The Baddest Dog In Harlem

The novel “The Baddest Dog in Harlem” is written by the author Walter Deans Myers, who is an Afro-American writer. It was published in 2001 as a part of the collection “145th street: short stories” and is a nonfiction short story.
Throughout the novel we are not shared with a lot of information about the main character nor the other characters we come across in the novel. The main character, also the narrator in the novel, is a black male, whose name remains unknown. We do get the names of the main characters friends Pedro, Willie and Mr. Lynch, who is the oldest in the group, so old the narrator describes him as “…so old he had washed dishes at the Las Supper”. Another character we meet is a woman named Mary. She is the one living in the apartment that the police fired multiple shots

The mixture of racism and guns is the main reason as to why an innocent child ended up being killed.
The novel “The Baddest dog in Harlem” is very likely to have been inspired by the same incident that was the inspiration for the song “American Skin (41 shots)”. On February 4th 1999 Amadou Diallo, a 20 year old black immigrant, was shot dead by four police officers. The policemen suspected him of matching a profile of a man who had committed several rapes in the area. Diallo pulled something out of his pocket, which the policemen thought was a gun, but later on showed to be the his wallet. He was hit by 19 shots out of the 41 shots that were fired against him. The four policemen were all found innocent by a jury.
The similarity between the novel and the song is the crucial misjudging of a situation by police officers, which leads to multiple shots being fired at innocent people, who in this case was a young man and child both ending up losing their lives to racism and the power of guns in the hand of