The Savage CityRace, Murder, and a Generation on the Edge

A strong portrayal of the tension and violence of NYC in the late '60s and early '70s
It may be difficult to remember in post-Giuliani New York City, but decades ago the city was a hotbed of racial tension, violent crime and police corruption. Of course, all those elements still exist in the NYC of today, but in the late '60s and early '70s there were no sanitized, "New 42nd Street" headlines to hide behind. In The Savage City, journalist T.J. English tells the story of that particularly fraught time in the city's history. He filters the big picture through the stories of three men caught up, in various ways, in the crime, injustice, and racial turmoil of the era.

One is George Whitmore, a young, mild-mannered black man violently coerced by the police into confessing for a slew of high-profile crimes he didn't commit; the second is Dhoruba Bin Wahad, a former gang member from the Bronx who became a key player in New York's Black Panther Party and, later in the underground, militant Black Liberation Army; and, finally, there's Bill Philips, an old-school white police officer for whom being "on the pad" (getting paid off to keep quiet by various criminals on his beat) is a way of life. Filtering the larger story through these individual narratives keeps Savage City catholic and compelling; the book is a mini-history of the Black Panther Party, the corruption of the NYPD, and the heroes and anti-heroes of the criminal (in)justice system rolled into one. English's writing has a hard-boiled crime writer feel to it, and he keeps the action moving and the sprawling cast of characters and events exceedingly clear. That clarity allows for an engaging specificity within a wide-ranging tale — who knew that Dhoruba Bin Wahad escorted Jean Genet on a tour of Bay Area Panther activities?

Though English gives the reader plenty of riots, shoot-outs and other headline-grabbing moments to ponder, the real strength of this book is the way it portrays the tension and violence of the era as a slow-moving schism, a cauldron of disquiet. The events of the "Savage City" era were insidious, pervasive, causing rents in the fabric of New York City that exist to this day.