The Black Gotham Experience

Today, Bronx Art House (BXAH) is fondly remembering its rainy day tour with the Black Gotham Experience!

This Lower Manhattan tour and accompanying exhibit opened with a question met with silence. The "gravity of loss" in which visitors had trouble thinking of references to the black experience in the early Dutch New Amsterdam is telling. Visitors were pushed to critically consider how historical narratives are told and actively re-imagine more complicated, inclusive past experiences to which they are deferentially connected. They were led on an “empathy-driven exercise” that memorializes traditionally unknown black figures as integral actors in New York's origin story. The space is more than a site of interpretation; it's an assertive act of restorative justice.

- Amanda Guzman

Author attended the Sarah's Fire Walking Tour, led by Black Gotham founder Kamau Ware, as part of a Cultural Innovative Advocacy fellowship at the Caribbean Cultural Center (CCCADI) in May 2018.

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