'Vann’s contributions — the institutions he built, the leaders he mentored, and the opening of the system he engineered — will stand the test of time,' writes errollouis
Al Vann. Photo: William Alatriste/New York City Council Upon arriving in Brooklyn after college in the early 1980s, my first real journalism job, at the now-defunct City Sun, was to chronicle the politics of Brooklyn’s Black neighborhoods, where a generation of fiery, colorful local officials — the product of grassroots movements — were locked in a pitched battle against a string of unimpressive hacks tied to the Kings County Democratic organization.
Vann himself had managed a remarkable feat of political strength in 1980 when, after being knocked off the ballot by the Democratic organization, he won re-election running solely on the line of the Liberal Party.“Al was unique in that he always talked about how it wasn’t enough to have the quantity of leadership, but qualitative leadership was key,” ex-Assemblyman Roger Green, a protégé and longtime ally of Vann’s, told me.
A key part of the project was a series of lawsuits, initiated by Vann, to undo entrenched electoral practices — including racial gerrymandering and at-large city council districts — that had long prevented candidates of color from winning elections. “The significance of it, which many people lose, is that it was the case that really said that section five of the Voting Rights Act applied to New York City,” Wooten told me. “It means that all future voting practices, procedures, legislative plans, districts — even judicial districts — now had to pass muster with the Voting Rights Act, which means there was a presumption that they had to be non-discriminatory.
Not all of Vann’s plans worked out. In 1985, he launched a disastrous, failed run for borough president and simultaneously tried to build a citywide Black/Latino political coalition that would make Herman Badillo New York’s first Latino mayor.
“Al had the ability to attract the best and sometimes the brightest possible people available at the time. He was not afraid of people who would challenge him. He was not afraid of people who would sit down and discuss things with him, equal to equal,” says Wooten.
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