Yusef Hawkins

Yusef Hawkins was 16. He lived in East New York, Brooklyn, and on the night of August 23, 1989, he traveled with his younger brother and two friends to Bensonhurst to look at a used 1982 Pontiac that someone had advertised for sale (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Yusef_Hawkins). Bensonhurst was a mostly white, working-class, Italian-American neighborhood. A mob of white youths was lying in wait. The instigator, Keith Mondello, had once dated a neighborhood resident, Gina Feliciano, and believed she had invited Black and Latino men to her birthday party. When Hawkins and his friends walked into the neighborhood, the mob mistook them for those guests and attacked (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Yusef_Hawkins; source: https://progressive.org/latest/killing-awakened-city-never-sleeps-rampell-200810/). The New York Times described "a crowd of 10 to 30 white youths, with at least seven of them wielding baseball bats." One of them carried a handgun. The mob surrounded the four teenagers, and the gunman shot Hawkins in the chest. He died shortly after (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Yusef_Hawkins; source: https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/yusef-hawkins-murder). Hawkins had nothing to do with the young woman the killers thought he was dating. Police confirmed he "had not in any way been involved" with her. He was killed because he was Black and in the wrong neighborhood (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Yusef_Hawkins). His death set off months of protest marches through Bensonhurst, led by the Reverend Al Sharpton, and reshaped New York City's racial politics during the 1989 mayoral race (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Yusef_Hawkins; source: https://progressive.org/latest/killing-awakened-city-never-sleeps-rampell-200810/).