THROUGH THE 1960S, THE ALLIANCE BETWEEN BLACKS AND Jews held strong. But with the emergence of the Black Panther movement with its assertion of Black Power, the ties that bound the two groups began to untangle. Jews had flocked to the South to help their black brethren in the Movement, but now blacks like Malcolm X and other leaders were slapping the Jews, who had supported them, in the face, telling them that their help no longer was needed or wanted.
There was a real fallout from this rejection as these Jews made the survival of Israel a more important cause than the civil rights movement. For many Jews, keeping Israel strong against Arab aggression turned Democrats into Republicans. When that happened, the old alliance crumbled.
In 1991 Crown Heights was a home to approximately 50 percent Caribbean immigrants, 40 percent African-Americans, and 10 percent Jews. A small but influential group of Jews were members of the Lubavitcher community, a sect of ultraconservatives led by the esteemed Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, whom his followers believed to be the long-promised Messiah.
In the late afternoon of August 19, 1991, a three-car motorcade bringing the rebbe back from a visit to his father-in-law’s grave came driving through a Crown Heights intersection. The last car in the motorcade, a station wagon driven by twenty-two-year old Yosef Lifsh, may or may not have been speeding and may or may not have driven through a red light, but what is certain is that he had to swerve to avoid a collision at the intersection of Eastern Parkway and Utica Avenue, and he lost control and drove onto the sidewalk, where he ran over two seven-year-old black children from Guyana who were pinned under his car.
As hundreds of black onlookers gathered, a Hatzolah ambulance—part of an Orthodox Jewish volunteer ambulance corps—stopped to offer assistance, but drove off upon the appearance of the city’s EMS ambulance, prompting rumors that the Jewish ambulance had refused to provide service to the black children. Lifsh got out of his car and went to see if he could help the kids, and when he did so, he was robbed and beaten by black bystanders. Police hustled him off, and false rumors began to spread that he was drunk. When the police refused to charge him with a criminal offense, word spread that he had gotten away with something, more “proof” that the Jews of Crown Heights received preferential treatment over the blacks. The death that evening of one of the children, seven-year-old Gavin Cato, fanned the flames of resentment.
That evening around eleven, black youths began throwing bottles and rocks. Someone shouted, “Let’s go to Kingston Avenue and get a Jew.” In some of the ugliest racial violence, let alone anti-Semitism, ever seen in Brooklyn, black youths began a three-day rampage, burning police cars, looting, beating people, and screaming “Heil Hitler!” and “Kill the Jews!”
A twenty-nine-year-old rabbinical student from Australia, Yankel Rosenbaum, was in the wrong place at the wrong time when he was accosted by several black youths. He was stabbed several times and suffered a fractured skull. He would later die in Kings County Hospital.
The anger directed at the Hasidic community burned hot. At Gavin Cato’s funeral, the Reverend Al Sharpton told the mourners, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.”
Sharpton would go on to criticize Mayor David Dinkins, calling him an “Uncle Tom.” The Hasidic community blasted Dinkins for not calling out the police immediately. Former mayor Ed Koch called the riot a pogrom, hearkening back to the czar’s Cossacks burning the shtetls of Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. For three days the rioting went on unabated. The police also lashed out against him, and when Dinkins ran for reelection in 1993, he was defeated handily by law-and-order candidate Rudy Giuliani.
What Crown Heights needed badly was someone who could bridge the chasm left between the black and Hasidic communities. It fell to an ex-marine Vietnam vet by the name of Richard Green, a man who believed in the goodness of all people, who was sure if he could somehow establish communication between the blacks, the Jews, and the police, that the hatreds and resentments would lessen and perhaps even disappear. That he succeeded says a lot about the goodness found in Brooklyn.
Green, who started the Crown Heights Youth Collective in 1978, was born on February 26, 1948, in Honduras. His father was a merchant seaman, and his mother was a nurse. In 1957 she decided to move to the States, and after a short stay in San Antonio, Texas, she came to Brooklyn to live near her sister. Richard was nine years old when he arrived in Brooklyn.
