Mayor Bloomberg yesterday denounced a bid to rename several blocks in Brooklyn after racist black activist Sonny Carson as probably “the worst idea anybody in the City Council has had.”
In his first public comments on the matter, Bloomberg said, “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.”
Brooklyn Councilman Al Vann introduced a bill earlier this year that would rename four blocks of Gates Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant after Carson.
But Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D-Manhattan), who opposed the move, maneuvered to have Carson’s name stricken from a routine street-naming bill that would have changed the names of 51 other streets.
Quinn deemed Carson, who died in 2002 at the age of 66, as “anti-white” and said he doesn’t deserve governmental recognition.
In 1990, Carson led a boycott campaign against Korean-owned delis in Brooklyn’s black neighborhoods, marching with signs that read, “Don’t shop with people who don’t look like us.”
“In the future,” Carson said at the time, “there’ll be funerals, not boycotts.”
A year later, he hailed the Crown Heights lynch mob that killed Hasidic scholar Yankel Rosenbaum, saying he was “very proud” of what had happened. Accused of anti-Semitism, he replied, “I’m anti-white – don’t limit my anti’s to one group of people.”
Quinn’s move to block the street renaming sparked a racially tinged battle in the council, with several black lawmakers accusing the white council speaker and white legislators of imposing their will on the black community.
Black lawmakers charged Quinn with having a double standard, because she had earlier pushed through a street-naming bill for Al Jolson, the vaudeville performer considered racist for his use of blackface and “mammy” routines.
The Jolson bill had gotten nowhere under the two prior speakers until Quinn came into office. Bloomberg signed that bill into law last December.
The Carson brouhaha will be reignited tomorrow when Vann, who is black, pushes for a vote on the council floor.
Asked yesterday about Bloomberg’s comments, Vann responded diplomatically.
“The mayor is entitled to his opinion, but the community has other ideas, and I’ll go with my community,” Vann said.
He has routinely said the street-name change was borne out of community request.
“I intend to offer an amendment, which is what my community expects me to do,” Vann said.
Councilman Charles Barron, another Brooklyn Democrat, was more caustic in his response and suggested others less deserving than Carson have Big Apple streets named after them.
“Tell the mayor he needs to look around the city and see Thomas Jefferson a slave-holding pedophile, and Al Jolson, who he signed off on.”
Barron added: “Sonny Carson, a Korean War veteran, can’t be worse than a slave holder who raped a teenager. The mayor is being very selective. This is white power at its worst.”
About the time the mayor was speaking, Barron was conducting a renaming ceremony on a refurbished park in Brooklyn on Linden Boulevard.
Some 100-plus people showed up for the ceremony – not sanctioned by City Hall – where a sign was put up declaring it “Sonny Abubadika Carson Park.”