Yusuf Hawkins Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Naman Ramachandran Speciality distributor Cosmic Cat has set U.K. release dates for documentary “Cassius X: Becoming Ali.” The film follows the early years of Cassius Clay, from a bright-eyed rookie boxer from Louisville, Kentucky, to world heavyweight champion and from working class intellectual to one of America’s most influential civil rights campaigners. The film reveals how the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, reinforced by a friendship with revolutionary preacher, Malcolm X, set Clay on the journey to become Cassius X, before his induction to the Nation of Islam and ascension to the name of Muhammad Ali.

EXCLUSIVE: HBO Documentary Films is embarking on a documentary about pioneering supermodel Donyale Luna, one of the first Black models to be featured on the covers of major European fashion magazines.

Jake Kanter International TV EditorThe virtual Mipcom begins in earnest today and, although the industry is not gathering in Cannes, there is still a glut of news as studios announce sales. Deadline will keep this page updated with some of the day’s most notable deals.

NEW YORK -- A man who was among those charged in the notorious 1989 killing of Yusuf Hawkins, a Black teen set upon by a white mob and shot, was fired from a New York hip-hop radio station after a new documentary brought the murder case renewed attention.

In the summer of 1989, less than two months after the release of Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, a dramatization of racial tensions between Black and Italian Americans in Brooklyn, Yusuf Hawkins was shot to death for being a Black boy in a white neighborhood just a few miles from the film's Bedford-Stuyvesant setting. Sixteen years old, Hawkins was the victim of an impromptu mob in Bensonhurst that had gathered to attack another Black youth rumored to be dating an Italian-American girl.

Danielle Turchiano Senior Features Editor, TVOn August 23, 1989, teenage Yusuf Hawkins took the train into Bensonhurst, Brooklyn with a few of his friends to look at a car for sale. What they didn’t know, being young Black boys from East New York, was that tension was running high in that other pocket of town.

Dino-Ray Ramos Associate Editor/ReporterThe online fest will bring the energy and magic of the live fest as it spotlights the best of independent Black cinema, studio premieres, conversations and panels, along with virtual networking events.

A new documentary is making an old hate crime more relevant than ever.

Given the recent Black Lives Matter protests that have swept America and social media, the upcoming HBO documentary “Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn” feels extremely relevant and timely. The documentary tells the story of Yusuf Hawkins, a Black teenager who was murdered in 1989 by a group of white men in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.