As part of Creative Time’s exhibition “Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn,” a collaboration with Weeksville Heritage Center, Creative Time Reports is featuring essays related to the history of African-American struggles for self-determination in Brooklyn.

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts: Freed But Not Free

The critically acclaimed author of Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, meditates on the limits to freedom imposed by a legacy of institutionalized racism.

Greg Tate: Tempus Fugit in the People’s Republic of BK

The writer and musician Greg Tate evokes a bygone time and place he calls “Original Brooklyn: the radically Black BK of haute culture and avant-cult leaders.”