Boss of Black Brooklyn is about the Ron Howell's maternal grandfather, Bertram L. Baker. Baker was born on the Caribbean island of Nevis in 1898, immigrated to the United States in 1915. In 1948 Baker became the first black elected official in Brooklyn. In the 1940s, when Baker won his seat in the New York State Assembly, blacks made up four percent of the population of Brooklyn. Today, they make up a third of the population and there are scores of black elected officials. Some call Brooklyn the capital of the black diaspora. But, it is a capital under siege. Brooklyn today is the most talked-about locality in the United States of America. Blacks are frightened by the gentrification taking place there, and Americans of all races are fascinated by it and want to know how it became what it is.
Baker was not just the first black elected official in Brooklyn. For thirty years, from 1936 to 1966, he led the all-black American Tennis Association as its Executive Secretary, and he successfully negotiated to get Althea Gibson accepted into previously all-white tennis competitions. Althea came to the author's Bed-Stuy home right after her historic 1957 victory at Wimbledon.
In 1992, Jeffrey Gerson, now a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, wrote words that hold true today. In an article titled "Bertram L. Baker, the United Action Democratic Association, and the First Black Democratic Succession in Brooklyn, 1933-1954," Gerson wrote: "Bertram L. Baker was an extraordinary figure about whom much can be written, though very little has . . . Criticized and honored in the same breath, he was . . . widely respected by black and white political leaders as a pioneer in Brooklyn politics. It is hard to fully capture the community's admiration of and awe for Bertram Baker during his . . . decades of political stewardship in Bedford Stuyvesant."
Baker's story is not just about black politics and black organizations. It penetrate Baker's inner life and reveal themes that have significance today--black fatherhood, relations between black men and black women, faithfulness to place and ancestry. This story goes back to Bertram Baker's birth on Nevis, then a little British colony, at the end of the 19th century, and to Baker's upbringing there.