Moses Stewart Heard A Noble Calling
by Frederick B. Hudson
The Nigerian Nobel-prize winning author Wole Soyinka's play,
Death and the King's Horseman, delivers a poignant statement about the elusive
bond between fathers and sons. A king's chief assistant is told by a spiritual
being that: "it is those who stand at the gateway of the great change to whose
cry we must pay heed…as if the timelessness of the ancestor world and the
unborn have joined spirits to wring an issue of the elusive being of passage."
Moses Stewart of Queens, New York learned and relearned the sweet and
bitter reality of transformation from bitterness and hatred at life's
injustices to renewed commitment and compassion for others when his son, Yusef
Hawkins,16, was killed by a white mob in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, New
York in August, 1989.
Hawkins and some friends went to the largely Italian
neighborhood to look at a used car. Yusuf had been shot and killed by someone in a
gang of up to 30 young men who mistook him for someone else. Although five
members of the attacking group were convicted, Stewart harbored a fiery anger and
a desire for revenge.
That anger grew during subsequent marches through Bensonhurst
with the Rev. Al Sharpton to commemorate the day his son was killed. Stewart was
spat on, jeered, and called "nigger" by bystanders, some of whom held
watermelons aloft. "I wanted to hurt them," he said during an interview with a Newsday
reporter in 1996.
Photo of Moses Stewart courtesy of Tassie Stewart
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Stewart, 42, an Army veteran and former amateur boxer, turned to
drugs following the extended trials in connection with his son's murder. "I
fell in with the wrong people," he said. "I didn't know how to handle my anger.
I was burned out after attending seven trials and hearing over and over how
Yusuf had been killed." For the next few years, he drifted into a world
populated by addicts.
But an Italian-American priest named Father Vito Tiboni, director
of the Veterans Administration's medical center in Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn
directed him to a drug rehabilitation program called Samaritian Village in
1993 . And Father Vito, a self-effacing man who credits Stewart with having the
will to "save his own life," directed him to another drug rehab in Ellenville,
run by Carmine Saino.
Saino told him that he knew that his son had been murdered by men
of Italian heritage like Saino but encouraged him to call him him in darkest
moments. Stewart graduated from the Samaritian Village program in 1995
determined to stay drug free. Stewart also met the woman who was to become his wife
in the Samaritian village program, Tessie Barnes.
Stewart strengthened his bonds also with Reverend Al Sharpton who
encouraged him to transmute his rage into a commitment to social activism,
and who named him director of the New York bureau of Sharpton's National Action
Network.
The depth of Stewart's transformation was tested in A lone White
attacker, Michael Riccardi, 27, plunged a knife three inches into Sharpton's chest on
Jan. 12, 1991, just as the street activist was to lead a demonstration through
the White ethnic enclave of Bensonhurst. Stewart did not harm the knife
wielder but held him for the police.
Stewart went on to counsel the families of other victims of police
and civilian brutality, including those close to Amadou Diallo, the Guinean
street vendor who was shot at forty one times by New York City police on February
3, 1999.
The former bus driver from Virginia used his empathy to relate to
grieved families in the midst of their turmoil. Reverend Sharpton said at
Stewart's funeral that "every case you heard of in last 14 years, whether it was
Amadou Diallo, whether it was Abner Louima, whether it was the Gavin Cato family,
Moses was the one who would say," Rev, you deal with what you have to deal with: let me talk to the family."
When he passed away on June 7 of this year, noted black attorney
Alton Maddox Jr. wrote that : "the death of Yusef Hawkins from a gunshot sound not
only ushered in the first Black mayor in the city's history, but also
temporily energized the Black community in New York City. Moses became a key figure
in the movement and sudden hero. It proves that political struggle leads to
political success."
Moses Stewart has passed from flesh to spirit. But his willingness to
face his rage and pain, to help others through sorrow and tears to strength
and unity serves as timeless testimony to our destiny in the words of Soyinka
"not to wander in the void of evil with beings who are the enemies of life."
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