THE MAN NOBODY KILLED: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York
ELON GREEN
Celadon Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: The first comprehensive book about Michael Stewart, the young Black artist and model who died after an altercation with the police in 1983, from Elon Green, the Edgar Award-winning author of Last Call.
At twenty-five years old, Michael Stewart was a young Black aspiring artist, deejay, and model, looking to make a name for himself in the vibrant downtown art scene of the early 1980’s New York City. On September 15, 1983, he was brutally beaten by New York City Transit Authority police for allegedly tagging a 14th Street subway station wall.
Witnesses reported officers beating him with billy clubs and choking him with a nightstick. Stewart arrived at Bellevue Hospital hog-tied with no heartbeat and died after thirteen days in a coma. This was, at that point, the most widely noticed act of police brutality in the city's history. The Man Nobody Killed recounts the cultural impact of Michael Stewart’s life and death.
The Stewart case quickly catalyzed movements across multiple communities. It became a rallying cry, taken up by artists and singers including Madonna, Keith Haring, Spike Lee, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, tabloid legends such as Jimmy Breslin and Murray Kempton, and the pioneering local news reporter, Gabe Pressman. The Stewart family and the downtown arts community of 1980s New York demanded justice for Michael, leading to multiple investigations into the circumstances of his wrongful death.
Elon Green, the Edgar Award–winning author of Last Call, presents the first comprehensive narrative account of Michael Stewart's life and killing, the subsequent court proceedings, and the artistic aftermath. In the vein of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace and His Name is George Floyd, Green brings us the story of a promising life cut short and a vivid snapshot of the world surrounding this loss. A tragedy set in stark contrast against the hope, activism, and creativity of the 1980’s New York City art scene, The Man Nobody Killed serves as a poignant reminder of recurring horrors in American history and explores how, and for whom, the justice system fails.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Elon Green's followup to Last Call, again centering the life and murder of someone very much not like his cishet Jewish self, gets the tones of his subject's life and murder spot-on.
It's a gift not all have. I think his evident curiosity about people, the whys that drive them to the wheres that force us to hear about them, shines through in this exploration of all parties to this crime. Stewart, a young man of borning fame for a talent still developing, does not have much of a documentary footprint outside his still-early recognition from the downtown Manhattan art scene. He is of necesity flattened in affect thereby; he had little time and no special reason to leave behind a trove of thinking, essays, manifestoes; he is known only because his death interrupted his rise to Basquiat-levels of celebrity. It doesn't change the outrage vented by the white establishment liberals on the MTA-cop murderers, it doesn't alter by a jot the klieg-lights-and-klaxons that the murder of young Black men by white men set off, only to subside as the relentless slopping of the media trough with more acceptable outrages that refocus attention away from systemic racism accomplishes its task.
Michael Stewart died in vain. His death did not stop cops from killing other young Black men on the regular, nor dissuade the occasional white amateur from trying it...getting tried...getting off.
Elon Green doesn't shy away from the ugliness inherent in this story. He uses the limited materials about the victim to flesh him out as much as possible. It's just that the system itself, the perps it's enabled, the horrors of living in a world that views your existence as a provocation deserving of death, has a much larger footprint. It's thus that the system and its publicity becomes the focus of the book (hence my docked half-star). That might leave the reader wondering why Stewart got such prominent billing on the cover. Because we are accustomed to centering the white person(s) over the victims of color, we're accustomed to the perps (eg Derek Chauvin) getting media attention. It was his fate to be the killer cop who ignited, finally, #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHisName...could as easily have happened with one of Ahmaud Arbery's murderers, or Michael Stewart's. Follow those links, white people. Look at the titles of each article. Think about what you are seeing. Really THINK.
I assume you're sentient and I don't need to spell it out for you.
It's an infuriating read. I wanted the results not to be the results. It is history so of course I was disappointed. But, and all y'all who "just can't, too hard," with these books on difficult topics, think about how supremely spoiled and privileged a stance that is. Michael Stewart and his mother couldn't just ignore it. They had to live it, she lived it until she died.
Does it still feel too hard? Or can you use that rage, outrage, sympathy for a mother who outlived her child, to power some practical resistance? The US is sliding into a new era of sanctioned violence against those They hate. Does that not seem important enough to do actual work to oppose?
