Letter to my newborn son

March 22, 2024

Dear Emory Chauncey Jolly:

Late on March 14, 2024, I held your mom’s hand through her awe-inspiring act of resilience and love, as she gave birth to you. Sharing your name with the doctors while hearing your first cries was the culmination of a nine-month personal journey. Invoking childhood and ancestral memories, I engaged in more personal writing than I have ever done, something I have avoided since a college mentor encouraged me to keep a journal. This process helped me make sense of fatherhood, an approaching new chapter of life.

Your mom and I learned of her pregnancy the day after the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the landmark affirmative action ruling. In Fair Admissions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson delivered a fascinating dissent where she discusses what she describes as “gulf-sized race-based gaps” that “exist with respect to the health, wealth, and well-being of American citizens.” In one paragraph, Justice Jackson describes the Great Migration following World War I when Black Americans moved northward in response to Jim Crow’s repressive economic system in the American South. Upon their arrival to northern cities, Black Americans were welcomed by new forms of discrimination like exclusionary zoning laws sanctioned by the government and redlining practiced by financial institutions. The connections between today’s wealth gaps and these past socio-economic conditions are well documented.

As a history enthusiast, the timing of the Fair Admissions decision and learning of your mom’s pregnancy was significant to me. Although I would like to think of my achievements as solely based on my hard-work and diligence, I am clear-eyed in my understanding that government action — especially housing policies aimed at remedying racial discrimination of the past — created opportunities for me to succeed in today’s America.

Your name is partly an ode to this fact. Your middle name is a reference to Chauncey Street. Less than two-miles long, Chauncey Street cuts through the Historic District of Stuyvesant Heights and Ocean-Hill Brownsville, and the street ends sightly past Bushwick’s border with Bedford-Stuyvesant. This is the area of Central Brooklyn where I lived my adolescent years, attended middle school, and cut my teeth in federal policy as a Washington intern for my former Congressman, the Honorable Edolphus Towns.

Chauncey Street’s dozen blocks, briefly disjoined by Brevoort Projects, includes some of Brooklyn’s most beautiful brownstone homes, historic religious edifices like Holy Rosary, and townhouses developed in the 1990s under New York’s Saratoga Square Urban Renewal Program (“Saratoga Square”). Saratoga Square was a major redevelopment effort to expand housing opportunities for low- and moderate-income families by building on blighted land left vacant after New York’s 1977 Blackout. During the summer of ’77, citywide electricity loss sparked a match that ignited decades of racial tension in communities like Ocean-Hill Brownsville. Looting and arson severely damaged what were already economically dismal and neglected neighborhoods. Decades later, policymakers on the city, state, federal levels — in collaboration with banks and nonprofits — put forth significant financial resources towards revitalizing Ocean-Hill Brownsville, creating new pathways to the middle class for New Yorkers.

I am a product of those policy efforts.

Your paternal grandparents initially settled in the Crown Heights and East Flatbush subsections of Brooklyn. In the late 80s and early 90s, these adjacent communities — both with extensive histories of welcoming newcomers — included Caribbean enclaves that were known for their cultural vibrance as much as they were known for racial tension and bouts with crime.

Your dad was born in Crown Heights at the now defunct St. Mary’s Hospital, a stone’s throw away from the historic Black neighborhood of Weeksville. The area was named after its first settler James Weeks, a free Black Virginian who relocated to Brooklyn in 1838, worked as a longshoreman, and built a self-sufficient community in Antebellum America. This neighborhood would serve as a stop on the Underground Railroad, a haven for enslaved people escaping the persisting horrors of slavery.

A century later, Crown Heights also became a haven for Jewish Americans fleeing Eastern Europe and the Nazis. By 1991, although Crown Height’s white population largely fled the community following a heavy influx of Black West Indians, an Orthodox Jewish group — the Lubavitch — remained firmly planted within the community.

