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About the author:
\nWilber t L. Cooper \;is a journalist for the Marshall Project\, a no nprofit news organization focusing on criminal justice. He has written for publications such as \;The \;Guardian\, \;The&nb sp\;New York Times\, \;and \;The \;Wall Street Journa l\, and he has produced and hosted documentary films\, travel shows\, and live broadcasts for platforms like VICE TV and HBO.
\nAn intima te\, bold work of literary nonfiction\, \;The Black Shield \;is an urgent exploration of the complex duality of th e Black cop. Cooper grapples with a knot of contradictions: Is the Black o fficer a sign of progressive change\, or of the system&rsquo\;s masterful way of changing its appearance without changing its outcomes? How can he r econcile the fact that policing helped lift his family out of poverty\, an d the equally real panic that accompanies being pulled over? Fearless and singularly powerful\, Cooper gives us an American story about race and pow er of a kind that has never been told before.
\nIn the wake of the G eorge Floyd protests\, a Black police organization in Cleveland called the Black Shield was causing a stir. Officers broke ranks with their fellow c ops\, aligning themselves with local Black Lives Matter activists and supp orting demands for radical reforms. In the midst of these fissures\, Wilbe rt L. Cooper returned to his hometown to write a profile of the organizati on's president\, who had become notorious years earlier for shooting a you ng unarmed Black man.
\nFor Cooper\, the news was deeply personal. B oth of his parents are retired Black Cleveland cops\, his sister was a Cle veland cop\, and on his mother's side\, there&rsquo\;s been a Cleveland co p in the family since 1950. Unearthing the dramatic histories of the Black Shield and his own family\, Cooper tells the intertwined stories of the t wo: his relatives\, who trace their roots back to the Great Migration and who chose policing because it was one of the few stepping stones to econom ic security and status in a segregated city\; and an organization that\, o ver decades of cultural and political upheaval\, cycled endlessly between rebellion and acquiescence.
\nWilbert L. Cooper will be in conversat ion with Rachel Dissell. Rachel Dissell is a Cleveland-ba sed journalist with more than two decades of experience in reporting and e diting. She currently serves as Managing Editor at Signal Cleveland\, a nonprofit newsroom she helped found in 2022. In 2020\, she helped l aunch Cleveland Documenters\, which trains and pays residents to create a public record of local government meetings. In 2023\, Dissell won an Edwar d R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Innovation for &ldquo\;Testify\,&rdquo \; a project on Cleveland&rsquo\;s justice system that she produced while working at The Marshall Project.
\nAdditi onal books will be available for purchase courtesy of Loganberry Books.
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