For Valentine’s Day, a Love Letter to Joan Maynard, Activist and Artist

In the 1960s, Joan Maynard, along with local preservationists like James Hurley, Patricia Johnson and Dewey Harley, was an instrumental part of resurrecting the history of Weeksville through fundraising, education, and community participation. While her celebrated legacy of advocacy for Weeksville’s community and history is well-earned, through the newly-processed Jeffrey Gerson Brooklyn politics research collection at the Center for Brooklyn History, we can learn more about Maynard’s childhood, her development as an artist, and how these experiences shaped her legacy into what it is today. 

The Gerson collection, recently processed by archivist Alice Griffin, reflects decades of research by Jeffrey Gerson, a scholar at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, where he teaches in the Department of Political Science. He wrote his Ph.D dissertation on ethnic and racial political succession in Brooklyn, and served as a scholar-in-residence for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. While researching his dissertation, Gerson interviewed a number of notable figures in Brooklyn politics and activism, including Joan Maynard. 

In her September 19^th, 1989 conversation with Gerson, Maynard is wonderfully candid about her family life growing up in various neighborhoods across the borough of Brooklyn, and how her upbringing shaped her worldview. Born in 1928 in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn (“we were the second Black family on the block!”), Maynard also remembers being one of the only Black students at Holy Rosary School, and navigating the social realities of being different. After her family moved to Stuyvesant Heights, Joan relates witnessing the phenomenon of “blockbusting,” blending her recollections as a young person with the sophisticated political awareness of a seasoned activist. “There was a lot of housing going up on Long Island,” she shares, “and they needed people to move fast to cover their investments...if you have a whole lot of houses to sell, you gotta get people to buy it. Who are those people? The prime people are people that are afraid.” She then relates how Black families like hers were sold the newly vacated houses “for an enormous amount of money.” Fully in free-wheeling conversational mode, Joan here slips in a book recommendation from novelist Paule Marshall for Gerson. “Did you ever read Brownstone, Brown Girls? (sic) So you get some sense of that.” 

Joan also shares in this interview her experience of attending Bishop McDonnell high school with intersecting identities as one of the only Black pupils, and having a visible disability. “I had a curvature of the spine, which I had from polio from a few years ago,” she explains, and years later, laughs as she recalls the “horrified” looks some of the nuns gave her when she got on the school elevator. Maynard had gotten permission to use the elevator for the year she was placed in a cast to treat the issue. Implicit in this memory is how Maynard’s family background of advocacy and fighting spirit resulted in this permission, generations before the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) legally mandated such accommodations.

This political upbringing is a major part of her conversation with Gerson. She shares how her uncle on her mother’s side, who was from the Caribbean island of Grenada, used to take her to meetings of a Brooklyn chapter of the United Negro Improvement Association as a little girl. The organization made it a point to empower her and the other children present. “All the little kids had to sit in the front row,” she remembers, “and [UNIA meeting leaders] would tell them ‘you children here are descendants of Africa! Africa is a rich country! You are supposed to carry yourself in a proper way and uphold the race!’ We took it seriously...kids, little kids don’t have anything in their heads, you gotta put some solid stuff in their heads.” Even though Joan was just nine or ten years old at the time, those meetings made an impression that never left her. “To me,” she insists, “that was the beginning of any sort of political...being a political animal.” It was serendipitous, then, that the Unity Democratic Club, a political organization she would join as an adult with many of the other individuals whose interviews can be found in the Gerson collection, was later founded in a former UNIA building on 1199 Bergen Street.

But Joan was not just passionate about politics, she married her political awareness with a deep need to create art. When she was 12 or 13, and heard that a group of Harlem-based artists, including Charles White and Elizabeth Catlett, had founded an art school in Harlem, the George Washington Carver School, “I begged my parents half to death.” They finally relented and allowed Joan to travel from Brooklyn to Harlem to take classes, agreeing only after acclaimed Black artist Ernest Crichlow agreed to “come home with me once a week and deliver me to my mother and father, who’d be waiting at the subway.” 

In fact, it was Maynard’s experience getting to know the artists at the George Washington Carver School, and watching them surveilled and punished during the Red Scare, that led her to become more heavily involved in politics. “My consciousness was somewhat raised then, and particularly at the Carver School,” she reflects. “These were people with brilliant minds who cared about justice,” but they were “hounded and harassed in all kinds of ways...because if you were to talk about economics and how world trade worked and who really benefited from keeping people in a degraded state, the minute you said that, you were a Communist.” For Joan, this was the spark that put the political fight in her. “I was aware that grave injustices were happening, especially against people who were saying things I believed in very much,” and she thought to herself, “I gotta belong to something that’s gonna do some good around here.” Later, Joan Maynard would join the Unity Democratic Club, founded in 1960 by Shirley Chisholm. 

Today, the Weeksville Heritage Center that Maynard helped to found in 1970 has been serving history, art, and political empowerment to the people of Central Brooklyn for generations. Joan’s legacy as a community builder and activist is certain, but her childhood in Brooklyn, and where her awareness grew from, is an exciting perspective made possible by the new access to this interview in the Gerson collection. Her recollections remind us how larger forces in history, from the Red Scare to white flight to disability advocacy, shape Brooklyn residents in very personal ways. And sometimes, those Brooklynites go on to change history themselves.