Lenape territory. Dutch colonial New Amsterdam. The first enslaved Africans. The names were erased. The labor remains in the soil.

The land now known as Bed-Stuy is Lenape territory. By 1626, the Dutch West India Company had brought the first enslaved Africans to New Amsterdam. Some of the earliest free Black landowners in the Americas lived nearby in a settlement the Dutch called the Land of the Blacks. Brooklyn's farmland was worked by enslaved people through this entire period.

Kings County had more enslaved people than any other county in the north. Freedom was gradual for everyone except the ones waiting.

The British consolidated slavery in New York. Black New Yorkers fought on both sides of the Revolutionary War seeking freedom. The Gradual Emancipation Act of 1799 freed no one immediately, binding children born to enslaved mothers to decades more of servitude. Freedom was gradual for everyone except the ones waiting.

New York abolished slavery in 1827. Black Brooklyn grew. Weeksville was built on purpose. The neighborhood we know began to take shape.

Weeksville, a free Black community founded in 1838 just east of this corridor, became an anchor of Black self-determination. The Great Migration brought Black families from the South into Brooklyn's changing neighborhoods.

By the 1920s, Bed-Stuy was becoming one of the most significant Black communities in the country. The neighborhood wasn't always here. People built it on purpose.

Bed-Stuy produced artists, activists, athletes. The Billie Holiday Theatre. Hip hop. Four hundred years of people refusing to leave.

The Billie Holiday Theatre opened on Fulton Street in 1972, anchoring Black arts through decades of disinvestment.

Malcolm X organized in this borough. Through redlining, urban renewal, the crack epidemic, and gentrification, Black residents have fought to remain - and we have. This corridor is the result of 400 years of people refusing to leave.