The Cops Thrashed Him. Madonna, Spike Lee and Toni Morrison Took Notice.

New York Times

10-03-2025

In the early hours of Sept. 15, 1983, a 25-year-old Black man named Michael Stewart was arrested for allegedly tagging a subway wall with a marker. According to the arresting officer, Stewart attempted to escape up the stairs, where the officer caught him, pinning him to the ground with a nightstick. Outside the precinct headquarters on Union Square, he allegedly tried to run off again, only to be piled on by multiple officers. College students in a building overlooking the square saw the officers kicking and beating the handcuffed Stewart (who weighed only 143 pounds) as he lay facedown on the sidewalk, screaming for help. One witness saw an officer slide a club under Stewart's neck and yank it upward. After Stewart stopped moving he was thrown, hogtied, into a paddy wagon, and driven to Bellevue Hospital. There, after 13 days in a coma, he died. No one was ever held accountable.
Elon Green's grimly vivid telling of this story and its aftermath in 'The Man Nobody Killed' is part elegy for Stewart himself, part portrait of the city that failed him. It avoids drawing explicit parallels with our own time, but then it hardly needs to.
An aspiring artist, Stewart was just beginning to make his presence felt in New York's downtown scene. He'd bussed at the Pyramid Club (until he was fired for being insufficiently aggressive), modeled for Dianne Brill (Warhol's 'Queen of the Night'), dated Jean-Michel Basquiat's sometime girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk, partied at Danceteria and appeared in Madonna's debut music video at Paradise Garage.
His own art, executed at a dilapidated studio above the Anderson Theater on the Bowery (no running water — fishbowls for toilets), was still at a formative stage: 'small, resonantly colored abstract paintings,' the New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote, that conveyed 'a serious aspiration.' He was seriously ambitious too: 'He wanted to do giant murals across the country,' a tagger buddy tells Green.
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.