Chair calls Brooklyn Public Library panel; Stacey Bell testifies

Gracias por tu testimonio.

I just got a quick lesson.

I'm not that good.

All right.

Thank you so much for everyone joining us from Puerto Rico.

With that, we'll turn it back to the libraries.

We are going to hear from Brooklyn Public Library, Stacey, Aina, Dominique, Megan, and Yonina.

And I believe this is the last library panel, and then we'll go to testimony from, I'm sure, many folks who have been here all morning from 10 a.m.

I see people who are here since 10.

So thank you so much for your patience.

Okay.

And Megan is from the Schaumburg, but it's okay.

I think she can hang out with the Brooklyn folks.

I don't know if people left, but Stacey, Aina, Dominique, Megan, and Yonina.

Do you want us to start without the full panel?

You can start, yeah.

Good afternoon.

Buenas tardes.

My name is Stacey Bell.

I am the president of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, Gene Sampson Scott Greater New York Chapter.

We just call ourselves OGS New York for short.

Libraries are more than buildings filled with books.

They are keepers of our collective memory.

Institutions like the Center for Brooklyn History preserve the evidence that connects New Yorkers today to the people who walked the Brooklyn streets 500 years ago, 100 years ago, and 50 years ago.

Without these research archives, I wouldn't know about the Pawpaw family,

a family of African and Lenape descent who had a homestead in Midwood, Brooklyn in the 1850s, or their contemporaries, the Copeland family, who lived on Union Port Road in the Bronx until they were driven away.

During the New York draft riots.

They sought refuge in Brooklyn.

They couldn't return to the Bronx because their land had been taken from them.

D-theft and displacement are not new.

I want to call another name, and this one is personal, Sam Anderson.

In 1898, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle article penned Sam as the last slave of Flatbush.

Sam was born in 1813 and was enslaved by the Lott family.

Near what we now know today is Flatbush and Cortellu.

I live in Flatbush, right near Cortellu Road.

2025, the Center for Brooklyn History centered Sam Anderson and his descendants.

Yes, there are descendants of people who were enslaved in New York City still living in New York City today.

In an exhibit appropriately called Traces.

The visitors who interacted with this exhibit saw evidence of who was enslaved here, what they built, what was taken, and how their lives are connected to ours.

We were able to follow up the exhibit with genealogy workshops.

Supporting these institutions will make sure the people who we hear before us are not erased from history a second time.

Thank you.