Letters to the Editor
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
‘End of the UFT Is Talk, After A Parley in L.A.’
Your story [New York, “End of the UFT Is Talk, After A Parley in L.A.,” June 11, 2007 is wrong — and the headline was an anti-unionist’s wishful thinking. I find it interesting that both right-wing ideologues and a representative from a union caucus that just lost an election decisively would be petrified that I would visit schools in Los Angeles that are unionized, teacher-centered, and successful for students. Why would anyone fear an exploration of every option in public schools that incorporates these key characteristics? After all, we all want great schools, don’t we?
RANDI WEINGARTEN
President
United Federation of Teachers
New York, N.Y.
‘Activists Rally Around Aide Who Made Death Threat’
Much too much is being made of the so-called “threat” on the life of City Councilman Leroy Comrie from Viola Plummer, the aide to Councilman Charles Barron who, like her boss, is a self-described “black revolutionary” [New York, “Activists Rally Around Aide Who Made Death Threat,” June 11, 2007].
What Ms. Plummer and Mr. Barron are, actually, are publicity seekers who engage in racial rhetoric and antics to bring attention to themselves and their cause of black nationalism. How else to explain their advocacy of a street to be named after Sonny Carson, whose “troops” during their boycott of Korean grocers called Asians “yellow monkeys?”
We’ve heard plenty of this sound and fury from black militants in the 1960s and 1970s. Their version of Black Power always turned out to be self-destructive chicanery and directed mostly at their more successful, white and black brethren and at other minorities, who they imagined to be “interlopers” in “black” neighborhoods.
Such entrepreneurs in distressed neighborhoods and outside of them — they who refused to kowtow to the black extremists’ demands and sloganeering for reparations and separatism — simply ignored the militants. So, relax.
MICHAEL MEYERS
Executive Director
New York Civil Rights Coalition
New York, N.Y.
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