Hardened New Yorkers have seen bloodier and deadlier racial attacks, but the latest hate crime has softened hearts unlike others, bringing a tear to the mayor's eye and condemnation from all quarters.
Two black children, a brother and sister, were attacked early this week while walking to school in an ethnically mixed section of the Bronx. Four white teenagers beat the children and stole $3, then cut the girl's hair and sprayed both with white shoe polish."You'll be white today!" police said one attacker shouted. The teenagers have not been caught.
The attack Monday was vastly different from the city's other notorious racial cases in Howard Beach, Queens or Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where blacks were killed by mobs of white youths.
Yet it has attracted as much attention.
Mayor David Dinkins condemned it as a horrific crime - one that evoked such painful racial memories of his own youth that it brought tears to his eyes at a City Hall news conference.
Dinkins, who is black, said racial tensions in the city must be quelled at their source.
"We adults have failed," he said.
Religious leaders called on their faithful to condemn the incident at services this weekend.
After the attack, the 12-year-old girl was terribly shaken, her mother said. The 14-year-old boy said he would have trouble trusting whites again.
"The nature of the incident was especially evil" because it combined physical and mental abuse without any provocation, said Mitchell Moss of New York University's Urban Research Center.
"This happened to good kids, innocent kids walking to school," he said. "This was a pure act of racism."
Parents and civic leaders moved quickly into schools in the middle-class neighborhood to counsel fearful children and urge angry youths to forgo retaliation.
Despite that effort, a gang of blacks beat an Asian-Indian teen and two light-skinned Hispanics in separate attacks. "White kids will get beaten now!" a black youth reportedly yelled in the latter incident.
Inspector William Wallace, head of the police bias unit, said racist attacks typically affect the whole community.
"A bias crime doesn't just affect the immediate victims, but all members of the victims' group and each of those members respond in a different manner," Wallace said. "Some experience deep sorrow, some anguish, some deep anger - and some act that anger out."
One of the attackers told the victims: "We're from the Albanian Boys," referring to a Albanian-American street gang operating in the area.
But Wallace refused to say if the suspects were Albanians. "We won't know who they are until we catch them," he said. "Until then it's not fair to single out one group based on what is still uncorroborated evidence."
Vic Vuksanaj, a spokesman for the Albanian community, agrees. "We don't like having our name involved before the facts" are known.
The children's mother, Nellie Wilson, who emigrated from the Virgin Islands a few years ago, says that since the attack she's tried to impress upon her children that "not everybody who is white is bad."