"English, the first Black woman to open a private practice in the state of New York, was known as Brooklyn's Birth Mother. She had delivered some six thousand babies, including the children of Betty Shabazz and Malcolm X. She became a philanthropist, and her patronage of the arts was perhaps best represented by her conversion of St. Casimir's into a haven for theatre, performance, and community engagement."
"In Brooklyn, there's a one-hundred-and-sixty-two-year-old building that stands at 40 Greene Avenue. English died in 2011, and the theatre shuttered. The building would undergo a restoration, in 2017, but in that intervening period the inanimate structure seemed actually dead. Scaffolding was put up, throttling the full view of the building's neglected façade, except for that gilded, periwinkle sign: "The Paul Robeson Theatre"-a gesture of reclamation, snuffed."
40 Greene Avenue in Brooklyn was St. Casimir's Catholic church before Dr. Josephine English converted it into the Paul Robeson Theatre. English, the first Black woman to open a private practice in New York, delivered about six thousand babies and supported the arts. The theatre closed after her death in 2011 and later sat behind scaffolding, its gilded 'The Paul Robeson Theatre' sign the lone remnant. Paul Robeson, born in 1898 to a father who escaped slavery, rose from Rutgers All-American football star to global celebrity and was declared an enemy of the state in 1950. Robeson's House Un-American Activities Committee testimony became a profound psychic injury in Black celebrity history.
Read at The New Yorker
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]