Dear Editor:
On Friday, April 20, 2007, legal representatives of the Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, 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 that removed the properly and legally presented request of Brooklyn's Community Board 3 for the re-naming of Gates Ave. (between Classon Ave. and Marcy Ave.) to Sonny Abubadika Carson Avenue. This legal action challenges the aforementioned council members' actions as arbitrary, capricious and without precedent.
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.
Exactly 150 years ago (1857) Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Roger B. Tawney in the Dred Scott decision issued these infamous words, "Blacks have no rights that whites are bound to respect," and it is clear 150 years later that four white members of the New York City Council reaffirmed that Chief Justice Tawney's words are still true.
The council members' "capricious" cover of Mr. Carson being a "controversial" person, and Councilmember 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 (this week) 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. And on the other hand: a white community of privilege that lives above the law and can change or discard the law when it suits them.
Black Nationalist activist Sonny Abubadika Carson was a product of this condition and rose above it, not his people. Sonny was before anything else a "Black Man," an object targeted for extinction today. Therefore, the attack on the re-naming of Gates Ave. to Sonny Abubadika Carson Avenue is more than attack on person thereof, but the example of community control, racial pride and stiff resistance offered to any disrespect of our people.
It was Sonny who led the fight to rename Reid Ave. to Malcolm X, Sumner Ave. to Marcus Garvey, Fulton Street to Harriet Tubman Blvd. 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 these white City Council members and mayor override the wishes and will of our community. We will not stand for two cities, two rules of law and two City Councils which violate our fundamental Human Rights.
Thank you.
Omowale Clay,
December 12th Movement
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