Blacks demand justice in Staten Island killing
1988 1988-12Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 4 →
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By CHRIS NEW YORK-Michael Griffith in Howard Beach, 1986. ... Derek Tyrus in Staten Island, 1988. According to witnesses, it has happened again.
Derek Tyrus, 17, was struck and killed by a car in the lily-white Rosebank section of Staten Island on Oct. 7. Tyrus had been accosted by a group of whites who yelled racial epithets and chased the youth on foot and in cars to his death.
A month and a half after the incident, police report no arrests. The special NYPD "bias unit," established in the wake of the Howard Beach protests, is still "investigating" if the incident was racially motivated.
New York has seen a rise in racist vigilante and police violence against minorities in the last several years. But it has also seen the reawakening of a movement against racist violence and a criminal-justice system that protects the racists.
"March for Decency"
On Oct. 29, over 350 people marched through the streets of Staten Island in a "March For Decency." After marching to the site of the death, demonstrators heard representatives from a variety of labor, church, and civil rights organizations call for the prompt arrest of the Rosebank residents responsible.
"Just as they claimed Michael Stewart strangled himself with a police baton, just as they claimed Eleanor Bumpurs threatened the lives of four armed policemen with a kitchen knife, forcing them to shoot her, so today they say Derek Tyrus was killed by a car due to horseplay in the street," said Colin Moore, attorney for the Tyrus family.
"We have descriptions of those who committed the acts," said Moore. "The police say they can't solve the case because the Black youths are not cooperating, when actually they have cooperated despite hostile grilling. We will not tolerate their excuses."
Norman Siegel, director of the New York ACLU, declared, "We must bring the civil rights movements of the 1960s 'up-South' to the Northern cities." This was especially poignant since Derek Tyrus lived the first 16 years of his life in Selma, Ala. He died due to racist violence in his 17th year, when he moved to the "deep North."
New York is two cities Nothing better illustrates the fact that New York is two cities—one for Blacks, one for Whites-than to contrast the treatment of the white killers of Derek Tyrus with the Black teenagers who assaulted a white youth in Queens the week before the demonstration.
On Oct. 27, 15-year-old Kevin McAleen was assaulted on a bus by a group of Black teenagers, reportedly yelling racial epithets. (The teenagers were later halted by several other Black teenagers who said, "That's not right.")
Two days later the New York Daily News prominently featured a quote from an NYPD representative to the effect that the case was being classified as a bias case by the NYPD bias unit. The Black youths have since been booked for first-degree riot and second-degree assault.
Soon after, Mayor Koch invited McAleen and his father to City Hall, where they were given an "I LOVE NY" scarf at a press conference. The father, a retired police sergeant, took the occasion to blame the incident on Maddox, Mason, and Sharpton, the three advisers in the Tawana Brawley case. Their struggle for justice for Brawley, he claimed, "is causing some of them (Black people) to hate whites."
In a reference to the anti-racist protests in the City since Howard Beach, McAleen wailed about "a double standard in the police department. If several white boys beat up a Black kid, the Black leaders jump on it and the police react."
There is of course, a double standard in the NYPD, but it is not as McAleen portrays it.
In racially polarized New York City, there is occasional Black-initiated racial violence against whites, which meets with swift punishment-and press conferences at City Hall with the white victims. And there is racial violence initiated by whites against Blacks, which is sanctioned, if not by law, then by a complex of racist institutions-the cops, the courts, and the government.
Michael Griffith, Howard Beach ... Derek Tyrus, Staten Island. To receive even a shred of justice in New York City in 1988, Black people know they must organize and fight for it. No Justice, No peace!