The celebrate Black History Month and the 220th birthday at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, we are looking at the obstacles and opportunities that Black people encountered at the Brooklyn Navy Yard from the end of the Civil War through the Yard’s closure a century later. The program will examine the long history of African-Americans in the maritime trades, their systematic exclusion from the uniformed ranks of the US Navy in the Jim Crow era, and the new opportunities that emerged during World War II. We will look at profiles of trailblazers, innovators, and activists who worked and served there, and how the Yard became an important to Black economic and cultural life in Brooklyn. This virtual program follows up where we left off with last year’s “An Unfree Fleet,” which looked at the Yard’s connections to the institution of slavery.
- WATCH An Unfree Fleet: Slavery and the Brooklyn Navy Yard
- African-American Maritime Heritage – PortSide NewYork
- The Monitor’s Crew – Monitor Center
- Brooklyn Navy Yard – John Sharp, Genealogy Trails
- The Brooklyn Navy Yard: Civil Servants Building Warships – John Stobo, Columbia University
- Phyllis Mae Dailey, the Navy’s first African-American nurse
- Robert Hammond oral history (Center for Brooklyn History)
- Clark J. Simmons oral history (National Park Service)
- Bolster, Jeffrey W., Black Jacks (Archive.org)
- Harrod, Frederick S., Manning the New Navy (Archive.org)
- Hodges, Graham Russell, Root and Branch (Archive.org)
- Peterson, Carla L., Black Gotham
- Stillwell, Paul, The Golden Thirteen (Archive.org)