RICHARD GREEN “We moved into an apartment at 289 Kingston Street in the heart of Crown Heights. It was right across the street from Lubavitcher headquarters. The neighborhood was primarily Jewish. If you went to the other side of St. John’s, it began to become more black.
“I went to PS 167 through the fifth grade. Then we moved a little farther up to Midwood Street, and I went to PS 92 in the sixth grade. Both of the schools were predominantly black and Jewish, but very well integrated. The students pretty much got along, though in PS 92 there was a larger mix of Italian and Irish students. You had a large number of ethnics to deal with, and each one had its own spirit, and you had to learn how to get along with their spirit. But basically we got along very well.
“The Hasidim, the orthodox Jews, sent their kids to the yeshivas, private schools. The big yeshiva was at the corner of Church Avenue and Bedford. I went to Lefferts Junior High School, and from there I went to Walt Whitman High School, and I graduated from Erasmus Hall High in June 1966.
“I started Brooklyn College in the fall, and then I got my draft notice, and in December of 1966 I enlisted in the military. I went to Vietnam in April of 1968, on the day Dr. King was assassinated.”
For African-Americans of Green’s generation, the assassination of Dr. King was the third in a series of assassinations that left the black community mourning the demise of inspiration and leadership. Dr. King seemed to be the key to ending Jim Crow. Now he was dead. Was there no way out from racism?
RICHARD GREEN “First came the assassination of President Kennedy, and then Malcolm, and then Dr. King. Coming out of the 1950s, John Kennedy was the best thing that ever could have happened to this world. When Kennedy ran, I was twelve years old, and I was really, really excited about him. And when he was assassinated, that was a real damper. And when Malcolm was assassinated, I said, ‘Oh my goodness, that means you’re not supposed to speak up, that anything you say will be held against you.’ And when Dr. King was killed, that really shook me up, because Dr. King wasn’t a political leader, wasn’t a president. He was a real church minister.
“When we got to Vietnam, we wondered, What’s going on back home? Dr. King had been a change factor. We asked ourselves, Now what? When we go back home is it going to be worse than when we came? Are we going to have to leave Vietnam and go home and have to deal with home?
“We were discriminated against in Vietnam by the Vietnamese. Yeah. They would call you a nigger in a minute. If you made them mad and they wanted to get your attention, they used the n-word. I don’t think they knew the volatility of it. That was something you never wanted to hear.
“And there was still a level of racism in the military. The military was still getting over it. Remember, we had only been integrated in the military for twenty years.
“I served in the Marine Corps, a small organization. And what Vietnam did was thrust a lot of people together. It was good, because you met guys from other parts of the country—the guy who slept in the bunk above me was from Alabama. I was from New York. And he caught malaria, and I had to take care of him. He was so sick he couldn’t even get out of his bunk. Before he arrived in Vietnam, he might have been a racist, but as he lay there, I was the one who would go and bring him food, and I was the one telling him, ‘Man, you gotta get out of here. You have to see a corpsman.’ He had lost a whole lot of weight. Finally they medevaced him out, and I never saw him again.
“That was the thing about Vietnam: you got to be close with guys, and it wasn’t based on their ethnicity. If you got close to a guy, he became your friend. Sometimes white, sometimes black, sometimes Latino, sometimes Native American. They were your friends. My best friend was Bobby Farrell from Chicago, and another [white] friend was from Kentucky. No matter what race they were, your friend was your friend. Whatever preconceived notions they had about you ended then. And vice versa.
“We went on patrols together. Sometimes I would sleep, and they would stay awake. My life was in their hands, or their lives were in my hands.
“Vietnam wasn’t very nice. Innocent people got killed. Anytime you have a war with civilians involved there are going to be civilian casualties. I can remember one guy who had been shot already and who didn’t want to go back into the field asked me to break his trigger finger. I started to pull it back, but I just couldn’t put him in that kind of pain.
