CROWN HEIGHTS — Lately, oral historian and Crown Heights resident Zaheer Ali has noticed a pattern in stories written about his neighborhood: a lot of them begin with the riots there 25 years ago, using the conflict as a jumping off point for “triumphant narratives of renewal.”
“You read these articles and it’s like ‘We’ve come a long way since the ‘90s. This isn’t the Crown Heights of the ‘90s,'” he said.
And while a lot has changed since August 1991, Ali, the Brooklyn Historical Society’s oral historian, knows the story of the area since the three-day-long riots isn’t as simple as that.
To create a more full picture of how the neighborhood has transformed — or not — since 1991, Ali, the BHS and several neighborhood groups are partnering to create “Voices of Crown Heights,” a multi-year oral history project that aims to “listen to the unheard,” Ali said, to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the conflict this summer.
To make it happen, staff at BHS will interview dozens of residents in the area over two years, train community members to take oral histories themselves and create “listening stations” throughout the neighborhood to allow people to hear the recorded stories.
The project is building off of work BHS did after the riots, in 1993 and 1994, creating oral histories with Jewish, black and Caribbean residents about their lives then; a small, edited sampling of those conversations are available on the BHS project site and embedded below.
Listening to those older stories, it became clear to Ali that issues important to residents in the area haven’t changed all that much.
“Narrators [in ‘93 and ‘94] talk about policing, they talk about the challenge of getting affordable housing, they talk about getting access to quality goods and services. We’re still dealing with that in Crown Heights,” he said.
Mark Winston Griffith, executive director of the Brooklyn Movement Center, one of the groups partnering with BHS on “Voices,” lived through the 1991 conflict and sees the project as an opportunity to “draw a line between what happened decades ago and what’s happening now” — namely, gentrification.
“All the different issues that were bubbling to the surface during the — whatever you want to call them, the riots, the uprising — issues like fair housing and police accountability, economic development… as well as the broader issues of race and class and ethnicity … We’re just really trying to mine that as much as possible,” he said.
Though “Voices” will continue well after the riots’ anniversary in August, the BHS, Brooklyn Movement Center and the Weeksville Heritage Center — also conducting their own oral history on the subject — will host a public program during that month to discuss the issues explored in the interviews with a panel discussion hosted by NY1’s Errol Louis.
But before that can happen, Ali and the BHS will begin listening and recording the stories of Crown Heights residents this spring, aiming to hear from all kinds of people in the area, but especially those most affected by changes in the last 25 years.
“When a neighborhood is undergoing significant transformation or change, or some people call it renewal … one of the first things to go, even before the people get displaced, are their stories,” he said. “One of our hopes is that, with this project, we can at least help the ways that people can claim the spaces of their neighborhoods through storytelling.”
For more information about Voices of Crown Heights, visit the Brooklyn Historical Society’s project site or email oralhistory@brooklynhistory.org. Photo credit: Alicia Atterberry/Crown Heights in Color.
