Bensonhurst, Brooklyn:

Italian-American Victimizers and Victims

 

This paper addresses a number of interrelated issues which have emanated from a series of recent tragic “incidents” that have seri­ously affected the reality, as well as the image, of Italian Ameri­cans. The incidents in question were racially-motivated assaults and homicides involving Italian Americans or taking place in neighbor­hoods described as Italian American. These events have received na­tional as well as international media attention. As a result, the three New York neighborhoods; Gravesend’s Avenue X, Howard Beach, and Bensonhurst have been added to the American urban lexicon of infa­mous places. In these places three black men; Willie Turks (1982), Michael Griffith (1987) and Yusuf Hawkins (1989), were murdered.

A central issue addressed here, and seldom discussed elsewhere, is the role played by Italian-American professionals, and those others who study the Italian community, in helping to present to the general public an accurate picture of the various and diverse segments of the Italian-American population. This must be done without reservation and without apology even when the situation, such as instances of in­tergroup violence, is distasteful. Equally important to Italians in America is the issue of ethnic defamation. Defamation, however, cannot be effectively dealt with by mere denial, it must be countered with accurate information.

Italians in the United States, as elsewhere in the world, have long suffered from a “bad press.” Works such as Salvatore J. La Gumina’s WOP: A Documentary History of Anti-Italian Discrimination in the United States, for example, have clearly demonstrated this symbolic historical reality on the American scene through an examination of text and illustrations concerning Italians in newspapers and other pe­riodical literature. As I had noted in a previously published article on “The Italian American Community: an Essay on Multiple Social Realities,” the negative images produced and disseminated in the various media have persisted despite the presentations and protesta­tions of more or less objective scholars and ethnic-group spokespersons. The three organizations which have been most active in the area of combating the negative stereotyping of Italian Ameri­cans in recent years have been the American Italian Historical Asso­ciation, the National Italian American Foundation, and the Commis­sion for Social Justice of the Order Sons of Italy in America. Groups such as these have been exceptionally forceful regarding the “criminal” and “mafia” stereotyping of Italian Americans.

Since the liberal social activism of the 1960s two new, and perhaps even more dangerous, negative images have been added to the histor­ical repetoire of nocuous and innocuous organ grinders, old ladies in black dresses, birds of passage, stiletto wielders, mindless madonnas, mafia dons, wise guys, spaghetti sauce makers and disco dancers who have been held up as images of Italian Americans; that of social “reactionary” and racial “bigot.”

A major threat presented by this contemporary stereotype is the potential that the Italian-American community can be easily scape­goated for the economic and other failures of low-income minority groups in the United States making inter-group cooperation even more difficult. On the political side, this would also make it less likely for Italian-Americans leaders to serve as inter-ethnic bridges in Ameri­can politics as they have frequently done in the past. One could note in this vein for example; Vito Marcantonio, Fiorello LaGuardia and Mario Cuomo and many others, who promoted better inter-group rela­tions.

The reputation of Italian Americans and Italian-American neigh­borhood groups as vocal opponents of racial integration is not unde­served. The question in this essay is not whether some Italian Ameri­cans are biased but why they are perceived as being so much more so than other ethnic groups, and what can and should be done about it. It is not merely that the reputation of Italians in America is at stake; the establishment of better inter-group relations is an especially crit­ical problem in large American cities and their near suburbs today.

Not since the turbulent 1950s have cities been faced with such rapid demographic transitions. The United States in the 1990s is ex­periencing a new, almost tidal, wave of Hispanic, Black and Asian immigration which is virtually swamping older urban areas, such as the New York-New Jersey Metropolitan Area. Given that working class Italian-American populations occupy residential territories which are directly in the path of minority group expansion, they are also the most likely to experience inter-racial and inter-ethnic con­flict on a local level between themselves and other ethnic minorities. As noted by Robert C. Freeman in his article on “The Development and Maintenance of New York City’s Italian-American Neighbor­hoods,” the cultural propensity of Italians toward residential stabil­ity has resulted in their being, in many cases, the last white ethnic group in changing urban communities.

The recent history of bias-related criminal incidents in Brooklyn, New York presents glaring evidence of the reality of inter-group fear, hostility and every-present potential for violence. These incidents have been by no means limited to those between Italian Americans and others. No ethnic group, either as victim or perpetrator, has been immune to this plague. In researching New York City newspapers for stories concerning inter-ethnic violence, not involving Italian Ameri­cans, over the past two years the following polarities of victim and perpetrator represent only a partial listing: Black-Korean, Asian-Black, Black-Jewish, Jewish-Black, Jewish-Hispanic, Hispanic-Jew­ish, Indian-White as well as intra-Carribean, Asian, and Hispanic.

