A racist murder in Howard
USA tan DA in 1985 in a campaign based largely on denunciation of the complicity of the current DA in hampering prosecution of racial violence.
As the Black community began to mobilize for the march on Howard attention focused almost exclusively on Sandiford's refusal to testify. Sandiford and the lawyers were blamed for hindering the effective prosecution of the case. The most strident voice in this campaign was Mayor Koch, who had earned the wrath of Blacks for his
ON DECEMBER 21, a gang of white youths chased and beat three Black men in Howard Beach, a section of Queens in New York. One of the Black men ran onto a highway during the chase and was struck and killed by a car. Michael Griffith's death has ignited a sustained series of protests against racism in New York. ANDY POLLOCK
The murder of Griffith several other racially-motivated deaths in the city in the last ten years. Arthur
Willie Turks, Edmund Perry, Michael Stewart and Eleanor Bumpurs were each murdered in racist incidents, either by city police, transit police, or white civilians. The death of each was followed by rallies and marches and the formation of committees to seek justice in their cases. But the Howard Beach incident is also provoking widespread discussion about issues of racist violence, discrimination in the city in general and the role of the various forces involved in adafter Griffith's Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) called for a candlelight vigil the following Saturday in Howard Beach. Other groups, including many Southern Africa solidarity movement and grassroots community organizers, called for a march through that neighborhood. The latter groups intended the march to end at the 107th police precinct in Queens, which had been exposed the year before as the site of Black suspects with "stun guns."
days leading up to the the precinct became more and more of a focus of attention as a cover-up of the incident by the became known. The DA, John Santucci (who a few weeks later was embroiled in controversy for participating in a 14-hour lunch meeting with a local Mafia chief), was refusing to move on testimony by one of the survivors of the incident, Cedrick Sandiford. He said that the driver of the car that killed Griffith, Dominick Blum, was part of the group that chased and
¡International Viewpoint66 April 1987;
beat the men. Blum was not held for questioning when he returned to the scene after having gone home to consult his father (a police officer), and returned with a different car. No hit-and-run or leaving the scene of the accident charges were filed, and Blum never arrested or indicted in connection with the murder.
Sandiford, a victim and more about a robbery which had occurred in Queens earlier that evening than about the Howard Beach incident. As a result Sandiford, who later reported physical abuse at the hands of the police investigating the incident, to collaborate further with the investigation. Police and media witchhunt
Sandiford's treatment, combined with the failure to arrest or indict any of the participants in the attack other than the three picked up, led his lawyers to demand the intervention of a special New York state prosecu-
This became the signal for a joint enforcement-media heir supporters in the community vith the aim of taking the heat of the racist gang and the Queens officials. C Vernon Mason, have participated in many of the well-publicized police brutality cases in recent years. Mason also served as the lawyer for Columbia students fighting disciplinary proceedings growing out of their anti-apartheid blockade" The two have frequently been targeted by the media as a result. Mason himself ran for Manhatdefence of racist vigilante Bernhard
This support for the police who murdered Michael Stewart and Eleanor Bumpurs, his frequent racist comments (he once referred to Black Congressman Ronald Dellums as a "Watusi") and the overall policy direction of his tenure in office. This has favored the real estate interests gentrifying the city at the expense of poor, and especially minority, neighborhoods.
After the Howard Beach incident Koch, denouncing the attackers as a "lynch mob", tried champion of racial justice, resurrecting his days as a civil rights lawyer in the South (Mason later claimed these days numbered eight). Koch held several meetings at City Hall with Black elected officials and ministers, calling for tolerance and understanding. Koch combined this pose with a vicious attack on Sandiford and the lawyers, blaming their attempts to expose a cover-up as hindering the prosecution.
On Saturday December 27, approximately 5,000 marchers, mostly Black, showed up in Howard Beach. They were met by white residents with an overt and vicious display of racism. Howard Beach is a largely Italian neighborhood of middle class and skilled working class single homes. In media interviews after the attack these residents had repeatedly denied their neighborhood some of them followed this up with questions such as "what were those Blacks doing in Howard Beach anyway?"). But on the day of the march hundreds of young white men gathered around the pizza parlor at which the beating occurred and yelled racial slurs and obscenities at the marchers. Police prevented any physical contact between the two sides: the potential for violence was
Many marchers were shocked by the depth of hatred shown, and older marchers said they had seen nothing like it since the actions in the South in the 1960's. Howard Beach has resurrected the geographical designation of New York, among Blacks, as "upSouth".
The NAACP, in the days before the
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march, had engaged in secret negotiations with the police precinct over the route of the protest, hoping to avoid a march on the precinet. The NAACP and some Black elected officials were hedging on support for the victims lawyers and sought to defuse criticism of official handling of the case. After a march down the highway on which Griffith was killed, the marchers were led into a fencedin school playground to hear speeches by civil rights organization and elected officials. crowd remained outside the gate chanting for a march on the precinct stationhouse. Some militant community and student organizers moved through the crowd trying to organize such an action, and Reverends Daughtry and Butts and C Vernon Mason announced from the platform that after the speeches the precinct would be targeted. But at the end of the program the NAACP representative introduced a police official who gave the crowd instructions for the remainder of the march route (which of course did not include a stop by the precinct). The crowd ignored her directions however and marched chanting to the police station, then returned to the main highway and the pizza parlor, where they were met again by hundreds of screaming racists.
