The Legacy of a Bed-Stuy Black Utopia
The Sun Rises in the East documentary, now streaming on Amazon, unearths the story of a 1970s Brooklyn community that spurred the borough’s Black solidarity culture.
Students pose outside of the Uhuru Sasa Shule school, part of The East movement.
Credit: The Sun Rises in The East
It started with an experiment of Black residents claiming control of the public schools in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. It grew into a constellation of food co-ops, schools, jazz lounges, and arts centers anchoring the community. The movement arising in 1970s New York was called The East, named, in part, as a rebuke of Western ideals and values; instead, it centered around Pan-African cultural beliefs and practices.
Despite The East’s enormous Brooklyn presence during that time period — at its peak the community occupied a 232,000-square-foot armory building — there is little documented or on record about the collective’s existence. However, Brooklyn couple Tayo and Cynthia Gordy Giwa resuscitated The East narrative through their new documentary The Sun Rises in The East, a darling of film festivals across the globe that recently began streaming on Amazon.