Black In Blue James N. Reaves Watched A Lot Of History And Made Some, Too. He's Put It All Down In His Book About Philadelphia's Black Police Officers.

The words rise from the pages like religious testimony:

Testify: Here is Charles K. Draper, Philadelphia's first black patrolman, Aug. 9, 1881.

Testify: Here is Dick Anderson, Special Investigation Squad leader and arguably Philadelphia's "most famous black policeman."

Testify: Here are Rosa J. Satterwaithe, the first black policewoman; Dorothy Cousens, the first black female staff inspector; George L. Williams, the first black detective, and first killed in action.

Testify: Here are Jerome Banks, first black to finish first on the police Civil Service test; Robert B. Forgy, the first black sergeant; Alexander G. Davis, the only ex-slave to become a policeman.

The words belong to James N. Reaves, and this is his history.

He wrote it over 10 years' time - but he lived it over 50. It tells the story of Philadelphia's black police officers. Some chapters of the book, an untitled work for which Reaves seeks a publisher, belong to him alone:

He was the first black to become a police captain under the Civil Service merit system. First to integrate patrol cars in the district under his command. First black delegate to a national convention of the Fraternal Order of Police. And as such, first black to stay as a paying guest in a Miami Beach hotel.

Then there are parts he shares with others:

The 1964 riots along Columbia Avenue. The desegregation siege of Girard

College in 1965. The "opening up" of housing for blacks in West Philadelphia south of Market Street in the early 1950s.

"I have lived through major changes," says Reaves, now 75 and retired to a neat brick bungalow in Pennsauken.

"He was a role model for the people who knew him," says Police Commissioner Willie L. Williams.

"He helped clarify the lines and make it easier for those who followed," says Ronald D. Oliver, head of the Guardian Civic League, an organization of black police officers, which Reaves helped found. "He was one who made the beachhead."

Reaves has a distinctive point of view, reflecting the duality faced by blacks who had already made inroads in established institutions when the civil-rights movement burgeoned. Like others of his time, he was caught between duty to the institution for which he worked and the steady, inexorable forces that would change such institutions forever.

"Those were definitely the times that try men's souls," says Oliver. "He had to weigh his job, his duty to his people, and his duty to the Police Department. The lines were not clear."