Morgan Jerkins

Inside on a recent day, a man who works as a consultant helped five others certify their businesses. Another launched a campaign to run for City Council, engaging members to assist in outreach. An author presented research in a forum. The Gentlemen’s Factory brought them all together.

As one of the very few spaces in New York City catering to men of color, the Gentlemen’s Factory began as a middle ground between work and home for men who need a venue for networking and socializing.

“They’re going through a divorce, or they have mental health challenges, or they’re going on an interview but they don’t know how to ask for a salary increase,” said Jeff Lindor, the club’s founder. “There wasn’t an outlet for them to be.”

Lindor, clad in a custom-made Prince James suit designed by a Gentlemen’s Factory member, noted that members contribute to making the space their own, whether it’s the Malcolm X art above the leather sofa or the magazines near the coffee table.

Born in Petit-Goâve, Haiti, Lindor was raised in a Coney Island housing project. The son of non-English-speaking immigrants, Lindor was wedged between a wealthy, white community on one end of the neighborhood and an impoverished and predominantly black population on the other. He asked himself: Why does my community look like this? Why does blackness look like this?

The socioeconomic disparities between white and black people inspired Lindor to study urban policy at the New School, where the seed of what would become the Gentlemen’s Factory started to germinate.

While earning his master’s degree, he organized gatherings with other black men to discuss their experiences.

Their first event was a Saturday gentlemen’s brunch in Brooklyn, with a $50 entry fee. When 40 black men showed up, Lindor realized that the group might need a dedicated physical space.

Hundreds of black male New Yorkers gathered at the mixers that followed. “I had to ask myself,” Lindor said, “Is this an enterprise or a hobby?”

At the time, Lindor was working as the strategic adviser to the executive staff at the Department of Correction, in the DeBlasio administration. He resigned, spent two months developing a business model and then secured a lease. Lindor asked friends who made six figures a year if they would support him, and they invested $100,000 in the Gentlemen’s Factory.

“There are very few spaces where men of color can come together and engage in meaningful dialogue,” said Rubain Dorancy, a member who is also an attorney and an educational consultant. “At the Gentlemen’s Factory, you will find men of all ages and with varied backgrounds, engaging, supporting and uplifting each other.”

Spaces made by and for people of color are not new.

In 1826, young African-Americans gathered at 161 Duane St. to socialize and discuss the arts in a group known as the Philomathean Literary Society.

In 1892, Victoria Earle Matthews, an author and activist, created the first black women’s club in New York City, the Woman’s Loyal Union. Five years later, in 1897, she created the White Rose Mission, in uptown Manhattan, where young black girls who migrated from the South could get acclimated to city life.

Yet social spaces for people of color such as the Gentlemen’s Factory — with over 100 members and a range of event programming, from finance workshops to wellness seminars — remain extremely rare in New York.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, there were many social clubs in different communities of color, but as the decades passed, their numbers dwindled. Some clubs closed because they were operating illegally; others could not afford the expensive licenses required.

Today, Toñita’s is often called the last Puerto Rican social club in Brooklyn. Langston’s, one of the last remaining black LGBT clubs in New York City, according to its owners, needs $73,000 to stay open.

The Gentlemen’s Factory charges $150 a month for membership. Prospective members must apply and be interviewed by a committee. If a white man wanted to join, Lindor says, “We don’t discriminate. He’ll just have to know that all of the content is still going to speak about the black and brown male experience.”

In New York, the law states that any public establishment must allow full and equal access to people irrespective of race, as well as “color, religion, or national origin.” Alicia McCauley, a spokeswoman for the New York City Commission on Human Rights, said in an email, “NYC Human Rights Law protects against racial discrimination in any form, including in public accommodations such as social clubs. However, social clubs can be centered around certain experiences as long as the membership policy is not discriminatory based on race, religion, national origin or any one of the other 22 protected categories in NYC.”

