Both an epic history and an intimate family story, a startling account of the lives of Black cops in one Midwestern city.

Amid the fervent protests over police killings in 2020, the reporter Wilbert L. Cooper returned to his hometown of Cleveland to profile the president of a Black police organization called the Black Shield. The group had aligned itself with activists calling for reform, but its president was notorious for having shot a young unarmed Black man years earlier. As Cooper explored the question of whether Black cops can create the kind of radical changes in policing that Black people are calling for, he was also welcomed by the members of the group in a different, more complicated capacity: as Sergeant Will Cooper’s son.

For Cooper, this assignment was personal. His parents are retired Black Cleveland cops; his sister was a Cleveland cop; on his mother’s side, there has been a Cleveland cop in the family since 1950. In unearthing the dramatic histories of the Black Shield and his own family, Cooper tells the intertwined stories of the two: his relatives, whose lineage traces back to the Great Migration and who chose policing because it was one of the few stepping stones to economic security and status in a segregated city; and an organization that, over decades of cultural and political upheaval, has cycled endlessly between rebellion and acquiescence.

An intimate, bold work of literary nonfiction, The Black Shield is an urgent exploration of the complex duality of the Black cop. Cooper grapples with a knot of contradictions: Is the Black officer a sign of progressive change, or of a system that shifts its appearance without changing its outcomes? How to reconcile the fact that policing helped lift his family out of poverty while it has kept its knee on the necks of his people? Fearless and singularly powerful, The Black Shield gives us an American story about race and power that has never been told before.