Word: beaching
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Both cause and symptom of that New York City increase -- and lately a symbol of racism everywhere -- is the name Howard Beach. That now stands for the ugly pre-Christmas scene in which a gang of eleven youths beat up three black men, one of whom died under a passing car as he tried to escape. After disputed charges of a cover-up, a state-appointed special prosecutor finally took the case before a grand jury last week...
Unmollified, a crowd of 3,000 blacks marched down Fifth Avenue with banners expressing anger over Howard Beach. "We are all angry, we are all oppressed!" cried Chris Griffith, brother of the dead man. To antagonists on both sides, Howard Beach is now a kind of battle cry. Two blacks reported last week that they had been attacked by a gang of white youths shouting "Howard Beach!" and two whites reported a similar attack by similarly chanting blacks...
Other names have become almost as symbolic as Howard Beach: for example, the Citadel, the Charleston, S.C., military academy where a black cadet was subjected to racist hazing; or Jefferson Parish, the New Orleans suburb where the sheriff (a Chinese American) made a suggestion (later retracted after a public outcry) that blacks walking in white neighborhoods might be stopped for questioning...
...Hall, when Jackie Robinson had to promise not to retaliate if spiked and spat upon as the only black in major league baseball, and magazines periodically published photographs of some charred black body dangling on a rope from a branch of a tree. "In the 1940s," says Pettigrew, "Howard Beach occurred every night of the week...
People look to the White House for some sense of what is acceptable, what is right. "Although I can't say Reagan made kids behave the way they did at Howard Beach," says Roger Wilkins, senior research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, "whites get the message that the leader of this country, the moral beacon, is saying it's all right to be racist." That judgment was considerably exaggerated, but it nonetheless remains true that any sign of indifference means that the beast is free to prowl...