By Aníse Meccouri

Deep in the heart of Brooklyn, New York, historic Bedford-Stuyvesant is the last frontier for brownstone living. Surrounded by Crown Heights, Park Slope, Cobble Hill, and Brownsville, the neighborhood's houses are registered historic spots, and its streets are lined with trees and lampposts.

Day-to-day life in the neighborhood is charming, with little bodegas owned by people of many ethnicities, and kids who play on their leafy blocks, watched by neighborhood veterans sitting on stoops. Historic churches are on virtually every corner. The family mentality that sustains the community is intensely present on Sunday mornings, when everyone becomes each other's responsibility.

Bed-Stuy is the largest black community in New York City, and the second largest in the United States. The neighborhood is essentially a microcosm of African American life, with cultural ties to the South, and an enduring concern for independence and ownership.

Many of the neighborhood's older residents either moved to Bed-Stuy in the early 1900s, or their parents did. Southern Christian values of having good manners and being a helpful neighbor characterize Bed-Stuy. They have also thwarted disunity and chaos in the community for decades.

It is a strong social structure not sponsored by organizations or politics. Bed-Stuy is truly the neighborhood of the people who live there.

This culture, on top of the prime real estate, is attractive to outsiders, and the threat of "urban renewal" is at the doorstep of Bed-Stuy. Residents of the neighborhood have bitterly called this process "negro removal." There is a sudden interest in the neighborhood by not only young middle-class African Americans, but also by privileged white people who are being priced out of Park Slope and Cobble Hill. The neighborhood of Bed-Stuy is affordable because the median household income is $23,741, and it is beginning to look available for purchase.

This is both historically familiar and strangely new. If you try to research the neighborhood of Bed-Stuy in the archives of, say, The New York Times, you are likely to find more violent crime reports than anything else. Black Americans and crime are linked in the white American mind, not only because of the racist lineage between these two cultural groups, but also because of how the media caters to white expectation. When I characterize people as "white," I refer to a cultural orientation, not a color. "White expectation" is an entitlement to superiority and privilege. Whites have not felt welcome in Bed-Stuy for at least the last 80 years—until now.

Bed-Stuy was originally farmland that Dutch immigrants purchased from the Canarsee Native Americans. The Dutch divided the land into two settlements that would eventually be known as Stuyvesant Heights—an upper middle class neighborhood—and Bedford, a poorer counterpart lagging in development, which remained farmland until 1883, when the Brooklyn Bridge was completed.

By the 1920s, Bed-Stuy's population was on a steady incline, exceeding 45,000. By the 1940s, 65,000 African Americans had settled in Bed-Stuy, one of the few places in America where they could buy real estate.

White opposition to integration brought efforts to prevent blacks from buying property, with language like "high-quality" and "desirable," and attempts to influence banks' loan decisions. A popular argument was that black families, being uneducated, would bring property values down and destroy the character of a neighborhood. Another used by white organizations, like the Midtown Civic League in the 1930s, was the flaunting of their mission to improve "conditions in our section and stabilize real estate values."

When these arguments failed logistically, the white people of Stuyvesant Heights tried to find an "ideal community for colored people" in less-accessible Brooklyn locations. No one succeeded in actually removing black families from the neighborhood: they were homeowners, and not easily moved.

African American residential areas were pushing the boundaries of Stuyvesant Heights, and the white middle class became infuriated and moved out. This may have been the best thing for Bed-Stuy, as it was the groundwork for the development of the largest African American community in the city, a cultural asset that American society at large has yet to appreciate.

Just as the birth of the United States was painful and bloody, the birth of an African American community in a country still struggling to acknowledge its own racist tendencies is just as much of a war. S. Eric Blackwell, a professor of urban studies at Long Island University in Brooklyn, affirms that "unfortunately, violence is a part of black inner-city culture. …I hate to say this, but we are almost…bred to be volatile."

Bed-Stuy, upon becoming a predominantly African American neighborhood, has not seen the economic stability and public funding of other New York City boroughs. While New York as a whole has seen a decline in criminal activity, Bed-Stuy cannot boast the same numbers. Because Bed-Stuy has been economically depressed for so long, when there is a boom in the country, the neighborhood remains unaffected. If there is a crash, the neighborhood loses funds promised by Civic Leagues and non-profit organizations.

There has been real tension on the streets for the last 60 years, and it has broken out a few times in the form of race riots, crack epidemics, and gang warfare. In the 1960s, the 250-member Fulton (Street) Merchants Organization launched a campaign against "sadistic hoodlums who evidently are robbing and beating merchants with increasing frequency." The slogan for the campaign was, "The Life You Save May Be Your Own!" The police designated parts of Bed-Stuy "hazard precincts." But that is all the police seemed to do, as the campaign was launched in response to a lack of police presence.

Many programs have been launched to try to counter criminal activity in Bed-Stuy. In 1970, the Brooklyn Model Cities program recruited 25 young men with minor arrest records, and without high school diplomas, to be trained as policemen and patrol the streets. Most of these kids were Puerto Rican or black. Like many other development programs, it denied them higher education through lack of encouragement or information, and it kept young black men oriented toward violence.

Throughout the '70s, violent crime increased in the neighborhood: serial rapes, child murders, shoot-outs in streets populated by families. By the '80s, much of this crime was dismissed as blacks training themselves to be violent through hip-hop music.

Professor Blackwell counters this idea: "Part of us is expressed through rap music." Bakari Kitwana, author of The Hip Hop Generation, attributes the violence and lawless mentality to a lack of cultural resources, as well as the generational divide between older African Americans with Southern values, and their children, who grew up in a city free but unequal, lacking cultural resources.

