“If it takes an assassination of his ass, he will not be borough president in the borough where I live.”
That was the chief of staff to Charles Barron speaking about another City Council member, Leroy Comrie, who is black and voted to abstain today on a failed proposal today to rename a street after black nationalist Sonny Carson.
The chief of staff, Viola Plummer, was speaking outside City Hall to a group of reporters and advocates for Carson. When asked about her comments, Plummer later said, “So, to assassinate Leroy Comrie’s ass, because that’s what I said, means his whole stuff, his whole run for Queens Borough President.”
When Plummer was asked by a reporter to identify herself, she first indicated that she lived in Queens and ran a community program in Brooklyn. Later she identified herself as a Council employee.
Plummer’s “assassination” remark was very much in the tradition of the sort of militant language employed by Carson himself. (“I’m not anti-Semitic, I’m anti-white,” he once said.) Carson’s supporters have said that it’s unfair to judge his entire life by his most extreme comments.