Black History Month: Grassroots List February 2025
By Carolyn Gevinski and Claudia Gohn
In honor of Black History Month, Grassroots Magazine would like to highlight organizations in New York City centered on local black history. Amid the new Trump Administration’s Anti-DEI push, this month’s Grassroots list is more vital than ever.
Please consider visiting or getting involved with the following organizations:
African Burial Ground, according to the National Park Service, is the oldest and largest known excavated burial ground in North America for both free and enslaved Africans. It honors the role slavery played in building New York City as we know it.
The Caribbean Cultural Center and African Diaspora Institute is an arts, culture, and education center that aims to advance cultural understanding and racial justice for African descendant communities.
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is a research library specifically devoted to the preservation and exhibition of the African Diaspora. The Center is run by The New York Public Library.
Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn aims to document the history of Weeksville, one of the largest free Black communities in pre-Civil War America, and the Historic Hunterfly Road Houses, through art and education.
The Black Women’s Studies Association, while not solely based in New York, is a professional organization committed to supporting scholars conducting research on Black women.
The Black Institute is an organization based in Brooklyn that influences public policy and discourse from the perspective of Black individuals and people of color through research, civic development, grassroots activism, and leadership training.
The New York Urban League’s mission is to “[Empower] African Americans and other underserved communities to secure a first-class education, economic self-reliance and equal respect of their civil rights through programs, services and advocacy.”
Carolyn Gevinski and Claudia Gohn are co-founders and co-editors-in-chief at Grassroots. They can be reached at carolyn@grassrootsmagazinenyc.com and claudia@grassrootsmagazinenyc.com, respectively.