Brooklyn, Illinois, sits directly across from St. Louis, Missouri, on the east bank of the Mississippi River. Brooklyn, a small commuter town with nearly six hundred residents, the majority of whom are Black, boasts the town motto “Founded by Chance, Sustained by Courage.” Local oral histories claim that in 1829, eleven Black families led by Priscilla “Mother” Baltimore, a free Black woman, left Missouri and crossed the mighty Mississippi into Illinois. The wild river served as the state border between Missouri, a slave state, and Illinois, a free state. Some members were fleeing from their captors and some had already secured freedom through manumission, a legal process enslaved persons used to obtain freedom. Once on the free soil of Illinois, the group settled in a secluded wooded area near the river in what scholars and local historians call a “freedom village.” Notably, Brooklyn’s location, discrete yet with optimal proximity to the state border, allowed for an effective safe haven for runaway Blacks on the Underground Railroad — a complex and vast network of routes and people that secretly helped enslaved people escape the American South. Over the next forty years, the town developed into an organized “biracial pseudo” town with spatial, social, economic, and political infrastructures that Blacks were actively helping to create. As Black property ownership increased in Brooklyn, so did the Black collective power. By 1873, Brooklyn became the first Black incorporated village in the United States, which cemented its legal standing and was recognized by the state of Illinois. In other words, Brooklyn took the next daring step in self-determination and decided to be seen.
I learned about Brooklyn, nearly two centuries after its founding, in my last year as a graduate architecture student at Washington University in St. Louis in 2014. A teacher pointed me towards the small town after I expressed interest in conceiving a spatial practice rooted in my identity as a Black woman. My education rarely addressed architectural thought beyond the European canons and the spatial techniques often used to threaten and perpetuate risks in Black and brown communities. Indeed, historical disenfranchisement reflected in spatial practices was a powerful strategy that needed to be acted against. A few examples of such bias are segratory practices such as state-level-initiated “white flight” movements across the United States. Or an industry that privileges the production of form-driven structures only meant for the elite. It was clear to me that architecture has a hand in creating spaces that do not serve Blacks. However, if architecture could be biased against Blacks, then it could be reversed and used to benefit Blacks as well. As a Black student, struggling to understand my purpose in the architecture world, where whiteness was privileged, the need to define and determine my perception of space felt imperative. My intention became to seek new spatial practices that could benefit Black communities, via Black spaces.