On Saturday, December 10, 1966, one thousand people from Brooklyn, New York’s north-central neighborhoods gathered at P.S. 305 for the third annual Bedford-Stuyvesant Conference. They assembled in the auditorium at the invitation of the Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council (CBCC), a coalition of more than ninety community-based organizations that worked to improve conditions in predominantly Black sections of the borough. Residents faced cramped housing stock, insufficient health services, inadequate youth programming, overcrowded schools, and infrequent sanitation services. The area also suffered from increasing rates of poverty, crime, infant mortality, and unemployment. But Black areas of north-central Brooklyn, especially Bedford-Stuyvesant, were not without social capital and stable social organization. Since the 1930s and 1940s, north-central Brooklyn had strongholds of middle- and working-class Black residents, who, by the mid-1960s, had created thriving Black churches, well-organized block associations and tenant groups, and an emerging political club. The attendees at the 1966 Bedford-Stuyvesant Conference were people who spent most, if not all, of their free time in community organizations trying to make the area a more habitable place to live, work, and raise children.

By 1966, the CBCC’s hard work was finally going to be recognized in the form of financial support from the federal government. The anticipation in the crowded room was palpable as participants eagerly awaited the conference’s keynote speaker, the junior US senator from New York State, Robert F. Kennedy. Kennedy had chosen Bedford-Stuyvesant as the place in which to establish a new, systemic economic development initiative that would combat urban poverty. Kennedy’s plan for Bedford-Stuyvesant created the nation’s first federally and privately funded community development corporation (CDC). He envisioned bringing corporate and business titans, leading philanthropic foundations, city and federal politicians, and local leaders into a collective enterprise that would grow neighborhood-based businesses, create jobs for local people, and spur social rehabilitation. Community leaders were excited that this endeavor would draw from their organizing experiences and help make Bedford-Stuyvesant a safer, healthier, and more economically stable place to live.

Bedford-Stuyvesant was the epicenter of a predominantly Black section of north-central Brooklyn, the boundaries of which had remained constant since Black migration to the area increased from the 1920s through the end of the 1950s. At midcentury, the neighborhood extended north to Flushing Avenue, east to Broadway, south to Atlantic Avenue, and west to Washington Avenue.