CEDRIC SANDIFORD

RACIST ATTACK SURVIVOR

Chased and beaten in the widely publicized racial attack by young whites on three black men in Howard Beach in the Queens borough of New York City in 1986, Sandiford never condemned that neighborhood. Interviewed in 1990, he said, "I know there are good people over there."

Born in Guyana in 1950, Cedric Sandiford immigrated to America in 1968. After serving in the U. S. Army (1968-1970) he became a construction worker in New York. On December 20, 1986, according to testimony in three trials, Sandiford was one of three African-American men walking through the mostly white Howard Beach neighborhood after their car broke down. When a car carrying several white teenagers passed the blacks, racial insults were exchanged. Other whites joined the teens and pursued the black men, chasing Michael Griffith onto a highway where he was hit by a passing car and killed. The whites caught Sandiford and beat him severely with a baseball bat and other weapons.

Griffith, who died in the incident, was the son of Sandiford's fiancée, Jean Griffith, whom he married in 1989. They had a daughter besides other children each had from previous marriages. Mrs. Sandiford did not say how her husband contracted AIDS, but he had been quite ill with it for some time before his death. When he died in Brooklyn on December 19, 1991, he had just returned from Kenya, where he was treated for AIDS with Kemron, a drug believed in Africa to be a cheap cure for HIV and AIDS. Kemron's effectiveness has been challenged elsewhere, and, in fact, Sandiford died less than a week after his return from Africa.

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