#BlackHistory – Pioneer with Bajan roots left a legacy

The name Lloyd George Sealy is held with high esteem in law enforcement in the United States of America as a trailblazer for black police officers, especially those with the New York City Police Department (NYPD).

During his career he was the NYPD’s first African- American officer to graduate from the FBI National Academy and the first African-American officer in the NYPD to make rank as the commander of a police station in 1963 serving the 28th precinct in Harlem.

He was also the first African-American officer to serve as Assistant Chief Inspector and Borough Commander serving the Patrol Borough of Brooklyn North (which included historical African-American communities such as Bedford Stuyvesant, Brownsville, Weeksville, Clinton Hill, Fort Greene, and East New York, among others) in 1966.

Sealy was born January 4, 1917 in Manhattan, the second of three brothers, and grew up in a Barbadian household in the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn, where his father was the janitor of a 10-family apartment building. His parents, both Barbadians, named him after Britain’s Prime Minister during World War I, David Lloyd George.

He was one of only a dozen blacks at Thomas Jefferson High School, but in his senior year, he was elected president of the school’s student organisation. Sealy received his bachelor’s degree in sociology from Brooklyn College, and after working a few years in low paying jobs in the Federal General Accounting Office in Washington and as a railway mail clerk, he joined the police force in 1942.

In his early career, promotions came slowly. He first served as a patrolman walking the beat in the Bedford- Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn and five years later was assigned to the youth
division where he earned the rank of sergeant. During those years he earned a law degree from Brooklyn Law School.

In 1959, he became a lieutenant and was assigned to the confidential squad. He was promoted to captain in 1963.

As violence struck Harlem in 1964, Sealy was given his precinct command, eliciting a warm response from a community where activists charged that the police only enforced the white man’s law. And as tensions grew in the following years all around the city, Sealy experienced a meteoric rise.

In September 1966, as an assistant chief inspector, he was given the highest post then held by a black man, the command of uniformed forces in Brooklyn North, which included the Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville sections, the scene of particularly severe racial strife the previous summer.

In the following two years, Assistant Chief Inspector Sealy often accompanied Mayor Lindsay and other officials to hear the demands of protestors and help defuse potentially violent confrontations.

On one night in July 1967, a group of youths stood before 70 uniformed patrolmen who were tightly gripping their nightsticks. Inspector Sealy, however, avoided violence by ordering his men to step away.

He and his officers maintained their composure despite taunts from the youths, including cries of ‘’Take off your black mask and show us your white face.’’ After Sealy’s retirement from the NYPD in 1969, he became the first African-American Associate Professor of Law and Police Science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice., and a founding member of NOBLE, a national organisation of African-American police officers from various American cities.

In 1974, Sealy published The Community and the Police: Conflict or Cooperation with co-author Joseph Fink.

In this book, Sealy and Fink wrote that “if people are to view the police as an integral and beneficial component of the community structure, the police must improve the social service aspect of their mission,” but that too often police attitudes are self-serving rather than community-serving.

To address this problem, they proposed increased minority recruitment, human services training, and citizen participation in law enforcement.

Sealy died in 1985 on his 68th birthday. He had been preparing for his classes in the John Jay College Library when he suffered a heart attack.

On December 4, 1991, the library at John Jay was renamed the Lloyd Sealy Library in his honour. The Special Collections there house his personal papers, which document his career as a police officer and a scholar. (Adapted)