WorkLore: Confronting Racial Bias

Taking the Initiative

If you can't find an opportunity. . . make an opportunity. Sometimes, people of color did not try to open closed doors. They opened new businesses instead.

Brooklyn has a long history of people who have harnessed local resources and their own energy as entrepreneurs to bypass bigotry and bias in the workplace. Many have created careers tailored to the specific needs of their ethnic community.

I had a store in Bed-Stuy that was very Afrocentric in the 1970s. I got African inspired textiles and imports and I would educate my customers on the artwork. Then, around the 80s, I looked up and saw everybody in a suit. So, I changed the style of the store, making the clothes more career-oriented.

Studio 14A Boutique (St. James Place)
1970’s
Courtesy of Velma Johnson

'When El Diario started, they gave me a job as a printer, here in Brooklyn. El Diario united the people here and was the best thing [that] happened in New York for the Spanish speaking people. So in approximately two years, the circulation of El Diario, [grew] to a hundred thousand.'

Newspaper Printing Room
March 14, 1958
Justo A. Marti
Courtesy of The Justo A. Marti Photographic Collection, Centro de Estudios Puertorriquenos, Hunter College, CUNY

Chart showing the changing types of occupations from 1850 to 1990 for African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians in Brooklyn

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From “Free Man of Color” by Willis Hodges, 1815 – 1890

Born free in Virginia, Willis Hodges came to New York in 1836 and settled in Williamsburgh, purchasing a lot and opening a grocery store in the village near Peck’s Slip, in 1840.

His story exemplifies the African-American work experience in Brooklyn in the mid 19th century: the types of occupations available, experience of racial discrimination, state of race relations in Williamsburgh after slavery ended in New York State (yet before national abolition), work in pre-industrial and pre-large-scale-European immigration in Brooklyn, and the status of black society at the time.