This weekend marks the 25th anniversary of the Crown Heights Riots, three days of sporadic violence, protest, and destruction that placed Crown Heights in the international spotlight and laid bare deep, bitter divisions between the neighborhood's black and Lubavitch Jewish communities.
Gothamist spoke to people who were there—activists, journalists, police, and politicians—about their recollections of the events of August 19-21, 1991, which were sparked when a black child was killed and his cousin seriously injured by a driver in the motorcade of Lubavitcher Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. We also spoke about what happened before the riots, and where the neighborhood is today.
Each day this week, we'll be running edited excerpts of our conversations. (Read part one and part two of the series.)
This mini oral history is not an attempt to offer an authoritative or comprehensive account of what happened during those three days. That would require a book, or several books. (The Girgenti Report, commissioned by then-Governor Mario Cuomo to analyze what happened, clocks in at 616 pages—if you're interested in the chronology of events, the Daily News did a solid write-up.) Rather, these are a series of snapshots.
The people with whom we spoke offered different, at times conflicting, narratives of what happened. When their recollections about the chronology or nature of specific events significantly diverged from published accounts we've judged to be reliable, we've noted these discrepancies and linked to relevant accounts.
Gothamist: What role did individuals who were not from Crown Heights—political leaders or other Brooklyn residents—play in inciting the riots?
Errol Louis
Errol Louis is the host of Inside City Hall on NY1. He has written for the New York Sun, the Daily News, and Our Time Press. In 1991, he was living in Crown Heights, working for a nonprofit and freelancing as a journalist.
I think there's an interesting bit of fiction that has entered into the record that really should be corrected. For example, Al Sharpton gets blamed for everything involving poor race relations, and he got blamed for this. Now, he did do his part to stoke a little bit of the righteous rage that was going on after the fact. I remember him traveling to Israel to try and make a citizen's arrest of the driver, which probably wasn't helpful. But in the moment, he had nothing to do with it.
There's this unshakable belief among opponents of civil rights activism that everything would be fine if it weren't for the civil rights activists. That lie should always be contested and exploded. Believe me, there was a lot of tension there before anybody ever heard about Sharpton.
I'm sure if you talk to enough people, somebody's going to say, "Sharpton stirred everybody up and then there was a riot." It's not true.
I know people who were there, and believe me, they were from at a minimum Central Brooklyn. Between Prospect Heights, Prospect Lefferts-Gardens, Flatbush, East Flatbush, Bed-Stuy, and Brownsville—it's all kind of one big neighborhood. If anybody was in any of those half-dozen neighborhoods, I wouldn't call them "outsiders."
I would call bullshit on anybody who wanted to act as if the place was Shangri-La and it was only outside agitators who caused the problem. Let's just say I remember it differently.
Philip Gourevitch
Philip Gourevitch is an author and journalist. At the time of the riots, he was New York bureau chief of the Forward. He is a staff writer for the New Yorker.
It became very clear after not long out there that most of the rioters were not kids from Crown Heights. They were being drawn to the neighborhood by rabble rousers who glommed onto this thing, like Sonny Carson and Al Sharpton, whose role in Crown Heights was totally pernicious and exploitative.
They turned it into a story that conforms to 99 percent of racial conflicts in the United States, which is there's been a confrontation or there's been a clash between two communities and the injustice was directed at the black guy, and in fact it was a car accident like many that had never been indicted in Brooklyn in the preceding year.
It was a catastrophic tragedy and it was then set upon by people who were looking to exploit it and who left as soon as police put this thing down.
Sharpton didn't have Hitler signs over the marches he led out there, but he never denounced them, I'll tell you that. It was a strong suggestion that this was some kind of a murder by the Jews of Crown Heights and that it was apartheid. Later, he spoke at Gavin Cato's funeral about the diamond merchants of South Africa as somehow involved. He did not reproach anybody for Jew-baiting and Jew-bashing.
News report on the third day of the riots.
It was immediately obvious, and everybody, including the Lubavitchers, said so: most of these rioters were not immediate neighbors. Many Hasids had stories about how the West Indians that they lived immediately amongst were not involved in any violence against them. On the contrary, there were many stories of neighborly assistance, protection, sympathy.
When I was out there during the riot, pretty much everybody was willing to talk except for the actual rioting kids. Many people from all backgrounds in the neighborhood said, "Yeah, you know, we don't have the best relations or so but this has nothing to do with that," or, "This is nuts."
Ife Charles
Ife Charles is the Center for Court Innovation's coordinator of anti-violence programs, including the Save Our Streets programs in Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy. At the time of the riots, she was working at a hospital and living in East New York.
People came from the outside and started to escalate the situation, instead of de-escalating. It wasn't the people in community, it was people outside that were just stirring up the pot saying, "Fire, throw more kerosene on the fire!" Just wanted to see it explode.