Despite the participation of a broad spectrum of ethnic groups in the troubling reality of inter-ethnic violence, the Italian-American community has received the greatest press attention. Why has this happened? I believe that a major reason for the focus upon Italian Americans as epitomizing racial bigotry among white Americans is the reluctance of most Italian-American organizations and their leaders to honestly address the problem of racial and ethnic bias. In most cases Italian-American spokespersons have tended to deny the extent or degree of the problem or to make defensive statements when bias incidents in the community occur. This has resulted in an even greater focus on the community because it projects an appearance of lack of remorse or sympathy for victims of bias-related violence.

The following are two articles written by the author following the most highly publicized interracial homicide involving Italian Americans or a neighborhood identified as Italian American. They were published in The Brooklyn Free Press, a bi-monthly local news­paper. Being a professional sociologist, I have studied community problems in many different ethnic contexts. These pieces combine a di­rect, no excuses approach to the incident with some historical and so­ciological “understanding” of the Italian-American experience. Rather than excuses, influenced by ethnic pride or shame, they offer an alternative and more effective approach to explaining the prob­lem of inter-ethnic violence to the public. A new approach is needed because it is certain that intergroup violence will continue in urban America and elsewhere. As an American of Italian descent, I be­lieve that the Italian-American scholarly and professional commu­nity has an “ethnical” responsibility to offer its sensitive and in­formed opinions and advice in the service of better intergroup rela­tions in an increasingly volatile urban environment.

As the reader will easily notice, this first article was written with a great deal of anger. It was composed immediately after the slaying of a black teenager in a predominately first and second gener­ation working-class Italian-American section of Bensonhurst, Brook­lyn. The stereotypical “Italianness” of the area was highlighted in all the major press accounts of the homicide.

Although I was consulted as an “expert” by many reporters and widely quoted in a number of the resulting stories, my own reaction to the slaying was focused on the political and economic, not the ethnic aspects of the tragedy. Simply stated, the various media were doing a story about a homicide of an African American by Italian Ameri­cans.

 

“Yusuf Hawkins and the Closing of the American Mind”[1]

 

To hear some people talk, it appears that 16 year-old Yusuf Hawkins made a couple of ultimately fatal mistakes. One mistake was in biology and the other in geography. According to the rules of the game in the US, he committed a serious violation by being born black. At least this error was not his fault. His second and most grievous fault was geographical. He assumed that a ride on the “N” subway train to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, USA would not stop in Soweto, South Afrika. For this misreading he had to be punished. And punished he was! It was like a Moslem or a Christian in Beirut crossing the Green Line. In Lebanon they hurl artillery shells at one another. In American Cities we throw teenagers.

Those who laid down the law to Mr. Hawkins feel they should be absolved of any guilt in his execution because of his (the victim’s) and their own unfortunate, but understandable, miscalculations. Some witnesses claim it took about thirty punks wielding baseball bats and at least one loaded pistol to put Mr. Hawkins to rest. Remnants of this rabid mob of miscreants claim absolution for their conduct based on the doctrine of mistaken identity. Undoubtably some one will also claim that they “didn’t know the gun was loaded.” Besides, they swear, they mistook Mr. Hawkins for another dark-skinned African American with whom they had also never met. According to a lot of people young Yusuf was just unlucky and the assassinators had made an honest error in staunchly defending the crumbling walls of their sacred neighborhood against the barbarian hordes. This honorable “duty” is even fun to do when the barbarians are unarmed and vastly outnumbered.

Academically speaking, these young hoodlums are Allan Bloom’s kind of people. They obviously have been saved from the horror of the liberal American educational system which produces the “democratic personality.” Professor Bloom’s widely acclaimed best selling book, The Closing of the American Mind, is a stirring indict­ment of America’s schools which practice “education of openness” and other subversive anti-absolutist doctrines. Bloom laments that this system has created citizens who are unfortunately open to “all kinds of men, all kinds of life styles, all ideologies.” According to this Pro­fessor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College and Co-di­rector of the John M. Ohlin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy at the prestigious University of Chicago, America is in danger because too many educated people think that “everything is relative.” To Bloom and his colleagues on 20th Av­enue, absolutism is a virtue and certainly not everyone is a relative.

