On Saturday, August 23rd, 1989, 16-year-old Yusuf Khan was walking through Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to look into a used car.
It was a day that should have been a joyous one for he and his three friends, but they made one fatal mistake.
They walked through a neighborhood they weren’t welcome in.
You see, Bensonhurst, a heavily Italian neighborhood, was not very open to people of a darker shade.
Yes, even in Brooklyn, home of Biggie, Jay-Z, the Nets and gentrification, there were, and still are, areas that Black people aren’t welcome in.
And on that day in 1989, Yusuf paid for it with his life simply because he was Black.
The group was jumped and chased by 30 white youths with bats, reportedly because one of the white thugs were spurned by an Italian girl who was reportedly dating a Black guy.
It was not Yusuf or his friends, but they represented a target for these enraged mob, so despite being innocent and unarmed, they were attacked. Hawkins was shot and killed by Joseph Fama, who was sentenced to 25 years to life (he’s currently still in jail although in 2024, his attorney claimed he wasn’t involved and was fighting for a new trial).
On Saturday, August 23rd, 2025, Yusuf should have been 52 and enjoying life. Instead, his family still feels the pain of his murder.
This racist killing came only four months after the then-called Central Park Five- Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron Brown and Korey Wise- were wrongly arrested and convicted of raping and beating a jogger in Central Park.
Both cases still inflict pain, anger, distrust and frustration almost 40 years later, particularly the latter incident for the involvement of the current president.
Tr**p took out a full-page ad in the New York Times at the time calling for their execution, something he’s, unsurprisingly, never apologized for.
It’s a moment he used to catapult himself into the national medic spectrum, and he’s stuck with playing racial politics as a strategy to this very day.
Hawkins and the now Exonerated Five is history Tr**p is thirsting to erase through whitewashing efforts across multiple institutions, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC).
“Everything discussed [in NMAAHC exhibits] is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was,” posted Trump. “WOKE IS BROKE. We have the HOTTEST Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.”
History must be told regardless of the brutal truth it holds for that’s how we all learn.
But MAGA-lovers and their leader don’t want you to be educated about history, especially Black history, for that would mean that America’s truths would be learned. So he employs racial politics to distract, rile up his base, destroy the truth and dumb down this generation, a generation that includes Black athletes, many of whom are being blinded and silenced by big paydays at both the college and professional sports levels.
That is why we must fight to preserve this history and teach it, particularly to Black athletes.
