Response to a Reader

To the Editor:
I love the Bedford-Stuyvesant community. My family and I are newcomers and would like for our local politicians to stop using and abusing the words “black community”.  Yes, we know Bed-Stuy is mostly black, but that will not be the case for very long. We wish you would include others like Hispanics, whites, Asians as well when it comes time to speak about improving the community. We are all doing what we can in these tough times.
This community will come to fruition when all people are mentioned as an important part of this community. We live in New York City, a place surrounded by all different groups, does Al Vann really believe Bed-Stuy will continue to be mostly a black community.
Wake up sir, we all care about the neighborhood and want to live next to decent people without regard to their racial makeup. When you mention the fact that blacks can’t let go of Bedford-Stuyvesant, you create tension between different groups.
That is not what our politicians should be doing. Why not just refer to all community members of Bed-Stuy simply as that, because that is what we are.
Steven,
Brooklyn

Dear Steven,
As far I can tell, you do not love the Bedford Stuyvesant community.  What you love about Bedford-Stuyvesant are its amenities: the transportation infrastructure, the tree-lined streets, the brownstones.   There is the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, Prospect Park, the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens and the Brooklyn Museum all within a nice walk, that is what you love.  The inhabitants, however, are an entirely different matter.
Bedford-Stuyvesant has had many ethnicities passing through it over the years.  Now  it is a mostly African-American community with roots stretching back over two hundred years, the Weeksville Houses, still standing, date from 1840.  Bridge Street African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church was organized in 1766, incorporated in 1818.  So yes, that sentence fragment was right, you are newcomers.  Beyond that, you suffer from what we can call Post-Traumatic Slave State Syndrome (PTSSS).
Dr. Joy DeGruy has written about Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome, the transgenerational transfer of emotional trauma arising out of  the terror needed to hold African-Americans in chattel slavery for 400 years.    This period also produced a state apparatus as well as a state of consciousness in European-Americans arising out of  hundreds of years of superiority and of relating to African-Americans as property.  What you are experiencing here is an example of PTSSS, a condition brought on by vestiges of slavery that are with us every day.
For example.  There are weekly and daily publications in many languages all around you, all referring to their “community” of Polish-Americans, Russian-Americans, Korean-Americans, Pakistani-Americans and many more.  They are of  no interest to you because you do not speak their language.   And if Our Time Press was written in Swahili, you would also pay it no mind.  It is written in English because Africans were captured, transported as cargo and sold as property to provide the cheap mass labor needed to convert raw land into the economic engine that jump-started this United States.
As a part of that, the slave system took away the languages of the Africans and substituted its own, giving slave owners access and control over the Africans’ thoughts.  And now, as you continue that legacy of eavesdropping, you are overcome with umbrage that the property has misbehaved, but you take a gleeful solace in projecting that we won’t be here very much longer.
It is impossible to know which of the echoes of slavery you feel will take us out but given the combination and the multitude I can understand your feeling of confidence.   There are the foreclosures resulting from racist predatory lending driving people from their homes and depression-era unemployment plus a 50% dropout rate, all intertwined with emotional distress, most obviously acted out in self-hating crimes of gunfire and dysfunction at home.
As African-Americans work to cure these problems, you feel empowered to object, which were it not for the PTSSS diagnosis, would be an astonishing impertinence.   But I guess such malevolent arrogance is not unexpected, and the rewards for stealing another’s language, the ability to meddle, keep coming in.
Of course you are right again, it is nice to live next door to decent people.  A person I would have liked to have lived next to was the family of Louisa May Alcott.  In the biography Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women, Harriet Reisen writes this about the capture of Louisa’s family hero, the militant abolitionist John Brown: “We are boiling with excitement here,” Louisa wrote to Alf Whitman a few weeks after the raid, “for many of our people (Anti Slavery, I mean) are concerned in it.  We have a daily stampede for papers, and a nightly indignation meeting of the wickedness of our country & the cowardice of the human race.  I’m afraid mother will die of spontaneous combustion if things are not set right soon.”   And later, after a harrowing description of Louisa’s experiences in a Civil War hospital was this: “The night before she had celebrated the Emancipation Proclamation by leaping from her bed at midnight and racing to the window to add her own cheer to the hollering and singing in the streets of the embattled nation’s capital.  She waved her handkerchief to a crowd of black men gathered below, and returned to bed to savor the bursts of firecrackers and choruses of ‘Glory, Hallelujah’ that sounded all night.”  These passages and many others show me that Miss Alcott and her people, “Anti Slavery, I mean”, are people I’d like to live next to.  And I know their descendants and legacies are here also, luckily offsetting those such as yourself.
(It would be better if abolitionist fire still burned with indignation, decrying white control of African-American education and demanding fairness in city contracting, but the vote for Obama showed there were still some embers there and maybe they just have to be fanned.)
You, however, are a different matter.  Your words on African-Americans remaining in Bedford-Stuyvesant, “that will not be the case very long,” spring from a different source, one captured by Claude McKay in his poem “The Lynching”:

Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to view
The ghastly body swaying in the sun:
The women thronged to look, but never a one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue;
And little lads, lynchers that were to be,
Danced ’round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.

