As Black residents of Brooklyn neighborhoods like Brownsville and East New York continue to confront displacement, inequality, and questions of who has the power to shape community life, what can earlier movements for self-determination teach us about the present moment? And how can literature amplify the cause?

Inspired by the publication of Abigail Savitch-Lew’s novel Livonia Chow Mein, this conversation explores the long history of community control movements in historically Black Brooklyn neighborhoods, from the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school struggles of the late 1960s, to the culturally and politically groundbreaking organization The East in the 1970s, to today’s community land trust movement.

Organizer Mark Winston Griffith, founding Executive Director of the Brooklyn Movement Center, moderates this discussion with Savitch-Lew; Debra Ack founding member of East New York Community Land Trust; Lumumba Akinwole-Bandele, educator and cultural activist, who grew up within The East; and artist Monifa Edwards who was a student during the Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers’ strike.

Drawing from both lived experience and literary imagination, the evening brings together these organizers, educators, cultural workers, and community leaders whose work reflects generations of struggle for racial justice, local power, and neighborhood equity. Savitch-Lew’s multiracial novel, inspired in part by her own family’s history in Brownsville, serves as a springboard for a larger conversation about Brooklyn then and now: Who gets to shape a neighborhood’s future? What does self-determination look like across generations? And what can communities build for themselves in the face of systemic inequity and displacement?

Presented in connection with the current CBH exhibition, “People Making Power: Politics in Brooklyn”

_{Above image: A girl protests Ebinger’s bakery’s hiring policy; 1962-1963; BCMS_0011_0015; Rioghan Kirchner Civil Rights in Brooklyn Collection, Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History}