NEW YORK, NY.- At 10 Claver Place, sandwiched between a 24-hour parking garage and a beige apartment building, stands a three-story complex that was once the epicenter of Pan-Africanism in Brooklyn.

The brick building, on the edge of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights, is now home to 10 apartments, but starting in 1969, it was the headquarters of The East, an organization and meeting place where Black people from all walks of life could learn about the African diaspora and its history and culture, beyond slavery.

The building’s first floor once housed an iconic jazz club where Sun Ra and Gil Scott-Heron played into the wee hours of the morning. Above it, there were workshops on politics and activism for adults, and a state-certified school for children of all ages known as Uhuru Sasa Shule, Swahili for “Freedom Now School.”

Although its doors closed in 1985, for 16 years The East served as an incubator, spurring the political awakening and cultural enlightenment of its hundreds of members and giving them a sense of belonging and pride.

A forthcoming documentary called “The Sun Rises in The East” traces the organization’s inception and its impact and has renewed interest in it among Brooklynites.

The documentary, which features about a dozen of the group’s former members, will premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Feb. 24.

The film was made by the husband-and-wife duo Tayo and Cynthia Giwa, who also run Black-Owned Brooklyn, an Instagram account and website that highlights Black businesses and document enclaves of Black culture around the borough.

The couple’s curiosity about The East was sparked while they were drafting an Instagram post highlighting the International African Arts Festival, a four-day celebration of African culture featuring performances, spoken-word events and a marketplace. Cynthia Giwa soon learned that the festival had originally sprung out of The East.

“We found snippets of information, kind of like these passing references to something that sounded really remarkable, really robust and really revolutionary,” Giwa said.

The festival, which began as a fundraiser and graduation celebration for the first class of students in 1971, is the sole entity of The East still in existence.

The Giwas said they made the documentary because they wanted to honor the organization’s history and illustrate the magnitude of young Black people deciding what liberation from systemic racism would look like, then creating it.

“The history’s not hidden from the people who lived it, but they don’t see it anywhere,” Cynthia Giwa said. “They don’t see it being spoken about or recorded or celebrated.”

Black people made up almost 75% of Bedford-Stuyvesant’s population in 2000, according to a report from the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University. By 2019, that number had dropped to about 45%.

The Giwas said that even as gentrification continues to reshape the racial makeup of the area, it is not uncommon to walk down a block in the neighborhood and spot red, black and green flags wrapped around trees.

They hope their film shows people how Brooklyn neighborhoods were — and still are — brimming with Black pride.

“Why is central Brooklyn so Black and cool? The East is very much a part of that story,” Tayo Giwa said.

After opening its jazz club in the winter of 1969, The East expanded, bringing “a bit of Africa” to Brooklyn, as The New York Times wrote in 1975. Members opened several brick-and-mortar businesses along Fulton Street.

Where a pediatric clinic now stands, a clothing store that sold fashionable dashikis and other African regalia once lived. What is now a boarded-up building held a food co-op and a bookstore.

The film chronicles how the New York City teachers’ strike of 1968 and the Black Freedom movement of the 1960s and 1970s played key roles in the founding of The East, and it explores how the organization went on to shape Black culture in Brooklyn.

“The East was a microcosm of Black nationhood,” Martha Bright, a former member, said in an interview. “We had culture, language, African aesthetics, politics. We had everything.”

Bright was a student activist who joined The East as a volunteer reporter for its monthly newspaper, Black News.

“We wrote about every kind of current event, community news, profiles, and a lot about politics,” she said.




The East emerged against the backdrop of the Black Freedom movement, a catchall term some historians use to describe the overlapping period in which the modern-day Civil Rights movement and the Black Power movement took place.

During this time, local and national organizations with a range of ideologies materialized across the country to amplify the message of Black self-determination, which emphasized the importance of Black people relying on one another in every aspect of life.

“The East was a manifestation of what was going on in every major Black community in the United States,” said Jeffrey Ogbar, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut.

“People are saying, ‘We need resources. We need funding. We need control of what we teach our children. We need control of all these things,’” he said.

In the Ocean Hill-Brownsville area of Brooklyn, parents and activists, many of whom were founding members of The East, were lobbying for the same control over public school curricula that community school boards in white neighborhoods had, said Kwasi Konadu, a historian who appears in the film.

“What they were arguing for wasn’t new or radical,” said Konadu, who chronicled the period in his book “A View from The East: Black Cultural Nationalism and Education in New York City.” “It was only that it wasn’t occurring in their neighborhoods and in their communities.”

In the spring of 1967, the city granted the community control over schools in their district as part of an experiment to decentralize the schools and give parents a greater say in their children’s education.

Tensions between the community school board in Ocean Hill-Brownsville and Albert Shanker, the leader of the United Federation of Teachers, came to a head after the board fired 19 primarily white and Jewish teachers and administrators, Konadu said.

The firings ultimately led to a citywide strike in the autumn of 1968, when thousands of teachers stopped working and public schools were shut down for almost two months.

The desire to offer a more culturally affirming education led to the opening of the Uhuru Sasa Shule school, The East’s beating heart, in the spring of 1970.

While accounts of how many students attended the school vary, Konadu said that at the height of its popularity, in 1978, more than 400 students were enrolled.

In addition to learning the standard curriculum, the students were taught African cosmology, African languages and African value systems. Girls took African dance classes, while boys took martial arts. Lessons were not always confined to the classroom, either.

“One of my lessons was to go see James Brown at the Apollo,” said Fela Barclift, who taught at the school during the first two years it was open. “The lesson wasn’t just about seeing James Brown, but learning about Black culture and Harlem, a very important place in the Black experience in the United States.”

Kweli Campbell, the eldest daughter of Jitu Weusi, the teacher and activist who was a founder of The East and died in 2013, said she was not aware at the time that other Black children in her neighborhood were not receiving the same education that she was.

For her, learning about everything from an “African perspective” was expected.

“We didn’t start with the Pledge of Allegiance,” she said. “We had songs that were about Black positivity.”

When it was time to protest the latest social injustice, Campbell said she and her classmates were on the front lines, “which was a totally different experience from the other people that I grew up with.”

Former members of The East said the organization’s ethos — one of self-pride and self-determination — was still alive and thriving today.

Barclift, for example, was unsatisfied with the lack of Black representation in the day care centers she was considering for her daughter. So in 1981, she opened Little Sun People, a private preschool that aims to inject Black pride into its students.

The approach to teaching at the school is inspired by her time at The East, she said.

“I want these children to know that you fit everywhere; you belong,” she said. “You know you are grounded in a history and in a culture that is not only great, but it’s magnificent.”

In another sign of The East’s lasting influence, a plaza in Clinton Hill was renamed for Weusi in July. The renaming took place the same weekend that the International African Arts Festival celebrated its 50th year bringing Black people from across the world together.

“Through the protests and other avenues of fighting injustice,” Cynthia Giwa said, “they didn’t also forget to create something beautiful.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.