The council chamber room inside Albany City Hall is a standard meeting site with podiums and chairs. But for Pursell McDowell, a member of The Brothers, the room was once an innovative protest space.
In 1967, the group brought a jar of cockroaches to that room. It was to raise awareness about the subpar living conditions in the city’s Black neighborhoods.
“We gathered as many as we could, and at that meeting, we just turned them over, and they went everywhere,” said McDowell. “And you should have seen people running and backing up and jumping and carrying on because they were not used to that, but it was OK for us.”
McDowell says demonstrations like these weren’t anything new to The Brothers. Oftentimes, he says, such acts were the only way their concerns and demands were heard.
He recalls seeing the roach infestation inside houses in the South End and Arbor Hill neighborhoods, where the practice of redlining was the most prominent.
“Everywhere you went, it was cockroaches. We visited homes with babies on the floor, and cockroaches,” said McDowell. “And I mean, terrible. It's like nobody cared.”
Brian Keough is a state archivist and PhD candidate at the University at Albany. He has researched and written extensively about The Brothers. He says the group was formed out of the care the Black men had for their Albany community — care, but also frustration.
“They were men from the community who lived in Arbor Hill, who lived in the South End, and, you know, they were young in their 20s. They were trying to get jobs, they were trying to raise a family, and they kept running into obstacles,” said Keough. “And that's really what created this group, The Brothers, trying to fix a lot of these local issues regarding housing, education, and employment.”
Leon Van Dyke was one of the founding members of The Brothers. He says many of the members were also inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s calls to grow the 1965 Civil Rights Movement.
“Throughout the country, it was forming because of that call, because it was a sign of the times. And you know, it was hard,” said Dyke. “By '66, '67 it was hard to go to any Black community and you didn't have some kind of neighborhood group who thought of themselves as being in the Civil Rights Movement.”
In Albany specifically, the group began after Dyke and other Black men faced employment discrimination at the hands of a local construction union. In the 60s, the city saw a huge boom in employment for young men as two major construction projects were being built at the same time. The local construction union was tapped to hire workers to build the Empire State Plaza and the University at Albany campus. Dyke recalls the long hours he spent waiting to get hired at Union Hall.
“We’d be the first one, they would go there at five o'clock in the morning,” said Dyke. “And always be the last one hired, if we were hired at all.”
Frustrated with the discrimination, Dyke began a one-man picket at the hall, where he would eventually be joined by other Black men and allies. He says at the height of the picketing the group would have upwards of 25 people. Dyke says the union and local leaders were initially confused.
“They didn't know what to do with us,” said Dyke. “They didn't know what was going on. ‘These guys stand up against us. Where did they come from? Who are they, communists or what?’”
The confusion, McDowell believes, came from shock that anyone would stand up to the powerful union and its connections to the Democratic machine.
“I never seen that that type of white power in the South,” said McDowell, who had moved to Albany from North Carolina. “You could actually see the power sparkling off the mayor and city leaders that was in Albany when I first come here.”
The Brothers faced a lot of retaliation for their advocacy. Part of that retaliation came from the group directly protesting the Democratic party’s tampering with Albany votes. In the'60s, the party was known to go around the city, giving $5 — roughly $50 in today’s money — to anyone who promised to vote for the Democratic candidates.
Keough, the archivist, says the other part of the retaliation came as they were protesting at a time when there were no major codified protections in place for many Black neighborhoods.
“There’s community action agencies that were created in the mid-60s in the federal program that are still active today, making communities better for people to live in, making them more hospitable, creating more opportunities, making sure there's equity in people's opportunities,” said Keough. “You know, there was none of that in 1964, '65, '66 when The Brothers started, saying, ‘Hey, we want access to jobs, education, housing, health care.’”
The Brothers’ advocacy efforts would pay off in 1967 when the city created an Albany-wide trash collection program for all houses, increasing sanitation in neighborhoods where people couldn’t previously afford their own trash removal.
As the years passed, some members went on to get that construction job they were denied, and some continued with their advocacy. McDowell says the surviving Brothers still meet from time to time, recalling their days in the group.
“We cared about people. We cared about mothers, fathers. We cared about people that was downtrodden,” said McDowell. “That was the main reason why The Brothers existed, because they cared, every one of them.”