My most vivid childhood memory of Crown Heights was as a ring-boy at your grandparents’ wedding at Trinity Methodist Church. The church was only 200 feet from the starting point of another gathering of Black Brooklynites. That day, community leaders led a march in memory of Gavin Cato, the seven-year-old Guyanese American child who was recently killed by a speeding car.

A New York Daily News headline does a spectacular job at summarizing the context of my parents’ wedding day: “Haven and Hotbed: They Came to Crown Heights, from the Deep South, from Europe, from the Caribbean. All Hoping for a Better Life. Now They’re Caught in a Culture Clash.” I was only three years younger than Gavin Cato. His untimely death occurred only three blocks away from the address on my birth certificate: 921 Montgomery Street. Gavin — who was playing with his bike before his tragic death — was pinned to the corner by the trailing car of an NYPD-led motorcade. Local police were ushering the local Lubavitch Rabbi through the community as was customary then.

Cato’s death — and the subsequent killing of a Jewish student, Yankel Rosenbaum –sparked several days of protests, violent riots, and a heavy-handed police response during the week of August 19, 1991. On the Thursday of the protests, a hail of bricks and Molotov cocktails were thrown from the apartment building your grandmother and her mother once called home on Montgomery Street, injuring 10 police officers. In comparison, the protests on your grandparents’ wedding day were more peaceful, with a NYPD presence that created a challenge for their limousine traveling a one-mile distance between the church ceremony and the wedding reception.

Despite the world around us being rife with rage and grief, what I remember most vividly about your grandparents’ wedding day was love, family, music, and dancing. Within the Church, I remember Luther Vandross’ “Here and Now” being sung by family friends. At the reception, I remember Soca artist Colin Lucas’ “Dollar Wine” being played while my young self, four years of age, gyrated my hips, likely waving a toddler-sized tuxedo jacket in the air.

During those early years, we relocated from Crown Heights to the neighboring East Flatbush. That community connected me to our Caribbean roots in powerful and formative ways. I remember the smell of jerk chicken and corn from pit barrel grills, the music, dancing, and fun we had at summer block parties, and the comradery I shared with fellow first-generation American kids being raised by foreign-born parents.

Nonetheless, East Flatbush in the 1990s, was as fun as it was challenging to raise young children. As much as I remember the friends, food, and fun, I also remember being the victim of a hit and run during the Blizzard of 1996. I remember being robbed as a young child, several times. A walk to the nearby park meant you may get your basketball “tooken,” or your bike “juxed.” I remember returning home from these incidents and being chastised for being “careless” as personal responsibility was devoid of any context in Caribbean immigrant homes. My awareness of your grandparents’ sacrifices — a mechanic and a bank teller — made their seemingly unfair reactions understandable, even at a young age.

Moreover, I remember my cousin who was killed merely five blocks away near Lincoln Terrace Park at East Flatbush’s and Crown Heights’ border. An August 1999 New York Daily News article describes the sounds of his murder as a “staccato burst of gunfire.” My cousin was the article’s nameless 22-year-old left dead while “the shooter’s vehicle sped off in the dark.” He was the closest thing to an older brother to me then and remains a source of spiritual motivation as well as anxiety as I often think of the pitfalls that too often besiege Black men.

Accordingly, our family moving from our two-bedroom apartment on East 92nd Street and Clarkson Avenue to a two-family, newly constructed home built under the Saratoga Square Plan, near Chauncey Street, was a positive life altering change. We now had a backyard and I no longer had to fear the trappings of the local park. I no longer shared a room with my three sisters. Biggie, Jay-Z, Nas, Fabolous and DMX were stapples in my bedroom, their music consumed my free time and motivated me to approach my academic work as hustlers approached the block. Above all, the change in environment expanded my understanding of what it meant to be Black in America as my friends were no longer primarily Caribbean American; many were the grandchildren of Black Southerners who took that leap of faith to New York during the Great Migration Justice Jackson referenced in Fair Admissions.

