Between the World and Me

Shortly after Samori is born, Coates is pulled over by Prince George’s County police, a police department in the Maryland suburbs outside DC that many in Coates’s writing circle had warned him about. PG County police have a history of killing people without due cause, the most high-profile cases of which include Elmer Clay Newman and Gary Hopkins. In September of that same year, Coates picks up The Washington Post to see that PG County police killed one of his Howard classmates, Prince Carmen Jones, a kind and promising student. The officer, who had stopped Jones in plain clothing, claimed that Jones tried to run him over with his Jeep. The officer was a “known liar,” having arrested a man on false evidence earlier that same year (79).

Coates remembers sitting at Jones’s funeral and feeling unmoved by the community’s religious cries for forgiveness of the officer. Coates is again reminded of the systematic way in which black people are killed in America, maintaining, “I knew that Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country and all the fears that have marked it from birth” (78).