“I was in Vietnam thirteen months. I still had eighteen left. I was an MP in Norfolk, Virginia. By that time I had a little rank. I was a sergeant, and there were a hundred and some guys under me. By 1969 the racism had started to loosen up. The riots were over, and people began to see after Woodstock that love would supersede all the hatred.
“I stayed in Virginia, went to school at Norfolk State College, and then my brother told me to come up to Marist College in upstate New York. He was going there, and he wanted me to check it out. One time I came home on leave, and I went up there and liked it, and I graduated from there in 1974. I then went to graduate school at New Paltz and got out in 1977 having majored in history.
“I started to look around for work as a teacher, but there had been layoffs, so I went to work at Brooklyn College as a counselor. I had always had a desire to start a youth community initiative, so after a semester I left and came out to Crown Heights to work for another youth group and after six months I started my own group called the Crown Heights Youth Collective. It was for all age groups, and it specialized in school programs, sports, job development, and counseling. The idea was to get our young people directed and redirected.
“Our first challenge came after the Michael Griffith incident in 1986. He was coming back from a job in Howard Beach, and he was chased onto the highway [by a group of white teens], and he was struck by a car and killed. White guys in Howard Beach wanted to know what he was doing out there.
“I knew the Griffith family, a really beautiful family. They didn’t allow it to get too carried away. They kept it pretty much controlled. They didn’t allow it to go into that continuous back and forth, tit for tat. His mother was a very conscientious person, and she managed to minimize the hatred.”
Mayor Ed Koch was jumpy. He was aware of a series of race riots in Brixton, a suburb south of London, England. Unemployment of black youths in Brixton was at about 50 percent when in 1981 two policemen stopped a black youth who had been knifed, and spontaneously hundreds of onlookers began to riot. Fueling the hatred for the police was a campaign called Operation Swamp 81. Police had swooped down on the black community and stopped and frisked large numbers of black youths. The rioting was ugly, and it would pop up sporadically again in 1985.
RICHARD GREEN “Mayor Koch really took precautions to make sure that wouldn’t happen in New York City. For many years I ran a youth employment agency. We had been given a summer allotment to employ five hundred youths. After Brixton, Koch brought us in for a meeting, and he gave us money for another four hundred slots. We hired them to do everything from child-care work to sports in the parks, hospital jobs, and day-care centers.”
As the 1980s came to an end, an ugly incident arose in 1989 that incited the racial passions of all of New York. Four black teenagers were beaten by twenty to thirty whites in Bensonhurst. One of the white Bensonhurst residents shot and killed a sixteen-year-old black youth by the name of Yusef Hawkins. The Reverend Al Sharpton led marches in Bensonhurst, and the whites who came to heckle were vicious in their behavior toward the black protesters. Screaming “Nigger go home,” some whites held watermelons to mock the demonstrators. In May of 1990, when one of the two leaders of the white mob was acquitted of the most serious charges, Sharpton led another protest through Bensonhurst. A resident, Michael Riccardi, tried to kill Sharpton, stabbing him in the chest. Eight months later came the Crown Heights riots.
RICHARD GREEN “Mayor Dinkins realized that one of the biggest problems facing black youths was a lack of jobs. In June of 1991 he initiated a job-training program called Safe Street, Safe City. Dinkins hired five thousand new cops, and he ordered five thousand youths to be trained as leaders. He put together a serious thirty-day citywide youth leadership initiative, and those youths who hit the streets in Crown Heights were part of his new group, called Street Outreach Program.
“At that time violence was high. The streets were tough. In one of those years there were 2,400 homicides. The thinking was these trainees would go out in the neighborhood and talk to their peers in an effort to stop the shootings. And we were part of the Street Outreach Program. And when the Crown Heights riot struck, we were able to hit the streets on the very first night or two of the violence.”