Lindor’s dream is to expand into Harlem, Washington, D.C., and London, and to learn how to navigate venture capital funding. “I was privileged enough to get family and friends to donate, but when I look at my counterparts, they’re getting millions,” he said. “There need to be more spaces like this — but how are we going to fund it?”

Najla Austin, the 27-year-old founder of the forthcoming Ethels Club, has no interest in venture capital funding.

While working at tech startups, Austin kept her eyes on the women’s coworking space The Wing, which opened in 2016. She considers it to be one of the “coolest, innovative” spaces around — and wondered if there might be a possibility for black and brown people to replicate that success.

For two years, she waited to see if more spaces for people of color would pop up. When they didn’t, she said, “I’ll do it.”

Last October, Austin created an Instagram page for Ethels Club — a name honoring her grandmother. The following day, 600 people had signed up for the waitlist.

“I got tons of emails — people wanting to have an event or buy a membership. Most companies struggle with demand, and for me, it was the opposite,” Austin said.

While Austin will not disclose the amount of money she’s received in fundraising, it is enough for her to be looking at 10,000-square feet locations in Brooklyn for a proposed August 2019 opening.

She is planning to have a boutique featuring products made by people of color in the front of the club, and a members-only quarter in the back.

Membership is application-based; interested parties must support the brand mission of empowering and advancing people of color.

With regard to fees, Austin said, “There is tiered access with the hope of allowing everyone the ability to use the space as needed with a financial commitment they’re comfortable with.”

A one-year membership is required, and events will range from matchmaking to wellness to tech workshops. Her credo is “for us by us.” Austin is not looking for investors whose interests might conflict with those of people of color.

Ladin Awad was a student at the New School where she met and befriended Sienna Fekete. A few years later, the duo linked up with June Canedo; they then planned conversations about identities, privilege and the spectrum of experiences for women of color.

Each woman is from a different place in the diaspora — Ladin from Sudan, June from Brazil and South Carolina, and Sienna, a Caribbean-Canadian, from Los Angeles.

When they researched lexicons, “chroma” stood out for its meaning as an intensification of color.

“That makes sense because that’s what we’re amplifying, women of color,” Fekete said. Although there is no strict ban on white people attending their events, the trio emphasized that people of color are going to be centered.

Chroma has organized events with names like “Working Women of Color” and “Continuity: A Conference on Self-Preservation for Women of Color.” Its members recently celebrated the grand opening of their studio in the lower East Side.

At the Chroma studio, they partner with other collectives and document the conversations, which have themes such as digital archives, social media and mental health, and alcohol and drug addiction.

“We were having a candid, transparent conversation of the struggles that we go through as a collective,” Fekete said. “There is a need for a physical space.”

What these spaces share, in addition to catering to people of color, is the privilege of connections.

While they exist outside of traditional venture capital and corporate structures, pre-existing networks of families and friends were responsible for carrying the financial backing.

Tim Jack, general manager of The Gentlemen’s Factory, said, “I’ve never been a fraternity kind of person. I actually shunned them because of the elitist part of it. But this space is different.” He added that Lindor “is giving black men the opportunity to unleash in a positive way and also deal with the things that have been traumatic to us. He gives us a space to be able to talk about it and not feel rejected.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/nyregion/social-clubs-nyc-people-of-color.html" id="e522bf23-626b-3e87-a70e-5c216cc1733a">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Members access the space, in central Brooklyn, by having their fingers scanned and giving a pass code. Upon entering, they find a lounge, complete with couches, a barber chair and books on finance. The spiral staircase leads to an area with workstations.

Inside New York's Social Clubs for People of Color

And march the streets of Birmingham

And clubs and hoses, guns and jails

Aren’t good for a little child.”

So begins “Ballad of Birmingham,” a poem inspired by the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four black girls.

They were also the first words that the poet, a librarian named Dudley Randall, printed and copyrighted under the name Broadside Press in 1965.

He did it to retain his rights to the poem, which was adapted into a folk song by Jerry Moore.

