At first, I didn’t want to read this book.

It’s another story of a young Black man brutalized by police, denied justice, and forgotten by a system that never intended to protect him.

But I decided to read The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart’s New York because Michael Stewart was a part of an artistic and cultural moment that shaped me.

He was associated with artists like Jean‑Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Madonna, and Spike Lee. These were the names that shaped my understanding of art, activism, and identity. I’d just finished The Andy Warhol Diaries and saw how Stewart’s death sent shockwaves through that community. Warhol wrote:

“It was just so awful. I mean, I guess it really happens, but you don’t think of people you know getting killed by the police. Michael Stewart was so sweet, so quiet. Everyone’s totally freaked out.”

At just twenty-five years old, Michael Stewart was a promising Black artist, model, and deejay trying to make a name for himself in the downtown art scene of 1980s New York.

On the night of September 15, 1983, he was arrested for allegedly tagging a subway wall at 14th Street. Witnesses reported officers beating him with billy clubs and choking him with a nightstick. Stewart arrived at Bellevue Hospital hog-tied and with no heartbeat. After thirteen days in a coma, he died.

This was, at that point, the most widely publicized act of police brutality in the city’s history (Spoiler alert: There would be many others).

In The Man Nobody Killed, Edgar Award–winner Elon Green offers the most comprehensive account of Stewart’s life and death to date. But more than that, he exposes the coordinated failure of justice, the limits of celebrity advocacy, the complicity of the medical establishment, and the media’s fickle relationship with Black pain.

Through interviews with friends, artists, lawyers, and family, he gives us a man with dreams, flaws, ambition, and deep roots in the artistic community. His writing is precise, compassionate, and unsparing. If you’ve read The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace or His Name Is George Floyd, you understand how powerful it is to tell the full arc of a life cut short.

Stewart’s life was full of potential. He could’ve been a household name, appearing on magazine covers and sharing walls and galleries with other great artists. Instead, his death became another reminder of how quickly Black lives can be erased.

Basquiat mourned Stewart’s death by saying, “It could have been me.”

Madonna lent her rising fame to protest efforts, and Spike Lee would allude to Stewart’s story in Do the Right Thing, a film that still feels painfully relevant today.

So why read a book like this now? Because Michael Stewart’s life deserves more than a paragraph in a textbook or a passing mention in a Warhol diary. His story is a lens through which we can examine the intersections of race, power, culture, and justice. It demands we ask harder questions: Who gets remembered? Who gets erased? And why does this keep happening?

If you care about Black lives, art, justice, or the truth behind the glitzy myth of 1980s New York, read this book.

And remember Michael Stewart.

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