Mayor Eric Adams and Council Speaker Adrienne Adams shared a somber moment Friday at a Queens street renaming ceremony honoring a police shooting victim.
The ceremony for Clifford Glover, a 10-year-old Black boy fatally shot by a white NYPD officer in 1973, was held in the early afternoon at the Cavalry Baptist Church in Jamaica two blocks from where the killing took place 50 years ago.
Speaker Adams, a smattering of other local elected officials and police reform advocates as well as members of the Glover family were on hand, delivering emotional remarks about the pain of the young boy’s death that haunts the local Jamaica community to this day.
”Unfortunately, in the year 2023, things have not improved that much,” Speaker Adams said. “We are still losing Black children, we are losing Black men, Black boys, Black girls to the scourge of gun violence, and even to the scourge of police brutality. It is something that we have to continue to talk about.”
The Rev. Herbert Daughtry , a longtime mentor to Mayor Adams, wrapped up his remarks and handed it over to him.
“No matter what I had to do today, I had to come here and close this chapter in my life,” Adams said. “I was devastated when a 10-year-old boy was shot when I was 12. That could’ve been one of my classmates.”
After the mayor’s remarks, the group went over to the intersection where the tragic shooting took place five decades ago to unveil a new street sign declaring the block “Clifford Glover Road.”