Brooklyn (popularly known as Lovejoy), is a village in St. Clair County, Illinois, United States. Located two miles north of East St. Louis, Illinois and three miles northeast of downtown St. Louis, Missouri, it is the oldest town incorporated by African Americans in the United States. Its saw is “Founded by Chance, Sustained by Courage.” The mayor is Mayor Vera Banks-Glasper.

A missionary AME Church was conventional in the new agreement in 1836. Now known as Quinn’s Chapel AME, its congregation is believed to have supported the Underground Railroad and aided fugitive slaves to freedom, together afterward members of the Antioch Baptist Church normal in 1838.

An beforehand interracial community, it suffered from structural discrimination; transport lines were routed to bypass and make unfriendly it rather than connecting it, and economic develop projects passed on zenith of it, and indeed were set in the works in competition to it. In 2015, the county’s own up attorney Brendan Kelly described the village as a ‘failed state.’

According to oral chronicles tradition, by 1829 “Mother” Priscilla Baltimore led a group of eleven families, composed of both fugitive and pardon African Americans, to make off slavery in St. Louis, Missouri. They crossed the Mississippi River to the clear state of Illinois, where they time-honored a freedom village in the American Bottoms. “Mother” Baltimore was said to have purchased her release as an adult from her master. She also bought the pardon of members of her family. Born in Kentucky, she tracked her white father to Missouri and bought her mother’s release from him. The early black families included Anderson, Sullivan, Singleton, Wilson, Cox, Wyatt, and Carper.