Comptroller Scott Stringer says, “Speaker (Corey) Johnson is trying to circumvent the will of the voters and change the rules to benefit himself. The Council should reject his brazen power grab.”
Here’s how money is stacking up so far, according to the News story:
—Stringer has $2.3 million.
—Johnson has $88,481.
—Ruben Diaz Jr. has $738,707.
—Eric Adams raised $1.7 million.
Sent from iPhone. Please excuse autocorrected typos
By Ron Howell, Opinion, The Brooklyn Eagle, May 29, 2019
Wow and yesterday I finished the last chapter of this 900 page book by David Blight on Frederick Douglass. It ranks with David Levering Lewis’s series of books on W. E.B. Du Bois, which left me in awe. And now a Pulitzer for it.
What’s meaningful is not just that Blight is a Yale Historian but that I met him several years ago at the home of the late pioneer of modern American journalism Les Payne. Les’s childhood buddy, Dr. Walter Evans, a physician, put his earnings into collections of black history items, including copious archival materials, which captivated David Blight and enriched his magnificent dive into America’s racial history. Notable also is that the last time I chatted with Blight was when he came to give the John Hope Franklin lecture at Brooklyn College last year. The extraordinary (and late) John Hope Franklin in the 1950s raised hopes for a new birth of equity in the American academic world as he became the chair of the history department at Brooklyn College. But the lifting of hopes did not last. Hope (oh the poetry) went on to other colleges and the topic of diversity, or the lack of it, survives into a new century as a revealing reality of our lives.
Congratulations to all and that means you, too, Les Payne.
Stupid me. I should have been looking at the camera. But, hey, nothing wrong with signing a copy of the book! Assemblywoman Tremaine Wright, in front, had invited me to give a Black History Month talk at the Saturday meeting of VIDA (The Vanguard Independent Democratic Association). VIDA is the very strong political club in Bed-Stuy. The gentleman standing, retired City Councilman Al Vann, is the founder of that now historic, though still strong, club. I’ll have to remember her name but I believe the lady next to Al Vann is the head of the membership committee of VIDA. There were many scores of attentive people from the community at that meeting, listening and asking questions about politics. Notable, of course, is that Assemblywoman Wright is the current political descendant of Bertram Baker, known to me and many now as the “Boss of Black Brooklyn.” Very meaningful also is that former Councilman Vann was once the community’s Assemblyman, and so he also is a descendant of the Boss. In fact, give that Vann was an Assemblyman and a district leader, he could be called Black Brooklyn’s second Boss. Very notable to me was that while we were there that morning, in walked this lady whom I knew as a little girl. Her dad was in Bertram Baker’s club and he later became a State Supreme Court Justice. That was Judge George Wade. And the little girl who walked in Saturday was his daughter, now State Supreme Court Justice Carolyn Wade! Life is crazy.
DAILY CHALLENGE FRIDAY, JANUARY 11, 2019
By RON HOWELL
[photo caption: Bertram Baker in 1965 with Assemblywoman Shirley Chisholm, state Senator William Thompson and an unidentified officer of the Brevort Savings Bank. Courtesy of author’s family archives.]
Judge William C. Thompson started on the road to great accomplishments in the 1950s. He initially was a protégé of Bertram Baker, who in 1948 broke Brooklyn’s longstanding racial barrier by becoming the first Black person elected to public office in the borough’s two-century history.
Baker was 50 years old at the time of his election and “Willie” Thompson was among the stream of then-young, ambitious Black lawyers who began seeking Baker’s advice and support. Some of those lawyers wanted to become elected officials themselves, just like Baker. But those flush with their law degrees dreamed of sitting on high benches, which Baker could never do because he wasn’t a lawyer.
Thompson would become both, holding office as Brooklyn’s first Black state senator, then winning a seat on the City Council and finally becoming an appellate judge.
“Boss of Black Brooklyn” paints a picture of Bert Baker as a tough guy who tussled with Brooklyn’s Irish Democratic leaders, from the 1920s and on through the successive decades of his career.
But there are those who say when Baker met the end of his line in the late 1960s, it was his one-time acolyte “Willie” who helped bring him down.
Thompson almost literally stormed out of Bertram Baker’s United Action Democratic political club in the late 1960s. In professed anger, he began lending his contacts and knowledge to Baker’s rivals.
He effectively declared himself to be his own boss, and he knew that nothing would be more insulting and offensive to Baker than that. On the surface, the clash had to do with Baker’s decision to cross party lines and support a Black Republican in a minor local contest.
But, to me and others who knew them both well, the fight between the two power brokers was grounded in a collision of extraordinary egos. As Baker aged out of politics, a career he always called “the game,” the younger Thompson grew more powerful.
At one point, Thompson almost catapulted into big-time national exposure. In 1968 he gained the backing of Democratic Party bosses in a bid to become Brooklyn’s first Black member of the United States Congress.
Things were looking very good. But when the ballots were all counted, he came up with a measly .06 percent of the 13,000 votes cast, and he thus lost to a brash Black Brooklynite who called herself “unbought and unbossed,” an up-and-comer named Shirley Chisholm.
Interestingly, Baker, Thompson and Chisholm all had roots in the old British Caribbean. Baker and Thompson, in fact, traced their ancestry to the two-island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis. Baker immigrated from Nevis in 1915, when it was a British colony.
Thompson’s parents came from St. Kitts in that same immigration wave. As for Chisholm, her parents were from another British colony, now the independent nation of Barbados.
In saying, as I have, that Judge Thompson was part of our Greatest Generation, I have in mind that he, like my father and like so many of the then-young men who knocked on Bertram Baker’s United Action Club door, was a World War II veteran, and he was one with acknowledged distinction.
— Ron Howell is an award-winning journalist and author of "Boss of Black Brooklyn: The Life and Times of Bertram L. Baker" (Fordham University Press).
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