The history of Brownsville is that of poverty and crime, but also communities determined to help themselves. In 1930, Brownsville hosted the largest Jewish community in the United States. By the 1960s, its population changed, becoming predominently African American and Puerto Rican. Yet, according to a review of Wendell Pritchett's book Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto in Journal of Social History by Joe W. Trotter, the underlying conditions faced by these communities and their responses are similar: Pritchett does not make the point explicitly, but Brownsville, Brooklyn is organized around the complicated interplay of "structure" and "agency" in the lives of African Americans and Jews. While African Americans would face the most entrenched and implacable forms of racial and class discrimination, Jews and African Americans gained employment in low wage and largely nonunionized jobs in the industrial workforce (particularly the garment industry); occupied tenements and rental structures rather than single family homes; and lived in the most unhealthy part of the city's environment. Like African Americans, Jews also confronted barriers to their movement out of Brownsville into other areas, and were largely excluded from teaching positions in the public schools, until the onset of World War I and the 1920s. Moreover, Brownsville's Jewish community expressed increasing concern with juvenile delinquency (particularly youth gangs) and adult crime, including the activities of syndicates like the so-called "Murder, Inc" (p. 44). As African Americans and Puerto Ricans gained ascendancy during the post-World War II years, outside perceptions of the community as a socially and culturally "inferior" and isolated slum/ghetto intensified. ...the [Jewish] community founded a variety of synagogues (many of them storefronts), women's societies, and civic, education, social welfare, labor, and political organizations: the Hebrew Ladies Day Nursery, the Hebrew Educational Society, and the Brownsville Labor Forum (later the United Hebrew Trades union), to name only a few... Although African Americans did not build the broad range of institutions that characterized the experiences of their Jewish counterparts, they nonetheless developed a substantial infrastructure of churches, social service, and civil rights organizations. Certainly, racism plays a large hand in the current policing strategy of Brownsville. But I also wonder how differently the police would react if the youth gangs that worried the Jewish community decades ago had had access to guns. Would random people be frisked for not using their keys to enter unlocked buildings? Would elected officials tolerate this abuse of civil rights for as long as they have these days? We don't have to know the history of Brownsville to be outraged over the rate of crime and the civil liberties violations that infringe on the lives of the people who lives. Yet as a Jewish person, knowing how much we have in common - and how differently we were/are treated - makes it stand out more to me. There may have been no "good old days" in Brownsville, but current police tactics certainly don't help lead to better ones in the future. |
