Hate crime spike in Crown Heights?

I read about the 16 year old boy getting beat up on Errol Louis' blog Savebrooklynnow. There was a link to the site crownheightsinfo.org. where the beating was reported and below it, like a week or so ago, were something like 31 comments posted. Some of them were really inflammatory and most of them were virulently hateful and racist. Reading them was disturbing. I too live on the northern side of Crown Heights and I wasn't aware that tensions were so astronomically high. I can think of several instances where I've seen Jewish kids from the neighborhood playing with everyone else in Brower Park, including one where a bunch of African American kids were patiently teaching a Hassidic boy how to play basketball. I can only hope that the posts I read on that site were the words of a more extreme, out of touch, and possibly older slice of the community.

Subject: Roger Kahn and Jackie Robinson

Here's a story I researched for a recent newsletter.

Roger Kahn and Jackie Robinson: Early Race Relations in Crown Heights

Race relations have been much the hot topic in Crown Heights in recent years. Since the riots of 1991, people often now associate Crown Heights with racial tension. Groups such as The Crown Heights Youth Collection and the Crown Heights Mediation Center have done much to address the underlying issues that fed the riots, but the stigma persists.

Given this history, it might be of interest for many to know that one of the most famous of US sports writers, Roger Kahn, author of The Boys of Summer, grew up in Crown Heights. Roger is Jewish but one of his closest friends, as discussed in his recent autobiography, Into My Own, was none other than Jackie Robinson. Robinson is famous of course for being the first African-American to play in major league baseball.

Roger became close to Jackie while covering the Dodgers where Jackie played first base. Roger was not yet a copy boy at the Herald Tribune when Jackie joined the Dodgers in 1947. But in 1952 he took over Dodger coverage for the Trib and had the privilege of spending many long hours on the road with Jackie. He heard many tales of the incredible drubbing that Jackie took from both fans and players as he integrated US baseball.

In one memorable incident Roger recounts in his book, Jackie was being intensely harassed by both fans and especially the bench during practice before his first game in Cincinnati. Suddenly, without warning, Pee Wee Reese, the Dodger captain (and a Southerner raised in segregated Louisville Kentucky) threw his arms up to stop the practice. With the whole stadium watching in awe, Pee Wee walked from his shortstop position over to first base and threw an arm around Jackie’s broad shoulders. Pee Wee glared at the bench and into the stands for several seconds and the catcalls quickly subsided. Jackie later told Roger “After Pee Wee came over like that, I never felt alone on a baseball field again.

Roger devotes an entire chapter in his book to Jackie Robinson. He tells of Jackie’s close relationship with Branch Rickey, the Dodger manager who hired Jackie and swore Jackie to an oath of silence as a condition for signing him. When Robinson asked if Branch wanted a man without the courage to fight back, Branch according to Roger bellowed that he wanted a man with the courage NOT to fight back. He then went on to allow that Jesus Christ would serve as a suitable role model. Jackie stuck to his pledge but it wasn’t easy. It’s never easy being a pioneer.

During his later years, Roger moved to Connecticut and lived not far from Jackie and his family in North Stamford. Jackie’s wife Rachel was the head of the psychiatric nursing department at the hospital affiliated with Yale in New Haven so the home was a convenient for the Robinsons. Roger tells a great story of when his young son, Roger, came with him to visit Jackie. Young Roger saw a football in a glass case that Jackie had gotten years earlier when he was a star on the UCLA football team. It was signed by the entire team and obviously of great value. When young Roger asked his dad if they could take the ball out and plan a little catch, Roger gently explained that this was a special football, not the kind you played catch with. Jackie immediately reached over, took the ball out of its case and handed to young Roger, saying, “Go on, have a good time with your dad.” As Roger points out in his book, the ball never touched the ground in a half hour of catch. He was very relieved when it ended up safely back in its case.

In late 1952, Jackie hired Roger to help him start a magazine called “Our Sports”. It focused on integration and told stories of interest to minority baseball fans. It lasted only a handful of issues but it was brave effort and gave Roger a chance to get to know Jackie from yet another perspective, that of writer and intellectual.

As Roger and Jackie’s friendship shows, race relations have not always been troubled in Crown Heights. We can only hope that their fine example can help us return to happier days yet again.

