Michael Griffith

Michael Griffith may refer to:

See also

Howard Beach racial incident

One African-American man was killed and another was beaten in Howard Beach, Queens, New York, in a racially charged incident in December 1986 that heightened racial tensions in New York City.

The dead man was 23-year-old Michael Griffith, who was born on March 2, 1963 in Trinidad and lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He was killed after being accidentally hit by a car on December 20, 1986, as he was chased onto a highway by a mob of white youths who had beaten him and his friends. Griffith's death was the second in a string of three infamous racially motivated killings of black men by white mobs in New York City in the 1980s. The other victims were Willie Turks in 1982 and Yusuf Hawkins in 1989.

The incident

Late on the night of Friday, December 19, 1986, four black men: Michael Griffith, 23; Cedric Sandiford, 36; and Curtis Sylvester and Timothy Grimes, both 20; were riding in a car when it broke down in a deserted stretch of Cross Bay Boulevard near Broad Channel. Three of the men walked about three miles north to seek help in the Howard Beach neighborhood of Queens, an insular, mostly white community. Sylvester remained behind to watch the car. They argued with some white teens who were on their way to a party, then left.

Michael Griffith (novelist)

Michael Griffith is a novelist and short-story writer. His stories and essays have appeared in literary journals such as The Oxford American, The Southwest Review, Salmagundi, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, among others.

Griffith received a Master of Fine Arts from LSU in Baton Rouge, and is the former associate editor of The Southern Review. He now works as a professor of creative fiction writing at the University of Cincinnati in Cincinnati, Ohio and teaches fiction writing at the Sewanee School of Letters at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN.

His published works include the novel Spikes out in 2001 as well as a novella plus collected stories entitled Bibliophilia released in 2003. Both works are published by Arcade Publishing.

References