Bloom et al claim that the founders of their version of American society considered minorities to be a bad thing—“selfish groups who have no concern as such for the common good.” According to this Uni­versity of Chicago-20th Avenue view, as a result of misinterpretation of the founding fathers (or perhaps evil design?) Americans have been educated not only to accept differences but to exhalt them. The Professor has travelled all over the world and most notably has translated Plato’s Republic as well as Rousseau’s Emile. He also wrote an excellent book on Shakespeare’s politics. I didn’t know that Skakespeare even had any politics and I wonder what he thought of minorities.

One can conclude from all this that the ivory tower and the me­dieval neighborhood fashion similar kinds of bigotry. Intellectual bigots however are much more fashionable than those who yell “nigger go home” and hold up watermelons during civil rights marches. Both groups frequently rail about Affirmative Action. In fact, one local source interviewed about the murder of Yusef Hawkins last week in Bensonhurst cited anger about affirmative action policies which residents believe have taken away job opportunities for neigh­borhood youths as a major reason for the hostility that led up to the killing. Blacks and other minorities are seen by unsuccessful people as the cause of their failures. This claim of victimization is a worrisome echo of times past. I remember once reading the head of a German Newspaper in the Ann Frank House in Amsterdam about fifteen years ago—“Die Juden Sind Unser Unglueck”—The Jews are our Misfortune. Millions of Jews were murdered en masse. In New York City we murder our misfortunes one at a time.

There are lots of excuses which have or will be offered for the murder of Yusef Hawkins. I don’t think his death can be excused but it can be easily explained. Like other young men who have killed, maimed, raped, and simply terrorized people because they are “different” and therefore “less then” themselves, the mob on 20th Avenue is reflecting the behavior and attitudes of the most powerful of people in our society. They emulate their leaders—the people they look up to and fear. Neighborhood gangs also have an unfortunately accurate sense that no one is looking out for their interests and that they have to defend themselves against any and everyone. They want to be feared by others. Blacks are easy targets for those on 20th Avenue because blacks are easier to spot on their own, reasonably white, turf. The other enemies are hidden from view or protected by powerful institutions. 20th Avenue in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn differs from other neighborhoods only by on-the-surface characteristics. This community of struggling people is simply another place that is off limits to “outsiders.”

When I was a teenager in the 1950s I was living in a neighborhood under seige in Prospect Heights. My family had an apartment on the third floor over Love’s Meat Market which catered to the rapidly diminishing population of wealthy WASP’s on the once elegant East­ern Parkway across the street from the Brooklyn Museum. We were the janitor-family (“supers”) of the building. The mafia, the 80th Precinct, and the Grand Avenue “Boys” were the neighborhood’s first lines of defense against the imperial growth of black Bedford/ Stuyvesant and their teenage gangs—the “Bishops” and the “Chap­lins.” It was a war mentality and the children played war games.

One warm summer evening my friends (a mix of working class Irish and Italian Catholics, one Jew and one WASP) decided to have a race around the block—Sterling Street to Underhill Avenue to Park Place to Washington Avenue and the Sterling Street finish line by Lewne’s Ice Cream Parlor. The winner would got a few bucks in prize money from those who ran and those who bet on the race. I needed the money badly so I ran like a deer. I was way ahead on Park Place when two guys jumped in front of me and forced me into the space between the high Brownstone stoops. The space was dark but some light pene­trated from the street lamp down the block. Three black kids, about my size and age were preparing to rob me of all my worldly goods. They didn’t know I had nothing to my name. One held what felt like a knife to my side.

I am certain that the dim light from the lamp post saved me as one of the crew said to his friends, “Let him go. I know him from school.” Indeed, he was a friend of mine from P.S. 9 which billed itself as the “Brotherhood School.” I came in last in the race. Yusef Hawkins didn’t find a friendly face in the crowd.

Some powerful people in New York City have fostered an atmo­sphere of intense paranoia and we have all become its victim. Our paranoia benefits them. It keeps us from looking for and finding the things we have in common and things we all need. Each group in the city has a unique history before they got here, but once here they fall into the same pattern of intergroup hostility, the volume and violence level of which rises and falls like the tide. The hostility is seldom addressed except as lip service at the anniversaries of the deaths of fallen heroes. For many politicians the violence is measured first as to who benefits most by it; themselves or their opponent. The greatest sadness which I can contemplate after Mr. Hawkins death, and the greatest insult to his family, is that some people will soon be receiv­ing campaign literature with the subliminal message “Vote for Me, I’m Not Black” or “Vote for Me, I’m Not White.” Yusuf Hawkins will eventually become a “Statistical Bump” in an election year public opinion poll.

