Crown Heights Riot Research Paper

“I want to state upfront, unequivocally and without doubt: I do not believe that any racial, ethnic or gender group has an advantage in sound judging. I do believe that every person has an equal opportunity to be a good and wise judge, regardless of their background or life experiences” (Sonia Sotomayor). There are so many different ethnic conflicts in the world. Whether it be from the past or sometime recent. Ethnic tensions in the United States include events that happened because of it including the Red Apple boycott, the Crown Heights Riot in 1991, the 1993 killing of five and wounding of 19 on the Long Island railroad, etc.

In 1990 a Haitian woman, Giselaine Fetissainte, was allegedly struck by a Korean-American shopkeeper. Fetissainte was at Family Red Apple, a Korean-American owned grocery store in Brooklyn. She went to the shop in search of limes, plantains, and peppers. The shopkeeper stated that the woman refused to pay for the store items and that she had not been attacked. This issue started a boycott led by Robert Carson. Carson was a local activist and black nationalist. The incident led to a lot of public criticism of the mayor at the time for not ending the protest.

Carson threatened the store owner that the boycott would get larger and escalate. He stated “In the future, there will be funerals not boycotts. ” The boycott finally ended after the owner of Family Red Apple sold the lease to another Korean-American who reopened the store three days later and had a steady stream of customers. Korean-Americans and African-Americans have a lot in common: the negative experience of being an oppressed minority; the positive experience of devotion to family; deeply held Christian beliefs, and an emotional openness and zest for life.

Many blacks perceive Korean-American merchants who do business in their neighborhoods as economic exploiters, shopkeepers who take from but give nothing back to a black community. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries African-Americans and Jewish people began to meet in Northern urban centers as two major migration streams intersected: African Americans moving North and into cities and East European Jews fleeing the same forces in a different setting. Jews were not considered fully white but still had more exposure to racism. Although it was less violent than others.

African American and Jewish people have a lot in common, but they were still seen as two different races so they each got racism in different ways. An example of black and jewish interactions and conflicts is the Crown Heights Riot. This riot was three days long that occurred in Crown Heights of Brooklyn, New York City. This riot caused the black residents and Orthodox Jewish residents against each other. Two children of Guyanese immigrants were unintentionally struck by a car by a leader of a Jewish religious sect. One of the child died and the other was severely injured. One Jewish man was killed and one non-Jewish man.

The non-Jewish man was mistaken for a Jew and was killed by a group of African Americans in the riot. Black and Jewish leaders developed an outreach program between their communities to help calm and improve racial relations in Crown Heights over the next few years. On December 7, 1993, in Garden City, New York 6 people were killed and nineteen others were injured. As the Long Island Railroad train pulled into the station at 5:33pm, Colin Ferguson got out his gun and started firing until he was held to the ground by three of the passengers: Kevin Blum, Mark McEntee, and Mike O’Connor.

The three men held him to the ground until the police arrived. The police found a note in his pocket labeled “reasons for this” and among them was “racism by Caucasians and Uncle Tom Negroes. ” Ferguson was offered free representation, but fired them because they urged him to say he was driven temporarily insane by “black rage. ” He then chose to represent and argue his own case. He argued that someone had stolen his gun whilst he was sleeping and framed him for the shootings. Colin Ferguson was convicted of murder for six passengers and attempted murder for the other nineteen.

He was sentenced 315 years and 8 months in prison and is currently serving his time at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York. Colin Ferguson is an African-Jamaican mass murderer who expressed his rage by shooting at 25 whites. The African-American and Latino cultures have always had an unspoken alliance because of the previously white dominated society. Their communities have shared common struggles and problems, but hidden underneath all of hat are steaming tensions. These conflicts are brought upon by economics, culture and race have caused quite a few incidents of violence.

One of the most controversial of these was the shooting and death of a black teenager Trayvon Martin by a Latino man, George Zimmerman in central Florida. In 2011, a group of African American assailants killed a hispanic store owner, his wife and sister-in-law during a robbery. These tensions rose again when a black police officer beat a Latina woman at the 2014 Puerto Rican Day parade. After the Martin case a poll found that conflict between Latinos and AfricanAmericans was the worst of any two racial groups.