By August 1991, discord between the black and Hasidic communities had been brewing for a long time. Blacks felt that the orthodox Jews received preferential treatment from the government. Housing was an issue, and blacks felt more Jews had access to it than they did. The Hasidim had started what is called the Lubavitcher Security Patrol, and while they played their role as block watchers, there were ugly incidents. The blacks saw the security patrol as racist.
After Gavin Cato died, blacks went looking for revenge. It wasn’t but a few hours later that a group of black teens isolated a Lubavitcher student from Australia, Yankel Rosenbaum, and stabbed him to death. Richard Green, who had hoped to become a bridge between the two communities, could only stand by helplessly and watch as rioting escalated.
RICHARD GREEN “There was a lack of communication that night. Gavin Cato needed a city ambulance, which provided advanced trauma care. The Hasidic ambulance only provided basic care. The cop at the scene, who was black, knew this, and he told the Hasidic ambulance corps, ‘Don’t even stop.’ And that fed the misperception in the black community that the Jewish ambulance wouldn’t stop for the young black male. The word never got out that the reason was the Jewish ambulance crew would have done more harm than good because they lacked training.
Crown Heights residents rioted for days in 1991 as tensions flared between blacks and Hasidic Jews. AP Photo/David Burns
“It was nine thirty when Yankel Rosenbaum, the rabbinical student from Australia, came down the block into trouble. This young man was just an innocent bystander. He fit the profile. He probably hadn’t even heard about the Cato incident. Had he known, he would have walked the other way. But he was new to Brooklyn, and he didn’t understand the dynamics of the situation, so he walked right into it.
“He was stabbed, and he was taken to Kings County Hospital, and for some reason they weren’t able to recognize the wound had been much deeper than they thought, and he died.
“That very first night I was called out, and the Hasidic youths were just as animated and active and angry as the black youths. Even before word of Yankel’s death, there had been minor skirmishes in the streets. Action, reaction.
“But because of the Street Outreach Program, after two or three days we were able to get the Hasidic youths and the black youths to sit around a table and talk. On the first night of the riots, Mayor Dinkins asked me, ‘What would be a good place for people to meet?’ I suggested PS 167, my old elementary school, because it was easily accessible to both the black and Hasidic communities. It became the headquarters for everyone, including the cops.
“Through these meetings, the tensions were defused rather quickly. One of the good things that happened, something people probably will never understand, was that Dinkins didn’t send in the heavy hand of the cops the very first day. We lost some property, and there were minor injuries but no bodies. His not sending in the heavy hand of the law allowed for a compromise to settle it, and the people who were yelling and shouting the loudest soon were ignored by the people who were not. But if a couple of folks had been shot or beaten by the cops, those people would have left and gone over to the other side. So that was the best thing that could happen. By Thursday, when the cops decided to go full-force, the incident was almost over. All that remained were skirmishes.”
Dinkins lost his bid for reelection in 1993, seen by the whites as weak and ineffective. The man who replaced him, Rudolph Giuliani—a former federal prosecutor who was tough on the Mafia—brought with him a law-and-order philosophy. Richard Green, who has been a mediator between the police and the community, saw the benefits of the new philosophy for the community, as well as the negatives.
RICHARD GREEN “Mayor Giuliani used the ‘broken-window theory.’ If there’s a broken window in a building and you don’t fix it, soon there will be two broken windows, and after that it will become an abandoned building. His thing was to fix the broken window right away. He went to war against graffiti and the squeegee guys. Remember the squeegee guys? And his philosophy was if I pick up enough youths causing trouble enough times and get them into my data system, when they really mess up and do the big thing, I have them in my system and I can go after them. And so under Giuliani there was a lot more interaction between the police and the community. The cops were doing a lot more stop-and-frisks. They were going after drug users. It came across that the cops were in your face, which they were, and there were a lot of arrests.
