25 Years in 25 Days (1991): A Report from the Crown Heights Riots

This fall, the Brian Lehrer Show is marking 25 years of Brian at WNYC with a year-by-year look at stories that mattered from 1989 to 2014. Find the full schedule and lots more here.

Also today: Douglas Rushkoff remembers the first website and how the 'net has changed our lives since 1991.

We remember perhaps the most tumultuous local event of 1991, the Crown Heights riots, which pitted members of the black community against the ultra-orthodox community in one of central Brooklyn's most diverse neighborhoods. The riots began on August 19, 1991, after Gavin Cato, a child of Guyanese immigrants, was struck and killed by an automobile in the motorcade of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the leader of a Jewish religious sect. The incident pushed the long-simmering tension to the breaking point, and the next few nights saw protests, bottle throwing, looting and attacks. And Mayor David Dinkins, stuck in the middle, was never able to recover his reputation among either community.

To remember this moment, we went back into the WNYC archives and found some of the original reports that aired that summer of 1991. As it happens, the reporter on the scene was Maria Hinojosa, who you may know now as the host of Latino USA. We found her reports to be so emotional, and nuanced, and rich in sound, that we thought we'd present about three minutes of the original reporting.