Bed-Stuy now has a Sonny Carson Ave.

Militant chants of “Black power!” resonated on a street corner in the Brooklyn, N.Y., community of Bedford-Stuyvesant on June 16 as 200 people, young and old, the vast majority of them Black, gathered for a historic street-renaming ceremony. Even a thunderstorm could not dampen the spirits of the rain-drenched crowd when the “Gates Ave.” sign at two corners of Nostrand Avenue were replaced with plastic strips with the inscription: “Sonny Abubadika Carson Avenue.”

This event’s literature cited the close proximity of “Juneteenth,” which commemorates June 19, 1865, the day when slaves in Texas found out that they had been legally freed by the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863. People of African descent in the U.S. celebrate Juneteenth all over the country and Bedford-Stuyvesant was no exception.

WW photos: Monica Moorehead

Streets are named and renamed every day, usually without a lot of fanfare, especially in a large metropolitan city. This particular street naming, however, came about through a struggle that showed once again that racism is alive and well in New York.

On May 30, a resolution raised by Black City Councilmember Al Vann on behalf of the thousands of people who signed petitions supporting the street-renaming campaign for late Black Nationalist community activist Sonny Carson was defeated. Twenty-four out of the 25 white council members, including the Speaker of the Council, Christine Quinn, voted against the street renaming. A majority of the Black council members voted for the resolution with some abstaining.

Councilmember Charles Barron and others stated at May 30 and June 10 news conferences and during many interviews that the defeat of this resolution was a racist slap in the face. Barron argued that the white-dominated capitalist establishment has no right to declare who should or should not be declared heroes in the Black community. Black people, Barron said, should have the right to self-determination.

So in defiance of the city council vote, the December 12 Movement (D12) and its allies and supporters carried out their own renaming ceremony to honor the legacy of Carson, who died in 2002.

Speakers included Al Vann, Barron and Viola Plummer, Barron’s chief of staff and also a longtime leader of the D12 Movement. They all spoke about how the Carson development was an important example of why Black people must continue to fight for all forms of empowerment.

Recent racist editorials in the New York Post and New York Daily News attacked both Barron and Plummer for their consistent anti-imperialist stances and for defending Carson’s legacy. Carson had been an outspoken critic of police brutality and organized a struggle to keep drugs out of the community.

Some of those who attended the Carson street renaming ceremony as a show of anti-racist solidarity were International Action Center volunteers and a multinational delegation from Workers World Party.