Rejecting A Racist Bully

Amid all the noise raised in the City Council Chambers last week during the bitter battle over naming a street after Sonny Carson, it would have been impossible to hear Mr. Carson's soul creaking under the weight of some of the lofty comparisons made in his behalf.

Various City Council Members compared Mr. Carson to Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Harriet Tubman, and suggested the battle was a continuation of the civil rights struggle.

The problem, for many in the audience and a majority of the Council, was that the rhetoric bore no relation to reality. There were some parallels to Malcolm X, who also had a criminal past but became known for his fiery oratory on behalf of black people. But Malcolm's speeches, however incendiary some were, have to be placed in the context of their time: he was urging blacks to assert and defend themselves by any means necessary in an era when white racists were using lynchings to dissuade them from seeking equal rights.

It was a very different climate in New York City when Mr. Carson during the late 1960s looked to take over city public schools and remove white Teachers. It had changed even more by the early 1990s, when he led a racist boycott against two Korean grocers in Flatbush and later egged on youths who rampaged through Crown Heights even after the accidental death of a young black boy had produced the fatal stabbing of a rabbinical scholar who was chased down by a mob.

Those were not cases of standing up to white oppressors, but rather using physical force to intimidate those who were unlikely to reply in kind.

Those who laud Mr. Carson for crusading against crack when it began to infect the black community in the mid-1980s seem to forget, or are unaware of, his visit to City Hall in late 1989 to oppose the renaming of a street in Jamaica for Police Officer Edward Byrne. Mr. Byrne was not guilty of any of the crimes of brutality Mr. Carson imputed to other cops; he had been murdered on the orders of a drug dealer because he was guarding the house of a man who planned to testify against the dealer. That should have made him someone with whom Mr. Carson would feel some bond. Instead, he was so blinded by his hatred of the police that he came to City Hall to have one of his acolytes libel the dead officer.

Mayor Bloomberg, who uncharacteristically weighed in strongly on the racially-tinged controversy, Council Speaker Christine Quinn - who was vilified by Council Member Charles Barron in a moment that even by his standards was particularly ugly - and the other Council Members who balked at giving Mr. Carson a wholly unwarranted honor deserve the city's gratitude for doing the right thing.