Looks like the moderator(s) took down many of the posts including the ones calling blacks in CH animals and beasts.

holy shit!

it's pretty funny when people who devote their entire lives to god promote random racial violence. rock on, guys.

and who the hell says "colored"?

caseopele wrote: Oh, there are still some ugly comments up there.

rage wrote:
we should show them what a good beating means.
here's what we do. we rome the streets. if we find more then three colored teenagers walking together, we confront them. start asking them questions.
and ask them to go home.
if they refuse, that's when the beating should start.
none of them should be able to walk after the beating. they must be hospitolized...
just pump the streets with fire. fight fire with fire.
Kahana Chai.
“every jew- A 22”

01/19/08 - 19:41

Cee wrote:
These people are animals. We need to drive them from our community.

01/19/08 - 20:19 -

Sruly K wrote:
Carroll & Kingston! OMG! I lived on that block a couple of years ago. May G-d be with you and shield you from these violent beasts.

You could always move...WOULD YOU LIVE IN HARLEM? Prob not...Why would you live there?

01/19/08 - 21:04 -

:shock: :shock: :shock:

"just pump the streets with fire"

hahahaha

this dude is hard core

homeowner wrote: [quote=filmlover44][quote=homeowner]Looks like the moderator(s) took down many of the posts including the ones calling blacks in CH animals and beasts.

That's some pretty bad moderation to allow stuff like that through. Disgusting.

Well, I gather that the posts are pretty indicative of the attitudes of the Lubavitch community over there, so its no surprise that it remains. I think a lot of the problem is that the CH Lubavitch community is a mecca for Jews worldwide to come and study. There are always folks coming from all of the large Hassidic communities around the world coming there to live for months and study. So you have a lot of people that are not just unused to living with minorities, but who don't even have a sense of the complexity of race and class in this country. Add into that the insularity of the community, the sense that all others are somehow beneath them and its a pretty combustible mix.

You might be right. I guess I find it hard to believe because I've lived in a couple of peaceful neighborhoods without ethnic conflict where there were large Hassidic communities that had equally large populations of other marginalized minorities (Hispanic and Asian). I tentatively add that someone on these boards accused me of being anti-semitic because I said that the Lubavitch were cultish, so I shall say no more on this subject....Really.

Unfortunately, that's been the pattern for millennia. Economy's down. Blame the Jews! Black people were not the first to do this and they won't be the last.

The difference is that I don't see black anti-Semitism as ideological. The only place where there is ideological anti-Semitism is among Farrakhan's crowd, and who pays attention to them anymore? I seriously doubt our young perps were enacting the teachings of Elijah Muhammad.

I think these kids were angry and looking for a target to take it out on. If this neighborhood were say, Black and Korean, a Korean person would have been the victim, not a Jew.

I *hate* Charles Barron. He's an evil demagogue. At least Al Sharpton repented of his earlier anti-Semitism and is capable of learning from his mistakes. He's loud and frequently wrong-headed, but not evil.

Where's Eric Adams? Didn't he say something about all this? I'd be surprised if he didn't. That's a pol I like and respect.

Hamilton, it's not that Jews would be off the hook, necessarily, but that there would be other targets. Sonny Carson et al are pretty much equal opportunity bigots.

Subject: Re: Mug a Korean for Fun And Profit

Hamilton wrote: So what you are saying is if the neighborhood had Koreans, Chinese or Mexicans the Jews would be off the hook.

The real problem was created by the insane rants of Sonny Carson,The Hon. Muhammed Khalid Abdul and the ever entertaining Charles Baron who have contaminated the minds of many young blacks who want to blame others for their problems.

Where are their parents and why hasn't the Rev.Al Sharpton addressed this problem

[no money to be made?]

i doubt chinese or koreans would get a free ride either. i remember getting blame for stealing jobs by minorites and gotten beaten and chased. as asians we don't get media attention like other groups get.

WOW.

way to assume that black people are automatically the aggressors against other groups.

sweet tea wrote: WOW.

way to assume that black people are automatically the aggressors against other groups.

huh?

seriously. HUH?

Oh, ok. I see your point. It was carelessly put. I think the point was that the person was not attacked because they were Jewish but because they were seen as "an outsider" and that the attack was not specifically anti-semitic.

This was in response to me...I was saying that anti-semitic attacks are up everywhere and that Jewish people are specific targets (not specifically by Black people).

I saw his post as a hopeful one, vis-a-vis, He hopes that Jewish people are not targets.

I guess that I can see how that could be taken the other way. Hopefully he didn't mean that anyone who wasn't Black would be attacked.

lilbangladesh wrote: No I didn't. And if that was carelessly put, I apologize. It certainly wasn't my intention.

I'm well aware that blacks aren't always the aggressor in every situation. My best friend is a black truck driver and when he makes runs in the deep South, I get scared for him. God forbid his truck should break down in a bad area for him. Or in Martinsville, IN, for that matter, which he often has to pass through to get home.

Boy, that one still didn't come off quite right.