Stacey Patton, author of the powerful memoir That Mean Old Yesterday, wrote a concise New York Times article about what she perceives as the failures of the Montclair, New Jersey Historical Society to preserve the truths of the Black past, from slavery to the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s to current problems of school tracking along racial lines and gentrification. She focuses on Howe House, and what she considers the wrong decision to move the 220 year old building, the home of freed Montclair slave John Howe, to situate it, insultingly enough, next to the house of John’s former master.

Writer Amanda Insall also sent me yesterday’s New York Times article about the history of African Americans in Brooklyn. Amanda’s concern is mentioned on page two of the article. A building used as a “station” on the Underground Railroad is vulnerable to demolition as the city prepares to clear out Fulton Mall and bulldoze properties, including this historic site, to make way for more gentrification. Citizens are organizing to save this Duffield Place building and any other historic sites in Fulton Mall that the developers target.

They’re moving us, and our historic houses, to suit them, tearing down the ones that are in their way. Let’s identify “Them,” as Nathan McHall calls the forces pushing gentrification in his new novel, and push back.