The Savage City

"It was a time of hope and desperation, a time of reckoning . . . In the early 1960s, the Mad Men era, a mood of uncertainty and menace gripped New York City. At the centre of the unrest was a poisonous divide between two camps in the city- the deeply corrupt, cynical and racist police of the era and the African American community, buffeted by economic distress, casual police brutality and the spread of narcotics, as well as the winds of change blowing north from the civil-rights...
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"It was a time of hope and desperation, a time of reckoning . . . In the early 1960s, the Mad Men era, a mood of uncertainty and menace gripped New York City. At the centre of the unrest was a poisonous divide between two camps in the city- the deeply corrupt, cynical and racist police of the era and the African American community, buffeted by economic distress, casual police brutality and the spread of narcotics, as well as the winds of change blowing north from the civil-rights movement under way in the nation s southern states. The city s crime rate was growing and violence was becoming a daily reality for New Yorkers in every neighbourhood and borough. Then, on 28 August 1963 the day on which Martin Luther King Jr stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and declared 'I have a dream' two young white women were murdered in their Manhattan apartment. The murders struck fear through the city and ignited a ten-year saga of racial violence and unrest. In The Savage City, English explores this traumatic decade through the stories of three very different men- George Whitmore Jr, a 19-year-old illiterate black man scapegoated for the 'Career Girls' murders; Bi