Howard Beach-Anatomy of a Lynching: New York Racism in the 1980s
Mills, Nicolaus
The New Park Pizzeria in Howard Beach, Queens, is not a place you go to if you're looking for trouble. It's too small and too neat, and so close to Cross Bay Boulevard, the main street in Howard...
...But as Hynes began to develop his case, he did not build it around Sandiford, whose version of events following his beating often contradicted the evidence...
...Such actions, Maddox's and Mason's critics contend, not only alienate sympathetic whites but foster the illusion that in a city as racially mixed as New York blacks can go it alone...
...The boys had gone back to the birthday party they were attending for help...
...A Boston district attorney had obtained a second-degree murder conviction, using the "tunnel theory" that the victim had no choice but to risk his life in order to get away...
...They note that the men in the white mob that in 1982 killed transit worker Willie Turks outside a bagel shop in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn were never convicted of second-degree murder, and they believe that for the police anything goes when the suspected criminal is black...
...But it is the political role Maddox and Mason have played outside the courtroom that has drawn the most fire...
...Early demonstrations were coupled with a call for a boycott of white businesses, then of white pizza parlors (on the grounds that the Howard Beach violence began in a white pizza parlor), and at a key rally in Brooklyn, all whites, including white reporters, were barred...
...The racial tensions that led to Howard Beach are not about to disappear suddenly...
...Like the Cross Bay Bowling Lanes next door, the New Park Pizzeria is a place where families and teenagers mix comfortably...
...The death of Griffith and the attack on Sandiford and Grimes could not have come at a worse time...
...But Maddox and Mason did not alter their strategy...
...The political and legal establishment is then forced to act or publicly defend itself, and the black community in turn is given a cause around which it can organize...
...A similar case had occurred in Boston in 1982, when a white mob chased a black man onto railroad tracks, where he was killed by a train...
...The strategy was very successful in the case of Lee Johnson, a black Union Theological Seminary student, who said that he had been dragged from his car in Harlem and beaten by two white policemen...
...This legislation is a belated and modest response to a blatantly serious disease that affects our society," he announced...
...For Maddox and Mason, there was also the added bonus of Governor Cuomo's involvement in the case...
...As Mason observed at a press conference the day the Queens grand jury handed down the twelve indictments Hynes asked for, "It was you black people marching and meeting and protesting all over the city who provided the fuel for these indictments...
...By this time Vernon Mason had joined the case as attorney for Timothy Grimes, and with both Sandiford and Grimes refusing to testify, there were now no eyewitnesses to identify the attackers...
...The night of the murder, Sandiford had been spread-eagled and searched, then, despite his injuries, made to sit in a police car for two hours while his possible involvement in another crime in the area was checked...
...Something is happening...
...After cutting through a parking lot and zigzagging down side streets, Griffith was chased onto the nearby Belt Parkway...
...Eleanor Bumpurs, a deranged sixty-six-year-old, shotgunned as she brandished a knife while protesting her eviction from her Bronx apartment...
...It just doesn't make sense to withhold evidence that may shed light on this case...
...Running was the right decision for Timothy Grimes...
...At that time liberals favored an integrationist strategy that emphasized coalition politics and a blackliberallabor alliance...
...The victims included Arthur Miller, a popular Bedford-Stuyvesant businessman, who, following a street altercation, died when the police used a choke hold to subdue him...
...It has seemed too much a New York problem to be remedied by a quick fix...
...So too have aspects of the protests Maddox and Mason have helped lead...
...The February 10 indictments produced great relief in the black community...
...What you find now is that New York is no different than Birmingham or Alabama or Nashville, and that things that occurred in those cities twenty years ago are being replayed in New York," Maddox, who, like Mason, was born in the rural South, observed...
...Griffith and Sandiford were not as lucky...
...He is very big on charges and very short on proof...
...Customers come in, eat their pizzas at the wooden picnic tables opposite the counter, then drop their paper plates in the trash barrel by the front door...
