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Arthur Browne in Conversation with Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams

When Samuel Battle broke the color line as New York City's first African American cop in the second decade of the twentieth century, he had to fear his racist colleagues as much as criminals. He had to be three times better than his white peers, and many times more resilient. His life was threatened. He was displayed like a circus animal. Yet, fearlessly claiming his rights, he prevailed in a four-decade odyssey that is both the story of one man's courageous dedication to racial progress and a harbinger of the divisions between police and the people they serve that plague twenty-first-century America. Author Arthur Browne, in conversation with Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, tells Battle's amazing story at the Brooklyn Public Library.

Arthur Browne has written the first-draft history of New York for more than forty years. As a reporter and editor, he has chronicled six mayors, from Abe Beame through Bill de Blasio, and coauthored I, Koch, a biography of Mayor Ed Koch. Browne presently serves as the Daily News editorial page editor. In 2007, he led a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for editorials that documented the epidemic illnesses afflicting thousands of 9/11 rescue and recovery workers.