Black activists to racists: 'Street naming WILL happen'

On May 30, the New York City Council defeated a proposal to rename a street in Brooklyn in honor of a well-known Black Nationalist activist, Sonny Carson. The proposal sought to replace the name Gates Avenue with Sonny Abubadika Carson Avenue. Carson passed away in December 2002 following two heart attacks.

New York City Hall May 30 press conference demands street renaming for Sonny Carson. Photo: Johnnie Stevens

The City Council vote split along racial lines. Twenty-four out of the 25 councilpeople who voted against the street renaming were white; out of the 15 votes for the street renaming, 14 were people of color and, of the seven abstentions, all were Black.

Carson was a founding member of the Brooklyn-based December 12^th Movement which, since its inception in the late 1980s, has defended self-determination of Black people and other nationally oppressed peoples in the U.S. and around the world. Carson helped to initiate Black Men Against Crack, a community group fighting against the government-instigated drug epidemic.

A 1974 film, “The Education of Sonny Carson,” was based on the activist’s life growing up in the predominantly Black community of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, where police brutality remains rampant today.

When Carson was alive, the racist mainstream media was forever demonizing him for being “anti-white”—a diversion from the fact that the Black community was and is still denied any real political or economic power due to the repressive measures of the white-dominated status quo.

Nana Soul from The Ghetto Chronicles interviewed Black New York City Councilperson Charles Barron, who told her: “The vote today to deny Sonny Carson’s name was a slap in the face to the entire Black community and a blatant display of the abuse of white power at its worst. The vote was split down the middle and it was whites versus people of color. I hold Christine Quinn—Speaker of the Council—responsible for being more divisive than Sonny Carson ever could have been in his life. Fortunately for us, we have some Black men and women that will put his name up anyhow. So Sonny’s name will go up and we will have a ceremony because we have a right to self-determination for the Black nation. Black Power!”

Since the defeat of the street-naming proposal, death threats against Barron have appeared on a Web site “frequented by police officers,” according to New York One News. The Web site contains a message board called “NYPD rant” on which two posts called for Barron to be shot in the head. The same site has posted messages calling for the execution of political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.

An April 23 press statement of the December 12 Movement reads in part: “On April 20, 2007, legal representatives of the Brooklyn Bedford-Stuyvesant Community went into court under an Article 78, seeking and being granted a stay of action by the City Council on ‘Introduction 556-A,’ which seeks to name approximately 53 streets in the five boroughs, until New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Council members Alan Gerson, Dennis Gallagher and Joseph Addabbo of the Parks and Recreation Committee ‘show cause’ for their unprecedented action which removed the properly and legally presented request of Brooklyn’s Community Board 3 for the renaming of Gates Avenue to Sonny Abubadika Carson Avenue.

“It is the view of the December 12th

Movement that the actions of the City Council members named above were fundamentally racist and an attempt to deny the Black Community equal protection under the law on the one hand and our right to community control on the other. ...

“The Council members’ ‘capricious’ cover of Mr. Carson being a ‘controversial’ person, and Council member Gerson’s statement that “we own all the streets” cannot hide that there continues to be two New Yorks—one Black, one white.

“A Black community without rights; a community where over 50 percent of Black men are unemployed, over 50 percent of young Blacks drop out of high school and a young unarmed Black man can get shot 50 times the night before his wedding. A community where just yesterday we find that the Imus racist rant was carried on by white police in the police precincts against Black women; a Black community where we are being priced out of existence, under the unwritten New York City housing policy that Blacks live where whites don’t want to live, until they decide to live there again—witness Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant.

“It was Sonny who led the fight to rename Reid Avenue to Malcolm X, Sumner Avenue to Marcus Garvey, Fulton Street to Harriet Tubman Boulevard and Elementary School P.S. 262 to El Haqq Malik Shabazz School. It was Sonny who recognized that we lived in a community with many streets and cultural institutions named after slave owners and criminals who passed white approval. We do not plan on letting this racist action of this white City Council and mayor override the wishes and will of our community.”

Go to www.workers.org/ww/2003/carson0109.php to read the Carson obituary.

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