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 motto is "Founded by Chance, Sustained by Courage." The mayor is Mayor Vera Banks-Glasper. A missionary AME Church was established in the new settlement 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 with members of the Antioch Baptist Church established in 1838. An early interracial community, it suffered from structural discrimination; transport lines were routed to bypass and isolate it rather than connecting it, and economic development projects passed over it, and indeed were set up in competition to it. In 2015, the county's state attorney Brendan Kelly described the village as a 'failed state.' History According to oral history tradition, by 1829 "Mother" Priscilla Baltimore led a group of eleven families, composed of both fugitive and free African Americans, to flee slavery in St. Louis, Missouri. They crossed the Mississippi River to the free state of Illinois, where they established a freedom village in the American Bottoms. "Mother" Baltimore was said to have purchased her freedom as an adult from her master. She also bought the freedom of members of her family. Born in Kentucky, she tracked her white father to Missouri and bought her mother's freedom from him. The earliest black families included Anderson, Sullivan, Singleton, Wilson, Cox, Wyatt, and Carper. Miranda Yancey-Bailey, an archeologist working on a 21st-century project in Brooklyn, has found written evidence that Baltimore still lived in St. Louis in the 1830s; the first documentation of her associated with Brooklyn is from 1839. She may have been traveling between these locations for a time. Baltimore had become a Methodist preacher and participated in the religious life of the new settlement. William Paul Quinn, then a missionary of the newly formed African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), visited the settlement in 1836 and helped found the Brooklyn AME church that year. He had been assigned as a missionary that year to what was then called the Northwest, including Indiana and Ohio. Quinn was also active in planting new congregations in Kentucky and Missouri; he later became the fourth bishop of the AME