...Later in January, after calls for Governor Mario Cuomo to appoint a FALL • 1987 481 A CITY DIVIDED special prosecutor began to build, Santucci told the City Sun, a black New York paper, that he would bow out if it would promote better race relations...
...The media have had little that was new or interesting to say about Howard Beach...
...A Newsday poll conducted just after Governor Cuomo named a special prosecutor showed that only 19 percent of the blacks surveyed gave Maddox an excellent to good job rating on his handling of Howard Beach, while 52 percent gave him a fair to poor rating...
...But as time showed each of these accusations to be untrue, Maddox and Mason made no attempt to retract them...
...In the ensuing days stories were given to the press that Sandiford's explanation for what he was doing in Howard Beach did not hold up...
...Most suspicious of all in Maddox's judgment, the car of Dominick Blum had not been impounded on the night of the murder, and there had been no arrest of Blum...
...It is a view that puts the two men—with their militancy and legal skills—in the vanguard of black politics in New York in the 1980s, and it also establishes a clear rationale for when the black community should take to the streets...
...In Maddox's view his client, Cedric Sandiford, was being put in the position of a defendant...
...Rather it seemed the culmination of a series of white-on-black encounters that in recent years have become increasingly ugly...
...Blacks in turn give no indication that they are, on the whole, anxious to pursue a separatist strategy or that they believe, as one Howard Beach protest sign declared, "New York is Johannesburg...
...A week after the death of Griffith, there was a protest march through Howard Beach, then a larger rally of blacks at Boys and Girls High in Brooklyn, and at the end of January a "Day of Outrage" protest in Manhattan, where demonstrators marched from a midtown hotel for the homeless to the mayor's apartment in Greenwich Village...
...By comparison with the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s or even those held recently in Forsyth County, Georgia, the turnout at these events was small...
...The legal controversy they created had both worked in their clients' favor and exposed shortcomings in the Queens district attorney's office...
...There was one vicious black-onwhite attack in Queens following Howard Beach, but arrests were quickly made, and the incident never went further...
...In the dark he managed to elude his FALL • 1987 479 A CITY DIVIDED pursuers, and later that night he hitchhiked back to his home in Brooklyn...
...FALL • 1987 485...
...They simply went on to new charges...
...But those who had begun the fight outside the New Park Pizzeria were now much more deeply implicated in the death of Griffith than before...
...But by the 1980s, such concern seemed to have vanished...
...They are not even sure that a lynching strikes them with equal horror...
...They had walked three and a half miles, and a pizza seemed like a good idea...
...Similarly, the call for a black boycott of white businesses went nowhere, and despite talk of widespread black retaliatory violence, that too has not materialized...
...When the mayor, among others, questioned Johnson's story, Mason told Johnson not to testify before a grand jury, and the ensuing controversy set off a chain of events that eventually led the mayor to appoint the city's first black police commissioner, Benjamin Ward...
...From the start these have had a separatist thrust...
...Go to the New Park Pizzeria on a weekend night, and you're back in the 1950s...
...Militant nationalists, particularly after Stokely Carmichael became chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), were represented by a black-power strategy that stressed separatism and race consciousness...
...But the counterman said there was no problem, and the police drove off...
...Only the sounds of airplanes taking off and landing at nearby Kennedy airport remind you that the New Park Pizzeria is not really part of small town America...
...This time second-degree murder charges against three ringleaders of the gang were sustained, and FALL • 1987 483 A CITY DIVIDED nine others were indicted for lesser crimes, ranging from manslaughter to inciting to riot...
...When Howard Beach became news, the same Boston district attorney contacted Santucci's office, and Hynes, after taking over the case, sent three of his staff to Boston to review the tunnel case...
...Now Howard Beach calls to mind the kind of racial violence that twenty years ago characterized Philadelphia, Mississippi, and Selma, Alabama...
...Many of them, including Ed Koch (then a reform congressman from Greenwich Village), even participated in the Southern civil rights movement...
...I have followed Maddox's career for years, and its most consistent themes have been hidden agendas, self-promotion, and hatred of all law enforcement," columnist Jack Newfield wrote in the liberal Village Voice...
