Home / Full timeline / More than three hundred mourners attend funeral services for Yusef Hawkins, a Black American youth slain in New York City.
More than three hundred mourners attend funeral services for Yusef Hawkins, a Black American youth slain in New York City.
1989 (Aug 30)
More than three hundred mourners attended funeral services for Yusef Hawkins, a Black American youth slain in New York City. Another one thousand persons who could not enter the church stood outside singing and listening to the eulogy. Hawkins had been shot to death on August 23 in the predominantly white Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. The Reverend Al Sharpton, a civil rights activist who lead protests immediately following the killing, said in one of the eulogies, "We're not going to let you down. ... They're going to pay this time, Yusef. It's time for us to change our ways. We can run a man for the White House, but we can't walk a child through Bensonhurst." Another speaker, Minister Louis Farrakhan, a leader of the Nation of Islam, proclaimed: “We say, as the Jews say, never again, never again, never again... As long as White children can get away with killing Black children, and White law enforcement does not know how to make examples of its own...then justice is far off." The church's pastor, the Reverend Curtis Wells, exhorted, “Let freedom ring from Howard Beach, Mr. Mayor" (addressing New York mayor Edward Koch) ... "Let freedom ring from Bensonhurst. We're not going to take it anymore. We're going to walk where we want to walk." Mayor Koch, New York governor Mario M. Cuomo, and Republican mayoral candidate Rudolph W. Giuliani were heckled outside the church, and Koch left the ceremonies through a side door. Others attending the funeral included Black American mayoral candidate David Dinkins and Black filmmaker Spike Lee.
References:
- • Hornsby, Alton. Chronology of African-American History: Significant Events and People from 1619 to the Present. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995.