Randall started the publishing house, which was based in Detroit, with his librarian’s paycheck and it swiftly became a success, producing dozens of broadsides — a printing style in which just one side of the paper is used — as part of the flowering of African-American literature, theater, music and other arts known as the Black Arts Movement.

“Black authors could not be published by white publications, white magazines, or by white publishers,” Randall said in a 1973 interview with Speakeasy Culture, a literary publication out of Central Michigan University. “We had to do it ourselves.”

Broadside Press seemed to be a natural addition to the cultural landscape of Detroit in the 1960s and ‘70s. The city was home to a sizable black middle class and several black bookstores, as well as college campuses that were beginning to teach black studies.

Though the press started with Randall working alone from his home office, the need for it grew. Within the first five years, it expanded to a staff of eight people who read submissions, created monthly newsletters and wrote news releases.

The Broadside Press provided an avenue for nearly 200 poets to be published, ranging from already established voices like Gwendolyn Brooks and Melvin B. Tolson to up-and-comers like Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez. Randall’s work also served as inspiration for contemporary writers such as Elizabeth Alexander, Rita Dove and Claudia Rankine.

Dudley Randall was born in Washington on Jan. 14, 1914, to Arthur Randall II, a minister, and Ada Randall, a schoolteacher. His grandparents, Arthur Randall and Missouri, were rare black farm owners and his grandmother was a founding member of the first black church in Macon, Georgia. His family moved to Detroit in 1920.

Randall’s first published poem appeared in The Detroit Free Press after he won a contest when he was about 13. He graduated from Eastern High School, then worked at a blast furnace unit at Ford Motor Co.'s River Rouge foundry and as a Postal Service clerk and letter carrier. He served as a supply sergeant in the South Pacific in World War II before receiving a Bachelor of Arts in English from Wayne University (now Wayne State University) and a master’s degree in library science from the University of Michigan in 1951.

It was while he was working as a librarian at the Wayne County Federated Library System that Randall started Broadside Press. He toiled during his lunch breaks and after work. The labor was overwhelming but provided little money. Print runs were usually 5,000 to start and there was often demand for more.

He would eventually be forced to slow down; in 1972 he had a heart attack that left him incapacitated for weeks.

By the time Broadside Press was sold in 1977 to the Alexander Crummell Memorial Center, a church in Detroit, it was $30,000 in debt, and had placed financial strain on Randall and his wife, Vivian. He regained ownership in the early 1980s, but in 1985, he sold the press again, this time to Hilda Vest, a poet, and her husband, Don, a businessman and activist.

He died from congestive heart failure on Aug. 5, 2000. He was 86.

Today, the press operates as Broadside Lotus Press after merging with a press founded by Naomi Long Madgett, who became Detroit’s poet laureate in 2001.

In his career, Randall published several poetry collections of his own, such as “Cities Burning” (1968), “More to Remember” (1971) and “After the Killing” (1973), and edited anthologies, such as “For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and the Death of Malcolm X” (1967) and “Black Poetry: A Supplement to Anthologies Which Exclude Black Poets” (1969). In 1981, he was named the poet laureate of Detroit.

But he was particularly proud of the work of other poets, whose voices he helped amplify.

As he said in “Broadside Memories,” a book of poems that he published in 1975: “My strongest motivations have been to get good black poets published, to produce beautiful books, help create and define the soul of black folk, and to know the joy of discovering new poets.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="ee0a3348-3a6d-4d0f-93ac-e88df405845d" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/obituaries/dudley-randall-overlooked.html">The New York Times</a>.

Overlooked No More: Dudley Randall, whose broadside press gave a voice to black poets

They were also the first words that the poet, a librarian named Dudley Randall, printed and copyrighted under the name Broadside Press in 1965.

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Morgan Jerkins

Articles written by the author

Inside New York's Social Clubs for People of Color

Overlooked No More: Dudley Randall, whose broadside press gave a voice to black poets