Carrying an enormous Howard Seaside banner, Black protesters chanting anti-racist slogans march throughout a day lengthy demonstration of “outrage” in opposition to the Howard Seaside racial assault on Jan. 21, 1988. | Supply: Bettmann / Getty
UPDATED: 8:00 a.m., Dec. 21, 2024
Friday marked the thirty eighth yr since a gaggle of younger white male thugs violently confronted three Black males who grew to become stranded after their automotive broke down and brutally attacked them with baseball bats and chunks of wooden, leaving certainly one of them useless within the Howard Seaside neighborhood of New York Metropolis’s Queens borough in 1986.
The one who died, 23-year-old Michael Griffith, was chased into freeway visitors, the place he was fatally struck by a car pushed by the son of an NYPD officer.
The teenagers accountable had been shouting racial slurs on the Black males, one witness advised the New York Day by day Information on the time.
The demise of Griffith, a Trinidadian immigrant who had been employed as a development employee, was in contrast by then-New York Metropolis Mayor Koch to “lynching events that existed within the Deep South.” He reportedly bumped into visitors on the Belt Parkway whereas unaware of the highway and making an attempt to flee from his attackers.
“The white guys had been yelling, ‘Come right here, n—–,’” mentioned John Patterson, who noticed Griffith moments earlier than he was killed.
One of many victims of the Howard Seaside assault in 1986, Cedric Sandiford, speaks at a press convention along with his attorneys Alton Maddox and Vernon Mason and the Reverend Al Sharpton. | Supply: Bettmann / Getty
The racially motivated assault occurred within the early morning hours of Dec. 20, 1986, after Griffith and three associates — Cedric Sandiford, 36, Timothy Grimes, 20, and Curtis Sylvester, 20 — acquired in a automotive in Brooklyn to drive Griffith to get his paycheck in Queens. However when their automotive broke down in Queens, Griffith, Grimes and Sandiford ended up strolling to close by Howard Seaside to discover a payphone and name for assist. Sylvester stayed behind with the automotive.
Seemingly as quickly as they entered Howard Seaside, a principally white neighborhood, they had been confronted by folks yelling racial slurs and telling them to go away the neighborhood. Nonetheless, the Black males shrugged it off and determined to seize some pizza as a result of they had been hungry. It was shortly earlier than 1 a.m. at that time.
That’s when a dozen white boys aged 16 to 19 armed with baseball bats, tire irons and tree limbs started ready for the Black males exterior of the pizzeria.
“What are you doing on this neighborhood, n——s?” they requested.
As soon as the boys left, they had been promptly pounced on and savagely crushed merely due to the colour of their pores and skin and their location.
“My God, I’ve a son such as you, 17 years previous,” Sandiford reportedly mentioned to the attackers. “Please don’t kill me.”
Grimes was capable of escape unhurt.
Police quickly responded to seek out Sandiford — the boyfriend of Griffith’s mom — crushed and bloodied and racially profiled him as a suspect in Griffith’s demise. Then-NYPD Commissioner Benjamin Ward, the primary Black man to carry that place, reportedly “scolded the Queens commanding officer for his officers’ insensitivity towards Sandiford.”
4 of the kids — Jon Lester, Jason Ladone, Scott Kern and Michael Pirone — had been charged with manslaughter, second-degree homicide and first-degree assault whereas the remainder of the racist attackers confronted lesser fees. Lester, Ladone and Kern had been all discovered responsible whereas Pirone was acquitted.
Lester, an immigrant from the UK who was the assault’s ringleader, testified in court docket that he noticed the Black males and went again to a celebration he had been attending to alert folks there that, “There’s n***ers on the boulevard,” the New York Occasions reported. He implored anybody who would hear: “Let’s go kill them.”
The Occasions reported: “The assault infected simmering tensions between blacks and whites in New York Metropolis; sparked indignant marches by protesters, who had been met by native residents outraged in flip at being tarred as bigots; and, with the case drawing worldwide consideration, reworked predominantly white Howard Seaside right into a metonym for racial hatred.”
It’s been thirty-seven years because the Howard Seaside assault and among the folks concerned on this tragic incident have handed away.
In 2017, Jon Lester, the convicted ringleader within the 1986 Howard Seaside racial assault, took his personal life in England on the age of 48. Lester’s sister advised the New York Occasions that her brother was severely depressed and suffered from “guilt desires” over the Howard Seaside incident, however insisted he wasn’t a cold-blooded killer.
Alton H. Maddox, Jr., the civil and human rights lawyer who represented Cedric Sandiford and the household of Michael Griffith, died April 23, 2023 at 77 years previous. Maddox was often known as “The Individuals’s Lawyer” and revered for his commanding presence within the courtroom, authorized data, and advocacy for victims of police abuse and protection of the underserved.
Regardless that almost 4 a long time have handed since Howard Seaside, comparable racially motivated assaults are nonetheless taking place throughout the nation.
That is America.
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