 

This second article was written after it become increasingly obvi­ous that the press had decided to make the “Italian” aspect of the murder of Yusuf Hawkins and the neighborhood reaction to provoca­tive marches through the community a continuing story. The Italian versus Black “angle” tied in nicely to the fact that Italian-American Rudolph Juliani, a Republican was to face African-American David Dinkins, a Democrat in the upcoming New York City general election for Mayor. I felt it necessary to express in my own writing and in my subsequent interviews with the media not only the non-ethnic aspects of the homicide but the common experiences of all of America’s mi­norities as exemplified in the infamous lynching of eleven Italian Americans in New Orleans almost a century ago.

 

“Lest We Forget: Racism Will Make Victims of Us All”[2]

 

On August 23, 1989 an African-American man by the name of Yusuf Hawkins was murdered in a predominately Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn. He was killed by a person, or persons, who were part of a mob of young men who some excuse because they acted in defense of their “turf.” Since this racist murder by a monstrous few has taken place, the wider racism and bigotry of the society at large has been prominently, and at times proudly, displayed. It was not unlike a lynching-murder by a hateful mob. It was not the first. Let’s try to make it the last.

Not unexpectedly many of those who are most responsible for the problems in our social and physical environment—our political lead­ers—have absolved themselves of guilt for the generally hostile in­tergroup climate in our city. Our politicians now claim they have been “unifiers”; their opponents have been the “dividers.” Editorialists and academics have done their part by blaming a particular neigh­borhood (Bensonhurst) or a particular ethnic group (Italian-Ameri­cans). In effect scapegoating working-class ethnics for the continued discrimination and episodic violence against nonwhite Americans.

As a sociologist and “expert” on urban affairs I was quoted in the papers and appeared on television explaining how the centuries-old Southern Italian culture of family and village defense makes Italian-American neighborhoods especially suspicious and fearful of out­siders. In every case however I emphasized that such communities are by no means more racist or discriminatory than any other “American” community. In working-class, white ethnic enclaves battles to keep “them” out of the neighborhood are just, more likely to be fought in the street by residents. Other, more advantaged, people for example use co-op boards or “color-blind” economic criteria and rely on private security and closed circuit television for protection against those they don’t like.

Pitting people who should be working together, against each other is a long-standing American tradition. Putting the blame on Italian Americans for American racism is not unlike blaming Irish Americans for anti-Catholicism or Jews for anti-semitism. Not too long ago—and to many, still today—Italians (especially Southern Italians) were (are) considered members of an inferior race. The idiots who held up watermelons while black protestors marched near the site of Hawkins death haven’t the faintest idea that watermelons, racism and Southern Italians have a lot in common.

First of all my grandfather, from Palermo, Sicily, Gerolomino Cangelosi worked his way up from selling watermelon by the slice on New York City street corners and had to endure the anti-Italian bias of America society. Being a victim, however, gives no one a right to victimize others.

Recently, Assemblyman Frank Barbaro led a contingent of Italian-American community leaders and members of Fiere, an Italian Ameri­can student group, who met with a group of African-American protest marchers at the site of Yusuf Hawkins murder as part of what should be a continuing dialogue. Barbaro and others have courageously spo­ken out against the violence committed by a small minority in the community and stand in marked contrast to the silent embarassment and sympathy of a much larger group of local residents. The differ­ence between those who speak out and those who are silent is that, like the members of Fiere, those Italian-Americans who confront and try to correct the problems in their own community rather than ignore or deny them are proudly aware of their own group’s suffering as well as their accomplishments and heritage. They know that Italians are not simply racist guidos and mafia dons and they know that Italians, as many other “Euro-American” immigrants were the victims of poverty and the focus of racist attention in past decades.

