This column, from the weekly opinion piece MATTER OF FACT, first appeared on BrooklynReporter.com, the Home Reporter and Spectator dated August 23, 2024
August 23 marks 35 years since a hate crime in Bensonhurst left a 16-year-old boy dead on a sidewalk near the corner of 20th Avenue and Bay Ridge Avenue. Yusuf Hawkins, a black kid from East New York, had taken the N train to Bensonhurst with a few friends to look at a used car they had seen a classified ad for. After dozens of local teens had shouted racial slurs at them and chased them with weapons, a gun was pulled and Hawkins was shot twice in the chest.
I was a kid in 1989 and the murder scene was a few blocks from my home. I can still recall hearing a commotion three days later, on a Saturday. My family came out from our backyard to see what was happening and realized that protesters had come to the neighborhood in response to the racist murder of an innocent boy.
the corner of 20th Avenue and Bay Ridge Avenue
A crowd from the neighborhood had already gathered to check out the scene. Many simply looked on at the unexpected march, but many shouted angrily at the protesters. A few stood atop a car, hurling racial epithets, and taunting the demonstrators with watermelons. In the 2020 HBO documentary ‘Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn’, news footage from the period shows a Bensonhurst resident at one of these protests proudly exclaiming, “This is not a racist community. We just don’t like black people, that’s all.”
I was aware of what racism was and that it existed in my community, but the sights and sounds of that day, as well as from the subsequent protests where black and brown people were berated by local bigots, has never left me. They are as vivid now as the day I witnessed them 35 years ago.
However that affected me as a white kid from Bensonhurst, it is inconsequential in comparison to how it affected the people of color who were there to speak for a murdered 16-year-old or to how it forever changed the life of Diane Hawkins, whose boy was stolen from her.
The complexion of the neighborhood has changed and the blight of racism has receded from what it was three-and-a-half decades ago, but remnants linger. Just eight months ago, 15-year-old Mahak Hussain was attacked by a woman near 17th Avenue and 79th Street. Just before the suspect pepper sprayed the Muslim teenager in the face, she used anti-ethnic remarks.
In April of 2023, Yemeni bodega owner Jamal Sawaid was attacked by a group of men who had entered his shop yelling anti-Arab slurs. Surveillance video captured the men entering the store on Mermaid Avenue and brutally beating Sawaid across the head and face repeatedly with a metal rod.
Anti-Asian, specifically anti-Chinese, hate crimes spiked during the pandemic. The southern Brooklyn Asian community held a protest March in Bensonhurst on August 5, 2020, following an incident they claimed was racially motivated. Video captured two individuals slapping a 90-year-old Chinese woman in the face and lighting her shirt on fire at 16th Avenue and 77th Street. Two teenage suspects were arrested on September 9, 2020, but as minors, none of their personal information was made public.
The following year, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez announced the arrest of someone they suspected in three assaults of Asian Americans around southern Brooklyn a few months earlier, all caught on Surveillance video. The NYPD and DA’s office treated the attacks as hate crimes. The individual charged has pleaded not guilty and the case is still pending.
The 1980s and 1990s were a dark time in southern Brooklyn with respect to hate crimes. Seven years before a mob of white youths attacked Yusuf Hawkins simply for coming to Bensonhurst, resulting in his fatal shooting, a mob of white youths set upon African American MTA workers for being in Gravesend, ultimately leaving one dead in the street. Willie Turks, 34, was with fellow transit workers near the train yards along McDonald Avenue when they were attacked. After they were besieged with racial slurs and pulled from their car, two of the workers fled to safety, but Turks was dragged through the intersection and bludgeoned to death.
In 1994, five years after the Hawkins murder, a group of white teens with weapons went looking for people that “don’t belong here.” They entered Dyker Beach Park looking for Latino immigrants. They found and beat 40-year-old Ecuadorian immigrant, Manuel Aucaquizhpi, to death with lead pipes, metal chair legs and two-by-fours, leaving his brain exposed.
I love the neighborhood I have called home my entire life, but I hate that it has had this connection to racism and hate. The murders of Willie and Yusuf and Manuel may be a few decades old, but we have seen that hate crimes have not disappeared from southern Brooklyn. The 1980s and 1990s saw several high-profile murders in southern Brooklyn that targeted black and brown individuals.
In recent years, we have seen a spate of anti-Asian and anti-Muslim attacks. We are fortunate none have had the tragic results of those local cases I was aware of growing up, but any bias attack is unacceptable.
