Panel on notorious 1978 police killing implicitly updates a questionable public gesture by Borough President Adams.

Just as the New York Times article yesterday helped explain Borough President Eric Adams' reflexive support of the scofflaw nightclub Woodland, a look at another recent article offers an unacknowledged update on one of Adams' public gestures.

Remember, as I wrote in January, a bombshell New York article, The Mayor and the Con Man, raised questions about whether the religious figure Lamor Whitehead (aka Miller-Whitehead or Miller Whitehead) indeed is the son of Arthur Miller, a Black man killed in 1978 by police officers in Crown Heights, a notorious episode Adams--as Borough President, not as Mayor--has commemorated with Whitehead as guest. Whitehead has said he is the son of a woman not married to Miller.

One of the four children Miller had with his wife told the New Yorker that "she and her siblings offered to fly Whitehead to Florida, where they now live, to take a DNA test. He had declined."

The memorials

In June 2020, Adams appeared with Whitehead at a public memorial, as headlined by the New York Daily News as ‘The first ‘I can’t breathe’ in modern times’: Victim of 1978 police chokehold death in Brooklyn remembered.

More recently, the Brooklyn Paper last week cited Brooklyn remembers beloved community leader Arthur Miller 45 years after police killing, reporting on an Center for Brooklyn History panel featuring four speakers, none of them Whitehead. The article also quoted Miller's youngest dauigther, LoLisa Miller-Bradford.

Neither Adams nor Whitehead were mentioned.

Note: Whitehead also had a Woodland connection; he and Adams used to hang out there, according to the New Yorker's Eric Lach, who also reported that Whitehead offered a character reference before the sentencing of the Petrosyants brothers, who operated Woodland, on federal charges.