For one evening in July, the fictional world of HBO’s The Gilded Age met the historical landscape that helped shape it.
Weeksville Heritage Center hosted a special screening of the acclaimed series on July 14, followed by a conversation with historian and writer Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar exploring the history behind the show’s portrayal of Black life in 19th-century Brooklyn. While the character Peggy Scott and the Scott family are fictional, their story is rooted in the experiences of Black New Yorkers who shaped the cultural landscape of Brooklyn during a period of immense transformation.
Peggy Scott’s story takes place in Brooklyn, and Weeksville was one of many historical sources that informed the world surrounding the Scott family. Watching The Gilded Age at Weeksville Heritage Center, one of the most significant preserved sites connected to 19th-century free Black life in Brooklyn, created a meaningful connection between the fictional world on screen and the history preserved on the ground. The evening became more than a screening; it became an opportunity for fans to reflect on the resilience, ambition, and self-determination of the Black communities that helped build the borough.
Dr. Dunbar, an executive producer and lead historical consultant for the show, said including Black New Yorkers in the story was essential to portraying the complexity of the Gilded Age.
“You can’t do a show about New York without Black people in it, at any time,” she said.
The series offered an opportunity to explore a segment of Black America that is often overlooked in popular representations of the 19th century: affluent Black communities that created economic stability and cultural institutions while still confronting racism and exclusion.
“This was an opportunity to show a different segment of Black America,” Dunbar said, describing communities that “still suffered from the indignities of racism and bigotry, but had found ways to advance, at least in terms of material gain and wealth.”
That history is deeply connected to Brooklyn. Following the violence of the 1863 Draft Riots in Manhattan, many Black New Yorkers sought refuge in Brooklyn, where land was more accessible and communities began to flourish. Neighborhoods including Weeksville, Williamsburg, and what is now Downtown Brooklyn became places where Black residents established homes, schools, churches, literary societies, and mutual aid organizations that provided support in a country that offered few protections.
“Out of the kind of ashes of the trauma of the Draft Riots, and the indignities of racism, we see these communities develop across Brooklyn,” Dunbar said.
These communities represented more than places of residence; they were spaces where Black New Yorkers built networks of care, opportunity, and collective strength.
Beyond the glamour and drama of The Gilded Age, Dunbar hopes audiences consider the larger questions the series raises about wealth, inequality, modernization, and the ways societies determine who benefits from progress and who is left behind. Although the series is not a documentary, she sees historical storytelling as a way to examine the unresolved questions that connect the past to the present.
“I’d like people to walk away thinking about some of the big issues that we’re still wrestling with as a nation, issues around inequity, wealth disparity, what modernization does to society, and how it can change it in ways that are unimaginable, to the benefit of some and the detriment of others,” Dunbar said. “It sort of reminds us that America is a project, and it is still figuring itself out.”
For Dunbar, there is no shortage of stories from Black history waiting to be explored. The challenge is continuing to create space for those histories across different time periods, places, and genres so that audiences can encounter a fuller picture of the American experience.
