Boss of Black Brooklyn is a gift from the island of Nevis to Brooklyn and the rest of America. It is the story of the man, Bertram L. Baker, who in 1915 emigrated from Nevis and in 1948 became Brooklyn’s first black elected official. Brooklyn today has scores of black elected officials and it is known as the capital of the Black Diaspora. When Baker was serving in the New York State Assembly, which he did for two decades, he continually paid tribute to another Nevisian who had served in the New York Assembly before him. That was Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. We learn a lot more about Nevis in this book. We learn about life on Nevis in the late 1800s and early 1900s; we learn about issues of fatherhood and motherhood there and then; and we learn about the sensitive issues of race and color in the old colonial Caribbean. The reason that the author, Ron Howell, knows so much about all of this, is that Bertram Baker was his maternal grandfather. Ron makes Nevis’ old Main Street come alive. In was on Main Street, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, that Bertram Baker’s maternal ancestors, the de Grasse family, owned the Scotch House retail store. The Scotch House was located a literal stone’s throw from the old stone house where Alexander Hamilton was born in 1757. That house still stands and helps make the remarkable history of Charlestown, Nevis’ capital, come alive to a visitor. In walking along Main Street, one can hear voices from the distant past, like the ones who speak in the opening chapters of Boss of Black Brooklyn.
Nevis continued to be a factor in Bertram Baker’s life in Brooklyn. His father, the Rev. Alfred A. B. B. Baker, started two Wesleyan Methodist Churches that exist to this day, more than a century later. One, Ebenezer, is in Brooklyn and the other, Beulah, is in Manhattan. The worshipers at those churches are still mostly Caribbean immigrants and their offspring. In the years before his death, we learn in Boss of Black Brooklyn, that Bertram Baker traveled to Nevis to recapture his roots. He was present in 1983 for the ceremonies marking the establishment of St. Kitts and Nevis as an independent nation, and no longer a colony of Great Britain, as was the case when Baker was born and raised in Nevis. Of course, Boss of Black Brooklyn is largely about all of the great and historic accomplishments of Bertram Baker during his decades in political power in New York. He authored one of the first laws in the United States barring racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. He opened up previously all white tennis tournaments to black tennis players. This he did in his capacity as the Executive Secretary of the American Tennis Association. He established leagues for the black boys of Bedford Stuyvesant to play baseball in the 1950s and 1960s. When he died in 1985, he took a bit of Nevis’ history with him.
We are proud of Bertram Baker and we are proud of his grandson Ron Howell who authored Boss of Black Brooklyn. Ron was born in Brooklyn. But in the late 1990s, affirming his grandfather’s roots on Nevis, Ron became a citizen of St. Kitts and Nevis. He now holds dual citizenship – with our nation and with the one to which his grandfather Bertram Baker pledged allegiance in 1924 when he became a U.S. citizen.