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By Matthew Perlman
Brooklyn Daily
We remembered King for a day.
Prominent Kings County residents gathered on Monday morning at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gillman Opera House to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Among them were African-American trailblazers Eric Adams, Brooklyn’s first black Borough President and the event’s master of ceremonies, and Ken Thompson, the borough’s first black district attorney.
Other officials spoke, including Mayor DeBlasio, his wife Chirlane McCray, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, and Sen. Chuck Schumer, paying tribute to the late civil rights leader and touting their present-day agendas.
DeBlasio vowed to fight to keep Interfaith Medical Center and Long Island College Hospital open, though he did not provide details of how he might do that, according to Crain’s New York Business.
Adams defended DeBlasio and McCray from criticism over the possibility of New York’s First Lady taking a position in the new mayoral administration, but did not specify whom he was responding to, the business publication reported..
The keynote address was delivered by Angela Davis, the activist, professor, and author whose latest cause is abolishing prisons.
Davis also introduced a screening of the documentary “Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners,” which chronicles the movement that helped absolve her of kidnapping and murder charges for buying the guns used in a botched Black Panther courtroom takeover that left four men dead.