Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-century New York City by Carla L. Peterson

Jim and I have been enjoying The Gilded Age, Julian Fellowes’ soap opera of old-money New York families besieged by new money upstarts moving in across the street in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. I was most intrigued by the inclusion of an aristocratic black family in the fictional mix and wondered if such really existed or if their presence in the series were merely a twenty-first century fantasia to soften the past and create a more palatable “inclusive” show for the present. Jim assured me that there was indeed an elite black population participating in gilded age wealth. In hoping to learn more, I came across this book. Other fans of the show must have had the same idea because after I put it on reserve at the library it took more than two months to become available.

It was published in 2011. The author is an English professor at the University of Maryland. Its impetus was the author’s curiosity about her own family history. The book she produced traces the life stories of her ancestors in New York, beginning with her great-great-gandfathers at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and uses their personal story to tell a broader history of black life in the city as they create an upper class black society. The work is painstakingly researched from archives and journals, obituaries in newspaper, and private memoir. It weaves together a rich complex of professions, education, church-life, social clubs, politics.

I suspect this book was a reference for the writers of The Gilded Age as the author’s ancestors worked as pharmacists, as does the father of the black family in the television show. The daughter in the show is a journalist, and the book mentioned the names of numerous black newspapers, which she relies on for her research. The central black family in The Gilded Age lives in Brooklyn, as does the author’s family, after they move from the Five Points area of lower Manhattan. I was most surprised in the television show by the appearance in the second season of a black family living in Newport, but that’s here, too. Many black families lived permanently in Newport where they owned restaurants and hotels, but apparently some also owned vacation homes there, just as the rich white characters do in The Gilded Age.

I can’t say I read the book completely. The book spans the entire nineteenth century and I was really only interested in the final decades which she gets too only in the final chapters. And her book is a family history, meaning much of the text is narrowly focused on a just a few men and their families who are important personally but not historically. So I mined the book for what I was curious about and skimmed the rest. Still, I’m grateful to the author for filling in a gap in our common telling of black history, and in my own ignorance.