Updated 08/17/2011 09:56 PM
Crown Heights 20 Years Later: Clash's Painful Origins Scar Neighborhood
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Twenty years ago this week, riots broke out in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and the violence and anger on display shocked New Yorkers and tore apart the neighborhood. In the first part of NY1's three-part series, Grace Rauh looks back at the clashes and explains what sparked the unrest.On August 19, 1991, long-simmering hostility between blacks and Jews in Crown Heights, Brooklyn suddenly exploded.
A seven-year-old black boy, Gavin Cato, was accidentally killed by a car driven by a Hasidic Jewish man in a motorcade for the Lubavitcher sect's grand rebbe. Cato had been trying to fix his bicycle.
Rumors quickly spread that a Hasidic ambulance helped the driver, not the boy, and enraged black teens tore through the streets.
Yankel Rosenbaum, a 29-year-old Hasidic scholar, was stabbed in the mayhem and later died.
Then-Mayor David Dinkins announced, "Lawlessness and violence will not be tolerated under any circumstance," but nevertheless the rioting lasted for days.
Black teenagers hurled bricks and bottles, looted stores, overturned police cars, and yelled anti-Semitic chants.
To many Jewish residents, it seemed as though the police simply let the rampage go unchecked.
"At that point we felt we were not being cared for by City Hall. That was a scary feeling," said Rabbi Shea Hecht, a Crown Heights community leader.
Why did Crown Heights explode? There is no question Gavin Cato's death was a tragic one, but fatal car accidents occur every day and do not lead to riots like the one that broke out 20 years ago.
"It simply was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back," said the Reverend Herbert Daughtry, a Crown Heights community leader.
Black residents felt Jews in the neighborhood had been getting preferential treatment from the city for years.
"You are talking about 10 percent of the population who now had the lion's share of the goods and services coming into the community," said Daughtry.
He dismissed charges that anti-Semitism was at the heart of the riots.
"I didn't view it as anti-Semitic. I viewed it as anti-Hasidic," said Daughtry.
Hecht thinks the distinction is a false one.
"It is noted throughout history that those who hated us, hated all of us," said Hecht.
The scars clearly remain in the neighborhood today.