women to "be seen and not heard" to guarantee their safety. Either or all, no description of the process or footnote alluded to this manifestation of silence. And so _Dare to Remember: A Digital Memorial of Black Brooklyn_ addresses silence as an [[epistemological area of inquiry,|Public School, Photo/ VR Series]] and memorializes black women in each of these lights.

<h4>The Crown School: Photo & Virtual Reality Series</h4> In efforts to work with students of color and a predominately black class to weave their knowledge of the digital sphere with history, _Dare to Remember: A Digital Memorial of Black Brooklyn_ incorporates a public school photography and virtual reality series. This series investigates black history using Brooklyn's landscape through photography and virtual reality ultimately expanding the southern based, slavery and Civil Rights focused black history students usually learn. Not only does this project's intersection live at the re-examination, interrogation, and revision of history, but it also provides cost effective ways to produce higher-level digital commemorative work of black people. Additionally, in a world of constant exposure to digital products marketed to children for mass consumption, this project focuses on producing these things for themselves. After proposing and detailing my thesis project and requesting student involvement to administration and faculty of my former public school, The Crown School, I began working with Mr. Porter's fifth grade photography class. Due to their exposure of photography and their already tech savvy minds, explaining virtual reality was relatively easy. They were blown away by the Samsung 360 camera, the Google Camera and Cardboard, and the images that could be made and seen from them. With an aim of interweaving the digital sphere with history, the first part of the series focused on the significance of black institutions. These include everything from churches and barbershops to street signs and parks. We then spoke about who considers these symbols of memory and/ or history worthy through a short conversation on the difficulty of preserving predominately black institutions. Shortly after, we listed numerous products and symbols of the digital sphere (computers, television, iPads and iPhones, Playstation, etc.), and in the middle of the Venn Diagram we spoke on how our project lies at the center of history and technology. After that discussion, we moved into how we can use digital technology to preserve these historical sites. We honed in on one of the sites for the photo series, Borough Hall. It was the site where Brooklyn's Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) dumped their trash from the predominately black neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant, onto the steps of the building as protest against the failure to have regular and proper sanitation in the neighborhood. We discussed this site as one that preceded places linked to #BlackLivesMatter protests and how they were intrinsically connected. Lastly, we named the Borough Hall as our destination for the field trip where they will photograph and create virtual reality images of the building. Our second class and the second portion of the photo/ virtual reality series consisted of a micro-version of our outing to the Borough Hall. Students created 360 degree images of their favorite places (otherwise known as sites of memory) in the school building that tell stories of their favorite moments in the school. Before their mini-trips around the school, we discussed where those places were and why they were important to them. Soon after, they set out on their chaperone-free trips through The Crown School. Short on phones, I asked Mr. Porter to pick group leaders so for each phone, there were three students. Though not all students perfected the 360 degree image due to various factors like the movement of their peers or others not giving their consent to be photographed, my students were still enthralled by the potential of the technology. Faster than even me, these kids soon found out that they could look at the stock images on the Google Cardboard Camera app and even access YouTube 360 videos. That way, students whose phones were incompatible with the Cardboard apps could still use their Cardboard headsets. At a time where I was worried that there would not be enough phones, the students' interest and flexibility helped further the connection between documenting the past through innovations of the present and possibly future. Mr. Porter drove that lesson home when he discussed how much "you don't take photos just to take photos" or "photography class isn't just about point and shoot." He imparted that it also heavily rests on what makes a great image and experience, and what those photos signify and could potentially be used for. The last day was the digital production and exploration day where students took photos and virtual reality images around Brooklyn Borough Hall. Jeffrey Lowell, the Director of Policy at the Borough Hall, gracefully gave the students a detailed tour. After the tour and shortly after the students took their own images, I photographed the students in the foyer of the building around the framed, older images of the CORE protest. We had the opportunity to meet the borough president's official photographer who gave the students photography tips such as how to shoot despite the quality or age of the camera. As we moved around the building on our tour and were introduced to some of the staff members, people in the Borough Hall could recall details such as the date the hall was built and the borough's connection to the Dutch. And yet, with all this historical knowledge, no one recognized the protest photos I had framed with the intention of photographing the students. No one mentioned the slaveholding status of those wealthy Dutch families. This memory has been carefully curated to produce the sanitized version of history and this silence of Black Brooklyn exists far beyond the Borough Hall. However, we witnessed the authenticity of intensity of unfettered memory as we walked towards the exit of