CBH Talk | Elizabeth Gloucester, The Most Powerful Black Woman Lost to History

Co-presented by the Center for Brooklyn History and The Brooklyn Heights Association
Elizabeth Gloucester, was born into slavery in 1817 in Richmond, Virginia. When she died in Brooklyn Heights six decades later, the Brooklyn Eagle described her as “the wealthiest colored woman in the United States.”
Gloucester’s remarkable story, her financial success and anti-slavery activities, were chronicled this past February in The New York Times by editorial board member Brent Staples. Staples’ essay was the product of nearly two years of research which, as he writes, “rescues her from the margins by drawing on hundreds of pages of archival material - including real estate transactions, banking records and genealogical research conducted across three states.”
The Center for Brooklyn History and The Brooklyn Heights Association are proud to co-present an evening with Staples and historian Prithi Kanakamedala, whose scholarship focuses on Brooklyn Abolitionists and Brooklyn’s nineteenth century free Black communities. Kanakamedala’s upcoming book, Brooklynites: the Free Black Community that Shaped a Borough, relays Gloucester’s often overlooked narrative, detailing her abolitionist, feminist, and social justice activism and the impact she had on the borough we live in today.
Moderated by Dominique Jean-Louis, CBH’s Chief Historian, the program will also shed light on the challenge of this research and the ways that scholars and genealogists must grapple with “silences in the archives” in which lives and voices of marginalized groups are excluded from the historical record. They will bring to life the risks, dangers, and uncertainty of the Civil-War era for New York’s free Black communities, and the critical importance of lifting their stories into the light.