Broken Mosaic

By Frank Trippett

For eight straight years, New York City had been pounded with one act of racial violence after another. 1982: Willie Turks, a black transit worker, is beaten to death by a mob of whites shouting racial slurs. 1984: Bernhard Goetz wounds four young blacks he said were menacing him on the subway. 1986: a white mob in the Howard Beach section of Queens attacks several blacks, one of whom fled in panic onto a highway and was killed by a passing car. 1989: a 28- year-old white executive is beaten and raped in Central Park by a pack of black teenagers out on a hell-raising spree that added the word wilding to the lexicon of urban fear.

And then in the 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.

The murder stunned a city already beset by spiraling racial tensions. To many New Yorkers it symbolized a breakdown in racial civility that had no quick explanation or readily available cure. Some of the youths accused of killing Hawkins were jobless school dropouts with histories of drug abuse -- mirror images in whiteface of underclass young black males. The whites had armed themselves on the night of Aug. 23 because the former girlfriend of their alleged leader, Keith Mondello, had invited black and Hispanic guests to her birthday party. They mistook Yusuf and his comrades for those guests.

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."

So it was 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.

At the verdict, Mondello's father Michael yelled, "Thank God! Jesus has risen!" The Hawkins family, seated across the aisle, shrieked in dismay and, pointing at the jurors, shouted, "He did it! He did it!" As night fell on Friday, crowds of angry blacks milled about in Brooklyn, disrupting traffic and throwing rocks and bottles. Fires, possibly ignited by arsonists, erupted in the Bedford-Stuyvesant and East New York sections of the borough, and a few whites, including several newsmen, were attacked but suffered only minor injuries.

The question now facing the city was what, if anything, could avert a plunge into deeper turmoil. Less than five months after he was sworn in as New York's first African-American mayor, Dinkins was confronting severe strains in the multiracial society he likes to call the "gorgeous mosaic." Yusuf Hawkins, Dinkins declared, had been killed by "racism in the first degree." Though "no verdict can take back the hate that was unleashed upon him or the pain that was inflicted upon all of us by the attack," said Dinkins, "it does allow us to begin to turn our attention to the process of healing. We have a long way to go."

Though his city was already so jittery that many openly speculated about the possibility of 1960s-style racial rioting, Dinkins had waited until May 11 to deliver what he called a "major, major" appeal for calm. Said he: "I oppose all bigotry against anyone, anywhere. I abhor it. I denounce it, and I'll do anything -- anything right and anything effective -- to prevent it." Speaking for many blacks and whites, the Rev. Calvin Butts, pastor of Harlem's % Abyssinian Baptist Church, welcomed Dinkins' appeal but noted that it "should have been delivered months ago."

Butts had a point. Since January, Brooklyn's Flatbush section had been roiled by a black boycott of two Korean grocers that began after a Haitian woman accused the Koreans of assaulting her in an argument over a dollar's worth of fruit. Two weeks ago, Newsday's Pulitzer-prizewinning columnist Jimmy Breslin was suspended for aiming a tirade of racial and sexual slurs at an Asian-American co-worker who had criticized his work. At Long Island University's Brooklyn campus, a brawl broke out when a white professor from the City College of New York delivered a lecture proclaiming white genetic superiority. Another C.C.N.Y professor, this one African American, joined the chorus with a theory that blacks, the "sun people," are warmer and better than cold and selfish whites, the "ice people."

The racial climate had been so poisoned that last week virtually everybody, upon hearing sketchy reports that blacks had beaten three Vietnamese men they had mistaken for Koreans, concluded that another monstrous outbreak of bigoted violence had occurred. It turned out that a black youth had fractured the skull of one Vietnamese with a hammer, but in a fight that started after a 13- year-old girl tossed a bottle through an apartment window. Immediately after the fracas, police hung a sign on the Vietnamese victim's apartment building: REWARD. THIS IS A BIAS ASSAULT CRIME SCENE. Wrote Daily News columnist Mike McAlary: "In this moment you can hang the sign on the entire city."

Even before last week's outbursts, doubts had arisen about Dinkins' ability to foster an improved racial climate. During his 35-year climb up the Democratic Party ladder, he was more a follower of aggressive black politicians than a force in his own right. Having spent most of his career in Harlem, he has few close links to the boisterous community leaders in Brooklyn, where 42% of the city's African Americans reside. His political base among the swelling ranks of Caribbean and Asian immigrants clustered in the borough is virtually nonexistent.

To many voters, Dinkins had seemed a perfect antidote to twelve years of confrontations from the irrepressible Ed Koch, who appealed to working-class whites by goading blacks. Low-key and conciliatory, Dinkins prefers quiet back-room negotiations to forceful public speeches. But even in such talks, Dinkins and his aides have blundered. When the mayor dispatched his most trusted assistant, Deputy Mayor Bill Lynch, to mediate the Korean boycott, Lynch angered the demonstrators by walking into one of the stores without first talking with them. After that bumpy start, however, Dinkins' men managed to keep both sides talking, and an end to the boycott appeared to be in sight.

Dinkins has been hampered by an economic decline aggravated by massive layoffs on Wall Street. To balance the city budget, he must raise $850 million from higher taxes and slash services by $303 million. That will mean backing away from campaign promises to put a cop on every subway train and provide housing for the homeless. Managing cutbacks would be difficult under any circumstances, but Dinkins has filled many of the top posts in his administration with outsiders, such as Police Commissioner Lee Brown (recruited from Houston) and Health Commissioner Woodrow Myers (from Indianapolis), who have no experience in New York's intricate local politics. "His executive core provides him with no political base," says Mitchell Moss, director of the Urban Research Center at New York University.

The mayor's desire to promote tolerance can hardly be faulted, but by itself it will do little for the people at the bottom who are most directly harmed by racism. The blacks and whites most often involved in racial violence have things in common: poor educations, no job skills and bleak, depressing futures. "You are seeing what happens when the possibilities for low-income people are cut back," says Madeline Lee, executive director of the New York Foundation, which supports community projects for the disadvantaged. "They turn on each other."

As opportunities constrict, the impulse to blame other racial groups can become overwhelming -- and the temptation to exploit such resentments can become irresistible to some unscrupulous leaders. When elected officials fail to provide effective leadership, says Moss, "the street merchants of hate move into the vacuum." Last week Dinkins mused about his role in repairing the cracks in New York's gorgeous mosaic. Said he: "No one ever knows if one has done enough." That realization could be the start of doing something more.

With reporting by Janice C. Simpson and Joelle Attinger/New York