Lefferts Historic House Has a New Message: New York Had Slavery, Too

Earlier than the restoration, the Lefferts home catered largely to households; youngsters might plant potatoes, harvest flax, play with reproduced artifacts and see how linen was woven. Though, greater than 20 years in the past, the museum started to acknowledge that the Leffertses owned slaves, it didn’t establish who, for example, might need stitched the high-quality linen clothes the household wore. (A replica of a person’s shirt from the early nineteenth century is in the home.)

“The perspective now,” Carrasco mentioned, talking of future reveals and customer data, “is it is a individual that was owned by the Leffertses, that lived right here in Brooklyn and who’s in all probability buried on the Flatbush African Burial Floor.”

ReImagine Lefferts and its companions, together with the Flatbush African Burial Floor Coalition and the Weeksville Heritage Heart, envision the museum as turning into a group middle as properly, internet hosting speaker panels, symposiums and conferences on neighborhood points. The initiative can also be surveying metropolis residents to ask what they wish to see inside the home, with a view towards putting in new reveals in 2024. To make the museum nonetheless welcoming to households, Monaco mentioned, the shows is not going to concentrate on oppressed folks’s struggling, however on “their legacy and the resilience of their tales.”

Shanna Sabio, who’s on the board of the burial floor coalition and an adviser to ReImagine Lefferts, mentioned an set up may ask younger guests to think about what they could have accomplished on the time to assist Isaac, an enslaved man who escaped the Lefferts farm after lower than three months, taking alongside members of the family who had been in bondage close by.

“Permitting folks to see themselves as potential brokers within the shaping of historical past,” Sabio mentioned, can “make historical past extra private.”

One other challenge adviser, George Stonefish, a Lenape elder and organizer, would love the museum to show how a lot the Dutch residents relied on Indigenous folks for sustenance. He has advised planting the so-called three sisters — corn, squash and beans — within the Lefferts backyard and alluring the general public to the museum for powwows and artisan demonstrations that spotlight Lenape tradition.