Shortly after our family moved, I enrolled in Ocean-Hill Brownsville’s historic middle school: John M. Coleman or I.S. 271. That school — named after the first African American appointed to New York City’s Board of Education — was the epicenter of the 1968 parent-led effort to achieve community control of New York’s public schools. Funded by the Ford Foundation, the community’s mostly Black and Puerto Rican parents assumed school governance authority. The experiment reached a crescendo when I.S. 271’s parent leaders fired several of the school’s mostly white teachers. This event led to the United Federation of Teachers (“UFT”) and community control opponents to accuse the local parents of antisemitism, though the underlying intent of the experiment was more associated with the Black Power fever of the time as opposed to anti-Jewish hate. For example, acclaimed author James Baldwin discusses these dynamics in Robert Campbell’s retelling of the controversy, The Chasm: The Life and Death of a Great Experiment in Ghetto Education. There, Baldwin notes: “dismissal of the unsatisfactory teachers was not intended to be an attack on the United Federation of Teachers” and that the UFT’s pushback was an effort to “prevent any of the billions of dollars involved in the education business from being controlled by Black and Puerto Rican communities.” Baldwin goes further and dismisses any claims of antisemitism, grounding the experiment’s narrative in a yearning for self-determination among frustrated Black parents.

Although the community control experiment was largely watered down by lawmakers shortly after its inception, its history was present within the halls of I.S. 271 when I attended 30 years later. That legacy was maintained well into the 1990s by local parents who maintained a role on the School District 23 board. I remember attending a few of those contentious, but meagerly attended meetings with your grandmother.

The community control legacy was also sustained by I.S. 271’s teachers and administrators, several of which were not too far removed from the controversy. My social studies teacher — a Catholic Irish American man — allowed me to arrive to school hours before the first bell rang almost every morning. Most times we played chess. Other times, I helped him file newspaper clippings in his classroom cluttered with interesting artifacts. In addition to discussing current affairs, or the 1969 Northern Ireland riots which were personal to him, we discussed the local community’s activist history. At that school, I excelled academically, passing several High School level state examinations suited for students well beyond my middle school age. In 2001, I was part of the mere 13.5 percent of the school’s eighth graders that passed the statewide math test. The overall academic circumstances at I.S. 271 were such that a 2002 New York Times opinion piece titled “A Lesson in Unintended Consequences” highlighted the school, lending support to an effort led by then-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to obtain greater control of the City’s public schools, further quashing any remnants of the community control experiment.

In the 1990s, the Saratoga Square Urban Renewal Program was one strategy to improve the social, educational, and economic situation of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville community. In a 1991 report, the Brooklyn section of the New York Daily News devoted two of its lead articles on the area. A little over a decade after the community succumbed to destruction of the 1977 Blackout, one article highlighted the local library’s need for $400,000 in repairs that caused it to be gutted and closed. While the City provided the community with a “mobile library,” local stakeholders — including Brooklyn’s Borough President — lamented the compounding costs of neighborhood neglect by the City government.

Juxtaposed on the same page, the Daily News reported on a hearing where the Saratoga Square program is discussed. The initial plan called for nearly 400 new homes and thousands of new or rehabilitated housing units. While there were some community concerns over the use of eminent domain to execute the bold program, community groups, local leaders, clergy, and other stakeholders remained meaningfully involved in its implementation. Accordingly, the multimillion-dollar public-private sector investment in affordable housing picked up steam over the years. In 1994, the local Councilman Enoch Williams noted that the program was “reversing a trend we had for years of abandonment, housing being torn down.” Private-led commercial activity also came to the area, as businesses — both small and large corporates — turned vacant land into a community shopping center near Brevoort Projects. Banks like Republic National funded workshops for first time homebuyers. Longtime community residents — including those in local public housing — were incentivized to stay with one resident noting: “Everybody is moving to Queens. I said I’m moving to my block. My son was raised on this block, and I didn’t want to go far.” In many ways, Saratoga Square was a model for sustainable, community-led real estate and business development before gentrified Brooklyn.