Much like jazz when it first emerged in the African American community, parents in Bed-Stuy did not immediately accept hip-hop culture. It is, as was the blues in the early 1900s, deeply concerned with accurately reflecting black life in America, a portrait at times violent and disheartening. As long as hip hop served as a venue for reflection in the black community, self-affirmation and cultural validity were not needed from other sources. It became a self-sustaining information system for a community denied information by those in authority. Hip hop said to the community, "We know ourselves. We see ourselves." This was an invaluable step toward socioeconomic development.

African Americans were not the only people who sought out Bed-Stuy for residence. From the '60s through the '80s, the neighborhood saw an influx of Koreans, Italians, Persians, and Puerto Ricans. Because they were all considered "minorities" no matter where they lived, these groups considered Bed-Stuy a place that would suffice.

Next came an entrepreneurial movement: Korean grocery stores, Italian delis, and Puerto Rican-owned corner bodegas. New minorities were accused of messing up the already-struggling local economy and confusing the cultural identity of the neighborhood. Persians arrived after the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and Asians as refugees from South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam.

In the '80s, African Americans boycotted Korean groceries, chanting outside, "Close 'em down, pass 'em by, let 'em die, Koreans out of Bed-Stuy!" A general xenophobia set in. Newcomers had successfully opened businesses and generated income for themselves, while the long-standing black community did not. Economists say the boycott campaign, and others like it, were essentially self-defeating, because people who open businesses in the neighborhood revive the economy.

In many instances, the conflict created a cultural interchange necessary for revival. With the benefit of hindsight, this forced mingling helped to shape a neighborhood ready to accept others. A renewed community pride and self-value was established.

The notion of unity was introduced through intercultural exchange, not through homogeneous grief and dissatisfaction. Beginning as early as the 1960s, a process began that countered racial strife and economic disparities. Organizations formed such as the Magnolia Tree Earth Center, which sought to clean up sidewalks and instill pride in home and business owners. Others were aimed at reorganizing block associations, so residents could find a collective voice for their groups of interest. Walk down the street today, and most residents can say a few phrases in Spanish and Korean. This cannot be said of neighborhoods like the Upper East Side in Manhattan, which has fended off integration for decades.

In the 1990s, when the overall crime rate of Bed-Stuy dropped dramatically, it appeared that the neighborhood was going through a renaissance. Its picturesque tree-lined blocks and magnificent brownstone relics attracted investors—and whites—who thought they saw potential: for profit.

The brownstone houses—real-estate gold—were originally huge, single-family, three- to five-story homes. The brownstone is a symbol of prosperity and stability in New York City and has been for the last 150 years. Brownstones of the Upper West Side and Greenwich Village, originally middle-class housing, now price typically over five million dollars.

Bed-Stuy is currently seen as affordable and secret, which is causing a frenzy for real-estate companies and private investors alike. Old-time residents are confronted daily by mail, phone calls, and solicitors who come to the doorstep with briefcases full of cash, offering to buy their homes immediately. It is a manipulation tactic for residents who struggle to make ends meet, and it causes unrest. People are told again, "This is not an ideal community for colored people, and you do not deserve this neighborhood."

It is not only white investors who want to capitalize on Bed-Stuy's historic charm, but also whites who wish to become residents. Current homeowners observe their abandoned buildings and homes being renovated by outside agencies, and the hipster kids and young couples spilling over from Cobble Hill and Park Slope.

Some people are confused as to why whites would want to live in Bed-Stuy, even though the real estate is prime. The amenities and conveniences that the white middle-class is so accustomed to are simply not readily available in Bed-Stuy: the New York Times, organic milk, regular trash pick-up, and cute cafés. Suspicion toward the new white residents is markedly different from suspicion among Bed-Stuy's existing residents toward each other. Such existing residents are there because they had to be: they were pushed into a "ghetto," virtually ignored by the city. Any regeneration of the neighborhood was due to their own hard work and perseverance. White people are the only residents, historically, who have had the privilege to choose Bed-Stuy, and it certainly wasn't chosen back when the neighborhood earned its peace through the race riots and gun warfare of the '70s and '80s.

Another common concern is that white people will purchase property in groups, and section off what they own to the exclusion of their black neighbors. They will implant Upper West Side culture in Bed-Stuy, creating businesses and public spaces that cater to them, and to no one else.

Lloyd Porter, co-owner of Bread Stuy, the only coffee shop in Bed-Stuy, accents the concern about "those who don't integrate, and interfere with the glue of the community." The situation is all-too familiar in New York City. Another resident, who wished to remain anonymous, said, "White people have this interesting thinking that if they see something they like, they'll get it; it's available for purchase."

Not all white residents are treated with this kind of suspicion. Another rapidly-growing demographic in Bed-Stuy is interracial couples with children.

This blurs race relations in the community. There are children on the block who represent a new generation of Bed-Stuy residents, unifying neighbors of all ethnicities; increasingly, everyone on the block assumes some responsibility for the children.

These couples are also usually middle-class and educated, and instead of demanding amenities, they embrace the entrepreneurial spirit of the community: open cafés, children's clothing stores, sit-down restaurants, and small health food stores. Older residents are commonly glad to see the integration of families who live in Bed-Stuy, because it is the kind of unity they have been waiting for all their lives.

These interracial couples and children serve as a constant reminder that people can live together peacefully and that there is a safe kind of development that the residents of Bed-Stuy can achieve without corrupt outside sponsorship. Bed-Stuy is gradually becoming an emblem of unity in diversity.