Word: bensonhurst
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...midst of a bitter mayoral campaign pitting three-term incumbent Edward I. Koch against a black challenger, Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins, came the murder of Yusuf Hawkins. He was a 16-year- old black who with a group of friends ventured into the tightly knit, mostly Italian Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn to inspect a used car. They were set upon by a gang of whites armed with baseball bats and a gun. When the melee was over, Hawkins lay dead with two bullet wounds in his chest...
Whatever the motive for the killing, tension mounted after a series of protest marches through Bensonhurt led by one of the city's most flamboyant rabble-rousers, the Rev. Al Sharpton. Inflammatory press coverage added to the heat. When the first two Bensonhurst youths charged with the killing went on trial separately in state supreme court on April 16, apprehension gripped the city. Not-guilty verdicts, blustered Sharpton, would be "telling us to burn the town down...
...that, with the exception of some outraged whites in Bensonhurst, New Yorkers heaved an almost palpable sigh of relief last week when a jury consisting of six whites, three blacks, two Hispanics and an Asian convicted the accused gunman of second-degree murder. But only one day later, the relief was replaced by dismay. A second jury acquitted Mondello, 19, of murder and manslaughter but found him guilty of several lesser charges...
...From Brattle St. to Bensonhurst, racism is a curse," the marchers chanted at Tuesday's vigil. Those who spoke at the rally made it clear that they considered Commonwealth Day the latest symbol of the city's hypocrisy...
...uncanny, the similarity between this scene and the earlier one at the party--but this was the real world. He and I, perfect strangers, could just as easily have been shouting racial epithets at each other in Bensonhurst or in the next Spike Lee movie--but, no. This was the real New York...