Description: Placing Brooklyn in the context of black town development and African-American nationalism, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua examines the town's economic dependency on the industrializing city of East St. Louis. He shows how this relationship ultimately poisoned the ground for Brooklyn's self-determination, despite dedicated efforts by its black citizens to consolidate political control and build a thriving community.

Cha-Jua traces Brooklyn's transformation from a freedom village -- "Founded by Chance, Sustained by Courage" -- into a residential commuter satellite that supplied cheap labor to East St. Louis. He examines why Brooklyn remained unindustrialized while factories and industrial complexes were built in nearly all the neighboring, white-majority towns. As Brooklyn's population tilted more heavily toward single young men employed in the factories and as the city's cheaper retail businesses drew the town's consumer dollars, local businesses -- except those catering to nightlife and tawdry entertainment -- withered away.

America's First Black Town challenges scholarly findings that black political community control necessarily leads to internal unity and economic growth. Outlining dynamics that presaged the post-1960s plight of Gary (Indiana), Detroit (Michigan), and other black-dominated cities, Cha-Jua confirms that, in Brooklyn's case, black control within the community was not enough to stem the corrosive tide of what he identifies as internal colonialism.

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