Why Riots Didn’t Happen in 2002

Errol Louis – NY Daily News

Over the last 25 years, the prime directive of Crown Heights politics has been to avoid another riot. That’s not as easy as it sounds.

For the last generation, my friends and neighbors in the diverse Brooklyn neighborhood have diligently practiced a homegrown local diplomacy in ways that often seem hokey. But it has helped keep the community from exploding like it did on those hot August days and nights in 1991.

Crown Heights has long been — and remains to this day — a place where the fires of faith burn brightly. Thousands of Jews from around the world converge on 770 Eastern Parkway to seek God, and thousands of Christians, many of them of Afro-Caribbean heritage, have built and nourished their own temples of faith and family, sinking their own deep roots in the same neighborhood.

The community’s grinding poverty, tight housing market and relative political weakness have long been aggravating factors setting neighbors on edge, steadily manufacturing social dynamite that was lying at hand, waiting to be detonated in 1991.

There’s a right and a wrong way to talk about those dark days, the innocent lives lost, bodies broken and trust shattered. I have heard every form of angry blame, willful denial and bigoted ignorance about the tragic events that took place a few blocks from my home.

What I tell the kooks and conspiracy theorists: I remember it differently. And I share other memories, good stories to stand alongside the bad.

After the riots, I remember carefully storing the phone numbers of a few of my Jewish neighbors, and giving them mine, with a plea and promise to talk as soon as we heard rumors of serious intergroup friction.

I remember trekking to Mendy’s kosher restaurant in Midtown to cover a story in which Norman Rosenbaum, whose brother Yankel Rosenbaum was stabbed to death during the riots, noshed on pastrami and corned beef with Carmel Cato, the father of 7-year-old Gavin Cato, the child whose death in a car crash ignited the unrest.

A decade after the riots, Rosenbaum and Cato became friends, and their comity and decency stood as a challenge and a rebuke to those seeking to relive or relitigate the riots.

I remember marveling that the longstanding practice of stationing an NYPD squad car in front of the Lubavitcher synagogue found a purely symbolic echo in the form of a car parked in front of the nearby First Baptist Church of Crown Heights, the area’s large and politically active Christian congregation. Not because Baptists need police protection, but to answer the argument that the Hasidim got preferential treatment from the city.

Posting cops in front of a building that nobody has threatened might seem like a waste of public resources. But the cops aren’t protecting the building; they’re guarding the peace.

I remember that exactly 11 years and a day after the 1991 riots, fate arranged a makeup exam when a black child named Tiamani Gittens, playing on Lincoln Place near Washington Ave., was struck and gravely wounded by a driver, Solomon Stern, who immediately became the target of anger from people on the street.

Unlike the 1991 debacle, the 2002 replay featured tons of black and Hasidic leaders descending on the corner and staying for hours, talking to people and squashing rumors at the source, literally putting bodies and personal credibility on the line. The only reason we all got there so quickly was the earlier exchange of phone and beeper numbers among people determined to prevent another explosion.

We owe a debt of gratitude to countless neighborhood diplomats like Chanina Sperlin — who regularly opens his home to sprawling meetings of cops, rabbis, ministers, politicians and civic leaders — as well as longtime stalwarts like Shea Hecht, Jacob Goldstein, Eli Cohen and Devorah Halberstam.

The legendary Richard Green, founder of the Crown Heights Youth Collective, has been a tireless advocate for community peace. Ditto for Amy Ellenbogen and Ife Charles of the Crown Heights Mediation Center, who invested many years patiently showing people how to channel neighborhood concerns over violence and other matters into positive directions.

And activists like my friends Mark Winston Griffith, Taharka Robinson and Kirsten Foy are consistent, principled voices demanding action on the underlying injustices that leave so many people aggravated and ready to turn on each other.

One lesson of the last 25 years is that when a lot of people take even a few small steps in the same direction, it amounts to an army on the march. Heading, we all hope, for another quarter century of peace.