The Black Shield by Wilber L. Cooper

Both an epic history and an intimate family story, a startling account of the lives of Black cops in one Midwestern city.

 

In the wake of the George Floyd protests, a Black police organization in Cleveland called the Black Shield was causing a stir. Officers broke ranks with their fellow cops, aligning themselves with local Black Lives Matter activists. Wilbert L. Cooper returned to his hometown to write a profile of the organization's president, who had become notorious years earlier for shooting an unarmed Black man.

For Cooper, the news was deeply personal. Both of his parents and his sister are retired Black Cleveland cops, and on his mother's side, there’s been a Cleveland cop in the family since 1950. Unearthing the dramatic histories of the Black Shield and his own family, Cooper tells the intertwined stories of the two: his relatives, who chose policing because it was one of the few stepping stones to economic security and status in a segregated city; and an organization that, over decades of upheaval, cycled between rebellion and acquiescence.

An intimate, bold work of literary nonfiction, The Black Shield is an urgent exploration of the complex duality of the Black cop. Cooper grapples with a knot of contradictions: Is the Black officer a sign of progressive change, or of the system’s masterful way of changing its appearance without changing its outcomes? How can he reconcile the fact that law enforcement helped lift his family out of poverty when he lives in an era that is marred by mass incarceration and perpetual police violence? Cooper gives us an American story about race and power of a kind that has never been told before.