T.J. English believes that New York needs to have a discussion about its not-too-distant past: specifically the 1960s and early '70s.
It's a history that is still raw for some, he believes, yet virtually unknown to anyone under 40.
English, the author of "Havana Nocturne," "Paddywhacked" and other bestsellers, had intended to write about the life of George Whitmore Jr., who as a near-blind and destitute 19-year-old was coerced into confessing to the murder of two young women in August 1963 on Manhattan's East Side.
But he broadened his narrative in "The Savage City" to include the parallel lives of corrupt NYPD officer Bill Phillips and Black Panther Party militant Dhoruba Bin Wahad, both of whom went on to serve long terms in jail.
"It never ceases to amaze me the great history that goes below the radar," he said. The stories weren't below the radar at a time, though. The city's seven daily newspapers competed in their coverage, for instance, of the "Career Girls Murders," the case that landed the innocent Whitmore behind bars.
The national backdrop to English's narrative is the climax to the long struggle for Civil Rights; a local factor is the emergence of a militancy primed by the rhetoric of Malcolm X.
"This history has been forgotten or conveniently swept under the rug, or no longer fits the narrative of how New York City likes to see itself," said English whose book is subtitled "Race, Murder, and a Generation on the Edge."
When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. opened up a second front to his campaign in Chicago, he got some taste of what African Americans experienced during the second Great Migration that began with World War II.
"I think they were surprised when they came North to the 'promised land,'" English said. "They found a segregation just as rigid."
That de facto segregation put the NYPD and other Northern police forces on the front line, charged with enforcing unstated norms and customs.
"Old Irish grandmothers, old Italian grandmothers would come up to them [saying] 'you have to save our block. You're our last line of defense.' And a lot of cops, I think, took that to heart," English said. "So there was racism, but there was also just genuine fear, concern and huge paranoia about this demographic shift happening in this city that nobody had planned for or anticipated."
Former police officers have told him they were misunderstood. "I tried to be somewhat sensitive to that," he said.
The author contends, however, in the era's racially charged atmosphere, some cops felt little or no identification with the minority neighborhoods they were policing. And that led, he argues, to the sort of corruption associated with crooked officers like Phillips. (He was convicted of murder and released on parole in 2007 after spending 32 years behind bars.)
The rise of black militancy politicized even NYPD interactions with small-time street criminals. In "The Savage City," Joseph "Jazz" Hayden - a former hustler and, it turns out, a natural storyteller - recalled how he became a suspect in a gun attack on two officers by radicals.
English said the difference between the 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds who formed the chapters of the Black Panther Party and the activists in King's movement was as much a generational one as anything else.
But it's true, too, that the genius of King's approach was only seen in retrospect. At the time, young urban blacks couldn't relate it to their own experience.
"When they saw the resistance on the part of white people in the North, they came to the conclusion that ‘we just need to take what's our right,’" English said.
Many of the non-violent tactics of King's movement also offended the young radicals' sense of manhood, he said.
Then King was assassinated. A whole generation said, according to English: "This guy preached non-violence and they killed him. Imagine what they would do to us.'"
And indeed while the FBI spied on King, whom its director J. Edgar Hoover labeled "the most dangerous negro in America," it actively disrupted and broke up militant organizations using the COINTELPRO program.
"They were riddled with snitches from the get go," English said of the Blank Panther Party. One of the most famous was NYPD officer Eugene Richards, who was Malcolm X's bodyguard on the day he was shot in 1965 and attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the dying leader. He joined the party in 1968.
"People joining that movement were coming from a lot of different directions. There wasn't a lot of vetting going on. And they took pride in allowing people from different levels of society," English said.
Some were community activists who organized breakfast social programs, but many others were intent on direct confrontation with the authorities.
"They called cops 'pigs'; they adopted a very inflammatory rhetoric - a lot of that was intentional, I think," English said. "The police reacted with hysteria, you might say.
"They never understood the street theater aspect of it," he added. "The inflammatory rhetoric was never the specific threat that cops interpreted it to be."
The Panthers debated whether their militant posturing was causing them more trouble than it was worth. Subsequent events suggest that was the case. In New York, charges were brought against 21 members -- a move that was, English said, a "vast overreach on behalf of the Manhattan DA's office," but one that also had the effect of crushing the party.
All that remained was an ultra-militant offshoot, the Black Liberation Army, which believed that the U.S. government could be overthrown violently.
If it had been left largely to itself, though, the Black Panther Party would have evolved into mainstream politics, English argued.
Four decades after the party's rise and fall, race remains a factor in the criminal justice system but has diminished in many other parts of American life, in the author's view.
He credits hip hop, a "meeting place for races and cultures," for some of that.
"Young people give me hope," English said.
