Cornel West stirs White Plains crowd on police controversies
Chamberlain Jr., Salaam supported at church
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'How does decency face brute force?' philosopher Cornel West asks Saturday at a meeting about police actions at Mount Hope AME Zion Church in White Plains. He gave a message of love, fighting victimization and indifference. / Melissa Elian/The Journal News
WHITE PLAINS — With all the fire of a Sunday sermon and all the charge of a street rally, speakers brought a capacity church crowd to its feet multiple times Saturday in solidarity with families who have lost loved ones to controversial police actions.
More than 300 people packed the sanctuary of Mount Hope AME Zion Church overlooking Lake Street to hear charismatic scholar and philosopher Cornel West deliver a keynote speech about standing up for justice.
“Hatred is a coward’s revenge, and we don’t want to be cowardly,” an animated West told the crowd. “We need to be courageous. We need to be maladjusted to injustice.”
The crowd also gave standing ovations to Yusef Salaam, one of the now-exonerated men who served prison time for the 1989 Central Park rape case, and for Kenneth Chamberlain Jr., the son of a 68-year-old man who was shot to death in his apartment by White Plains police in 2011.
“The last image I have is my father looking at me with his eyes wide open, his tongue hanging out of his mouth and a bullet wound,” said Chamberlain, whose family has filed a $21 million federal lawsuit. “We have to understand who has the power. We have the power.”
The 90-minute event was moderated by the Rev. Odinga Lawrence Maddox, the pastor of Mount Hope, and the co-chair of the Westchester Martin Luther King Jr. Institute for Nonviolence.
“This is a young man who is fighting for the honor and good name of his father, who was lynched by the White Plains Police Department,” Maddox told the crowd. “Anytime you take the life of someone without giving them due process, ‘lynch’ is a proper term.”
White Plains police went to the apartment of Kenneth Chamberlain Sr. when his medical alert accidentally went off.
An officer accused of using the N-word as the situation escalated has been suspended without pay and is facing department charges that could result in his dismissal.
A Westchester grand jury did not indict any of the officers involved in the fatal shooting, but the U.S. Attorney General’s office has met twice since the verdict with the Chamberlain family.
A police union official who was not at the meeting said the characterizations of police were unfair.
“I support my members who were involved,” said Robert Riley, president of the White Plains Police Benevolent Association. “It was a terrible tragedy, and I feel sorry for the Chamberlain family for their loss, but it went to a grand jury and my members were cleared.”
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