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Race, Murder, and a Generation on the Edge
William Morrow
March 2011
On Sale: March 15, 2011
416 pages
ISBN: 0061824550
EAN: 9780061824555
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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 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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