PALA/CE Faculty News

Congratulations to CALA writing instructor Marcus Reeves on publishing his latest book! Bronze Shields: A Black Police Organization’s Fight for Equality and Justice in Newark, NJ is an oral history of an African American police organization formed in 1959 to counter the racist policies and actions Black officers faced when applying to and joining the Newark Police Department. 

Reeves, who will be teaching his popular Interviews and Profiles course in Fall 2021, is an accomplished journalist and author who has written about hip hop, Black culture and politics for over two decades. In a recent interview, he told us more about his background, Bronze Shields and its inspiration, and what he’s working on next. 

Q: Tell us about your background in writing and journalism and how you got started.

A: I started my career as a journalist as a freelance writer for the hip hop magazine The Source. This was in the early ’90s, a few months after I graduated from Rutgers. My first assignment was covering a popular dance in Newark, NJ called the Lock-it-up or the Stolen Car dance. The dance imitated stealing a car. At the time, Newark was labeled the “stolen car capital” of America. At first I was troubled by such a dance. Then I remembered when I was a teen we all used to do a dance called Uprocking, which mimicked fighting in order to deter fighting. Remembering that made me want to do the assignment. So I pitched the story to Matty C, an editor at The Source (Matty is responsible for discovering the iconic rapper Notorious BIG), and he loved it. That story was widely read and launched my career. It led to me writing for the Amsterdam News, Vibe magazine, the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Washington Post, and a host of other publications. 

That Lock-it-up story inspired me to become an author because it was cited in Black Noise, the first academic book on hip hop. Seeing my work reach academia that way put it in my mind to become an author. I then published my first book, Somebody Scream: Rap Music’s Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power in 2008.  

Q: Tell us about Bronze Shields and what inspired you to write about this specific story.

A: Bronze Shields is an oral history of an African American police organization which formed in 1959 to fight the rampant racism Blacks were met with when joining the Newark Police Department (NPD). This wasn’t surprising in the ’50s and ’60s as Newark maintained a rigidly enforced racial hierarchy, with Blacks at the bottom. A group of Black cops, led by an officer named Floyd Bostic Jr., formed a group called the Bronze Shields to push back. At first their goal, like a lot of Black police associations before them, was to combat on-the-job racism and discrimination. One of their first breakthroughs was meeting with then-new Newark mayor Hugh Addonizio in 1962, voicing their complaints, and getting the NPD to begin integrating the agency and promoting Black officers who weren’t allowed to move beyond the position of patrolman. 

Over the next sixty years, the organization was able to help change the demographics of the NPD and its leadership. The Bronze Shields also worked to provide community services to Newark’s mostly Black and Latinx residents in order to bridge the gap and build a better relationship between the police and these residents. The narrative in the book is intertwined with key moments in Newark’s history, such as white flight, the ’67 riots, the election of the city’s first Black mayor, the hiring of Newark’s first women police captain and police director, and the election of Cory Booker.

I came to this project when a former president of the Bronze Shields approached me and asked if I would write a book of the organization’s history. The organization had been trying to write this history for over a decade but never completed a manuscript. Once I decided to take on the book, I decided to do it as an oral history and let the Bronze Shields and the people they have worked with tell the story themselves. This allows readers to instantly immerse themselves in the journey and lives of these officers. I was able to draw on the ideas and reflections contained in the original manuscript and particularly the work of James Du Bose to tell the story.

Q: What do you hope readers will take away from reading Bronze Shields?

A: Along with learning about this groundbreaking organization and its impact on the history of New Jersey’s largest city, I would like to shine a light on both the battles Black police have faced–and still face–within their departments, and the work Black officers are doing to improve relations between their police department and their city’s Black citizens. At a time when America is constantly reminded of racial tensions with abusive police, I want people to see an example of police office’s working to build an alliance with its Black and Latinx community and having a real impact. I would like Bronze Shields to be an inspiration to other police officers and their departments to do the same thing.   

Q: What else are you working on right now?

A: I am currently working on another book on hip hop history that takes readers well into the 21st century and tells the story of hip hop’s move toward the center of Americana. 

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Thank you to Marcus Reeves for speaking with CALA about his latest work. Bronze Shields is available for purchase on Amazon. Marcus will be teaching Entertainment Journalism in Spring 2022, with registration opening on November 1. 

CALA faculty member Leonard Cortana and NYU SPS’s successful Racial Literacy and Anti-Racism Practices series has received an Innovation and Anti-Racism Micro Grant from the NYU Office of Global Inclusion (OGI). 

During Spring 2021, Cortana developed a series of four workshops: Understanding Race in a Global Context; Microaggressions and Racial Stress: Reducing Harmful Interactions; An Introduction to Intersectionality: Positioning and Situating Identities; and The Fight Against Black Voter Suppression. The grant from OGI will support Cortana in expanding this series and offering a number of brand new workshops in Spring 2022. 

