This spring, as the Brooklyn-based December 12th Movement marked Malcolm X’s 101st birthday, the contrast underneath the tribute was hard to miss: Harlem already has its Malcolm X subway station, and Brooklyn, after a unanimous vote, still does not.
The December 12th Movement has organized its annual commercial moment of silence for 36 years, asking Black-owned businesses to close briefly on Malcolm X’s birthday as a show of collective economic power, a Shut Em Down tribute that runs across 125th Street. The campaign points to Bedford-Stuyvesant’s Utica Avenue station as next.
Harlem got there first. The 110th Street station was officially renamed 110 St-Malcolm X Plaza in August 2025, a completed win that the Brooklyn effort now holds up as the precedent it is chasing.
Brooklyn’s version has the votes and not the law. The bill to rename the Utica Avenue station on the A and C lines passed the full Assembly 144 to 0 in June 2025, a shutout, then landed in the Senate Transportation Committee, where as of early 2026 it sat. Its Senate companion, sponsored by Senator Zellnor Myrie, was parked in the same place.
That is the quiet frustration in the birthday observance: a renaming that nobody in the Assembly voted against cannot get itself onto the Senate floor. A 144-to-0 bill is not stuck because it is controversial; it is stuck because a station rename is a low-stakes, high-meaning measure that slides to the bottom of a committee’s list and stays there until someone forces it up.
The fix is a Senate Transportation Committee that takes the bill up, and the people who can push for that are the same Brooklyn lawmakers and organizers behind the December 12th Movement. The bill numbers, A6617 and S7764, are public on the State Senate’s site; the campaign to get Malcolm X’s name on the Utica Avenue platform runs through Albany now, not the MTA.
Featured image: Adam Moss / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
