A Head-Scratching Account of Bedford-Stuyvesant

"It was only after World War II that Bed-Stuy became mostly black," according to Mapping the African-American Past, a project from Columbia University to bolster the New York State social studies curriculum. "This enabled the community to go to the polls in 1960 and elect Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to serve in the U.S. Congress." (See screenshot below.)

Hold on. It's a lot more complicated, as I've learned during my research for my Bedford-Stuyvesant tour.

The sad fact is that a Black majority in Central Brooklyn, including adjacent Crown Heights, did not enable voters to elect Shirley Chisholm in 1960. At that point, Central Brooklyn was glaringly gerrymandered, allowing the perpetuation of five white incumbents, who each included a slice, but hardly made the locals' interests a priority.

Rather, Chisholm was elected in 1968, and only after a lawsuit under the federal Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965, forced a reapportionment to create the new 12th Congressional District. We should see her in two murals as we walk around the neighborhood.