The Black Shield: An American Memoir of Family and Power

Wilbert Cooper comes from cops: his father and his mother were both Cleveland police officers, black cops in a city that long resisted giving any such power to African Americans. It was, their son recognizes, a willful and strategic choice, which brought him a middle-class childhood and brought them both the impunity of a government-issued gun and a life of constant compromises, enforcing America's racial structure within their own community. Cooper brings the idealistic skepticism of youth to his excavation of family history, to which he adds thorough and impassioned histories of policing and race in Cleveland and America that give The Black Shield a striking resemblance to Julian Brave Noisecat's memoir/history of Native survival and activism from last year, We Survived the Night.