Race and Religion Among the Chosen People of Crown Heights

Chapter 1: Collisions: Race and Religion, a Riot and a Pogrom

36 1 Collisions Race and Religion, a Riot and a Pogrom Prelude: A Summer Day August 19, 1991, was one of those perfect summer days. It rained all morning, but the sky cleared by around one o’clock, and Crown Heights residents enjoyed a glorious afternoon. It had been a hot and humid summer , but Monday the nineteenth was cool and dry, with brilliant sun shining through scattered clouds.1 Neighborhood children like Gavin and Angela Cato—seven-year-old first cousins whose families had come to the United States from Guyana not long before—took advantage of this respite from the dog days of summer and went outside to play. The Lubavitcher Rebbe also took advantage of the pleasant afternoon, and went to visit the grave of his revered father-in-law, the Previous Rebbe, whom he had succeeded as leader of the Lubavitch community some forty years before. As a doctoral candidate conducting research for his dissertation, Yankel Rosenbaum may have been immune to the lure of the weather. I’m told (though I’m not really sure) that he spent much of the day scouring the shelves of a bookstore in Crown Heights. Just after eight in the evening—at what may be the most beautiful time of a Brooklyn summer day, when the setting sun suffuses the streets, bathing asphalt and brick in a warm golden glow—Angela was teaching Gavin how to ride a bike, and the Rebbe was returning from the cemetery in Queens to his office on Eastern Parkway. Angela held on to the seat of Gavin’s bike as he pedaled around the sidewalk in front of their apartment building, on President Street near Utica Avenue, by the intersection of a tree-lined residential block and a bustling, predominantly Afro-Caribbean shopping strip. (Here and throughout this chapter, readers may want to refer to the street map of Crown Heights on page 78.) A witness later described the scene to the playwright Anna Deavere Smith: “What I saw was, the little sister, she was pushin’ her brother on the bike, right? She was runnin’ and pushin’ and runnin’ and pushin’. And little brother was dippin ’ back and forth, dippin’ back and forth, right? Little brother didn’t know how to ride the bike.”2 The Rebbe, I can only guess, was in the backseat of his car, conferring with his staff, reciting psalms under his breath, or simply gazing out of the window, lost in thought. Perhaps he was meditating on the memory of his father-in-law—his Rebbe—and seeking his guidance in the countless concerns that occupied his days. Though they shared the same streets and the same summer sun, the Cato children and the Lubavitcher Rebbe lived in substantially different social worlds. They faced a number of common predicaments and everyday experiences—as New Yorkers, immigrants, Crown Heights residents, and members of more or less marginalized minority communities—but they negotiated these predicaments and interpreted these experiences in dramatically different ways. We may locate them, for a moment, in a single space and time—at the corner of Utica Avenue and President Street, just after eight o’clock, on August 19, 1991—but they arrived at this moment , and were destined to leave it, on divergent historical and personal trajectories. Yet they did meet in this moment. Their paths crossed, for an instant, with far-reaching results. There was a collision. Or rather, there were a number of collisions: of bodies in space, pavement and steel, lives and deaths, histories and identities, perceptions and realities. These collisions reminded Blacks and Jews in Crown Heights that they don’t actually live in different worlds—and that they do. DISCUSSIONS OF Black-Jewish difference in Crown Heights have been de- fined, since 1991, by the deaths of Gavin Cato and Yankel Rosenbaum, and by the violence that unfolded over the following three days. Yet while these tragic events have established the terms of subsequent debate, participants in these debates have struggled, in turn, to establish the nature of the events themselves. This is, no doubt, the case following most incidents of collective violence. But in Crown Heights, where Blacks and Jews don’t COLLISIONS 37 even agree on the nature of their difference, the struggle to define the nature of violence has been particularly intense. The collision that killed Gavin Cato precipitated a broader collision of...