We wuz juz do’n  da right thing.

Do the Right Thing: As the hottest day of the year gets underway at Sal’s, local activist Buggin Out (Giancarlo Esposito) stops in for a slice of pizza, then hassles Aiello because there aren’t black faces on Aiello’s “Wall of Fame” (which has photos of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Frank Sinatra, etc.). To his complaints Aiello replies that only Italian Americans get their faces on his wall, and that if Esposito wants to look at pictures of “brothers” he tells him  “get your own pizzeria.”  Noting that he doesn’t see any Italians patronizing Sal’s, Esposito spends the rest of the day trying to organize a local boycott of the pizzeria. This apparently trivial incident is the spark that eventually ignites the explosion with which the film ends, but not until the film presents various local figures and their interrelationships in an episodic fashion.

Rogerebert.com:

But the movie in any event is not just about how the cops kill a black man and a mob burns down a pizzeria. That would be too simple, and this is not a simplistic film. It covers a day in the life of a Brooklyn street, so that we get to know the neighbors, and see by what small steps the tragedy is approached.

This is my pizzeria: