The Final Word...In Stone

In a small workshop under the elevated tracks of the Broadway-Eastern Parkway subway station in East New York, monument builder Robert Pugh turns people's sorrow into hope.

"I'm taking the poison and making medicine," he says of his efforts to create gravestones that celebrate the lives of the deceased.

Pugh remembers the day more than a decade ago when Diane Hawkins walked into his office, angry and despondent. Her sixteen-year-old son, Yusuf, was attacked by a mob of white youths wielding baseball bats in Bensonhurst in 1989 and shot to death because he was black. The tragedy touched off events that revealed an alarming racial divide in New York City, as protestors, led by the Rev. Al Sharpton, were repeatedly greeted with taunts and chants of "white power."

In the highly charged atmosphere in the aftermath of the incident, Pugh told Yusuf's mother that he would create a monument in her son's memory that would capture the emotions of the moment without creating more antagonism. "She was angry and I tried to convert her to doing something positive," he says. "I felt that we should not show anger, but we should leave a statement in stone to show why we're angry."

Pugh chose a red mahogany granite stone with a vertical grain, and carved a clenched fist symbolizing black power and the inscription, "It is through the struggle in life that cause [sic] change." He had created a similar design for a young man killed in the Attica prison rebellion in 1971. In the middle of the fist is a cross that, upon closer examination, reveals a lynched man dangling from a rope.

"I wanted it to make a statement and it did," he says.