Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Historical Studies of Urban America)
Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Historical Studies of Urban America) Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Historical Studies of Urban America) OTHER ARTICLES From its founding in the late 1800s through the 1950s, Brownsville, a section of eastern Brooklyn, was a white, predominantly Jewish, working-class neighborhood. The famous New York district nurtured the aspirations of thousands of upwardly mobile Americans while the infamous gangsters of Murder, Incorporated controlled its streets. But during the 1960s, Brownsville was stigmatized as a black and Latino ghetto, a neighborhood with one of the city's highest crime rates. Home to the largest concentration of public housing units in the city, Brownsville came to be viewed as emblematic of urban decline. And yet, at the same time, the neighborhood still supported a wide variety of grass-roots movements for social change.The story of these two different...