About this item
A history of African Americans in New York City from the 1910s to 1960, told through the life of Samuel Battle, the New York Police Department's first black officer. When Samuel Battle broke the color line as New York City's first African American cop in the second decade of the twentieth century, he had to fear his racist colleagues as much as criminals. He had to be three times better than his white peers, and many times more resilient. His life was threatened. He was displayed like a circus animal. Yet, fearlessly claiming his rights, he prevailed in a four-decade odyssey that is both the story of one man's courageous dedication to racial progress and a harbinger of the divisions between police and the people they serve that plague twenty-first-century America.
About the Author
Arthur Browne is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and newspaper editor who has written the first-draft history of New York for more than forty years. He coauthored I, Koch, a biography of Mayor Ed Koch, and led a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for editorials documenting the epidemic illnesses afflicting thousands of 9/11 rescue and recovery workers. Browne presently serves as the New York Daily News editorial page editor. His latest book is One Righteous Man: Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York.
Photo credit Susan Watts.
