As part of our Black History Month commemoration, we are profiling Black Americans whose insights and accomplishments inform and guide the work LISC and the entire community development field pursue today.
Genevieve S. Brown (formerly Brooks) began life in 1937 on a 70-acre cotton farm in Anderson, SC. Her parents owned the land, which was rare in a Black community then made up mostly of sharecroppers. Statistically her family was poor, she later told an interviewer for Fordham University’s Bronx African American History Project. But she never felt that way. They produced plenty of good food to eat and her mother Birdie, an excellent seamstress, made their clothes. Her aunts and uncles all looked out for one another. They put education and faith above all else, and worshipped in the church her great-grandfather, born enslaved, had built, and where her uncle, with a divinity degree from Yale, sometimes preached.
As for the racist violence chronically visited on Black Americans in that place and time, Brown told the interviewer, “What my parents did was try to cut out a path, a road that they thought we should follow. You know, it happened, you read about it, you knew about it, but you would ask for strength from God and you keep on going.”
In the 1970s, in her adopted home in the Crotona Park East section of the South Bronx, she carved out a path of her own, initiating an odds-defying neighborhood movement that helped that devastated corner of the world rise, from literal ashes—and that became a model for the community development field.
She’d come to Manhattan as a teenager to live with an aunt and uncle and attend business school. Then, at 23, she moved to the Bronx, where she met and married Herbert Brooks; the pair soon settled in a handsome old building on Seabury Place, just a block or so from Crotona Park.
This was the mid-‘60s and the neighborhood was a stable, friendly community of working families, its main commercial corridor alive with activity. Brooks herself worked as a bookkeeper for an importer of buttons.
She watched as middle-class families left the area for newly developed coops and suburbs, leaving behind a remnant population, largely Puerto Rican and African American, with few resources. Landlords abandoned buildings. City services all but ceased. Garbage piled up in the streets. Crime became a daily harassment. Arson fires were so frequent Brooks slept with her shoes by her bedside. Ultimately demolition crews came to raze devalued buildings and cart them away like so much trash.
Instead of leaving, as she might have done, Brooks, who was widowed during this period, became an activist. First she agitated for upkeep in her building, then took on the block. She organized local kids to fill planters with evergreens and haul garbage to a spot where sanitation workers would pick it up Saturdays, rewarding her young volunteers with snacks. She helped found a city-funded day care. She served on the community board. She kept on going.
In the summer of 1974, her little group came together with a handful of other tenant, block, and church associations, people who, they all agreed, were downright desperate for better sanitation, improved safety—and especially decent housing. They called themselves the Mid-Bronx Desperadoes.
Later known as MBD Community Housing Corporation, Brooks’s group (she officially became president in 1980 after a decade of volunteer work) took on numerous revitalization and social service projects in the 1980s, before Brooks left in 1990 to become deputy Bronx borough president, the first woman to hold that key position.
But it was for MBD’s Charlotte Gardens development that Brooks first earned a national reputation as a heroine of urban revitalization.
By 1979, when a New York Times reporter visited the three-block Charlotte Street, it too was famous, the very symbol of urban decay and despair. Only one building remained—sadly, a school. Alerted by President Jimmy Carter’s highly publicized visit two years earlier, tourists regularly came to gawk at the scene, snapping pictures from the safety of their buses. “We are not animals,” one neighborhood resident told the Times reporter. “We are suffering. There is nothing to look at here. This is serious, this is people’s lives.”
In such a setting, Charlotte Gardens was an astonishment—eventually consisting of 90 owner-occupied prefab houses, each with three bedrooms, one and a half baths, and a yard enclosed by a white picket fence.
MBD worked on the project with the city’s South Bronx Development Organization, run by the hard-charging planner Ed Logue. A fledgling organization called LISC, whose modus operandi then was to raise private funds to bolster the most effective grassroots organizations in their bid to revive ailing neighborhoods, provided an early grant and loan funds. That included money to install the first two model homes. Dedicated in 1983, these models drew attention, and a waitlist of would-be South Bronx homeowners swelled.
Brooks herself interviewed and counseled the first-time homebuyers in Charlotte Gardens, Black and Latinx people, reflecting the neighborhood, whose federally subsidized homes came at an affordable price. Anita Miller, then a LISC employee, later told the Times, “We went with the Desperadoes because we decided they and Jenny Brooks deserved a gamble.”
The gamble was that an unlikely vision of suburban comfort could emerge in a place characterized by density in its heyday, desolation at its nadir. But that was part of the point, to flip the South Bronx narrative, starting on the stub of a street that made presidents (Reagan too) shake their heads in dismay.
No one understood that better than Genevieve Brooks, who wore a signature flower in her hair and whose family in South Carolina had always kept their yards and grounds beautiful and tidy even in hard times. “You should wear your own labels,” she remarked to the Fordham oral historian in 2008. “You should not wear a label someone else has given you.”