...Two decades ago when Mayor John Lindsay walked the New York streets trying to restore order after the 1967 riots, there was a feeling that at least some white politicians cared about what happened to blacks...
...Sandiford and Grimes would, they announced, cooperate with Hynes, and their meetings with him and his staff took place in a very different atmosphere from those with Santucci...
...Unaware that they were in danger, the three black men, Michael Griffith, his stepfather, Cedric Sandiford, and a friend, Timothy Grimes, went on eating their pizzas...
...The only charge District Attorney Santucci could make stand was one of reckless endangerment against the three defendants who had already given statements...
...But the governor refused to budge on this, and when the black leaders present at the conference decided to moderate their demands, Maddox and Mason dropped their objections...
...We'll never know what happened unless Maddox brings this witness forward," Wright observed...
...The deaths of black and white civil rights workers in Philadelphia and Selma were the cause of national outrage, and what followed was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965...
...and Nicholas Bartlett, a Harlem street vendor, who was shot to death by eight police officers after he allegedly attacked and injured one of them with a fifteen-inch pipe...
...They wanted someone in no way tied to the state or city government...
...Both on television and in papers the principal focus has been on how the legal strategy employed by Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason, the attorneys for Sandiford and Grimes, has aroused racial tensions...
...But even in that case, Maddox did not go away empty-handed...
...Worst of all, as many blacks see it, has been the feeling that in Ed Koch's New York black life is cheap...
...The aim is to showcase the problems blacks have when they come before the courts...
...The difference is that twenty years ago such racial violence seemed about to end...
...Nor is it just the rhetoric of Maddox and Mason that has upset liberals...
...They continued to insist that John Santucci was not doing his job...
...Now their emphasis was not simply on Santucci's shortcomings but on the need to replace him...
...The family atmosphere of the New Park Pizzeria is no longer what comes to mind, however...
...In the 1980s blacks and whites in New York don't just find it difficult to act in concert...
...I see him as an instigator of the climate of racial fear in this city," the Reverend Calvin Butts, the executive minister of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, said earlier this year...
...This is the first step in bringing this case toward some resolution," Harriet Michel, the head of the New York Urban League, observed...
...Each of these accusations threw new doubt on the fairness of Queens officials and advanced Maddox's contention, "There certainly is an official policy in this city never to convict a white 484 • DISSENT A CITY DIVIDED person for killing a black person...
...Minutes later the carload of boys they had exchanged insults with returned...
...Thus, in early February, when Hynes began his presentation to a Queens grand jury, his legal strategy was far different from Santucci's, and he had as his principal witness one of the teenagers responsible for the death of Griffith...
...Santucci's mind, but the appearance of justice would seem to mandate a special prosecutor," Alton Maddox insisted...
...There police found him dazed and bleeding...
...In the Michael Stewart case the noncooperation strategy was far less successful, actually impeding a conviction according to the trial judge...
...Now there were twelve of them, and their weapons included a metal baseball bat and a tree limb...
...Is it possible then to see Howard Beach leading to something other than more racial division...
...The strategy, as both lawyers argue, consists 480 • DISSENT A CITY DIVIDED of trying to get the legal system to work by refusing to cooperate with it...
...Despite his description of the Howard Beach attack as "a modern lynching" and the "worst crime in the recent history of the city," the mayor has often seemed indifferent to blacks...
...The indictments that Hynes was able to get have not, however, silenced Maddox's and Mason's critics...
...The answer to that question will in no small measure depend on what happens when Joe Hynes brings his case to trial, but even a spectacular courtroom victory by Hynes may not be enough...
...In this new version of the case, Dominick Blum, the driver of the car that hit Griffith, was no longer a suspect, as Maddox and Mason had declared he should be...
...Maddox's complaints, Santucci replied, were "the same old tripe—knock the system, dissolve the police force...
...Their car had broken down, and they were tired and cold after unsuccessfully trying to get a tow...
...It's too small and too neat, and so close to Cross Bay Boulevard, the main street in Howard Beach, that anyone driving by in a car can see in the front windows...
