Crown Heights riot
The Crown Heights riot was a significant and tragic event that took place over three days in August 1991 in Brooklyn, New York, stemming from a tragic accident involving a seven-year-old boy named Gavin Cato and a Jewish driver. The incident ignited existing racial tensions among the neighborhood's diverse communities, which included Caribbean Americans, African Americans, and members of the Hasidic Jewish Lubavitch sect. The accident and the subsequent handling by police, which was perceived as favoring the Jewish community, led to a violent backlash against Jews in the area.
As the riot unfolded, many businesses were looted, and violent confrontations occurred, showcasing the deep-seated animosities between the groups. The events culminated in the stabbing death of Yankel Rosenbaum, a Jewish graduate student, highlighting the chaotic and tragic escalation of violence. The riot severely impacted the political landscape, particularly damaging the reputation of New York City's first black mayor, David Dinkins, who struggled to restore order and harmony in a city marked by division. Ultimately, the Crown Heights riot underscored the complexities of urban ethnic relations and the challenges of effective policing in multicultural communities.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Crown Heights riot
The Event An anti-Semitic riot
Date August 19-22, 1991
Place Brooklyn, New York
This was the first large-scale anti-Semitic riot in the United States.
On a hot August night in 1991, seven-year-old Gavin Cato was riding his bicycle on the sidewalks of Crown Heights, a neighborhood in Brooklyn. A few miles away, graduate student Yankel Rosenbaum was conducting research for a doctorate. The events of the next few hours would link the two, bringing to the surface racial animosity in a quiet area of the city. The event would also reveal police ineffectiveness during a critical period. Finally, the event crippled the political career of New York’s first black mayor, David Dinkins.
In 1991, Crown Heights was dominated by three cultural groups: Most residents were from the West Indies, slightly fewer were African Americans, and about 10 percent were Jews of the Hasidic Lubavitch sect, headquartered in Brooklyn, which emphasizes community self-help and commitment to religious principles and whose members have a distinctive personal appearance. Relations between the three groups were tense: All were competing for limited housing and services during a time of economic scarcity. In 1990, in response to a $1.8 billion budget deficit, Mayor Dinkins slashed social services, laid off over 25,000 city workers, and raised taxes enormously.
In tough times, any perceived preferential treatment of an ethnic group will be resented, and many African Americans thought that the Lubavitch were getting preferential treatment. One particularly difficult point was the police protection that accompanied the Lubavitch leader, Menachem Schneerson, when he traveled in the city. To the Lubavitch, protection was justified because Schneerson had been the subject of death threats.
As Schneerson’s entourage sped through Crown Heights on the night of August 19, it was followed by a station wagon driven by Yosef Lifsh. He was not part of the motorcade but was following to help provide security. Trying to cross a major intersection, Lifsh struck another car, lost control, and hit Gavin Cato and his cousin Angela. The mood of the crowd that gathered was angry, and Lifsh was beaten. Police officers on the scene asked the first ambulance to arrive, a Jewish volunteer ambulance, to take Lifsh away quickly. The intent was to protect Lifsh, but the decision delayed care for Gavin and Angela Cato.
Retaliation
Without this shortsighted action, there probably would have been no riot. The perception seized upon by the crowd was that black children lay critically injured while Jewish adults received police protection and medical help. Although city ambulances arrived soon afterward, Gavin Cato died before he reached the hospital. When this news hit the street, hotheads in the crowd began inciting violence against any Jew that could be found. Several were terrorized, attacked, and beaten.
A few blocks away and a couple hours later, Yankel Rosenbaum, a Jewish graduate student from Australia, was attacked by a crowd of young black men, one of whom stabbed him several times. The police soon found sixteen-year-old Lemrick Nelson hiding behind a bush; he had Rosenbaum’s blood on his pants and a bloody knife in his pocket. Despite multiple wounds, Rosenbaum was in stable condition when he arrived at a local hospital and would have survived had he been given adequate medical care, but Rosenbaum bled to death early the next morning.
For three days, various groups of African Americans—many of whom were not residents of Crown Heights—rioted in the neighborhood, looting businesses, overturning cars, and throwing rocks through windows. On the first night of the riot, Dinkins and other civic leaders went to Crown Heights and were pelted with rocks. The mayor had to hide in the Cato household to avoid being severely injured. Control seemed to be handed over to various anti-Semitic agitators by day and rioters by night. For some, the physical damage was not as disturbing as marching crowds that chanted anti-Semitic slogans. Several accounts claim that an elderly Jewish woman named Bracha Estrin, a survivor of the Nazi holocaust, was so frightened and distraught that she committed suicide.
Impact
The Crown Heights riot was politically crippling to the city’s administration and law enforcement. Dinkins considered himself a harmonizer and envisioned the city as a beautiful mosaic of various groups living together peacefully. During the riot, this vision was ruined, and his administration lost credibility. The riot lasted as long as it did in part because police tactics were ineffective and were designed to prevent police brutality, not crime. The strategy was to establish a cordon and prevent the riot from spreading, hoping that the unrest would burn itself out. This measure protected neither property nor people in the area and proved unworkable. By the second day of the riot, police were ordered to break up groups of rioters.
Police ineptitude also slowed efforts to find justice for Rosenbaum. Although Rosenbaum allegedly identified Nelson as his attacker, police officers kept no notes of the identification. In fact, no officer interviewed Rosenbaum until three hours after the event, when he was dying. Similarly, officers neglected to record Nelson’s confession; no one had him sign a document waiving his Miranda rights. When Nelson’s case came to trial in 1992, he was acquitted despite the mass of incriminating physical evidence. Not until 1997 was Nelson found guilty of violating Rosenbaum’s civil rights and sentenced to substantial time in prison.
Bibliography
Evanier, David. “Invisible Man.” The New Republic 205, no. 16 (October 14, 1991): 21-26. This article profiles Yankel Rosenbaum.
Gourevitch, Philip. “The Jeffries Affair.” Commentary 93 (March, 1992): 34-38. Argues that widespread anti-Semitism simmered within the African American intellectual community long before the riot.
Lardner, James, and Thomas Reppetto. NYPD: A City and Its Police. New York: Henry Holt, 2000. Briefly overviews the significance of the riot to the police who had to quell it.
Shapiro, Edward. Crown Heights: Blacks, Jews, and the 1991 Brooklyn Riot. Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2006. Overviews various interpretations of the riot.