“As a result there was a lot of resentment in the black community. Everyone knew someone who was arrested, and the resentment was deep.
“The Crown Heights Youth Collective had good relationships with precinct commanders and borough commanders, and we would talk to them about what they were doing and how they were doing it. We would discuss with them issues relating to making a stop. Once the stop is over, there is a certain protocol that has to be used. A commander must be able to tell the cop that if he stops someone and finds nothing, a strong apology does not detract from his or her status. We remind the cop that he or she may never see that person again, but it’s likely someone not part of the stop-and-frisk might walk away with a bad taste in their mouth about policing, and they’ll react the next time they are in a situation.
“We use different methods to bring cops to our meetings, to teach them things. We would bring the cops and the members of the community together, people in the community who really cared, and the cops came to see that everyone who was being arrested wasn’t riffraff, that a lot of times a cop would think he was riffraff just because he looked the part or she looked the part. In a sense, this was racism without racists, because a lot of time they were just being cops, being who they are. Like one cop said to me, ‘We are a service organization. We service the criminal community.’ And in an inner-city precinct, the majority of the people he services will be black or Latino.”
The relationship between the cops and the community was tested several times after reports of violence by white cops against blacks. Each time, Richard Green and his organization took steps to ease tensions.
On August 9, 1997, a Haitian immigrant by the name of Abner Louima was arrested outside Club Rendez-Vous, an East Flatbush nightclub. There was an altercation, and a policeman from the 70th Precinct was punched. The cops thought Louima did it, and he was arrested.
On the ride to the station he was beaten by fists, nightsticks, and police radios. At the station he was strip-searched. The beatings continued, and he was sodomized with the handle of a toilet plunger so badly he needed several operations. One of the cops reportedly told him, “It’s now Giuliani time,” meaning that after four years of Mayor Dinkins keeping the police under constraint, now it was their turn. Officer Justin Volpe responsible was sentenced to thirty years in prison, and Louima won a judgment of $8.75 million against the City of New York.
RICHARD GREEN “After the Louima incident, the Haitian community wanted to march across the Brooklyn Bridge, and we were able to get that set up. Almost fifty thousand people marched down to City Hall. We were able to get the Manhattan South borough commander to sit down with the Haitian leadership. That’s the kind of thing I can do. I have a good relationship with the community, and I broker marriages between the cops and the community to get them to sit down and talk. When Bill Clinton was president, he would invite me down to Washington to talk to the police chiefs around the country just to get them some methodology how to deal with the community and the cops.”
Abner Louima in the hospital after being tortured by police from the 70th Precinct.
AP Photo/Todd Plitt, Pool
The next incident that caused public outrage occurred in the Bronx on February 4, 1999. A twenty-three-year-old Guinean immigrant by the name of Amadou Diallo, in the United States to study computer science, was stopped by four plainclothes policemen. He was stopped because he matched the description of a serial rapist.
Ordered to stop, Diallo reached into his jacket pocket to get his wallet so he could show the police his identification. As he reached into his jacket, the four policemen shot him forty-one times. His parents were paid $3 million by the City of New York, and because of the Diallo case, the Street Crime unit was disbanded in April 2002.
Through all of this, Crown Heights remained calm. Those who know are convinced that the work of Richard Green played an important role in keeping everything quiet.
CORE members walking down Fort Hamilton Parkway en route to the March on Washington. AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews
RICHARD GREEN “We had been doing a lot of things with the precinct and borough commanders, getting things back on track before an incident went any further. On the surface, if something happened it seemed that violence might break out, but we had meetings and got people together to keep everything calm.
“After the Diallo shooting, we brought in Street Crime cops to talk with members of the community. I had developed a relationship with the commanding officer of the Street Crime unit. We had met a few times to talk about how we could bring his cops, who were viewed in a real negative way, to the community to show that all the street crime cops weren’t like the four cops responsible for the shooting. We also tried to impress on the community that the four cops hadn’t been malicious in their actions, but more or less made unprofessional decisions.”
