[2] Broadway credits for Hawkins included James Baldwin's The Amen Corner (1965), Lolita (1981), Checkmates (1988) and The Shadow Box (1994).
She was also busy off-Broadway and in regional theatre, with a role in The Last Street Play with Morgan Freeman in 1977,[3] in a touring company of Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf in 1978,[4] and as James McDaniel's mother in Cheryl L. West's Before It Hits Home in 1992, among many others.
[5] Hawkins appeared in films such as Mighty Aphrodite (1995), Zebrahead (1992), Mississippi Masala (1991), Lean on Me (1989), and Nighthawks (1981).
Her television acting credits ranged from soap operas As the World Turns and Guiding Light to dramas Cagney & Lacey and Law & Order.
She was credited as a writer on the Children's Television Workshop health show Feelin' Good in the mid-1970s.