On December 20, 1986, 23-year-old Michael Griffith, along with his friends Cedric Sandiford and Timothy Grimes, were traveling from Brooklyn to Queens when their car broke down in Howard Beach, a predominantly white, middle-class Queens neighborhood.
The three young Black men walked to New Park Pizza and asked to use the phone.
When they were refused, they sat down at a table where they were then confronted by a group of white teenagers. After a brief verbal altercation, the white teens left to attend a party, where one allegedly announced: “There’s some niggers in the pizza parlor — let’s go kill them.”
When Griffith, Sandiford, and Grimes exited New Park Pizza soon after, the white teens had returned with baseball bats and tree limbs. Grimes ran fast enough to escape the attack, but Griffith and Sandiford were brutally beaten.
Fleeing the blows, Griffith ran into traffic on the busy Belt Parkway and was struck and killed by a car. The attack against Sandiford continued even as Griffith lay dying.
News of the attack spread quickly, sparking outrage and protests from the Black community and inspiring an anti-racism march through Howard Beach that crowds of white residents gathered to harass.
During protests, mostly Black marchers carried signs comparing Howard Beach to apartheid-era South Africa, while white residents displayed racist signs.
New York City Mayor Ed Koch compared the attack to a lynching, but in the press, many reports of the attack used dehumanizing language to describe Michael Griffith only by his race, while in some cases describing the young men accused of killing him as “teenagers” and “baby-faced.”
When Queens District Attorney John Santucci charged Scott Kern, Jason Ladone, and Jon Lester with reckless endangerment for their suspected roles in Griffith’s death, Santucci was accused of being inappropriately lenient and removed from the case, replaced by special prosecutor Charles Hynes.
After the three defendants were prosecuted and convicted for Michael Griffith’s murder, Judge Thomas Demakos sentenced Scott Kern to 6-18 years imprisonment; Jason Ladone to 5-15 years; and Jon Lester, the accused instigator, to 10-30 years.
While passing down his rulings, Judge Demakos asked, “What kind of individual do I have before me who, after witnessing a young Black man get crushed by a car, continues his reckless conduct by savagely beating another Black male with a bat?”
It wasn’t the last racially motivated attack in Howard Beach, which remains 78 percent white and just 1.7 percent Black.
On June 29, 2005, a group of local white men in Howard Beach attacked three Black men with baseball bats, resulting in one victim being hospitalized with serious injuries.
Police arrested two of the attackers, including Nicholas Minucci, who claimed the victims had attempted to rob him. Minucci, 20, was found guilty on June 10, 2006 of robbery and the racist attack of Glenn Moore, during which he used a racial slur. On July 17, 2006, Minucci was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
This essay was drawn in part from the Equal Justice Initiative’s History of Racial Injustice.
Read more about white supremacy in New York State.
Illustrations, from above: New York Daily News reporting the Howard Beach assault and killing; New Park Pizza in Howard Beach, Queens, 2021; and victim Michael Griffith.
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