...Maddox's and Mason's critics contend that the two lawyers made it impossible to separate legitimate complaints about DA Santucci and Queens officials from a smear of them...
...If they don't arrest Blum, there is no point in our being involved," Maddox told the New York Times...
...Michael Stewart, who, after being arrested for writing graffiti on a subway, arrived at Bellevue Hospital brain dead...
...but in a city where in recent years the black community has been politically quiet, the Howard Beach rallies were an important departure...
...When the strategy succeeds, a case that might otherwise get lost in the system is turned into a controversy...
...Hynes's appointment was one that Maddox and Mason initially opposed...
...The chain of events that produced the Howard Beach violence began just after midnight on December 20 when three black men walked into the New Park Pizzeria...
...His closing of Sydenham Hospital in Harlem, his opposition to the appointment of a black chancellor of schools, his resistance to a 1983 investigation into police brutality by the House Subcommittee on Criminal Justice are what blacks remember when they think of Ed Koch, and they see his feelings pervading New York in the 1980s...
...It was the last chance Griffith, Sandiford, and Grimes would have to get out of Howard Beach safely...
...Her validation sentiments were echoed by Maddox and Mason...
...In the Howard Beach case the noncooperation strategy began three days after the murder of Michael Griffith...
...Maddox in turn found more reasons to believe that a "bad-faith" investigation was being conducted by Queens District Attorney John Santucci and the Queens police...
...Equally important for Maddox and Mason was the politicizing of the black community that the Howard Beach controversy made possible...
...At the preliminary hearing in Queens on December 30, the noncooperation strategy appeared to backfire...
...All that changed on the Friday before Christmas 1986, when three black men made the mistake of stopping there for something to eat...
...The old roles just don't fit...
...The result was a stormy six-hour session on January 13 that ended with Charles "Joe" Hynes, the special prosecutor for the New York City Criminal Justice System, taking over the case...
...For all the similarities between now and then, there is, however, no seeing the response to Howard Beach as a replay of the 1960s...
...What Emery and lawyers like him have in mind are the shotgun accusations Maddox and Mason leveled as the Howard Beach case was unfolding...
...Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel declared, "I don't see what we gain or what justice gains by not going forward with what we have," and even Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Bruce Wright, arguably the most respected black jurist in the city, joined the critics...
...In recent years there has been a series of arrests in which a black man or woman was surrounded by the police, then killed in circumstances in which there seemed a clear alternative to lethal force...
...Ed Koch may still be a long way from Ronald Reagan on race, but in New York Kochism is often viewed as a local version of Reaganism...
...They had not, as Sandiford's original story indicated, merely chased Griffith, who, after getting away from them, made the mistake of trying to cross the Belt Parkway...
...When they saw what they were up against, Griffith, Sandiford, and Grimes began running...
...Sandiford, running behind Griffith, was caught by his pursuers before he could reach the Belt Parkway...
...Little effort had been made, Maddox found, to check out witnesses who lived in the area, and the confession of Jon Lester, a key defendant, had not even been videotaped...
...What Newfield had in mind was the kind of challenge Maddox laid down at the height of the Howard Beach controversy when he told the City Sun, "One of the things that you have to understand, as far as the white liberal wing of the civil rights movement is concerned, is that they have a vested interest in controlling what happens in the black community...
...To be sure, liberal whites have been offended by the broad-brush attacks of Maddox and Mason, but the difficulties that the exodus of whites from SNCC caused the civil rights movement are not happening again as a consequence of Howard Beach...
...A short while later, a police car, responding to a 911 call that there were three "suspicious" black men in the New Park Pizzeria, stopped by...
...During the Koch years life for blacks in New York has been especially rough...
...Ten days after being criticized in a special counsel's report for his handling of the Stewart incident, the chief of the New York City Transit Authority, John Meehan, resigned...
...That's a method we learned to despise during the McCarthy period...
...To Maddox and Mason that "something" is a New York civil rights movement...
...In the 1960s New York's liberal political establishment prided itself on its opposition to racism...
...I will never work with him again...
