Neighborhood History: The East
by Marina Weiss
Image source: CORE NYC
Brooklyn’s history is as rich and storied as the beautiful communities of our neighborhoods. Just around the corner from our own Greene Hill Food Co-op stood The East Educational and Cultural Center for People of African Descent, a community organization founded in 1969 to promote black self determination and community building. The East also had a Co-op, though little information is available about it online today.
The East, as it was known, was a branch of Amiri Baraka’s Congress of African People’s Party (CAP) until 1974, when it broke with CAP due to ideological differences. The East gave rise to more than 25 projects and programs including a restaurant, bookstore, performance space and, yes, a food co-op!
The East was founded by the African-American Student Association and the African-American Teachers Association in a three-story building across the street from the St. Peter Claver Roman Catholic Church. The building, which The East first leased and then purchased, still stands today, and had formerly been home to the Studio O art gallery and artists’ colony. The community came together to renovate and prepare the building, donating electrical, plumbing, carpentry and painting skills, and creating a mural on the front of the building depicting African, Caribbean and Afro-American leaders. The mural is still visible today, though the building is now shuttered.
The East provided a comprehensive range of programs and events. Notable among them were an Afro-centric school called Uhuru Sasa Shule, which means “Freedom Now School” in Swahili; an Afro-centric bookstore called Akiba Mkuu; a land cooperative project in Guyana; a restaurant; a monthly publication called Black News, which circulated in 50 cities nationwide; a weekly performance series called Black Experience in Sound featuring artists such as Betty Carter, Max Roach, the Last Poets, Pharaoh Sanders and Sun Ra Arkestra.well It was also home to The East Kitchen, which fed performers and audience members, and a Teacher Training Institute, The Evening School of Knowledge.
The East also gave rise to The Far East in Queens; The Mid East in Brownsville, Brooklyn; and the Uhuru-East Bookstore and Cultural Center in Memphis Tennessee. Former East members founded The Center for Law and Social Justice, Black Veterans for Social Justice, and Imani Day School Computer Campus.
In 1976, the East moved some of its programs, including the school, to the Sumner Avenue Armory, which it renamed the Uhuru Cultural Center — a building still standing on Marcus Garvey and Putnam Aves.
Black News, in particular, lives on in the archives of the Brooklyn Library. In 2011, the Brooklyn Public Library blog Brooklynology scanned several issues and retyped them, including the manifesto on the first page of the first issue, published in October 1969:
Black News is a new community publication. It was formed in order to encourage a new awareness and involvement among our people. We hope to attain wide circulation among all segments of the Afro-American community. It's not enough that the young militant reads Black News. Black people can't afford to have an In Crowd, who are the only ones hip on what's happening. If the Young Blood raps about Malcolm, grandma should be able to give her rap on Huey.
We're choosey about ads. If they don't satisfy Black Dignity, they don't satisfy Black News. Therefore we forward all peddlers of bleach creams, goofy dust, and wigs to the Amsterdam”*.
Our main concern is to agitate, educate, organize. If we don't do these things then we ain't doin nothin!
*(a rival African-American publication)
Brooklynology notes that, “with articles on police brutality, racist government policies, corrupt politicians, and the ‘P.O.W. Forum’ — a series on blacks in prisons — Black News did indeed live by those three words. On the last page of this first issue the editors issued a call to all students to skip school on Oct. 15, 1969 in order to protest injustices and to attend a teach-in at Prospect Park.”
Among other things, the protests demanded community control of schools, removal of police from schools, a decent living for families on welfare, and freedom for the Panther 21 and Ahmed Evans. Evans, a prominent black nationalist and activist, had opened the Afro Culture Bookshop in Cleveland, Ohio and been targeted by white police with gun violence, and convicted by an all-white jury of first degree murder in 1968.
The East closed its doors in 1986, but its legacy lives on in the International African Arts Festival, a five-day festival which began at The East and still takes place every July at the Boys and Girls High School at Commodore Barry Park in Bed-Stuy. It features a marketplace with more than 300 merchants, as well as musical and dance performances and films. Perhaps most importantly, the IAAF remains true to its roots in offering annual symposia on culture, community and struggle, assembling scholars, intellectuals and activists to address the challenges and opportunities that exist today for the people of the African diaspora.