Albert Vann, who as a progressive New York State and New York City legislator for four decades helped move the black political center of gravity from Harlem to Brooklyn, where he challenged the white-dominated Democratic machine, died Friday at his home in the Bedford. – Stuyvesant part of the municipality. He was 87.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Binta Vann-Joseph.
A mentor to the likes of New York City Mayor Eric Adams and New York State Attorney General Letitia James, Mr. Vann was so popular and powerful that in 1980, when he was kicked out of the Democratic primary after being challenged, Mr. for signatures on his qualifying petitions, he was re-elected in the State Assembly on the Liberal Party’s line alone.
“We all sit on his shoulders of leadership,” Mayor Adams said in a statement.
In the mid-1980s, Mr. Vann was instrumental in efforts to register black voters. Nevertheless, he lost a primary for Brooklyn city president in 1985, and despite his efforts to form a coalition of blacks and Latinos to overthrow Mayor Edward I. Koch, he was nominated and re-elected that year.
But in 1988, thanks in part to Mr. Vann’s registration campaign, Rev. Jesse L. Jackson ran first in the Democratic presidential primaries in New York City. The following year, David N. Dinkins was elected the city’s first black mayor.
Mr. Vann has been a catalyst for economic development in his neighborhood through his Vannguard Urban Improvement Association. He was also a founding member of Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York.
He started his career as a pedagogue. He was an advocate for community control of public schools in the late 1960s, when the predominantly white teachers’ union accused the local school board in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Brooklyn, of violating contractual seniority rights by transferring 19 white teachers from the district.
Ocean Hill was one of three experimental districts in the city that were given some measure of local control over school administration and curriculum, but a fierce, vicious battle over how much control broke out between the local government and the largely white (and heavily Jewish ) United Federation of Teachers. The conflict resulted in months of strikes and boycotts and became a major source of tension between the black and Jewish communities in the city.
Mr. Vann helped establish the African American Teachers Association, which supported local government and whose newsletters contained statements accusing white union members of “exploiting” black students and parents — a sentiment that Mr. Vann’s allies have about. generally dismissed as parochialism rather than outright anti-Semitism.
The crisis was defused with a compromise: The legislature decentralized the school system, granted community governments like those in Ocean Hill-Brownsville narrowly defined discretion, and reinstated the white teachers who had been transferred from the district. Unhappy with the deal, Mr. Vann resigned from the school system, eventually turning to electoral politics.
Mr. Vann, a persistent critic of police brutality, was often seen as a radical early on. But as an elected official, he became more dignified, if not less passionate.
“He always fought for equality, but never let the challenges embitter him,” former Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Twitter.
In an interview with New York magazine in 1983, Mr. Vann said, “I don’t consider myself an angry young man, except for the fact that I’ve read my history.” He added: “I know the injustice and inhumanity we have endured. Obviously there’s an anger out there when you know that story, and everyone should be.”
Albert Vann was born in Brooklyn on November 19, 1934, to parents who had recently moved from North Carolina to New York during the Great Migration and separated shortly after. His father was Benjamin Palmer. His mother, Nina (McGlone) Vann, a former tenant farmer, worked as a maid and in a factory before opening a grocery store.
After graduating from Franklin K. Lane High School, Mr. Vann served in the Marines from 1952 to 1955 and won a basketball scholarship to the University of Toledo, graduating in 1959 with a degree in business administration.
Returning to New York and not being inspired by a department store management training program, he earned a master’s degree in education from Yeshiva University. (He later earned a master’s degree in counseling counseling from Long Island University.)
He was a public school teacher, academic counselor, and assistant principal and led an internship program at the University of Long Island before being elected an insurgent to the State Assembly in 1974.
As chairman of the Assembly’s Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic, and Asian Legislative Caucus, he oversaw lawsuits that led to greater minority representation in New York’s city council, state legislature and congressional delegation.
After Annette Robinson was barred from reelection to city council by term limits, she and Mr. Vann switched seats; she was elected a member of the General Assembly and he served on the Council, from 2002 to 2013.
He was also an instructor at Vassar College’s Urban Center for Black Studies.
In addition to his daughter Binta, Mr. Vann is survived by his wife, Mildred (Cooke) Vann, whom he married in 1967; their three other children, Fola Vann, Albert Scott Vann and Shannon Clarke-Anderson; eight grandchildren; a great-grandson; and his brother, Charles Vann.