Calvin Dean

Calvin Dean, a Black man, died on March 5, 1963, in Queens, New York, after violence erupted around a craps game in Ozone Park. The surviving record of what happened that day is spare, but consistent in its outline: Dean was running the game when the situation turned deadly, and the night ended with Dean fatally wounded and the neighborhood left with another quiet, brutal loss that would ripple far beyond the corner where the dice had been rolling.

In the aftermath, investigators focused ...