But it was his unlucky fate to enter posterity as the subject of other people’s art and protest rather than the creator of his own. A remarkable number of the luminaries of that watchful, jittery era were shocked into action by Stewart’s killing. The artist David Wojnarowicz designed a flier for a rally at Union Square while Stewart was still on life support. Basquiat, profoundly shaken by the incident (“It could have been me,” he observed), painted a spontaneous memorial on his friend Keith Haring’s studio wall. Haring, who had been arrested four times for graffiti but — as he acknowledged — was spared mistreatment because he was white, later fashioned an anguished tribute of his own. Andy Warhol, Toni Morrison and Spike Lee all drew on the event in various ways, while political reaction ranged from demonstrations to two separate bombings, one of which blew up the bathroom in the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association building, injuring two maintenance workers.
New York at that time was in the throes of multiple crises: AIDS, crack, rampant violence, near bankruptcy. Its institutions were in disarray. The transit police closed ranks long before any serious attempt was made to investigate the assault. Backed by the P.B.A., they pursued a strategy of witness-smearing and victim-blaming. “Michael Stewart is dead,” a police lawyer brazenly asserted, “because of what he did to himself.” The medical examiner, whom Green presents as a study in craven evasiveness that would be funny if this were fiction, wouldn’t give a precise cause of death, making it almost impossible for prosecutors to bring charges.
The district attorney, Robert Morgenthau, did finally get a grand jury to indict three officers, but a rogue juror’s investigative efforts (on Stewart’s behalf, ironically) shipwrecked the proceedings and Morgenthau had to start over. Even with the most serious charges downgraded from manslaughter to criminally negligent homicide, jurors acquitted all three defendants. By then the public’s ambivalence over such matters had already been demonstrated in the case of Bernhard Goetz, who shot and injured four young Black men on the subway in 1984 after one of them asked him for $5. Goetz was convicted of nothing more than unlawful gun possession.
In 2019 the Guggenheim exhibited Basquiat’s painting, cut from Haring’s wall, along with Haring’s own tribute and some of Stewart’s work. With Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements then on the rise, the relevance of the decades-old incident was self-evident, and the fact that New York could no longer plead ’80s levels of chaos and underfunding made the contemporary echoes of Stewart’s killing all the more appalling. But if the subdued reaction to the recent acquittal of Daniel Penny in the death of Jordan Neely is anything to go by, there’s a renewed tolerance for lethal violence against Black men perceived as trouble. The events recounted in Green’s swift, unsparing book are as timely as ever; one can only hope they still have the power to shock.