The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown
How a White Police Officer Was Convicted of Killing a Black Citizen, Baltimore, 1875
Gordon H. Shufelt
The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown
How a White Police Officer Was Convicted of Killing a Black Citizen, Baltimore, 1875
Gordon H. Shufelt
- Vanaf €15,- geen verzendkosten.
- 30 dagen ruiltermijn voor fysieke producten
Omschrijving
"Historian Gordon H. Shufelt's true crime book recounts the 1875 murder of a Black man by a white policeman. While racial police brutality is still not uncommon, the grim distinction surrounding Daniel Brown's death is that, in late nineteenth-century Baltimore, this particular officer was convicted. With factual suspense, the book reconstructs the fateful meeting between Brown and McDonald. A noise complaint regarding a small, non-alcoholic party somehow escalated into Brown being clubbed and shot in his own home. Witnesses recalled McDonald being angry and antagonistic. McDonald, however, insisted that he acted in self-defense. McDonald was found guilty by a white jury—a verdict, Shufelt says, that was intended to quell police overreach, rather than support racial equality. Engrossing."- Foreword;
"A close and engrossing look at an obscure 19th-century homicide through a granular and judicious review of archival records. One summer night in 1875, white policeman Patrick McDonald confronted African American Daniel Brown in Brown's Baltimore home after receiving a noise complaint. The encounter ended with McDonald fatally shooting Brown. Surprisingly, given the city's endemic racism at the time, an all-white jury convicted McDonald of manslaughter after hearing testimony that Brown had done nothing violent to provoke the shooting. Shufelt puts that outcome in context, which included distrust of the police force following misconduct during elections that year, and the status of the Black witnesses to the killing; their employment as servants in affluent white homes made them viewed as trustworthy, which Shufelt considers 'the persistence of some elements of a slavery-era culture.' The verdict was not a breakthrough, however, or evidence that white Baltimoreans "objected to the oppression of African Americans" . . . Illuminat[es] race relations and the criminal justice system in post–Civil War Baltimore."- Publishers Weekly
Gordon H. Shufelt is a retired attorney and administrative law judge with an M.A. from the University of Colorado, a J.D. from Rutgers, and a Ph.D. from American University. He served in the federal government for 30 years, including 14 years as a Veterans Law Judge with the Board of Veterans Appeals in Washington, DC. He has published historical articles about Baltimore in the Journal of American Ethnic History and the Journal of Southern History with a focus on immigration and African American history.