Meanwhile, Green’s efforts to keep the black and Hasidic communities in close contact with each other have paid off handsomely.
RICHARD GREEN “Today there is much more understanding between the black and Hasidic communities than ever. We have the opportunity now to communicate. We have technology—cell phones and e-mail—so if there’s an incident in Crown Heights, if something is said or something happens, I get a call on my cell phone and I get over there, and the best thing to do—I remember this from Vietnam—they always used to tell us, ‘If you ever get captured, make sure you try to escape as soon as you get captured. As soon as you know you’re in captivity, go all out to escape because one, you’re still near your lines, and two, you’re not yet in a captive mode. I use the same technique when we deal with issues. It’s best to get on it right away, when it’s happening. Don’t wait a few hours, because if you do, people are going to have their own notions. We’re not in control of it anymore. We’re in the hands of the rabble-rousers and the riffraff who have beef with the cops that has nothing to do with civil or human rights. A cop might have arrested him for drugs, and this is an opportunity for him to get back at cops in general. So we want to keep it out of their hands and also the hands of the media saying what they want to say to sell the best six-o’clock headlines. We have to keep it close to our lines. So if something goes down right now, I get out there when it first is happening. Sometimes we’re out there before the police lines are even set up. And we get it rolling in our direction. If there’s an allegation of someone getting beat down, we want to find out who was responsible, and if the person responsible was malicious, he’s going to be as maligned as the person he beat down.”
One source of tension between the black and Hasidic communities has been the Hasidic street patrols. At times they go too far. Green is always available as a neutral advisor and mediator.
RICHARD GREEN “We sit down with the Hasidic leaders and talk all the time. If something happens, I’ll get a call, even late at night, and they’ll ask if I can come by and check it out. Very likely I can talk to the people in the black community. They know my face. I let them know, ‘We’re going to make sure your rights are protected.’
“We have to make sure the [Hasidic patrol] understands the rules of engagement, that you can’t just take a citizen and crack him over the head because he is alleged to have done something. You can’t beat someone up for breaking into a building. That’s wrong. And folks know that. When the patrol goes out, they are less likely to hurt somebody if there’s an arrest being made. I’ve gotten a phone call: ‘We know the bike is stolen. We want to grab him.’ I say, ‘Hang up with me and call 911. Those guys are paid to do that. Don’t go out and grab him, because if he’s not the right person and he reacts, and you react back, you face legal liability.’ They mean well. They keep the area secure, but sometimes it gets a little heavy-handed, a little out of hand.”
Richard Green is modest about the hundreds of awards and honors he has received. He received the key to the city and was named Person of the Week by the New York Police Department. In 1992, ABC-TV national news made him their Person of the Week. But perhaps the award he cherishes most came after a visit to see Rebbe Schneerson, who died on June 12, 1994. Ordinarily, after a visit, the rebbe would present his guest with a dollar bill for good luck. When he heard about the work Green was doing, he presented Green with two dollars. “When you get two from the rebbe, that’s major,” says Green. In his wallet is a photo of him with Rebbe Schneerson, which serves as his passport to the Hasidic community. “The young people are mesmerized when I show them the picture,” says Green. He has also been the subject of a documentary titled Crown Heights.
RICHARD GREEN “It showed how we are able to bring blacks and Hasidics together, cops and Hasidics together, and cops and blacks together. We bring in all the players. As someone said, ‘In Crown Heights, you have blacks, blues, and Jews.’ And we work together every day to make things happen.
“We’re not at Nirvana yet, but you won’t hear of this happening in Crown Heights ever again. Knock on wood when I say that.
“There’s an African saying, ‘Working together, ants are able to devour the elephant.’ And what we’ve done in the city is work together with different people to devour this great elephant of chaos, the elephant of racism, and the elephant of the prejudicial attitudes that people come in with. We are devouring them.”