NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- The co-founder of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York called Mayor Eric Adams a “white man in blackface” and said the city is a “war zone.”
Hawk Newsome made the comments in reaction to remarks Adams made about gun violence on April 14 following the arrest of a suspect in the Brooklyn subway mass shooting.
“Where are all those who stated, ‘Black Lives Matter?’” Adams said. “If Black lives matter, then the thousands of people I saw on the street when [George] Floyd was murdered should be on the street right now stating that the lives of these Black children that are dying every night matters—we can’t be hypocrites.”
Newsome told Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” in a Thursday interview: “Don't listen to what Eric Adams says, he gives great press statements. He's the master of the press conference. Some kid dies, he hugs their mother. He's holding up sneakers, he's crying.”
“But what we elected him for, the city of New York, was to keep the city safe,” Newsome continued. “This city is a war zone and he can't stop it. So with all his power he turns to BLM and says, ‘What are you going to do?’”
“I’ll tell you what we’re going to do, we’re going to organize people in our communities to preach a message of love and unification in the streets,” Newsome said. “We’re going to take control of our cities, because the government has failed us for decades. Even when crime is low, we’re still dying. And we have to fix this problem ourselves, because we believe that poverty is the mother of crime, and until we fix that, there’ll never be a decrease in crime.”
During the interview, Newsome referred to Adams using a racial slur and also called him a “white man in blackface, and a very conservative-minded white man at that.”
Newsome said measures put in place by the mayor, including increasing the number of plainclothes officers and the NYPD’s overall presence, aren’t making residents safer.
“His new strategic policing model is a monumental failure,” Newsome said, adding that Adams “has no plan.”
Newsome said defunding the police is about investing in the community by “taking money from the police, putting it in community centers, job opportunities and after-school programs, which this mayor has cut.”
In a statement, Adams’ press secretary, Fabien Levy, told Fox News that the mayor “has made clear that he believes that Black Lives Matter.”
“But, as he said, he is hopeful that more New Yorkers will stand up and show their outrage when innocent Black and Brown individuals, many of whom are children, are victims to gun violence. He will remain focused on ending gun violence across the city and will not respond to personal attacks that simply seek to divide us,” Levy said.
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