Sonny Carson Naming Fight May Get Ugly
Pastors and activists are descending on City Hall today, vowing to raise to new heights a fight to rename a Brooklyn street after a radical black activist, Sonny Carson.
City Council Member Charles Barron of Brooklyn, a former Black Panther, is leading the charge, lobbing threatening remarks at Speaker Christine Quinn, saying yesterday that she and others blocking the renaming are "at fault for anything that goes on during this struggle."
"People are really going to take this to another level," Mr. Barron said yesterday. Ms. Quinn "has to bear responsibility for anything that happens at City Hall."
A committee hearing last month on the proposal to rename a portion of Gates Avenue as Sonny Abubadika Carson Avenue devolved into a shoving match between City Hall guards and Carson supporters. Today's rally and planned remarks during the council's session is the first time since the tussle that the street renaming question will return to City Hall.
A spokeswoman for Ms. Quinn, Maria Alvarado, said in a statement, "The Speaker has every confidence that New Yorkers who come to City Hall to express their views will conduct themselves in an appropriate manner."
A police department spokesman refused to weigh in on the issue.
Carson's name has been pulled from a list of 51 proposed street and intersection names, including Alvin Ailey Way and Jerry Orbach Way. Normally, the council votes on all new street names at once, but the Parks Committee in this case broke with tradition, voting last month to separate Carson from the list. Ms. Quinn has said Carson's history of "anti-white" statements are divisive and his name doesn't merit placement on a street sign.
Carson, who died in 2002, led racially charged protests, including a boycott of groceries stores owned by Korean-Americans in Brooklyn after one store allegedly mistreated a black customer. He was arrested on charges related to a murder in the 1970s and was later sentenced to seven years in prison for kidnapping.
A prominent Brooklyn pastor of the House of the Lord Pentecostal Church, Reverend Herbert Daughtry, is attending the rally today and called the dispute "a clash of values and perceptions." He said the debate over the street name is gaining notoriety in the city and could resonate with black residents elsewhere.
"In communities across the country there is a feeling that whites want to dictate our lifestyle, our interests, and our values," he said. The debate over renaming a street after Carson is a small, simple matter, he said, "but it has the potential to raise all kinds of questions."
Rev. Daughtry said Carson gave voice to the anger of many in the city.
"We could not use timid language and expect to lead the people who were hurting the most," Rev. Daughtry, who also has come under fire for statements deemed anti-white and anti-Semitic, said. "Our language was language that expressed the heat in the street."
A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Tamar Jacoby, the author of "Someone Else's House: America's Unfinished Struggle for Integration," a book about race relations in New York in the 1960s, said she is troubled by the way black leaders are promoting Carson, whom she described as a thug.
"Turning Sonny Carson into a hero of the civil rights movement is a travesty," she said. "It's almost like black leaders are saying, ‘Just because white leaders don't like it, we are going to embrace it.'"
An effort to prohibit the council from voting on the bill to rename city streets without Carson's name being included failed yesterday after a state Supreme Court judge in Manhattan, Justice Leland DeGrasse, dismissed the complaint. The judge said the decision to remove Carson's name "clearly involves the exercise of discretion by a legislative body."
A deputy chief in the New York City Law Department's administrative law division, Robin Binder, said in a statement that the department is "pleased that the Court recognized that private individuals have no right to compel the City Council to adopt a law naming a street in someone's honor."
