The Killing that Awakened the City that Never Sleeps

Muta’Ali Muhammad’s powerful Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn is history written with thunder and lightning. His evocative nonfiction film returns to the scene of the crime and the uprisings that followed a 1989 murder.

The ninety-nine-minute documentary recounts the racist killing of an innocent Black teenager in New York City, and details how the ensuing unrest took place against the backdrop of a major election.

Storm Over Brooklyn is the latest in a growing cinematic wave reflecting real-life injustices against Black Americans, including David Midell’s new nonfiction film, The Killing of Kenneth Chamberlain, about the November 2011 police shooting of an elderly man in White Plains, New York. 

It deals with a different kind of killing than that of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, and Breonna Taylor in Louisville. It’s about lawless vigilante justice—as in Ahmaud Arbery’s February death in Georgia and the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida.

On August 23, 1989, Yusuf (alternately spelled Yusef) Hawkins was surrounded by a mob of baseball-bat-wielding whites. But instead of being bludgeoned to death, the sixteen-year-old was actually shot.

Hawkins’s “crime”? Attempting to buy a used car while Black. 

His coldblooded murder at the hands of these assailants galvanized New York City’s tempestuous racial politics, just as the culturally insensitive, crotchety Mayor Ed Koch ran for an unprecedented fourth term. Koch was defeated in the September 1989 Democratic primary by Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins, an African American. Dinkins went on to beat Republican Rudolph Giuliani, then a law-and-order U.S. Attorney, in November’s general election, prevailing to become NYC’s first Black mayor.

Lenora Fulani, the 1988 presidential candidate of the far-left New Alliance Party, and filmmaker Spike Lee are glimpsed in the film—as is a scene of Lee’s hard-hitting Do the Right Thing, which pit Blacks against Italian-Americans in Brooklyn and opened only a month before Hawkins’s death.

The Nation of Islam’s firebrand, Minister Louis Farrakhan, speaks at Hawkins’s funeral at a Baptist Church, attended by the welcomed Dinkins, while Governor Mario Cuomo, Giuliani, and Koch are heckled. Farrakhan tells hundreds of people, including officials: “God sometimes uses the innocent to send a message. . . . While power is in your hands, you must do justice.”

Arguably, Storm Over Brooklyn’s most imposing onscreen presence is the Reverend Al Sharpton. Viewers accustomed to seeing Reverend Al championing and eulogizing police brutality victims such as George Floyd, will be shocked at his 1989 persona.

Sporting long, processed hair and medallions, Sharpton provides a militant counterpoint to Dinkins. He burst upon the scene in 1986 after a baseball-bat-wielding mob chased three Black men and caused the death of one at Howard Beach, Queens.

Sharpton was widely viewed as a rabble-rouser and even as a “charlatan,” because he had supported Tawana Brawley and the African American adolescent’s subsequently unproven claims that she had been abducted and abused by four white males. In any case, Sharpton—who founded the National Action Network—bravely leads many Yusuf Hawkins-related direct actions including one where Sharpton “looked down and saw this knife sticking out of my chest.” 

Fortunately, Sharpton survived the January 12, 1991, stabbing and throughout the film appears in news clips and a contemporaneous interview, presumably for the filmmakers. It’s striking to compare today’s svelte, graying clergyman, who now seems like a movement elder statesman, with the brash “outside agitator” of three decades ago. 

Hawkins’s absentee father, Moses Stewart—who had reentered Yusuf’s life shortly before his death—also figures prominently in Storm Over Brooklyn. Other family members are seen in archival footage and contemporary interviews, including the slain teen’s mother, Diane Hawkins, brother Amir Hawkins, cousins Darlene and Felicia Brown, and Hawkins’s friends, who all recall the young man with the high-top hairstyle. With his insider access, Muhammad, grandson of actors Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, poignantly and palpably illustrates the grief and trauma caused by these violent hate crimes.

An emergency medical technician summoned to care for the stricken Hawkins in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, opens the documentary, portentously commenting: “Some calls you never forget.” 

In clips and original interviews, Storm Over Brooklyn tells the story of Hawkins’s death through the perspective of law enforcement, attorneys, and residents of the Italian-American neighborhood who were rocked by the murder and the civil disturbances that followed.

The film covers the struggle to convict Hawkins’s killer and assailants. Joey Fama was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to more than thirty-two years to life in prison. He maintains in an interview apparently from prison that he didn’t shoot Hawkins. Others, including Keith Mondello, were convicted of lesser charges, sparking outrage and fresh protests.

Storm Over Brooklyn reveals the motive behind the assault on Hawkins and his three friends, who were looking into buying a used car they saw advertised. Resident Gina Feliciano was celebrating her eighteenth birthday, and her purportedly spurned boyfriend Mondello believed she’d invited Black and Latinx people to attend her party in the largely de facto segregated neighborhood. In a fateful case of mistaken identity, Hawkins and his buddies were ambushed because they were incorrectly thought to be Feliciano’s guests.

This gripping documentary takes us back inside the crime that woke up the city that never sleeps, and suggests that Hawkins’s killing may have been the catalyst for the election of New York City’s first Black mayor. 

It remains to be seen whether the uprisings of 2020 in response to an endless list of racist murders will impact the November presidential election.

The must-see Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn premieres August 12 on HBO.