Parallels between the African-American and Italian-American experiences are numerous and should be the source of cooperation rather than conflict. All of the historical events which follow should seem familiar to the reader as they are the plagues visited upon wave after wave of poor American migrants and immigrants. In 1906, speaking on “The Immigration Problem” Robert DeCourcy Ward warned that Slavs, Italians and Jews because of their high birth rates would “degrade” the “American race.” Other contemporary crit­ics of Southern Italian immigration warned that Italians were a threat to America because they were not “white.” In fact it has been argued by some experts that the epithet “guinea” was “derived from a name attached to slaves from part of the western African coast.” The poverty of Southern Italy was so great during the latter part of the 19th Century that a trans-oceanic traffic was created for “Italian Slave Children.” The New York Herald reported on one of many “raids” on Italian padrones who either through contractual arange­ments with parents or kidnapping sent hordes of juvenile minstrels out to beg in the streets of New York and Philadelphia. In one cellar “home” for the children the police and reporters found “an abom­inable place, the breeding ground of disease and the abode of roaches and vermin.” In 1870 there was a “Riot in Mamaroneck.” Irish and Italian laborers clashed over jobs. The end result of the battle as re­ported in the New York Sun was: “The Italian population of Grand Park was Driven Out—The Women and Children Sheltered in the Town Hall of Morrisania—Our Home War of Races.” In many cases Italian laborers were paid lower wages than “native whites” or “negroes,” making them more desirable employees. This fact of life was the justification for many riots against Italian workers who also were eager to work as “scabs” during strikes. Poor Southern Italian peasants were viewed by Dixie plantation owners as potential re­placements for freed black slaves. The Italian government even coop­erated in several “experiments” at population transfers which were unsuccessful. The major problem for the plantation owners was that Italian peasants were too difficult to control.

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American press ac­counts and descriptions of Italians conveyed the message that “dagoes” were “dangerous,” “lazy,” “filthy,” “cruel,” “ferocious,” and bloodthirsty.” One Irish-American critic in the 1880s noted that “The Italian was all too ready to ask for public assistance.” And that the absence of “manly qualities” separated the Italian immigrants from others in America.

As with African Americans, the best indicator of racial hatred is the American custom of “lynching.” Although there are many inci­dents of Italians being lynched by racist mobs, the most (in)famous took place in New Orleans on March 14, 1981 when, related by histo­rian Patrick Gallo: “a mob of 6,000–8,000 people, led by prominent cit­izens, descended on the parish jail to get the “Dagoes.” State and lo­cal law officers, and the governor who was in the city at the time, stood by and did nothing, the mob hanged two of the suspects from lampposts, and lined nine of them up in front of the prison wall and blasted their bodies with rifles, pistols, and shotguns, taking less than twenty minutes for their grim work.” The victims of the mob had been accused of killing the New Orleans superintendent of Police whose dying words were “The Dagoes shot me . . . the Dagoes did it.” He did not recognize his killers. Neither did any other witnesses. The Mayor of New Orleans therefore ordered the police “to arrest ev­ery Italian you come across.” About 150 were arrested. When the courts began to find them innocent, the New Orleans Times-Democrat called for “All good citizens . . . to attend a mass meeting . . . to take steps to remedy the failure of justice,” resulting in the largest mass lynching in American history. Reaction to the lynchings were as good as could be expected considering the general stereotype of Italians. Theodore Roosevelt considered the lynching of eleven “rather a good thing” and the New York Times agreed that “the Lynch Law was the only course open to the people of New Orleans.” To preserve American honor President Benjamin Harrison apologized to the Italian govern­ment for the slaughter of these and other Italians in America and gave a $25,000 indemnity to the families of 18 victims.

I imagine that some poor Italian back in the 1890s, maybe even my grandfather, when he read about the lynchings, shivered and prayed that racial violence would someday end.[3]

 

Jerome Krase

Brooklyn College

 

Works Cited

 

Freeman, Robert C. “The Development and Maintenance of New York City’s Italian American Neighborhoods.” The Melting Pot and Beyond: Italian Americans in the Year 2000. Ed. Jerome Krase and William Egelman. Staten Island: American Italian Historical Association, 1987. 223–35.

Gallo, Patrick J. Old Bread, New Wine. Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1981.

Krase, Jerome “The Italian American Community: An Essay on Multi­ple Social Realities.” The Family and Community Life of Italian Americans. Ed. Richard N. Juliani. Staten Island: American Ital­ian Historical Association, 1983. 95–108.

La Gumina, Salvatore J. WOP: A Documentary History of Anti-Ital­ian Discrimination in the United States. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1973.

 

 

 

 


[1]By Jerry Krase, The Brooklyn Free Press 1 September 1989.

[2]By Jerry Krase, The Brooklyn Free Press, September 22, 1989.

[3]This paper is a revised version of that presented at the American Italian Historical Association 22nd Annual Conference, held on November 9, 1989 in San Francisco, California.