Celebrating Black History Month: The story of two Brooklyn sisters who forged a family of firsts

Yahoo

13-02-2025

NEW YORK - A peaceful playground in Williamsburg bears the name of Sarah J. S. Tompkins Garnet. Two miles away, in DUMBO is a park named after Susan Smith McKinney Steward. These are not the only places which bear their names; a school in Fort Greene, and another in Prospect Heights are also named after them.
Who were these women who left such a mark on Brooklyn?
Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward was the first Black Woman to practice medicine in New York State, graduating as valedictorian and opening a prosperous office in Brooklyn.
"She's working as a teacher, and it's her own income that is paying her way through medical school," says Dominique Jean-Louis, Chief Historian at the Brooklyn Public Library's Center for Brooklyn History.
Her older sister Sarah Garnet became the first Black female principal of a New York City Public school.
"It's easy to understand how they become trailblazers in their field. And also become national and even international symbols of what Black women are capable of," Jean-Louis tells CBS News New York reporter Hannah Kliger. "It has everything to do with the special circumstances of Brooklyn's Black community, and specifically, Weeksville, that is creating such excellence."
Jean-Louis says a look at their early life can provide hints at where they took their inspiration.
They were born to Sylvanus Smith, a prosperous hog farmer in Brooklyn's Weeksville, one of the first free Black communities in the United States, founded in the 1830s.
At its peak, it was a thriving, self-sufficient Black neighborhood full of businesses, churches, and schools.
"The world they're growing up in is a world of Black uplift, right, where people are not only trying to do well for themselves, trying to achieve in a world that has obstacles that are specific to Black people, but they're also trying to uplift their neighbors," Jean-Louis explains.
Regina Robbins is tour educator at the Weeksville Heritage Center, where several original houses remain along with collections celebrating prominent residents.
"People were drawn here not merely by economic necessity, but also by a desire to be a part of a majority Black community, which was essentially unheard of in the United States at that time," she says.
Mrs. Garnet and Dr. McKinney Steward went to London in 1911 to present at the Universal Races Congress to promote interracial harmony.
Dr. McKinney Steward specialized in childhood disease, co-founded a hospital, and later in life, ventured out West with her second husband, Theophilus Gould Steward, a U.S. Army Buffalo Soldier of the first all-Black Army regiment.
Her great-granddaughter is the late actress Ellen Holly, America's first Black soap opera star who died in 2023.
"Its very special when someone recognizes your work," Holly said in a 2004 interview recognizing her contribution to the history of TV.
Both sisters were also involved in the Women's Suffrage movement and helped create the Equal Suffrage League, which worked to abolish race and gender discrimination in the late 1880s.
"Once abolition was achieved, a lot of those allies kind of went away. And you had women standing there asking, 'well, what about us? 'So women like Sarah and Susan took it upon themselves to take up the mantle for Women's Suffrage," Robbins explains.
Among the idyllic hills of Brooklyn's historic Green-wood Cemetery are two graves steps away from each other; the resting places of both sisters who desired to educate and heal their community.
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