From: An Anonymous Reader [email her]

A BBC America TV Program called Copper lists this in their publicity material:

About Copper | Tom Fontana | Barry Levinson | BBC America

The melting pot is boiling over.

From Academy Award®-winner Barry Levinson and Emmy® Award-winner Tom Fontana, “Copper” is a gripping crime drama series set in 1860s New York City. Kevin Corcoran (Tom Weston-Jones, “MI-5?), an Irish-American former boxer turned cop, returns from the Civil War to find his wife missing and his daughter dead. As he patrols the streets of New York’s notorious Five Points neighborhood, he seeks the truth about what happened to his family with the help of two wartime friends: the wayward son of a wealthy industrialist, and a talented African-American doctor. [Emphasis added]

Huh?"Talented African-American doctor"? In the 1860s?

James Fulford writes: This looks like romanticizing the age of steamship immigration, Gangs of New York style. Steve Sailer and I both wrote about Gangs Of New York in 2003. My piece was called Ganging up on America.

It does  sound like what Jonah Goldberg has called "“The anachronistic black man”—Morgan Freeman as one of Robin Hood's Merry Men, or all those black guys in Viking  films.

While it's unlikely, it's not impossible, only extremely unlikely—New York was on the Union side in the Civil War, they had free blacks and black doctors. Dr. James McCune Smith was a doctor in New York, died 1865. There were thirteen black surgeons with the US Army during The Civil War, and one (1) in Canada.

It's a lot more plausible than the 1999 remake of "Wild, Wild, West" with Will Smith as Jim West—that was stupid.

That being said, while it seem that an Irish-American veteran of the Union side of the Civil War would have less prejudice against blacks than an Anglo-Saxon veteran of the Southern side, it also might not be—during New York's Draft Riots of the 1860s, mobs of Irish immigrants burned down a black orphanage.

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