Place:Brooklyn, St. Clair, Illinois, United States

Watchers


NameBrooklyn
Alt namesLovejoysource: USGS, GNIS Digital Gazetteer (1994) GNIS17002011
TypeVillage
Coordinates38.657°N 90.165°W
Located inSt. Clair, Illinois, United States
source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
source: Family History Library Catalog


the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Brooklyn (popularly known as Lovejoy), is a village in St. Clair County, Illinois, United States. Located two miles north of East St. Louis, Illinois and three miles northeast of downtown St. Louis, Missouri, it is the oldest town incorporated by African Americans in the United States. Its motto is "Founded by Chance, Sustained by Courage." The mayor is Mayor Vera Banks-Glasper.

A missionary AME Church was established in the new settlement in 1836.[1] Now known as Quinn's Chapel AME, its congregation is believed to have supported the Underground Railroad and aided fugitive slaves to freedom, together with members of the Antioch Baptist Church established in 1838.

An early interracial community, it suffered from structural discrimination; transport lines were routed to bypass and isolate it rather than connecting it, and economic development projects passed over it, and indeed were set up in competition to it. In 2015, the county's state attorney Brendan Kelly described the village as a 'failed state.'

Research Tips


This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Brooklyn, Illinois. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.