Mayor Koch Pleads for Calm in Wake of New York City Racial Attacks

Civic leaders issued a plea for racial peace Wednesday as police searched for more members of a white gang that attacked three black men and for members of a black group that retaliated against a white youth.

Three white teen-agers were being held on murder charges in the first attack, in which a 23-year-old black man was killed Friday night when he was struck by a car as he fled his assailants. The attack on the white youth occurred three days later.

FBI Investigating

The FBI began an investigation of the second attack to determine whether the 17-year-old victim’s civil rights were violated, officials said. The bureau continued a separate investigation of the first attack.

Mayor Edward I. Koch asked for calm.

“It is essential that New Yorkers do all we can to remember and to reinforce our proud tradition of tolerance,” he said at City Hall. “And that is particularly true among the city’s young people.”

The mayor announced that the city Board of Education planned teacher training sessions on race relations on Jan. 9 and a citywide school program the next week “to remind our children of the importance of tolerance to the fabric of our city and our society.”

Attack on Blacks

In the first attack, police said, about a dozen white youths set upon three black men with baseball bats and sticks as they left a pizza parlor in the predominantly white Howard Beach section of Queens.

One of the black men, Michael Griffith, was killed by a car as he ran across a parkway. Police said the white youths had yelled racial epithets at Griffith and his two companions.

Police said 25 to 40 black teen-agers chanting, “Howard Beach! Howard Beach!” attacked a white youth, Jeffrey McCarthy, as he waited Tuesday for a bus in Jamaica, Queens. He was cut and bruised before bystanders stepped in. The Police Department assigned 25 detectives to search for the assailants.

A coalition of civil rights groups said it planned a march in Howard Beach this weekend to protest Griffith’s death. And the New York Board of Rabbis issued a statement Wednesday calling the Howard Beach and Jamaica attacks “proof, if we needed it, that the poisons of bigotry are highly toxic.”