Before the outrage over Tamir Rice’s shooting in Cleveland, before the protests for Michael Brown in Ferguson, before the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer launched the Black Lives Matter movement, before the nationwide marches for racial justice in summer 2020, there was the story of Yusuf Hawkins in New York.
Hawkins was 16 years old when, in August 1989, he traveled with three friends to the insular white neighborhood of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, from his predominantly black neighborhood of East New York, to inspect a used car. Shortly after 9pm, a mob of white teenagers – some brandishing baseball bats, amped by a rumor that a local girl had invited black friends to town to taunt them – cornered the group. Someone fired a gun; two bullets struck Hawkins in the chest, killing him.
Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn, a new HBO documentary, examines the firestorm that engulfed New York in the weeks and years after Hawkins’s murder: the series of protests, frustratingly familiar calls for justice, upended bromides about New York’s diverse “melting pot” and flared racial tensions between segregated neighborhoods. The film tracks both the private aftermath – the long shadow of family and friends’ grief – and the determinedly public response: namely, the series of marches led by the Rev Al Sharpton in Bensonhurst from 1989 to 1991, which encountered vitriol reminiscent of civil rights hostility decades earlier and responses to Black Lives Matter solidarity protests this year.
When director Muta’Ali first signed on to direct the project in 2016, he sought contemporary relevance in the story, and in particular to the conditions of American racism – de facto segregation obscured by the denial of racism on a structural level – that led to Hawkins’s murder. In 1989, the neighborhood of Bensonhurst was predominantly working-class, Italian American; Yusuf’s group, according to his younger brother Freddy and friends Christopher Graham and Luther Sylvester, never went there. Bensonhurst was seven miles from East New York but a different world.
In his early days on the project, Muta’Ali read a 2015 New York Times data investigation called Mapping Segregation, which overlaid maps of America’s cities with census data color-coded by race; in New York, in Chicago, in Washington, the maps were less speckled mosaics than slabs of single colors delineated by neighborhood borders. Neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Manhattan with over 90% black inhabitants lay a stone’s throw from those with over 90% white inhabitants, with little crossover. By 2015, Bensonhurst had shifted from a white, Italian American enclave to a neighborhood with over half of its population born outside the US, owing to immigration from China, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. But the stark demographic divides between neighborhoods in New York remained.
The 2015 maps “gave a very clear perspective on how segregated we are now, even as diverse New Yorkers”, said Muta’Ali. They contrasted sharply with the “gorgeous mosaic” hailed by David Dinkins, the city’s first and only African American mayor, elected in 1990 in part by long-simmering frustration with racial tensions in the city that boiled over with Hawkins’s murder. Storm Over Brooklyn frequently favors bird’s-eye-view shots of the borough, tracking the teens’ movements block by block, as if performing a forensic analysis of neighborhood segregation. The New York maps do show a mosaic, said Muta’Ali, but “I don’t think that it’s gorgeous, because what happens is you have these siloed communities who easily make up stories about who other people are”.
In the weeks following Hawkins’s death, Sharpton endeavored to “make the comfortable uncomfortable”, he says in an interview in the film, by bringing the calls for justice straight to Bensonhurst’s doorstep. Sharpton, members of Hawkins’s family and mostly black community members marched through the neighborhood’s traditional Santa Rosalia festival in September 1989, through snow the following winter, past angry residents bearing watermelons written with “Al Sharpton you fat bastard”. More than 20 marches in total, through 1991, met with visceral disgust from Bensonhurst residents seemingly more concerned with being impugned as racist than with the killing of Yusuf Hawkins.
The footage from these marches – white people shouting “go home”, getting in protesters’ faces, declaring that just because one thing happened here doesn’t mean the neighborhood is racist – evokes both the civil rights backlash of the 1960s and white rage seen in the Trump-era demonstrations at Charlottesville in 2017, or in the small town of Bethel, Ohio, this summer. “I had never seen … such unrefined open hate in my life,” says Sharpton on the tension of the Santa Rosalia festival march. And yet, it was the accusation of racism that stung. As the then mayor, Ed Koch, maintained of Bensonhurst in light of the marches, during which the N-word was frequently lobbed: “This is not a community that should be described as a racist community.”
From neighborhood segregation to the refusal to confront hard truths of privilege and community racism, “a lot of the components that led up to Yusuf being killed exist today,” Muta’Ali said, “and a lot of the characters and positions that made the storm what it was, that made it into a large spectacle, are still in place now, too.”
Muta’Ali spent considerable time with, and frequently lends the voice of the film to, Hawkins’s mother Diane, who mostly avoided speaking to the press in the days after her son’s death, instead deferring to Yusuf’s father, Moses Stewart. (Stewart, absent from the boys’ lives until shortly before Yusuf’s death, appeared frequently as the right-hand man to Sharpton and died in 2003.)
But if time allowed for reflection by many of the people in Hawkins’s circle, it did not do the same for Bensonhurst. Getting people from the 1989 neighborhood to speak on camera was the “biggest hurdle” to the making of the film, said Muta’Ali. Storm Over Brooklyn does feature interviews with Russell Gibbons, one of the few black teenagers from Bensonhurst at the time (people in Bensonhurst were “raised with that segregation mentality”, he recalls) as well as with the alleged shooter, Joseph Fama.
Fama, then 19, was convicted of second-degree murder in 1990 and sentenced to 32 years in prison; he’s up for parole in 2022. The alleged ringleader of the mob, Keith Mondello, was acquitted of murder and manslaughter but convicted of lesser charges; he was released from prison in 1998, and did not participate in the film. Of the 30 or so people believed to have cornered Hawkins and his friends, only eight were charged, which is “a tough pill to swallow”, said Muta’Ali. “And I think only looking at it through the lens of ‘there could have been less justice served had the community not spoken up,’ can we see the silver lining there.”
Still, from the storm after Yusuf’s death, “we can learn that persistence works.” The sentences and visibility achieved were a “direct result of the community marching through Bensonhurst”, he said. “That is just dedication, that is relentless pursuit of justice.
“The solution of being persistent and actually causing good trouble, as John Lewis would say,” – keep the pressure on, march through the community at fault, confront denial with presence – “that is tried and true,” said Muta’Ali, invoking the recently deceased civil rights icon. “The solution is to bother people until it affects their money, until it affects their peace of mind.
“Do it in a peaceful way, but keep at it. Keep at it. Because eventually it’s going to behoove them to do what’s right.”
Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn premieres on HBO on 12 August with a UK date to follow
