Activists are rallying around a City Council aide who made a death threat against a council member, saying Speaker Christine Quinn’s denunciation of the threat and her probe into whether the aide legally can be fired is diverting attention from the real crisis at City Hall: rampant abuse of “white power.”

Viola Plummer, the chief of staff to Council Member Charles Barron, is standing behind her promise to keep Council Member Leroy Comrie from becoming the president of Queens even “if it takes an assassination.” Mr. Comrie is considered a probable candidate for the position.

“My intent is to destroy, assassinate Leroy Comrie’s political career in this city,” Ms. Plummer said yesterday outside City Hall, flanked by more than 100 supporters. “And to the black electorate in Queens: We got to take care of business.”

Mr. Comrie abstained from supporting a proposal to rename a Brooklyn street after a black activist, Sonny Carson, drawing the ire of Ms. Plummer. The proposal failed in the council but won the support of 14 members of the Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus and one white council member, Tony Avella.

Ms. Quinn is consulting with lawyers to determine what action, if any, the council can take against Ms. Plummer. The speaker opposed the plan to name a street after Carson, who died in 2002 and declared himself to be “anti-white.”

“The Council takes any threat made against one of its members extremely seriously, and we are currently reviewing what options we may have in response to Ms. Plummer’s comments,” a spokesman for Ms. Quinn, Anthony Hogrebe, wrote in an e-mail.

Mr. Barron said yesterday that the threat was “totally bogus.”

“Tell Comrie to look out, the 70-year-old grandmother of 10 is coming to get him,” he said, referring to Ms. Plummer. Moments later, Ms. Plummer called herself “a revolutionary.”