Emotions High At Council
Veto Naming Street For Racist Activist

By RICHARD STEIER

What some black City Council Members characterized as a continuation of the civil rights movement and white legislators termed a bid to honor a bigot ended with the Council May 30 rejecting an effort to name a street in memory of the late activist Sonny Carson.

ALBERT VANN: Invokes Council tradition.

In life as in death, Mr. Carson roused strong passions. He tried to intimidate white Teachers in Ocean-Hill Brownsville in the late 1960s and led a black boycott of two Korean groceries in Brooklyn in 1990. His supporters lauded him for his activism against crack in the black community during the 1980s, but he also appeared at a Council hearing in 1989 to oppose a street being named in memory of Police Officer Edward Byrne, who was assassinated on the orders of a Queens crack dealer as he guarded the home of a witness against that dealer.

Crown Heights Agitator

Mr. Carson was praised for his work with young people, but it was also suspected that he had dispatched many of the young black men who vandalized property and terrorized Jewish residents in Crown Heights in 1991 after a 7-year-old black boy was fatally struck by a Hasidic driver who lost control of his car. At the time, Mr. Carson said he was "proud" of them for their lawlessness, which continued even after an Australian rabbinical student was stabbed to death by a teenager in a mob seeking revenge for the death of 7-year-old Gavin Cato.

MAYOR BLOOMBERG: Carson unworthy of honor.

The incendiary qualities embodied by Mr. Carson - who once responded to a question about whether he was anti-Semitic by saying he shouldn't be pigeonholed that way when in fact he was "anti-white," prompted Mayor Bloomberg to make a rare foray into a racially controversial issue in which he was not directly involved.

Two days prior to the Council hearing, he called a proposed amendment to name part of Gates Ave. in Brooklyn after Mr. Carson perhaps "the worst idea anybody in the City Council has had. I think there's probably nobody whose name I can come up with who less should have a street named after him in this city than Sonny Carson."

Earlier Skirmish

CHARLES BARRON: Lashes out at Quinn.

Emotions on the issue had been running high since the Council's Parks and Recreation Committee six weeks earlier voted to remove the proposed renaming from a bill containing 51 other street renamings, ranging from choreographer Alvin Ailey and actor Jerry Orbach to lesser-known community leaders.

After that vote was taken, supporters of Mr. Carson tried to unfurl a banner on the Council floor and briefly scuffled with Council security personnel and NYPD officers. Council Member Charles Barron, a former Black Panther who was the most fiery proponent of the bill, defended the protesters, saying, "Sometimes you need creative tension to get a point across when you're being violated."

That theme was carried over to a press conference by supporters prior to last week's vote on the issue - this time as an amendment restoring it to the original bill by the renaming's sponsor, Brooklyn Councilman Al Vann - on the steps of City Hall.

'Put Foot on Our Necks'

Darlene Mealy, a former transit worker who is now a Brooklyn Councilwoman, declared, "I'm standing here on principle. We cannot sell our souls. Today they are trying to put a foot on our necks, and we're not going to have it."

CHRISTINE QUINN: Carson a divider.

Council Member James Sanders of Queens argued that it was hypocritical to deny Mr. Carson an honor that had been accorded to President Thomas Jefferson, whom he noted had fathered children with a teenage slave.

Inside the Council Chamber, Mr. Vann argued that the issue was "not just Sonny Carson" but a fundamental principle: that the Council had traditionally deferred to the wishes of an individual community and the Council Member sponsoring the street renaming.

"You've hit a nerve," he said to those opposed naming the street in Mr. Carson's memory. "You've harkened back to a time we've already overcome. In one way, you're voting on whether you respect the struggle of black people. In one way you're voting for your own neighborhood."

He invoked Harriet Tubman's name in urging his colleagues to take a political risk and back his amendment; another supporter argued that whites had once sought to marginalize Martin Luther King Jr.

Barron Bombastic

Council Member Barron, however, opted for invective over an appeal for support, and several times rudely brushed off admonitions by Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum that he had exceeded the time permitted to speak.

He questioned the courage of Brooklyn Council Member Letitia James - the sole black member of the Parks and Recreation Committee who had not supported the renaming - but trained most of his fire against Council Speaker Christine Quinn.

"You have divided us more than Sonny Carson ever did," Mr. Barron said, pointing his index finger at the Speaker while accusing her of secretly lining up opposition to the amendment, using her control of discretionary funding for Council districts. "What you did is despicable."

Several of her white colleagues retorted that Mr. Carson's divisive qualities overwhelmed whatever good he had accomplished in the black community and made him unworthy of a citywide honor.

'Terrorized Teachers'

Bronx Councilman G. Oliver Koppell said, "We're not voting on the civil rights movement. We're voting on whether to honor a man [with] a record of achieving ends with threatened violence. He terrorized Teachers in 1968 in Ocean-Hill Brownsville."

Brooklyn Councilman Michael C. Nelson added a personal note to that comment, saying that 37 years ago, "Sonny Carson walked into my wife's classroom and said he didn't want any white Jews teaching his children, and he also said he would carve his initials on her chest if she didn't leave."

Queens Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr. denounced Mr. Carson as "clearly a racist and a convicted criminal," referring to the jail term he served for kidnapping a man who had robbed his headquarters. Another of the robbers was murdered, but Mr. Carson was acquitted of that crime.

Quinn's Reasoning

Speaker Quinn, who was repeatedly heckled by Mr. Carson's supporters sitting in the balcony of the Council Chamber as she spoke, said she applied a basic criteria in deciding whether an individual deserved to be honored with a street renaming: that "this individual has embodied the core values of our five boroughs."

Mr. Carson, because of his divisiveness, she said, did not satisfy that standard.

"This for me is a matter of principle," Ms. Quinn concluded. "He was not an individual who sought to bring our city together."

The vote on the amendment was 25-15 against, with seven abstentions. To some extent, it was cast along racial lines: Tony Avella of Queens was the only white Council Member to support it, and Sara Gonzalez of Brooklyn was the only black or Latino member to vote against. But all seven of those who abstained were people of color.