And here you are, the little lads’ heir all grown-up and smugly snuggled in your white privilege, a critic of African-American conversations to combat the remains of the slave experience, strengthen our community and be a full partner in the future.
The fact that you find the methods and manner objectionable is heartening, I take it to mean we are on the right track, and as a sort of mile marker on our journey I ask a favor of you please, let us know when you become apoplectic, then we’ll know we’re almost there.

Estate Prompts Investigations of Brooklyn Supreme Court Guardianship Program and the Real Lowdown on the Slave Theater

Questions about the future of the Slave Theater have been raised to a higher level with the current photo exhibit at Five Myles Gallery.  The theater is a part of what’s left of the estate of Judge John L. Phillips after passing through the hands of four court-appointed guardians.
We spoke with Reverend Samuel Boykin, the court-appointed administrator of the Phillips estate and a nephew the eldest of Judge Phillips on the status of the estate.
He is the only member of the family the court has given permission to make financial decisions regarding the estate.   However, Synphonie Moss, a cousin, was able to make personal decisions a regarding the person of Judge Phillips.  But had overruled Moss and Boykin in placing Phillips in the Castle Senior Living at Prospect Park residence, rather than allowing him to stay at home.  Boykin is now suing the residence for wrongful death negligent health care.
As we go to press, Reverenc Boykin told us that he spoke with  the state comptroller’s office on Tuesday, and they said  they are actively considering doing an audit of the Brooklyn Supreme Court Guardianship program.   Boykin has charged that the illegal handling of the estates of elderly people, the misappropriation of funds and in some cases embezzlement and mortgage fraud should be a part of that probe in the handling of the Phillips estate.
He also told us that he has spoken with a representative of the NYS Unified Court System Office of Administration who said they were investigating some of the activities of the court-appointed guardians in the Judge Phillips case.   DG

Boykin: “Judge John L. Phillips had 13 properties listed with the Brooklyn Supreme Court Guardianship program.  Of those 13 properties listed, there was only rent recorded being collected for two months for two properties at 563 & 565 Nostrand Avenue, no other property has paid rent in 13 years. 
OTP:  The people in the Slave Theater now, what is their status? 
Boykin:  No one has paid rent in the entire time they’ve been there and all are there in a state of trespassing.  
OTP:  But they have access.
Boykin:  That’s because they won’t leave voluntarily.  I have an eviction notice that has been going on for 5 months, and I’m waiting on the court’s decision to evict.  We’re having a hard time selling the buildings because people want a building empty.  Not with tenants who have not paid rent in ten years. 
OTP:  But what about the electric?
BOYKIN: Dr. Paul Lewis of the Messengers for Christ World Healing center on the second floor is paying the utilities.  It’s an international church.  His church has been there for eight years and he is not paying any rent.  Mr. Hardy (downstairs) uses the church’s utilities and is paying zero bills.   People assume he is the spokesman for the family because he happens to be there. 
OTP:  And the status of the Slave Theater?
Boykin:  I’ve terminated my agreement with Massey and Knakel.  I put a “For Sale” sign on both theaters, “For Sale by Owner”.  I’ve received over a hundred calls.  We’re accepting bids and those that are authentic and qualified I will turn over to the attorneys.
What’s next for the Slave and the Black Lady Theater is that they must  be sold because we owe over $2 million dollars in back taxes and liens.  No property taxes on any of the properties have been paid in ten years. 
OTP: Whose responsibility is it to have paid those taxes?
Boykin:  These past guardians sold all the property and paid no taxes and filed no taxes. 
OTP: Where did that money go?
Boykin: A lot of that money we can’t find.  It’s been a continual embezzlement against the estate of Judge John L. Phillips non-stop by court-appointed guardians, by people who were close to Judge Phillips and say they loved him, but remain in the buildings without paying rent or taxes and others. 
OTP:  When you say that past guardians have been guilty of breaking the law, specifically, which laws are you talking about? 
Boykin:  Failure to file taxes.  Estate taxes, state and city taxes.  Selling property way undervalue.  Waiving of the guardianship law.  Failure to advertise property they were selling.  Paying off illegal mortgages.  Mortgage fraud was committed against 68 Cumberland Street for  $391,500.  Instead of the court reporting these people to the District Attorney’s Office and sending them to prison, they allowed Imani Taylor to pay off the loan from Judge Phillips’ account.  I couldn’t get anyone to respond until recently.  I sent information to the Departmental Disciplinary Committee of the Supreme Court Appellate Division,  State Attorney General, NYS Commission on Judicial Conduct.  Judge Phillips’ case is not isolated.   Anyone in the guardianship program is at the mercy of court-appointed attorneys and others who collaborate in mismanaging the estates.
OTP:  And the longer it takes, the more money everybody makes.
Boykin:  That’s correct.