Review: The Man Nobody Killed
Early ’80s New York City was a time of dazzling brutality. In the post DROP DEAD blackout Fear City era, the desperate and callow city government enabled private greed to run rampant. The whole country now lives with the results. Depending on your regard for history, the era might signify the ascension of Trump, the spread of HIV, the dawn of hip-hop, the mainstreaming of street art, the last hurrah of downtown, or the first tendrils of gentrification as we know it now. One particular moment that deserves renewed attention is the murder of Michael Stewart.
Elon Green’s The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart’s New York is a true crime story where the police are the killers and the killers walk free. There is nothing to figure out and everything to name: cruel civic mismanagement and institutional racist spite.
In the early hours of September 15th, 1983, the young Black artist, deejay, and model Michael Stewart was arrested for tagging a wall in the Brooklyn-bound 1st Avenue L train platform. Witnesses described NYPD officers brutalizing Stewart outside the Union Square Transit Police station. They reported hearing his screams and seeing the police beat him with billy clubs, choke him with a nightstick, and throw him in a police van. He arrived at Bellevue Hospital hogtied with no heartbeat. He was in a coma for thirteen days, in which time his girlfriend took surreptitious photos of the bruises, cuts, and abrasions all over his body. When he died on September 28th, the city’s medical examiner attributed the cause of death to alcohol poisoning and a heart attack — therefore not the police’s fault. After the second autopsy, he ruled Stewart’s cause of death to be a spinal cord injury, declining to specify the cause of injury. He did not examine Stewart’s eyes, which might have been hemorrhaged due to a lack of oxygen, revealing strangulation. The officers charged in Stewart’s death were acquitted by an all-white jury.
These details were publicly known and widely condemned — and yet there is so much more to the story. Green’s book is not so much investigative journalism as meticulously researched narrative preservation. He collects witness testimony, newspaper accounts, City Hall intrigue, and downtown art to preserve what was at the time the most famous act of police brutality in NYC history. But Green makes it clear that Stewart’s murder was one of many racist executions in early ’80s NYC. Just after the indictments in the Stewart case were dismissed, the NYPD shot and killed a Black, psychologically distressed, 66 year old woman named Eleanor Bumpurs in her own apartment. A few months later, a white man shot four young Black men with an unlicensed revolver on the 2 train, and the press treated him like a vigilante — just like Daniel Penny.
There are big names in these pages. Spike Lee dedicated Do the Right Thing to Stewart’s family; Toni Morrison wrote a play about Stewart and Emmett Till; David Wojnarowicz designed a poster for a rally against the NYPD while Stewart was in a coma; Madonna performed at a benefit concert to raise awareness and money for Stewart’s family; and Jean-Michel Basquiat, who shared an ex-girlfriend with Stewart and who was said to have told friends, “it could have been me,” painted Defacement (Death of Michael Stewart), which hung in Keith Haring’s apartment until he died. What is exceptional about Stewart’s case is how the East Village arts scene rallied to demand justice from the government — early activism practice for their eventual response to the escalating AIDS crisis. The Man Nobody Killed is worth reading to see what has changed in our city (artists and performers living in an affordable and nourishing downtown ecosystem), what has stayed the same (racist violence), and the work it takes to band together against it. —Natalie Adler