the building. A woman stopped in awe of the young students visiting the Borough Hall. When Jeffrey Lowell introduced them as "photographers from the Crown School," this woman gasped loudly and shared that she too attended the Crown School. There in the Borough Hall, stood three generations of Crown School students--the woman who turned out to be assistant to the borough president, me, and the current students. Enthusiasm surrounded the entire project, from the idea of being photographed by me, to photographing their own places and at the end of this series, taking home their own Google Cardboard Virtual Reality headset with knowledge of how to produce and access 360 images and videos. Even the slightest exposure to Black Brooklyn's past and understanding memory through the mechanism of silence and technology felt electrifying. Even more-so, memorializing these students as members of Black Brooklyn felt amazing because what goes on in the classroom felt historic, and what goes on at trips felt historic because it may very well carve out a path to furthering interest in anything we worked on since there is precedent for it in their present. Be it documenting themselves or sites of memory, becoming politicians or photographers, or transforming history-making by viewing memory in a dynamic way, they know they have community in these [[respective fields.|Virtual Reality Process]]

<h4>Remember the Silence?</h4> "Places make memories cohere in complex ways." - Dolores Hayden<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">160</a> _Theory_ Rewind back to moments of surveying history in Brooklyn's material landscape and hearing nothing but feeling everything. Recall asking questions about Black Brooklyn and having them met with silence. Remember expecting answers from memorialized works that only spoke back to you in a variety of European tongues, and internalizing the fact that Black Brooklyn could not answer you. Virtual reality serves an embodiment of my experience with Black Brooklyn's silence. A computer-generated simulation of three-dimensional images and environments that can be interacted with in a seemingly real or physical way, virtual reality warps time and takes us on a trip through space.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">161</a> We land in Brooklyn. In this virtual world of _Dare to Remember: A Digital Memorial of Black Brooklyn_, we witness a switch from temporal to spatiality. This transition happens because we have chosen memory, which "fastens upon sites" as opposed to history, which "fastens upon events."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">162,163</a> And as made clear by the photo series, our interest in the memory of Black Brooklyn is an active evasion of historiography's exclusivity. Immersed in the material environment, the user is tasked with locating the sites of memory first revealed in the photo series. Why the material landscape of Brooklyn? Michel-Trouillot's framework for deinstitutionalizing historical production, otherwise described as confronting the places silence enters history production, lays it out for us. Where GIS Mapping enters history production at fact retrieval, and the Photo Series enters history production at fact assembly, the Virtual Reality component enters history production at the moment of creation, particularly in the making of the material landscape as a historical source. This confrontation works best as virtual reality immersion. By inhabiting the space, the user can visualize where the material memorialization happens and where silences reside. This inherently means feeling the silence of past Black Brooklyn, as silence is what evokes their memory. What does that feel like? Pierre Nora describes it as a simultaneous visceral attachment and estrangement. Virtual reality for all of its merits in visceral reactions, makes silence not only visual but also perceptible--haunting if you may. It manufactures that initial feeling of incommunicable frustration and recurring feelings of disorientation, making it a useful and generative digital platform to experience Black Brooklyn. _Practice_ The culminating portion of the digital component requires visiting each site of memory, and photographing as well as filming them with the Samsung Galaxy Gear 360 Camera. These 360 images and videos, accompanied by audio files, give rise to the virtual reality immersion availble for webpage and iOS devices. The time warp begins the first step of the user's visceral experience. Very literal, the user gets an abrupt switch in time and movement through space once they put on the virtual reality headset. Relatively speaking, getting to Brooklyn, NY from Amherst, MA takes four hours on the Peterpan Bus. It takes less than 3 minutes to put on a virtual reality headset and arrive in Brooklyn. The second step to personifying this encounter with the silences of Black Brooklyn is the visual account of the material landscape. This can include hearing ambient noises, and seeing street names of slaveowners, buildings that recall European ancestry, or simply noticing the races of passerbys. The third step ultimately happens after the user has perused the area--an uncontrollable feeling of estrangement or attachment. With this level of immersion, you can look around and locate the space you remembered from the photo series which provides a level of attachment. Or, you may not remember it at all and feel completely overwhelmed or isolated in the streets of Brooklyn, mirroring estrangement. The last, cohering element of this digital personification are the literal silences. In the iOS version, audio recordings have been overlaid in the beginning of the experience and over some of the 360 images. So as the user passes through Brooklyn, they experience a literal muting of some stories. These resemble stories that have been muted upon the production of historical public works, effectively expunging public memory of past black existence. This sporadic sharing of silences, silences prefaced as commemorative ones, pays homage to the millennial old silence but also "disrupts time, thus concentrating memory." In the website interface version, the user has more of going where they want to go given a map that accompanies the virtual images. They receive one video with audio recording so their experience with silence would be more stark. However, everyone who interacts with _Dare to Remember_ has the opportunity to use either and all functions. As a user, this may feel disorienting, incomprehensible, or incommunicable. And that is the experience of silence in [[Brooklyn.|Virtual Reality Analysis]]

