The Savage City: Race, Murder, and a Generation on the Edge

On August 28, 1963—the day Martin Luther King Jr. declared "I have a dream" on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial—two young white women were murdered in their Manhattan apartment. The so-called Career Girls Murders case sent ripples of fear throughout the city as police scrambled to find the killer. But it also marked the start of a ten-year saga of fear, racial violence, and turmoil in the city—as events progressed from the Harlem riots of the mid-1960s to the Panther Twenty-one trials and police corruption hearings of the early 1970s. The Savage City explores this traumatic decade through the stories of three very different men: George Whitmore Jr., an innocent black teenager coerced into confessing to murder; Bill Phillips, a brazenly crooked officer whose public testimony sparked the largest scandal in NYPD history; and Dhoruba Bin Wahad, a founding member of New York's Black Panther Party, caught in the crossfire as the conflict between the Panthers and the police escalated into open warfare.