Hawkins, Yusef
Identification African American teenager and
murder victim
Born 1973; New York, New York
Died August 23, 1989; New York, New York
Hawkins was shot to death by a member of a gang of whites
in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, New York, in a ra-
cial incident that shocked the nation.
On Wednesday, August 23, 1989, Yusef Hawkins (also
known as Yusuf) and three African American friends
traveled by subway to Bensonhurst to look at a used
Pontiac automobile they had seen advertised for
sale. The Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, inhab-
ited mostly by blue-collar people of Sicilian heritage,
had few African American residents. It also had a his-
tory of racial violence, including attacks by white
mobs upon African American men in 1983 and
- None of the injuries in the earlier attacks had
been fatal.
Unknown to Hawkins and his friends, Benson-
hurst youths heard a rumor that an African Ameri-
can teenager had been invited to a local girl’s birth-
day party that night. Gina Feliciano had been going
out with one of the Bensonhurst youths, Keith
Mondello, but had since started dating an African
American man. Neighborhood men were planning
to harm this man if he arrived at Feliciano’s party.
These men witnessed Hawkins and his friends arrive
at about 9:00p.m.on Bay Ridge Avenue. Witnesses
reported that the men shouted, “Let’s club the
niggers.” A mob of ten to thirty people armed with
baseball bats and several guns then chased the four
young men. Hawkins told the crowd that he knew
nothing about the girl, but, in response, one man
shot Hawkins twice in the chest with a semiauto-
matic .32-caliber pistol. Of the other three African
The Eighties in America Hawkins, Yusef 445
Al Sharpton, center, leads a march protesting the murder of Yusef Hawkins in 1989.(Christian Razukas/cc-by-sa-2.0)