NOTES

August 28, 1963: A brutal double murder and its subsequent investigation that rocked New York City and changed it forever.

Re-creating this era of mounting racial tension in America's largest city was a challenge. Although many people think of facts as immutable objects carved in stone, in truth, facts are fungible. The same events are remembered by differing participants in different ways.

With The Savage City, I was lucky enough to find an array of people who were willing to share memories of a troubling time. Among the ex-cops, former prosecutors, black militants, defense lawyers, street hustlers, newspapermen, victims of police abuse, and others I interviewed, recollections of specific dates and minute details from the past were sometimes spotty, but what everyone was able to recall and still feel was the emotion of the era.

It was a time when New York City and the United States in general were struggling to deal with cataclysmic social changes brought about by the civil rights movement and the huge migration of "Negroes" from the South to northern cities.

Social evolution in an urban setting is often messy. It is too fast for some and not fast enough for others. Worlds collide, lives are changed forever; the whole damn universe seems to go up in flames.

The writer's job is to make sense of the chaos, to provide context, enlightenment, and a pathway to a deeper level of understanding- all of which I have attempted to do, to the best of my abilities, with The Savage City.

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THE SAVAGE CITY:

Race, Murder, And A Generation On The Edge

HARDCOVER: 496 pages
PUBLISHER: William Morrow & Co.
ORIGINAL PUBLISHER: William Morrow & Co. (2011)
LANGUAGE: English
ISBN-10: 0061782386
ISBN-13: 978-0061782381
ONLINE PURCHASE: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Indiebound

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Synopsis

In the early 1960s, uncertainty and menace gripped New York, crystallizing in a poisonous divide between a deeply corrupt, cynical, and racist police force, and an African American community buffeted by economic distress, brutality, and narcotics. On August 28, 1963— the day Martin Luther King Jr. declared “I have a dream” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial—two young white women were murdered in their Manhattan apartment. Dubbed the Career Girls Murders case, the crime sent ripples of fear throughout the city, as police scrambled fruitlessly for months to find the killer. But it also marked the start of a ten-year saga of fear, racial violence, and turmoil in the city—an era that took in events from the Harlem Riots of the mid-1960s to the Panther Twenty-One trials and Knapp Commission police corruption hearings of the early 1970s.

The Savage City explores this pivotal and traumatic decade through the stories of three very different men:

· George Whitmore Jr., the near-blind, destitute nineteen-year-old black man who was coerced into confessing to the Career Girls Murders and several other crimes. Whitmore, an innocent man, would spend the decade in and out of the justice system, becoming a scapegoat for the NYPD—and a living symbol of the inequities of the system.

· Bill Phillips, a brazenly crooked NYPD officer who spent years plundering the system before being caught in a corruption sting—and turning jaybird to create the largest scandal in the department’s history.

· Dhoruba Bin Wahad, a son of the Bronx and founding member of New York’s Black Panther Party, whose militant activism would make him a target of local and federal law enforcement as conflicts between the Panthers and the police gradually devolved into open warfare.

Animated by the voices of the three participants—all three of whom spent years in prison, and are still alive today—The Savage City emerges as an epic narrative of injustice and defiance, revealing for the first time the gripping story of how a great city, marred by fear and hatred, struggled for its soul in a time of sweeping social, political, and economic change.

 

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