In the well-attended workshops this past spring, he engaged with working professionals as well as administrators, faculty, and students at NYU and other universities around concerns about racial harm in the workplace and the concerns of international students. The series also featured faculty guests Dr. Durell Cooper, a notable cultural strategist specializing in systems change, and Dr. Mutale Nkonde, a distinguished scholar and CEO of AI for the People (AFP), a non-profit communications agency. Given NYU’s international presence, the emphasis on understanding race through a transnational perspective was particularly praised and opened debates about the lack of research and understanding of racial discourses outside the U.S.

Cortana’s Racial Literacy and Anti-Racism Practices Series will be offered again in Fall 2021, and three new workshops with a focus on technology and the internet will be offered in Spring 2022. The first of these new workshops will address digital identities, digital racism and fighting hate speech online as well as current scholarship on the racial harm of algorithmic practices. The second workshop will look at the spread of misinformation and how to tackle it with historically marginalized/racialized communities. Finally, the last workshop will address questions of representation/decolonization in the arts and best practices for expanding more inclusive racial imagery to launch successful activist campaigns online. 

The Fall 2021 Racial Literacy and Anti-Racism Practices Series is now open for registration as part of NYU SPS’ continuing education program. Students may enroll in one or more of the four individual workshops. To learn more and sign up, click here.

In a recent interview, Cortana told us more about his inspiration for the series, what makes it unique,  and what he’s working on next. 

What inspired you to create the series? 

Speaking about racial equality has always been a complex issue. The current pandemic, the aftermaths of George Floyd’s assassination and the global wave of protests which followed, had a significant impact. I have seen for the first time people who have always refused to tackle issues around race, asking questions and sharing texts about Black activism on their social networks. This crave for reading texts and gaining concepts is paramount for critical race scholars like me who are willing to educate and engage in these conversations. 

In my research, I investigate the legacy of assassinated anti-racist activists with a transnational perspective, focusing on the US, Brazil, France, and South Africa. I look at the ways racial discourses have always circulated through continents adapting to political and cultural contexts. Studying in the US feels like, sometimes, living on an island-continent where challenges around racial equality experienced elsewhere are very little known. In this series, I want to offer my expertise to make students reflect on race from a global perspective in order to challenge our own biases. This is very valuable in an environment like NYU which has antennas all over the world and hosts a large international student community. 

What skills and tools can students expect to walk away with? 

We will look into several concepts and texts so that students can leave the courses with specific tools that they will be able to deepen on their own. In our everyday life, concepts like microaggressions, intersectionality, and passing have often become buzzwords but they deserve a more precise examination through case studies and real-life situations (workplace, school, personal encounters) to be discussed in small groups. As I work with films and media, I also use visuals to help students decolonize their own visual imagery and help them think which medium/language will be more useful to work with in their local communities.

During Spring 2021, I really appreciated the participants’ willingness to share in our main discussions but also in breakout groups. I think it is important to dive into our own experiences to precisely situate our identities in order to understand how they fluctuate in different situations. Racial identities like gender and body-abilities can only be thought of in relation to each other and in movement. They are never fixed, which is why we look at different situations, switch roles, and develop empathy toward stories that are less familiar to us. In this way, we address how to develop storytelling skills while tackling racial discourses.

Finally, I also spend time applying mindfulness to racial stress. The best way to learn is to assume that we all make mistakes and we will all experience racial stress. The environment of this class is filled with joy and also humor since it is the only way to embrace this work.

What else are you working on right now? 

In addition to completing my dissertation at the NYU Cinema Studies Department, I am also an affiliate researcher at the Berkman Klein Center – Internet and Society at Harvard Law. I am examining digital identities applied to activism; the development of online film festivals and their consequences on digital exclusion; and online misinformation and the development of deepfakes (a type of artificial intelligence used to create convincing images, audio and video hoaxes). I tackled a bit of this work in the Racial Literacy and Anti-Racism Practices series and participants expressed a strong interest in learning more about how new technologies and the internet have impacted our information ecosystem. I am really excited to receive the Office of Global Inclusion Innovation and Anti-Racism Micro Grant to develop a series on the impact of internet environments on racial equality for Spring 2022. This is urgent to constantly link offline and online environments even more during the pandemic.

My short documentary Marielle’s Legacy Will Not Die on the activist movement spreading the legacy of Marielle Franco, an Afro-Brazilian Councilwoman assassinated in 2018, keeps on circulating and will be screened in the Fall in the US, Belgium, England, Italy, Congo-Brazzaville, and Romania. When the film is selected, I do my best to find local activists who can translate Franco’s legacy in their own context and participate with me on Q&As.

Finally, I am supporting the social campaign to re-open the cold case of South African anti-apartheid activist Dulcie September, murdered in 1988 in Paris. Enver Samuel made the film Murder in Paris and along with her relatives launched an online petition. I am organizing events at several universities including one at NYU this Fall where we will screen the film and create conversations about this period of history in order to celebrate the world’s unsung heroes,  particularly women fighters.