March participants were strikingly militant and determined. The most popular chant was "Coward Beach, haven't you heard, New York ain't Johannesburg." In speeches and informal conversations a consensus was emerging that white residents of Queens, by attacking Blacks passing through their neighborhoods, were establishing a de facto pass law system.
The racism exhibited by Howard Beachers found a subtler reflection in white progressive circles. The Village Voice, a liberal New York political and cultural weekly, carried an editorial by the publisher, Jack Newfield, which denounced the victim's lawyers as opportunists and racists, and organizers of the protest activities as criminals and poverty pimps. Newfield also waxed eloquent on Mayor Koch's supposed return to civil rights activism.
Among white movement groups the response, at least in terms of mobilizing outrage to this attack, has not been much more helpful. The percentage of whites at the Howard Beach march and succeeding rallies was very small. Predominantly white anti-intervention [in Central America] groups, women's groups, housing committees and unions have done very little so far to mobilize their members around this issue. In white progressive circles, in fact, more time was spent speculating on 10 the motivation and wisdom of the lawyers' strategy than in organizing in support of the Black community's protests.
Some attempts have been made to counter this trend, however.
group of white progressive activists built a meeting on 48 hours notice almost entirely by word of mouth and filled a high school auditorium.
Mendlowitz,
Amalgamated Transportation Union
Local 1202 (Greyhound Bus workers)
organized a press conference of prowhite union officials denounce the lynching and to express support for the lawyers. Some rank-
Chalkdust (teachers union), Hell on
Wheels (subway workers)
well as the Labor Notes supporters network, have begun to address the their publications and meetDemand for independent prosecutor
After the march attention began to focus on the demand for an independent special prosecutor to take out of the hands of the Queens DA. The demand was made upon Governor Mario Cuomo, who is being widely touted as a potential presidential candidate. Cuomo refused to intervene at first, refused even to publicly express sympathy for the victims or to attend Griffith's funeral, claiming he was too busy to address the issue. Cuomo then set up meetings with various Black elected officials some of the same officials who had agreed to meet with Koch), while trying to exclude those Black leaders supported the lawyers. The attempts by both Cuomo and Koch to play off one group of Black officials against the other, and against community organizers, has angered the community, and has been the subject of articles and editorials in such Black journals as the City Sun.
finally acceded to demand for a special prosecutor although not before allowing one of his assistants to denounce the lawyers who had demanded this prosecutor as having "zero credibility"), at which point Sandiford agreed to provide
In the meantime follow-up developments on two previous cases of racist violence have served to remind New Yorkers that Howard Beach is part of a larger pattern. A commission investigating the Michael Stewart murder (Stewart was a young Black graffiti artist and student murdered by transit police) found that the Transit Authority had not adequately investigated the incident and that the cop who accompanied Stewart to the hospital had not reacted when he saw Stewart had stopped breathing. The day after the commission's report was issued the chief of transit police resigned. Meanwhile, the policeman who murdered Eleanor Bumpurs, an elderly Black woman shot during an eviction attempt, was put on trial after earlier charges were dismissed.
Since the special prosecutor 12 of the gang members have been indicted, three on murder charges. Since Santucci had only arrested three originally, and then only sought assault indictments against them, the refusal of Sandiford and the lawyers to coopervindicated, and the media witchhunt against them is now more widely seen in its true character as part of the cover-up of the crime.
After the march at Howard Beach and rallies were held in Black neighborhoods in Harlem and Brooklyn in churches and highschools, drawing hundreds, and on at least three separate occasions over two thousand. Various groups and individuals in the Black community next called for a "Day of Outrage" on January 21, a key feature of which was to be a boycott of all white-owned businesses (an idea which was promptly denounced by Koch as racist). On the day several groups leafletted stores in Brooklyn and Queens asking consumers to participate in the boycott. Reminders were made to the community that Martin Luther King, whose birthday had just been celebrated, had used the boycott himself in his struggles.