<h4>Welcome to Black Brooklyn</h4> "Places trigger memories for insiders, who have shared a common past, and at the same time places often can represent shared pasts to outsiders who might be interested I knowing about them in the present." - Dolores Hayden<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">164</a> _User-Experience_ Virtual reality serve as an immersive, and interactive element. The user-experience can vary widely but the expected experience breaks user-ship down into three groups: Black Brooklyn participants, black participants, and anyone else who accesses the site. Each user experiences a 'journeying' through silence personified by virtual reality.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">165</a> Surely, this project employs virtual reality to do collective work. For members of Black Brooklyn, this is a visceral affirmation of the disorientation felt if they have taken the journey through Brooklyn, be it through the material landscape or through literature, and encountered silence. For black participants outside of Brooklyn, this experience may be familiar simply because of the effacing nature of historiography in the United States and the history of movement for people of the African Diaspora. Any other user is invited to the material environment and tasked with doing the work of traveling. This traveling is far more than mileage. It is the typically unrecognized labor of many marginalized communities. From the literal jumping to and around Brooklyn in less than two seconds, to the more nuanced temporal shifts that embody the feeling black people in Brooklyn experience when their ancestors' deafening silence jumps them centuries in seconds, to this history of uprooting lives for safety and survival as highlighted in the GIS mapping section, the user is tasked with the detective work of memory.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">166</a> Though extending that feeling to those who cannot naturally experience this encounter with memory through silence, virtual reality provides the tools to critically understand the feeling. Even the removal of the virtual reality headset is indicative of this privilege. You can take it off. _Sound and Silence_ I represent silences of Black Brooklyn through virtual reality, using a very specific set of sounds to optimize silence. Beginning with an audio recording and intermittently including verbal descriptions of some sites of memory, the virtual reality component has moments of silence intentionally weaved throughout. The sounds explicitly address the role of the oral tradition (or 'noise') throughout the African Diaspora, and its constant juxtaposition with silence conveys that silence accumulated throughout Brooklyn's black history is a unique and sobering one. Jumping from sound to silence mirrors how some people experience memory more forcefully than others, while some may not experience them at all. These silence are vastly different from the "dumb silence of slumber or apathy" that invites inaction fought long and hard with noise (activism, protest music, etc).<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">167</a> This silence aids in recognizing a critical relationship with memory, a relationship just as important as the one noise has. Ultimately, hearing sound at some points and none at others encourages the user to acknowledge that some memories are imbedded so deep in silence, that they can be felt but never filled. This may be apart of oppressive silence and its resulting emotional labor of resurrecting traumatic experiences that members of Black Brooklyn faced. Or it may be apart of optional silence, where traces of Black Brooklyn have been so well silenced for the sake of survival or safety that they cannot be resurrected. But those silences are important. And as experienced by the 360 images with no sound, they remain at their respective sites of memory. This vacillation between sound and silence indicates that _Dare to Remember: A Digital Memorial of Black Brooklyn_, at large, has been different from filling the void of silence. It is not an eradication of the quietude that encourages us to memorialize Black Brooklyn. Though filling silences can help identify where these silences existed prior to their work and cultivate important black voices, the virtual reality component suspends that silence as memory of Black Brooklyn itself. Silence is an "integral part of the fullness of expression rather than secondary to spoken words."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">168</a> So _Dare to Remember: A Digital Memorial of Black Brooklyn_ does "not argue for silence rather than speech, but for their organic relationship which preserves the former's dignity and generative potency."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">169</a> Common speech cannot exist without it and neither can the memory of [[Black Brooklyn.|Conclusion]]

