Apartheid. USA 1988

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December 22, 1986:

Yesterday more than 50 detectives searched homes near Howard Beach, Queens, a suburb of Manhattan, where a black man was struck and killed by a car while he and two other black men tried to flee a gang of whites who attacked them. The assailants of the three blacks were believed to number 9 to 12 whites. Officer James Coleman said that the attackers beat the black men with baseball bats and sticks as they left a pizza parlor on Cross Bay Boulevard. The dead man was Michael Griffith, 23 years old and a construction worker from the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Mayor Edward Koch compared the crime to ‘the kind of lynching party that took place in the Deep South’. But whites, in large groups near Howard Beach, articulated angry views. They said that blacks regularly ventured into the area only to commit crimes, prompting residents to hire Pinkerton guards to patrol the streets. ‘They come in the neighborhood and rob everybody. It is a known fact. That's why everybody has a thing about them,’ said a 23-year-old white construction worker. Terrence Reid, a 22-year-old black was nearly run over by a taxi driver. ‘Instead of apologizing,’ Mr Reid said, the driver shouted, ‘you blacks shouldn't be getting loud in a white area. You can see the prejudice in people's faces.’^6.

In Jefferson Parish, a suburb consisting of 84 percent of whites in New Orleans, Louisiana, the sheriff, Harry Lee, a Chinese-American, got himself into hot water following remarks he made during a news conference on December 2nd. Sheriff Lee announced a new strategy for combating a sharp increase in crime. ‘If there are some young blacks driving a car late at night in a predominantly white area, they will be stopped,’ he said. The next day he rescinded his order and apologized to black organisations and others who might have found his remark offensive. He then said

6. The New York Times, by James Barron and Jane Gross

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that deputies would stop blacks only ‘for probable cause’. Nevertheless, many whites indicated they believed the sheriff was right the first ‘time.’ However, he should not have said ‘blacks’, Mrs Dale Starr said, ‘he should have said “suspicious characters”. Everyone would have known who he meant.’^7.

7. The New York Times, from report by Frances Frank Marcus