He Honors Black New Yorkers. Not All Black Activists Are Thrilled.

He got his first taste of local politics when Lincoln was in middle school, and Mr. Morris realized that the city’s public schools were not required to count the test scores of students with learning disabilities toward their official averages. He felt like the practice gave schools an incentive to funnel low-performing students, most of them of color, like his son, into special education programs.

“It really just messed with my head,” Mr. Morris said. In 1998, he led a class-action lawsuit against the Board of Education that ended the exclusion of the reading and math scores of special education students in the city.

That experience led to a job as the director of the Parent Studies Institute at Touro College, where Mr. Morris learned to write grant applications. In 2002 he began working on a proposal to disseminate information on New York City’s role in the Underground Railroad. It took him three years to win the grant for the New-York Historical Society, and in the intervening years of research, Mr. Morris acquainted himself with the lesser-known figures in New York’s abolitionist history. He wanted to tell their stories.

“In the early 2000s, if people were talking about Black history, they’d be like, Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King,” he said. “And I was like, man, there’s all these other great people that had huge historical significance.”

He also learned about famous Black figures with little-known footprints in New York City, like Frederick Douglass, who, during his escape from slavery, had landed by boat at the Chambers Street dock in Manhattan.

In 2005, Mr. Morris brought before Community Board 1 in Lower Manhattan a proposal to name that block Frederick Douglass Landing. It passed in committee by one vote. “If the vote had gone the other way, I never would have become a street namer,” Mr. Morris said. His success paved the way for more projects.

Flush from his victory, he wanted to name a street in Harlem for Charles Hamilton Houston, a lawyer central to dismantling Jim Crow laws. But Mr. Morris knew it wouldn’t be easy politically, so he focused first on naming streets for more widely known figures: James Brown, Zora Neale Hurston, Count Basie, Billie Holiday.