TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/091189/09118900.042

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 4KB | 70 lines

NATION, Page 28

Death on a Mean Street

A murder in a white section of Brooklyn ignites racial discord


    Around his neighborhood in mostly black East New York, Yusuf
Hawkins was known as an easygoing kid, good at games, dutiful in
class, eager to get on with high school. No one would have thought
him a world shaker. Yet last week, when his funeral was held, it
was clear that the 16-year-old Brooklyn boy, gunned down on the
night of Aug. 23, had not merely shaken up New York City but had
become a national reminder that there are streets in white America
where a black man dares not tread.

    It was Hawkins' misfortune to have set foot on such a street
in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn that fateful night. He and
some friends had entered the largely Italian, working-class
neighborhood to inspect a used car advertised for sale there. They
were suddenly surrounded by ten or so white youths. Inflamed by the
fact that a former girlfriend of their ringleader was associating
with blacks and Hispanics, the whites were looking for trouble.
They carried baseball bats and at least one gun. It was fired four
times. Hawkins died shortly afterward.

    When scores of blacks marched into Bensonhurst to protest the
slaying, numerous residents screamed at the protesters, "Niggers,
go home!" and mockingly held aloft watermelons. Mayor Edward Koch,
running for his fourth term in office, added to his reputation for
insensitivity to black concerns by complaining (even before
criticizing the racist hecklers) that protest marches would
increase tensions. For Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins,
a black running for Koch's job, the death became an occasion to
blame the mayor for creating the hostile atmosphere in which it
occurred. Swiftly, Hawkins' death transformed the election campaign
and provoked the most sulfurous racial exchanges since 1986, when
a young black named Michael Griffith was killed in the Howard Beach
section of Queens after a mob of white youths chased him into the
path of a moving car.

    It is no coincidence that both racial episodes took place in
down-at-the-heels, ethnic white neighborhoods like Howard Beach
and Bensonhurst. According to a study done at Temple University's
Institute for Public Policy Studies, racial violence occurs most
frequently in poor or lower-middle-class white urban neighborhoods,
especially those in which housing values are in decline and
manufacturing jobs have been lost.

    Other cities, particularly in the Northeast and the Rust Belt,
have similar districts that are tinderboxes for violence: Chicago's
Marquette Park, Baltimore's Hampden section and Philadelphia's
Fishtown and Feltonville, where a young Hispanic was killed by a
white mob in July. Such confrontations "pit the powerless against
each other," observes J. Anthony Lukas, a Pulitzer prizewinning
author who often writes about racial conflict. "These swaggering
kings of the walk in Bensonhurst are as ill equipped to make their
way in the late 1980s as the blacks from Bed-Stuy, and they know
it at some level of their being."

    Last week a grand jury indicted Keith Mondello, 18, and
Pasquale Raucci, 19, for second-degree murder and lesser offenses
related to Hawkins' death. The youth suspected of pulling the
trigger, Joseph Fama, 18, surrendered the day after the funeral to
police in Oneonta, N.Y.

    Hawkins' funeral drew New York Governor Mario Cuomo, Mayor Koch
and three candidates running against him. While some mourners
objected to their presence, the Rev. Curtis Wells, who led the
service, addressed them directly, "Mr. Mayor, Mr. Governor, let
freedom ring in Howard Beach. Let freedom ring, yes, from
Bensonhurst."  To some, the ceremony had an all too familiar ring.
Said Jean Griffith, mother of Michael Griffith: "It seems like I'm
burying my son again."