Author: Thomas Mullen
Review by: Paul Varian, retired CNN executive producer
“Darktown” by Thomas Mullen is a brilliantly woven template for the police procedural — a favorite genre of mine — with a novelistic setting that is solidly rooted in little-known historic fact.
The main characters are two Black police officers in post-World War II, rigidly segregated Atlanta trying — on their own time and without the knowledge of their superiors — to solve the murder of a young black woman in a canary-yellow dress last seen in a car driven by a drunken and apparently abusive, disgraced white ex-cop.
An “immigrant” from Georgia’s rural and even more racially intolerable countryside, her discarded body was found days later amid the filth of a trash-strewn overgrown abandoned lot.
It happened on a hot July night not long after Atlanta’s first “Negro” police officers — eight men aged 21 to 32, all but one of them war veterans — were sworn in in March of 1948 to walk the beat in the city’s “colored” neighborhoods, from the poorest ghettos to the vibrant “Sweet Auburn” district where more upscale nightclubs, musical venues and other Black-owned businesses thrived.
They walked the beat because they were not allowed to drive squad cars. They could not patrol white neighborhoods, arrest white people or even set foot in police headquarters. They had their own precinct — in the basement of the Butler Street YMCA — overseen by a white commander who felt he was being punished.
Though revered by many in the Black community, others called them the “YMCA cops.”
Eldrin Bell, who rose through the ranks to become police chief in 1990 — and not the first Black to reach that pinnacle — still bristled at the memory of what would have been his first arrest of a white man. He was told to call for white officers to come and actually make the arrest.
Mullen’s research turned up a 1947 Newsweek article that claimed one-quarter of the city’s white officers — including the man who was police chief when the black recruits joined the force — were members of the Ku Klux Klan, and that the police union at the time was a front for the KKK.
The Black officers were constantly derided by their white colleagues, targeted for explicit racist insults and threatened — sometimes by speeding patrol cars as they tried to cross the street.
“We had to fight those we arrested and fight the rest of the force as well,” Clarence Penny, who became an Atlanta cop in 1950, was quoted as saying in an article Mullen wrote for Atlanta magazine publicizing his book. “It was us against the world.”
It’s not just the historic milieu, but the richly authentic characters that make this novel so engaging. The author allows us to get to know them ever so gradually — just like folks you might befriend in real life — as he pieces together a surprisingly complex story in telling snatches of punchy dialogue, descriptive visuals, poignant observations and jolting violence.
Much of the narrative is conveyed through rookie Patrolman Lucius Boggs, the respectful but determined son of a prominent Black pastor. His main antagonist is a blatantly racist white veteran cop, Lionel Dunlow, whose younger, more progressive partner emerges as a potential Boggs ally.
A rollicking sideshow featuring gambling dens, bordellos, moonshiners, cops on the take, phantom vigilantes, arson fire and a fleet-footed escaped convict known as “Triple James”— James James Jameson — at times threatens to overshadow the main event.
The introduction of Black police officers in Atlanta was a precursor to the Civil Rights era, with hometown son Martin Luther King Jr. at the forefront of black leaders urging Mayor William Hartsfield, whose name now adorns one of the world’s busiest airports, to take the politically pivotal step of appointing Black officers at a time that Black voter registration was exploding in the city.
King called it a move whose “time and hour” had come. While relegated to patrolling their own communities, the Black recruits carried guns but rarely, if ever, used them. They busted bootleggers who brought whiskey into Black neighborhoods and arrested some of their customers for drunken jaywalking, Mullen says.
When not in uniform — they were not allowed to wear them to and from work — they suffered the same indignities as the people they served — forced to sit in the back of the bus, banned from most restaurants and public parks and open to being targeted by mob violence or police brutality.
But walking the beat on the job enabled them to get to know the citizens they served. They talked with them, listened to their complaints and treated them with respect, calling them “sir” and “ma’am.”
Pioneers of community policing, as Mullen put it.
The community policing in “Darktown” is of a more undercover variety with Boggs pursuing his renegade investigation, aided by a young white cop nicknamed “Rake,” into the killing of Lily Ellsworth and a subsequent coverup that includes more murder and police mayhem and the threat of a high-society scandal.
This might sound like pulp fiction, but the sensationalism is tempered by genuine insight into the South’s legacy on race relations and the law enforcement issues at the core of today’s Black Lives Matter movement.
Read former World Affairs Council of Atlanta President Charles Shapiro’s review of “Darktown” from 2017:
Books 2017: Racism, Mystery Collide in Atlanta
Read more reviews by Paul Varian:
Books 2020: How Churchill Taught ‘the Art of Being Fearless’ During the Blitz
Books 2019: Shedding New Light on an Old CIA and Mafia Plot to Kill Castro
Books 2018: A Life of Exposing Atrocities, Abuses Through Journalism
Books 2016: From Georgia’s Refuge City Comes a Refugee Soccer Team
Books 2015: Raunchy Mafia Criminality Across 20th-Century America
Books 2014: A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and The Great Betrayal
Books 2013: American Witnesses to the Rise of Hitler’s Germany
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Each year, Global Atlanta asks influential readers and community leaders to review the most impactful book they read during the course of the year. This endeavor has continued annually since 2010.
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