...If Howard Beach proves anything, it is that New York City's vaunted recovery from near bankruptcy has left blacks and whites further apart than ever...
...The result was a much clearer picture of what happened the night of December 20 and a decision to base the prosecution on the testimony of one of the 482 • DISSENT A CITY DIVIDED gang, Robert Riley, who in exchange for cooperation was promised reduced charges...
...Badly beaten, he had enough presence of mind to feign unconsciousness, and when his attackers left, he crawled through a hole in a nearby fence and staggered onto the Belt Parkway...
...To New York City's black community the violence of Howard Beach came as no surprise...
...Nor, as Alton Maddox and Vernon Mason have demonstrated, are they about to go unchallenged or unexploited...
...But no comparable legislation has followed Howard Beach...
...They had actually pursued Griffith so closely that in order to escape them he was forced onto the parkway...
...For Maddox the climax came when Sandiford, his vision still impaired from the beating, was asked to pick his attackers from a lineup...
...The governor linked the timing of his civil rights proposals to Howard Beach...
...Instead, Hynes interviewed the teenagers who had stayed behind at the party...
...His [Maddox's] methods are sabotage and the pursuit of racial division," Emery told the National Law Journal...
...In recent years whites in New York have simply not been deeply involved in black politics, particularly on such basic issues as police brutality...
...As the conflict escalated, it was, however, Santucci who began looking for a way out...
...They point to the latters' claims that Dominick Blum was part of the murder gang, that there was a conspiracy by investigators to deny Cedric Sandiford's version of events, and that on the night of December 20 the police drove away from the New Park Pizzeria knowing there was a gang waiting outside it in the parking lot...
...In legal circles the attack on Maddox and Mason has been led by Richard Emery of the New York Civil Liberties Union...
...Maddox advised Sandiford to refuse to show up for the lineup, and when he failed to show, the case was thrown into turmoil...
...The debate over the meaning of Howard Beach has thus taken on many of the overtones of the 1960s debate over black power...
...We cannot say what is going on in Mr...
...In the press and in political circles, the pressure on Maddox and Mason to change their tactics began to mount...
...It is a validation of the contention of the lawyers that an extra perspective was needed...
...There a car driven by Dominick Blum, a white court officer returning home from a play at Brooklyn College, struck Griffith, killing him instantly...
...Blum's statement as to his whereabouts before the accident and his lack of knowledge of anyone in the Howard Beach gang checked out completely...
...Especially among liberals, there has been sharp criticism of the two attorneys...
...A few minutes before they had exchanged insults with a carload of teenagers, most of them from nearby John Adams High School, but the incident amounted to no more than name-calling...
...The following day at a meeting with Governor Cuomo, Santucci restated his willingness to bow out, and the stage was set for a meeting between the governor and the city's black leadership...
...At the start of the new year, he coupled a plea to black leaders for cooperation with a statement that his office was considering turning over the case to a Federal prosecutor...
...Rallies that once drew two hundred now draw two thousand...
...Although the conspiracy Hynes uncovered was not the one the two lawyers initially insisted existed, their tactics had, nonetheless, proved successful...
...As Brooklyn Assemblyman Roger Green noted, "Meetings on social issues that used to draw ten or twelve people now get one hundred or two hundred...
...There was no massive outpouring of white anger over the deaths of Michael Stewart and Eleanor Bumpurs or to the closing of Sydenham Hospital...
...Not only did the governor appoint a new prosecutor, at the end of March he followed up his appointment by proposing legislation designed to stiffen the penalties for bias-related violence in New York State...
...The tragedy that Howard Beach represents for New York's nonwhite population, now more than half the city, is not, however, what has transformed the killing of Michael Griffith from a headline into an ongoing story...
...They refuse to accept the fact that black men and women have brains similar to theirs...
...Infant mortality among blacks in the city is twice the national average, and during 1985-86, while unemployment for whites in New York dropped from 7.2 to 5.6 percent, it rose by almost a point for blacks...
...Then his staff did a psychological study of those who had participated in the beating...
Vol. 34 • September 1987 • No. 4
