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Carla L. Peterson on BLACK GOTHAM: A FAMILY HISTORY OF AFRICAN AMERICANS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEW YORK CITY

The New York Society Library
New York, NY

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Part detective tale, part social and cultural narrative, Black Gotham is Carla Peterson's riveting account of her quest to reconstruct the lives of her nineteenth-century ancestors. As she shares their stories and those of their friends, neighbors, and business associates, she illuminates the greater history of African-American elites in New York City. Black Gotham challenges many of the accepted truths about African-American history, including the assumptions that all nineteenth-century black Americans were enslaved people, that New York prior to the Civil War was a place of freedom, and that a black elite was a twentieth-century innovation.

Beginning her story in the 1820s, Peterson focuses on the pupils of the Mulberry Street School, the graduates of which went on to become eminent African-American leaders. She traces their political activities as well as their many achievements in trade, business, and the professions against the backdrop of the expansion of scientific racism, the trauma of the Civil War draft riots, and the rise of Jim Crow. Told in a vivid, fast-paced style, Black Gotham is an important account of the rarely acknowledged achievements of nineteenth-century African Americans and brings to the forefront a vital yet forgotten part of American history and culture.

Black Gotham was the winner of the Library's 2011 New York City Book Award for History.

Carla L. Peterson received her Ph.D. from Yale and is professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of "Doers of the Word": African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North, 1830-1880.