Letter From Crown Heights

Lemrick Nelson's is not a name most people across the country could quickly identify. But in my neighborhood, Crown Heights, Brooklyn, mere mention of the name draws strong reactions. Here, "Lemrick Nelson" is synonymous with the tempestuous co-mingling of race, urban life and the American justice system; here, his name belongs alongside those of Rodney King and O.J. Simpson.

Would Lemrick Nelson's release snap Crown Heights' already strained ethnic relations? I took a walk through the neighborhood to find out. On June 2, Lemrick Nelson stepped from a federal corrections vehicle into a halfway house in New Jersey, where he is to serve nine months of a three-year probation period. Residents of Crown Heights watched the release warily, wondering what it could possibly mean for neighborhood race relations.

Back in the summer of 1991, tensions had been simmering for a long time in Crown Heights between blacks and Orthodox Jews, the neighborhood's two most populous groups. On August 19, a Jewish driver in the motorcade of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneeman, the spiritual leader of Crown Heights' Hasidic Lubavitcher community, lost control of his vehicle and struck and killed Gavin Cato, a black child. The neighborhood erupted in violence. Bands of young people of African descent, fueled by a notion that the Hasidic community usurped power and influence over real estate and public works in the neighborhood, took to the streets, vandalizing property and menacing Jewish residents. Nelson, then 16, was in a group that ambushed Yankel Rosenbaum, a visitor from Australia. Nelson stabbed Rosenbaum, and Rosenbaum later died in hospital.

Nelson underwent three trials in 12 years. In 1992, he was acquitted of state murder charges. After outraged, mostly Jewish, protesters flooded the streets of Crown Heights, federal prosecutors announced an investigation into the case. Nelson was sentenced to 19 and a half years in prison, not for killing Yankel Rosenbaum, but for violating Rosenbaum's civil rights. That ruling ended up being thrown out by a court of appeals, which took issue with the racial composition of the jury: three African Americans, two Jews, three non-Jewish whites and four Latinos. Then, just last year, a subsequent trial reinstated the guilty verdict. The jury in this case comprised eight African Americans, two whites and two jurors of Guyanese descent -- the nationality of Gavin Cato, the child whose death touched off the riots.

Since the summer of 1991, over a decade of community organizing, civic programs and other formal and informal negotiations have gone into bridging the gap between Crown Heights' two defining communities.

In steadily increasing numbers, Crown Heights has also become home to people like me, young middle-class New Yorkers, some with ethnic ties to one of the "founding" groups. All of us washed into Crown Heights on a tide of gentrification. Our presence is a yet another tension.

Would Lemrick Nelson's release snap Crown Heights' already strained ethnic relations? I took a walk through the neighborhood to find out.

The question of who lives in Crown Heights is not nearly as interesting as why we live here.

I began my walk through the neighborhood at its western limit on the corner of Franklin Avenue and Eastern Parkway Boulevard. The boulevard is one of the main arteries in this part of Brooklyn. It has beautiful, tree-lined walkways on either side, to which many residents make use in their leisure time. There's something rather tropical about the Parkway, I have always noted. It is vaguely reminiscent of the leafy boulevards I've seen in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, the country from which my parents, and Gavin Cato, originated.

I've heard that Scottish settlers in New Zealand by-passed the sunny, temperate North island in favor of the damp, hilly South island because it reminded them of home. Sometimes, when I watch older Caribbean men and women enjoying the late-afternoon calm seated on a bench on the Parkway, or I pass a black couple laughing heartily over some joke one has just told, I imagine that Eastern Parkway operates the same way in the memory of these immigrants.