The idea of a march on City Hall, to expose Koch's complicity in the incident and in the overall pattern of discrimination in the city, was raised as far back as the first set of meetings the day after the attack. The National African Youth Student Alliance (NAYSA), a group formed initially by students active on campus around apartheid, issued a call for a march on Koch's home in Greenwich Village as a centerpiece for the Day
This march, which was composed mostly of militant young Blacks (a large number of them highschool students), began at the Martinique Hotel, a welfare hotel which was chosen to symbolize the link between racial violence and economic forms of racism. The march then wove its way through the streets to Koch's home, where the crowd heard speeches from the more militant community leaders, those who had International Viewpoint 6 April 1987
supported the lawyers all along and had refused to work with Koch and
The events of the last month have heightened discussion in New York around the general status of minority
Within New York itself discrimination in housing, education and has increased in the last two decades. After the budget cuts during city's fiscal crisis of the early 1970's, leading to hospital closures and education cuts, the "revival" of he city as a center for financial, ceal estate and related services has neant new jobs mostly for skilled white professionals, accompanied by gentrification throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn (even beginning to encroach on Harlem itself) driving out Blacks and other minorities. Newsday, daily, ran a seven-part series on racism in New York which documented these trends, including, perhaps most relevant for Queens,
Discrimination and violence against other national minorities in the city is on the rise. This has taken the form of physical attacks Puerto Ricans in the South Bronx and in Queens. It has also taken the form of increased exploitation of immigrant workers - many from Central America, Asia and the Caribbean - in modern-day sweatshops. In addition, implementation of the new immigration bill promises to curtail the ability of immigrants to get jobs and the civil liberties of all workers. around the country, combined with years of attacks on affirmative action desegregation by the administration, are seen as providing a context for the incidents in New response by Black elected officials in New York to Howard Beach comes in the context of a current crisis in their ranks. This crisis cropped up during Koch's last re-election campaign when a united Black-Hispanic opposition candidacy was sabotaged at the last minute by the announcement of a Harlem Democratic Party leader, Denny Farrell, that he would run, throwing out the possibility of a united effort.
Some Black officials (including, significantly, C Vernon Mason) refused to back Farrell, who was seen as a stalking horse for Koch and as dividing Blacks and Hispanics. Divisions between Harlem and Brooklyn Black Democrats have also surfaced (with the latter playing, all propor-
International Viewpoint 6 April 1987 guarded, a more outspoken
This crisis among elected officials over Howard Beach also found a reflection in Jesse Jackson's response. Since 1984 Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition has been the focus of much of the discussion on the tactics and strategy of the Black movement. The Coalition's attitude toward the Democratic Party, its alliances with other groups, the choice of issues it addresses, have provided the framework activists pondering the fate of the anti-racist of anti-electoralist, anti-Democratic Party activists who disagree with the context of this discussion have tried to argue against the Rainbow perspective and called for the revival of independent mass mobilizations, but until now been largely isolated and shunned as unrealistic. The response to Howard Beach, however, is giving the independent perspective increasing weight. Vacillations of Jesse Jackson
This is due in part to the vacillations of Jackson himself. Jackson was quoted as being first opposed to, then in favor of, the business boycott on January 21. He also tried to side-step comment on the incident itself, first by claiming it was a local affair, then by saying he would not follow the lead of those who would "divide" people when what was needed was unity against Reaganism.
The first national convention of the Rainbow Coalition in early 1986 had participation not just from Black activists but also from farm groups, presidents of two US unions (and more militant rank-and filers, including Jim Guyette of P-9) and some Black elected officials who had not backed Jackson in 1984. With the Democratic Party more moving to the right, Jackson naturally felt his chances were improved to be the only pole of attraction for reform elements in the Democratic Party, and hoped to rally the above-named groups behind him. His ability to keep together this coalition, and still appeal to the mass sentiment among Blacks which buoyed his presidential campaign, faltered at its real test in a crisis: Howard Beach.
Because there was a split between the NAACP and most local Black elected officials on the one side, and more militant organizers in community and student groups on the other, over the type of response needed to the lynching, Jackson could not easily find a niche for himself on this issue. One of his supporters confirmed to the City Sun (anonymously) that Jackson was trying to avoid alienating potential backers among the Black elected officials.
Jackson has correctly pointed to the connection between the Reagan/ corporate economic offensive against workers of all nationalities and the rise of racist attacks. But his calls for a united response to this economic comes in the context of his characterization of a militant response to Howard Beach as divisive. He has counterposed a united whiteBlack fight against "Reaganomics" to a militant response to Howard
Paul Robeson Jr., in a speech at Columbia University Birthday forum, articulated this position in its most vulgar form. In a similar call for a joint response to economic exploitation, he Black workers to say to white workers "let's unite around jobs and wages and we'll sort the rest of this stuff militant Black protesters the youth, are not willing to "sort this stuff out later." They want an end to racist violence and discrimination now. Furthermore, the more advanced labor activists are beginning to discuss how of minority rights in the community and on the job with a united response to the corporate concessions drive. (1)
As protests against Howard Beach continue, and hopefully broaden to include attacks on other forms of racism, activists in the various predominantly white progressive movements (anti-intervention, anti-nuclear, women's, labor, etc.) must show their ability and willingness to mobilize their memberships around these issues. Support for actions called by Black community and student groups must be a priority for activists of all nation. alities. Labor activists in particular support for anti-racist demands on the job and in the community with organizing efforts against concessions
A golden opportunity to begin this process is offered by the April 25 march on Washington against US intervention in Central America and South Africa. By making the link between US interventionist policies and both economic exploitation and racial oppression at home, solidarity between white and non-white activists can be strengthened.
1. The push to force the unions to give up gains won in earlier struggles.
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AFGHANISTAN
months, the fact remains that for the seven years that have gone by since
December 1979 the balance sheet of the intervention of Soviet troops