BK 50
TAYO GIWA & CYNTHIA GORDY GIWA
Publishers, Black-Owned Brooklyn
Jun 16, 2022
Black-Owned Brooklyn started in 2018 as a passion project blog to provide a curated guide to Brooklyn-based Black-owned brands, shops and businesses — and to tell the stories of the people behind those businesses.
In 2022, Black-Owned Brooklyn is still that and more. The site and its social media extensions have evolved into a vital borough-wide resource and place for community with more than 100,000 followers on Instagram. You’ll find stories about everything from a Flatbush-based family-owned independent cafe-bookstore to a Jamaican dumpling house to an analog photography store to cosmetic tattoo studios to a history of Fort Greene’s Afropunk festival.
“It’s a documentation of culture, history and business in Black Brooklyn,” said Cynthia Gordy Giwa, who runs the site with her husband, Tayo Giwa, from their home in Bed-Stuy. “The media narrative about Black people in Brooklyn is so often relegated to stories of loss and push-out and other things that are important to spotlight. But there’s this whole other universe of stories and experiences that we experience and see on a daily basis. We wanted to create a platform that celebrated them in a way that is joyful and authentic and beautiful.”
And passionate. The Giwas, who each have day jobs, aren’t making a dime off the site, which they update about once a week. “What we strive to be is a place where we are putting front and center the breadth of the Black diaspora in Brooklyn in a way that is intergenerational, that is connecting people,” said Tayo Giwa. “A lot of spaces sometimes can be very siloed, and we definitely want to show all that is Black Brooklyn, all the different types of people.”
A mention on Black-Owned Brooklyn can provide a bump in traffic to a profiled shop. But it takes a little something special to get profiled in the first place. “We’re storytellers, so we’re looking for a business with an interesting story that we find compelling that might be having long-standing ties to Brooklyn,” said Cynthia, who in a previous life was a journalist who covered the Obama White House.
And when they’re not working at their day jobs or updating Black- Owned Brooklyn, the couple are now also filmmakers; the two created a short documentary about Soul Summit, the long-running festival in Fort Greene Park. More recently, their “The Sun Rises in The East” tells the story of The East, a pan-African cultural organization founded in 1969 by Bed-Stuy teens and young adults. Led by educator and activist Jitu Weusi, The East embodied Black self- determination, building dozens of institutions, including its own African-centered school, food co-op, newsmagazine, record label, restaurant, clothing shop and bookstore.
Last week, the couple is threw their inaugural Juneteenth Food Festival with Weeksville Heritage Center, highlighting 20 local food vendors and a small marketplace of non-food vendors, with a focus on food across the Black diaspora.