The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown: How a White Police Officer Was Convicted of Killing a Black Citizen, Baltimore, 1875

Shufelt debuts with a close and engrossing look at an obscure 19th-century homicide through a granular and judicious review of archival records. One summer night in 1875, white policeman Patrick McDonald confronted African American Daniel Brown in Brown’s Baltimore home after receiving a noise complaint. The encounter ended with McDonald fatally shooting Brown. Surprisingly, given the city’s endemic racism at the time, an all-white jury convicted McDonald of manslaughter after hearing testimony that Brown had done nothing violent to provoke the shooting. Shufelt puts that outcome in context, which included distrust of the police force following misconduct during elections that year, and the status of the Black witnesses to the killing; their employment as servants in affluent white homes made them viewed as trustworthy, which Shufelt considers “the persistence of some elements of a slavery-era culture.” The verdict was not a breakthrough, however, or evidence that white Baltimoreans “objected to the oppression of African Americans.” Though this study is of limited utility in understanding current police shootings of Black men despite the author’s suggestions to the contrary, Shufelt does a good job illuminating race relations and the criminal justice system in post–Civil War Baltimore. (Feb.)