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Carrying a huge Howard Beach banner, Black protesters chanting anti-racist slogans march during a day long demonstration of “outrage” against the Howard Beach racial attack on Jan. 21, 1988. | Source: Bettmann / Getty

UPDATED: 12:30 p.m., Dec. 20, 2022

Tuesday marks the 36th year since a group of young white male thugs violently confronted three Black men who became stranded after their car broke down and brutally attacked them with baseball bats and chunks of wood, leaving one of them dead in the Howard Beach neighborhood of New York City’s Queens borough in 1986.

The person who died, 23-year-old Michael Griffith, was chased into highway traffic, where he was fatally struck by a vehicle driven by the son of an NYPD officer.

On this date December 20th in the year 1986 Michael Griffith 
man was killed and another was beaten in Howard Beach,Queens, New York,in a racially charged incident that heightened racial tensions in New York City. pic.twitter.com/G3B5SODSVC

— James C.B Gray (@JamesCBGray1) December 20, 2022

The teens responsible had been shouting racial slurs at the Black men, one witness told the New York Daily News at the time.

The death of Griffith, a Trinidadian immigrant who had been employed as a construction worker, was compared by then-New York City Mayor Koch to “lynching parties that existed in the Deep South.” He reportedly ran into traffic on the Belt Parkway while unaware of the road and trying to flee from his attackers.

“The white guys were yelling, ‘Come here, n—–,’” said John Patterson, who saw Griffith moments before he was killed.

Howard Beach Attack Victim With Lawyers

One of the victims of the Howard Beach attack in 1986, Cedric Sandiford, speaks at a press conference with his lawyers Alton Maddox and Vernon Mason and the Reverend Al Sharpton. | Source: Bettmann / Getty

The racially motivated attack happened in the early morning hours of Dec. 20, 1986, after Griffith and three friends — Cedric Sandiford, 36, Timothy Grimes, 20, and Curtis Sylvester, 20 — got in a car in Brooklyn to drive Griffith to get his paycheck in Queens. But when their car broke down in Queens, Griffith, Grimes and Sandiford ended up walking to nearby Howard Beach to find a payphone and call for help. Sylvester stayed behind with the car.

Seemingly as soon as they entered Howard Beach, a mostly white neighborhood, they were confronted by people yelling racial slurs and telling them to leave the neighborhood. Still, the Black men shrugged it off and decided to grab some pizza because they were hungry. It was shortly before 1 a.m. at that point.

That’s when a dozen white boys aged 16 to 19 armed with baseball bats, tire irons and tree limbs began waiting for the Black men outside of the pizzeria.

“What are you doing in this neighborhood, n——s?” they asked.

Once the men left, they were promptly pounced on and savagely beaten simply because of the color of their skin and their location.

“My God, I have a son like you, 17 years old,” Sandiford reportedly said to the attackers. “Please don’t kill me.”

Grimes was able to escape unharmed.

#OTD Dec 20, 1986: The car carrying 23yr-old Michael Griffith, Cedric Sandiford & Timothy Grimes, broke down in mostly white Howard Beach, NY. They were attacked by a white mob & Griffith was killed trying to escape by running onto the freeway.

30 years later…#History pic.twitter.com/AWNGi5J1Dq

— Jazz the Professor (@LikeButta3) December 20, 2022

Police soon responded to find Sandiford — the boyfriend of Griffith’s mother — beaten and bloodied and racially profiled him as a suspect in Griffith’s death. Then-NYPD Commissioner Benjamin Ward, the first Black man to hold that position, reportedly “scolded the Queens commanding officer for his officers’ insensitivity toward Sandiford.”

Four of the teens — Jon Lester, Jason Ladone, Scott Kern and Michael Pirone — were charged with manslaughter, second-degree murder and first-degree assault while the rest of the racist attackers faced lesser charges. Lester, Ladone and Kern were all found guilty while Pirone was acquitted.

Lester, an immigrant from the UK who was the attack’s ringleader, testified in court that he saw the Black men and went back to a party he had been attending to alert people there that, “There’s n***ers on the boulevard,” the New York Times reported. He implored anyone who would listen: “Let’s go kill them.”

The Times reported: “The attack inflamed simmering tensions between blacks and whites in New York City; sparked angry marches by protesters, who were met by local residents outraged in turn at being tarred as bigots; and, with the case drawing worldwide attention, transformed predominantly white Howard Beach into a metonym for racial hatred.”

Thirty-six years after the Howard Beach attack, similar racially motivated attacks are still happening across the country.

This is America.

SEE ALSO:

Suspected White Supremacist Who Used Noose To Threaten To Kill Black People Pleads Guilty To Hate Crimes

White Supremacist Pleads Guilty To Federal Hate Crime For Trying To Shoot Black People At A Gas Station

The post 36 Years Later, Recalling The Howard Beach Attack And The Racist Teens Who Targeted Black Men appeared first on NewsOne.

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