In addition to assisting long-term Ocean-Hill Brownsville residents, relatively new Brooklynites — including those from the Caribbean — benefited greatly from the new housing stock as well. The 10-minute drive of a relocation provided me a more stable structural home where focusing on my academics could remain a priority, and a community rich in Black history would inspire me.

The block parties were as fun as those in East Flatbush, and the cultural reminders of our Afro-Caribbean and African-American identities were evident. On one side of I.S. 271, I could get a beef patty and coco bread from the Jamaican-owned Tower Isle factory. On the opposite end of the school, I could get sweet potato pies from the Carolina Country Kitchen, founded by a family with roots in Raleigh, North Carolina. All in all, our home near Chauncey Street, and the public-private sector investments that enabled living there, made all the difference in a world at a time when the risk to Black boys were too well known in parts of Brooklyn. Moreover, I developed a sense of pride in a community that named its streets and buildings after Black Americans, including those with roots in the south and the Caribbean. There was a nearby boulevard named after Malcolm X (Grenadian and American ancestry), a day care named after Shirley Chisholm (Barbadian ancestry), and a major thoroughfare named after Thomas S. Boyland (Brooklyn Assemblyman originally from Tennessee). In the summers, we attended the International African Arts Festival at Boys and Girls High School where soul and R&B artists were as popular as the calypsonians.

During your mom’s pregnancy, I often reflected on how immensely fortunate I have been, which is the underlying meaning of your name: Chauncey (luck, fortunate or chance). Efforts of public servants and activists — many of which predated me — are inextricabe aspects of my personal story. The investments in affordable housing made by public and private sector leaders may have saved my life. There were publicly funded academic programs that kept me on the right trajectory towards college. Many of these programs were initially created as a remedy to past injustices that plagued the American descendants of enslaved Africanss. By chance (and sometimes intentionally), these programs also helped the Caribbean descendants of enslaved Africans. There were teachers that went the extra mile to care for me, including Black, Jewish, Irish, Italian and other teachers who felt like they had a vested interest in my success. And there were nonprofits — like the Institute for Responsible Citizenship and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation — that provided me my first congressional opportunities in Washington, DC. Your birth is an extension of these fortunes. Your birth is also a fortune to me in and of itself. You provide me clarity.

As you progress in life, you will have your own set of challenges and fortunes. Many of the opportunities I benefited from — including affirmative action programs — may not even be available to you as you come to age. However, there will be opportunities you come across that I never dreamed of, nor can currently fathom as I pen this letter. This is where your first name becomes most relevant.

Emory means industrious, hard-working, and diligent. Regardless of life’s circumstances, I hope you fully live up to your name. The best way to express gratitude for God’s grace, or to your parents for their unconditional love, is to meet life’s challenges and fortunes with a sense of purpose, grit, earnestness, and rigor. This is indeed the Jolly approach to life.

A few days before your birth, I was saddened to virtually view a funeral for a fellow Jolly family member who died a premature death. As we expected your arrival at any moment, traveling was not an option. At the funeral, several Jolly men were in attendance. Their professions included men who worked hard with their hands; mechanics like your grandfather, for example. There were other Jolly men who worked white collar jobs, including several pharmacists. What connected all these men were their commitment to family and providing for family. This ethos runs through your veins and extends as far back as when some of the first African slaves were brought to the Caribbean Island of Dominica. This ethos continued throughout the plantation, post-slavery Caribbean economies where your ancestors farmed land, transported the agricultural goods that economically sustained the Caribbean, built their communities up through brick masonry, and established institutions that provided community resources, like pharmacies and grocery stores that exist to this day. Yours is a rich ancestral history even as some of that history has been lost over time. I hope your family name reminds you of this. I hope your given names help you rise to the occasion. Sankofa.

Love,

Your father, Ernie Clement Jolly