CBH Talk | Black Brooklyn’s Fight for Community Control: From Ocean Hill-Brownsville to "Livonia Chow Mein"

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}  

Participants

Debra Ack is a founding member of the East New York Community Land Trust, a community organization working to stop displacement in their neighborhood. A life-long Brooklynite and 30-year resident of East New York, her work with the Community Land Trust has included advocating to end tax lien sales and pushing the city to address decades of sanitation and environmental justice issues for The Jewel Streets. She believes in empowering residents to lead their own community-planning efforts in collectively determining how land, buildings, and resources should be used.

Lumumba Akinwole-Bandele is a father, husband, educator and organizer based in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Born into the renowned EAST family organization, Lumumba reflects the principles of that organization and lives in its legacy. Currently, Lumumba is the interim executive director of Community United for Police Reform. As a member and organizer with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement NY chapter, Mr. Akinwole-Bandele helped establish its campaign to counter police abuse and misconduct. He also co-founded the world-renowned Black August Hip Hop Project. Black August raises awareness and support for political prisoners in the United States. Lumumba currently serves as an adjunct lecturer teaching Community Organizing at CUNY School of Professional Studies and he serves as board member at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute. 

Monifa Edwards is a Reiki Master, Jeweler, Poet & Lecturer who was born & raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.  She credits her foundational experiences in Ocean Hill-Brownsville during the infamous teacher strikes of 1968/69, as the basis of her phenomenal life.  She is married to percussionist, Bashiri Johnson with whom she shares a son, Jelani Jah Johnson.

Abigail Savitch-Lew is a writer of fiction and nonfiction and an American of Jewish and Chinese (Ashkenazi and Toisanese) descent. She has a BA in literary arts from Brown University and an MFA in fiction from Rutgers University-Newark. She is the author of the novel Livonia Chow Mein, and her short stories have been published in The Round, Post Road, The Best Teen Writing of 2010, and The Apprentice Writer. Previously, she was a staff reporter for City Limits, an Asian American Writers’ Workshop Margins Fellow, and an adjunct professor of creative writing at Rutgers. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the artist Emmanuel Knight, her sister-in-law, and their cat.   

Mark Winston Griffith is the Co-Executive Director of Free Speech TV, a 24/7 television news and commentary network, and was the co-host and co-producer of the NPR limited series podcast, School Colors, which examined race, class and power in American Cities and schools.

From 2011 to 2022, Mark was the founding Executive Director of the Brooklyn Movement Center, a Black community self-determination organization. He was the founding Executive Editor of Brooklyn Deep, a community-based citizen journalism platform for which he won the 2022 David Prize. He is a co-founder of Central Brooklyn Food Coop and in the early nineties he co-founded the Central Brooklyn Federal Credit Union, which was at the time the largest Black financial cooperative of its kind.

Mark currently teaches economic development at Pratt Institute and has taught urban reporting at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, and community organizing at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. He currently sits on the board of the news site The City, the Black literary journal Callaloo, and writes on culture and politics for the Amsterdam News.

Mark is Jamaican-American and a life-long Crown Heights resident