The Smiling Policeman
His son Marcus remembers his “indomitable smile. No matter what came at him, he had that smile.” And a LOT came at Prentice Earl Sanders during his nearly four decades as a San Francisco homicide detective, a career capped by his stint in the 1990s as the city’s first African American police chief. Along the way, Sanders — who died on Monday at 83 — had to fight his way for respect, even in liberal SF. Here’s how I quoted Sanders , who was born in Jim Crow-era Texas, in my book “Season of the Witch”:
“There wasn’t some scowling cracker on the other end of the whip. In San Francisco, racism came at you with a smile. Like they were doing you a favor when they told you they didn’t have any jobs open after you’d seen half a dozen white guys fill out applications, or you couldn’t buy a house, when they’d just sold one to a white guy who made less money.”
During his storied career as an SFPD homicide cop, during which he was paired with other legends like Rotea Gilford and Napoleon Hendrix, Sanders had to fight for justice within the department and on the streets. In my chapter about the Zebra serial murder case in the 1970s, during which a small Nation of Islam death cult targeted white victims and pushed the city of tolerance to the brink, I tell how Sanders kept his cool throughout the powder-keg times. As he and his partner Gilford pursued the Zebra killers, they could feel the racial tension building all around them, sensing “the whole place could go up in smoke.” During the city’s disastrous experiment with a “stop and frisk” policy aimed at black men, Sanders even had to intervene to stop a confrontation between Gilford and brutal white cops from exploding in gunfire.
I was gratified to read in the SF Chronicle obit that Earl Sanders often had a book in his hands. His grandson Prentice, whom I’ve had the pleasure of knowing, has a similar love of books. Prentice — who is a friend of my son Joe, costarred in his short film “American Paradise,” and helped develop the feature “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” — often was reading a book while he was visiting or crashing at our house. As soon as I recommended a book to Prentice from our library, he would devour it and engage me in conversation about it.
Earl Sanders belongs to a legendary time in San Francisco history — and as these lions disappear, the city seems smaller. But I’m counting on the younger ones like Prentice and Joe to keep the city’s flame burning.
