Frontline: Seven Days In Bensonhurst

In late August, 1989, a tragic incident occurred in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst. Yusuf Hawkins, a 16-year-old black teenager, who had come to the neighborhood with three friends planning to buy a used car, was shot and killed, when the four boys were attacked by over a dozen white youths wielding baseball bats (one of whom carried a gun). Frontline's documentary Seven Days in Bensonhurst, hosted by writer Shelby Steele (currently nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award for his book The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America), revisits both the event and the area a year later. In reconstructing the tragedy, Steele shows how the slaying of a young man became the platform on which political and media figures, alike, played out their personal dramas. In light of several racial incidents in New York in recent years, beginning with the controversial case of the subway vigilante Bernard Goetz, the murder of Hawkins was, for many, the final straw. Within hours of the killing, Reverend Al Sharpton, a flamboyant figure who was often in the thick of racial politics had met with Hawkins' parents and was planning a protest march through the streets of Bensonhurst. The march set off a virtual chorus of racial invective, as Bensonhurst residents took to the streets to rail against the marchers. Before the week was out, incumbent Mayor Ed Koch would lay the groundwork for his loss to black candidate David Dinkins, the story would play on Oprah Winfrey, and media personalities Jesse Jackson and Morton Downey would show up--all contributing to what one local priest would call "a media circus." Writer Steele's shrewd appraisal of the unfolding of events during the summer of 1989 not only offers an accurate and in-depth portrayal of Hawkins' murder, it also has a lot to say about race relations overall in our time. And the story continues--Sharpton was recently stabbed during another march in Bensonshurst and, as of this writing, is recuperating in the hospital. For those libraries who can afford it, Seven Days in Bensonhurst is highly recommended. (See DISCOVERING HAMLET for availability.)