Setbacks and Hope as America’s Oldest Black Town Fights for Its Survival

The brick building at Madison and South 5th streets is still vacant, still boarded up, still tagged with faded gang graffiti.

For the second time in as many years, it’s been slated for a $2.5 million makeover, courtesy of the federal government, that would transform the building — once a grocery store and, later, a skating rink — into a community center for this historic town of 650 people across the Mississippi River from St. Louis.

And once again, the project has stalled, its future uncertain, amid partisan spending battles in Washington, D.C., and the looming threat of a government shutdown.

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There have been plenty of reasons for anxiety, and some signs of hope, in Brooklyn this year as community members and supporters fight to stave off the city’s demise and preserve its legacy as America’s oldest Black town.

In January, the Chicago Tribune profiled Brooklyn: Its founding in the early 1830s as a refuge for free and enslaved Black people. Its days as a thriving entertainment hub. Its eventual decline in the second half of the 20th century and the disparate group of archaeologists, urban planners, preservationists, current residents and former Brooklynites at the center of an ambitious revitalization plan.

Shortly after the story published, staff from U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin’s office contacted Brooklyn officials to offer federal help. People familiar with those discussions said they included the possible construction of a dual visitor center and museum, but excitement for the plan had been quashed a few months later when it became clear that President Donald Trump’s administration had little appetite for anything that spoke to the country’s history of racism.

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Mayor Trenton Atkins said he is not waiting around for the federal government, nor is he concerned with attempts to whitewash his hometown’s story.

“You can’t erase history,” he said. “It was here before we were, so how can you erase it? We’re going to always have our history in Brooklyn. I think they’re trying to keep our children from learning our history. But it’s up to us to step in and show them.”

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There are plenty of other needs in Brooklyn: Housing. Infrastructure repairs. Jobs and businesses so the village is less economically reliant on the adult entertainment industry, which had been booming but has retracted in recent years.

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