A Street for Du Bois
The office of the speaker of the City Council, Christine Quinn, is offering assurances that a plan to name streets in our city for prominent African Americans will move forward, and these columns certainly welcome that prospect — particularly in the case of a number of names that have already been approved at the community board level. The story yesterday by our Grace Rauh was illustrated with the pictures of three of these giants, W.E.B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, and Billie Holiday. The historian who has been nursing this campaign, Jacob Morris, has a list of approved names for streets, including two towering figures of the bar, Charles Hamilton Houston, one of the greatest of our civil rights lawyers, and Constance Baker Motley, the activist and judge who was the first African American woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court of the United States.*
Mr. Morris is concerned that the naming of streets for such individuals may have been slowed because of the controversy over the activist Sonny Carson. If that is the case, it would be a shame. The names that Mr. Morris is advancing include a number who were no less radical that Mr. Carson, but who tower over our landscape not only for their achievements but for the steady brilliance of their long struggles. W.E.B. Du Bois died in the arms of the communist party, but even those of us who have given much of our lives to the struggle against communism can revere him for the brightness of the flame that came from his pen and the length of time that it burned. Du Bois wrote himself into the American pantheon as editor of the Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and was still undertaking a major new writing project, an Encyclopedia of Africans, when he died in Ghana.
The list Mr. Morris is advancing include other controversial figures, such as Paul Robeson, but we would not let that stop the City Council from moving expeditiously. One of our most enjoyable pastimes is pointing out to our children the statues and street names of the giants who lived here and whose deeds can inspire a new generation. The west end of the very street in which our editorial rooms are situated, Chambers Street, is named for Frederick Douglass, who, after a harrowing flight from bondage in Maryland, landed there on a day in early September of 1838 that deserves to be remembered and talked about by children thirsting for knowledge of how America, and New York, handed up its giants. The more street names, statues, and buildings to be dedicated to such figures, the richer our city will be.
* Meredith v. Fair, which won James Meredith's right to enter the University of Mississippi.