<h4>A Labor of Love</h4> "If a house burns down, its gone, but the place--the picture of it--stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there in the world... even if I don't think it, even if I die the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there... Because even though it's all over--over and done with--it's going to always be there waiting for you." - Toni Morrison<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">170</a> _Dare to Remember_ has been a tremendous project to weave together the intricacies of silence, memory, and digital commemoration of Black Brooklyn. Astounded by the rapid changes in my lived environment, I felt disoriented with every trip I made to Brooklyn from boarding high school and soon after, from college. Buildings come down, buildings go up, people come, people go. But it was more specific than that. Buildings that housed black people came down, buildings that only white people could afford went up. White people come. Black people go. And yet, this was not a matter of Black Brooklyn's recent confrontation with gentrification. There was a pattern of black displacement within a history of perpetually shifting ethnic enclaves. In quest of the logic behind this and to preserve blackness in the borough that raised me, I began to peel back layers of Brooklyn. I found black people and silence at each and every one. Brooklyn remains bereft of cultural landmarks and literature that chronicle black people's cultural, residential, familial, and occupational ties to the borough since slavery.<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">171</a> This physical exclusion to the urban landscape produces a feeling that Black Brooklyn does not have storehouses of social memories within the landscape that "frame the lives of many people and often outlast many lifetimes."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">172</a> This is evident from the uneven commemoration of Black Brooklyn in literature and the material environment. Not seeing blackness reflected in these manifestations of history is silence. And the fundamental components of each digital methodology--census data, archived photos, and sites of memory--when juxtaposed with public works, are silent. So very literally, _Dare to Remember: A Digital Memorial of Black Brooklyn_ uses the same silence history-makers have hidden or omitted to resurrect memory, and to combat the limited view in historical production that has left Black Brooklyn unaccounted for. If we continue to frame silence as negligible, we minimize the multifaceted relationship black people have had with silence. And so I visualize and personify that silence through digital media since "digitality [serves as a] productive lens on black life: movement/ production/ displacement."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">173</a> I opt into the digital sphere, where physical landmarks and literature are not the only ways to memorialize presence or engender social memory. In developing _Dare to Remember_ as a creative project, I encourage others to opt in to understand Black Brooklyn's silence. Geographic Information System (GIS) maps create a comprehensive visual account of the black population from slavery to present day, introducing wonder amongst participants. The photo series provides an intergenerational lens of Brooklyn's black community through sites of memory. Virtual reality embodies this experience with silence and attaches them to sites of memory in Black Brooklyn, challenging participants to engage in, as referenced in _Memory, Narrative, Identity_, the detective work of memory. While focusing on silence, _Dare to Remember: A Digital Memorial of Black Brooklyn_ does not disprove the hurtful effects of silence, but rather extends the common narrative and places attention on the functionality of silence for Brooklyn's black community. This digital memorial defies the one-sided ownership of history--a history that Pierre Nora in _Realms of Memory_ declares "belongs to everyone and to no one."<a href="http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/" title="note" target="_blank" onclick="window.open('http://blackbrooklyn.org/endnotes/','Essay Notes','location=no,scrollbars=yes,menubar=no,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,status=yes,dependent=yes,width=250,height=500,left=1000,top=40');return false;">174</a> Where lives are suppressed and negotiated, where histories are stolen, altered, and rewritten, we take ownership of our silence through its identification as our collective and individual memory. In an attempt to create a redemptive future and reconstruct our power from the historically defined to definers, I declare that memory, these memories that belong to us, can no longer be minimized. My use of digital media and spatial studies on sites of memory expands the definition of memorialization as it pertains to black history, placing attention on the functionality of silence and its haunting nature, both past and present. This void is not simply an absence of sound and it is not contingent on the eradication of noise. So _Dare to Remember_ marvels at and relishes in silence for its effectiveness at immaterial commemoration. It acknowledges silence as a mechanism to recognize and avoid repressive noise (or repressive commemoration or livelihoods) and the perpetuity of it. By outlining repression with silence, we become privy to the privilege of sound. We fail to experience "the stabilizing persistence of place as a container of experiences that contributes so powerfully to its intrinsic memorability"[176] For we who have achieved nothing, work-- Though our labor has been used to build Brooklyn from the slaves who labored on the agricultural fields of Kings County, to the black domestics who served white Brooklyn communities, to the West Indian small businesses that cultivated neighborhoods for immigrants like themselves, to the temporary jobs offered to assemble the Barclays Center, our names do not reflect our work. Who have not built, dream-- We moved up north or came to America with a dream of financial freedom, assimilating to America's culture of possession, though minor in relation to the "achievement" of whites. Who have forgotten all, dance-- We have worked endlessly and have had our dreams deferred, but we dance to forget our misfortunes and survive in America. They accept our rich performance history through music and dance but continue to exclude us from public discourse by limiting the space for and ownership of our creativity. We have only truly been included in silence. And dare to remember-- Our silence continues to haunt us, yet dares us to retain our history. We may never fully replace sound with our silence in order to preserve a fundamental feature of our history but we will learn to identify its recurrence in order to recollect our past.