Bertram Baker may not be a household name, but he has his space in the annals of black history, being the first African-American elected official in Brooklyn. Notably, while Baker may have been over 140 years after famed figure Alexander Hamilton, he drew a lot from the Founding Father to blaze his own path. The New York Times has more on the story.
For Baker, the connection to Hamilton started right in his youth as a teenager on the Caribbean island of Nevis. Baker worked at a store on Main Street called the Scotch House, only 100 yards from the house where Hamilton was born. In 1948, three decades after immigrating to the United States and settling in Brooklyn, Baker was elected to the Assembly and became the second and only other Nevis-born person to serve there, right alongside Hamilton. This made him the first black person in the 200-year history of Kings County to be elected to a political office. Many people, including Letitia James, frontrunner for NY Attorney General, consider him an inspiration.
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“It was Bertram Baker who knocked down the door of opportunity so that Hakeem Jeffries and I could just sway and walk on through,” said Ms. James when she was a member of the City Council. Mr. Jeffries, then an assemblyman, now a congressman, who was also at the ceremony, said that Baker had arrived in Albany before “our legendary folks like Percy Sutton and Basil Paterson, like Charlie Rangel and David Dinkins, like Shirley Chisholm.
“Before all of them got to the New York State capital,” he continued, “there was Bertram Baker, and we’re all standing on his shoulders.” When Baker first came to New York in 1915, black people only made 1% of Brooklyn’s population, and at the time, most were aligned with the Republican party, considered the “party of Lincoln.”
However, Baker saw the tip of power changing. After becoming a citizen, he joined the Democratic club, then located on Gates Avenue in what is now Bedford-Stuyvesant. Mostly dominated by the Irish, Baker began recruiting other black people to the Democratic Party, while trying to walk a tight balance with Irish and Jewish Democratic leaders. In the 1940s, the Democratic bosses knew they needed a liaison with the black community, and Baker made the perfect nominee. “The breakthrough was at hand,” Baker recalled at the Brooklyn Historical Society in 1976. “The final barrier would be broken down.”
Source: What Brooklyn’s First Black Elected Official Learned From Alexander Hamilton
