The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown: How a White Police Officer Was Convicted of Killing a Black Citizen, Baltimore, 1875

An extraordinary look at race and policing in late nineteenth-century Baltimore

In 1875 an Irish-born Baltimore policeman, Patrick McDonald, entered the home of Daniel Brown, an African American laborer, and clubbed and shot Brown, who died within an hour of the attack. In similar cases at the time, authorities routinely exonerated Maryland law enforcement officers who killed African Americans, usually without serious inquiries into the underlying facts. But in this case, Baltimore’s white community chose a different path. A coroner’s jury declined to attribute the killing to accident or self-defense; the state’s attorney indicted McDonald and brought him to trial; and a criminal court jury convicted McDonald of manslaughter.

What makes this work so powerful is that many of the issues that the antipolice brutality movement faces today were the very issues faced by black people in nineteenth-century Baltimore.