By TaRhonda Thomas
PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) — The legacy of Samuel Wyche, a pioneering Philadelphia police detective who also served as a bodyguard for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is being kept alive through the memories of his children.
Wyche’s daughter, Adrienne Thomas, said her father was more than a parent to her and her siblings.
“To me, my dad was Superman,” she said. She recalled moments from childhood that cemented that image, including times she and two of her siblings would meet his father on his way home.
“He carried all three of us up the street, my sister, brother and I,” she said.
But Wyche’s heroism extended far beyond his home. As a member of Philadelphia’s first all-Black detective unit – known as the Dick Anderson Squad – he helped protect the city during the 1940s and beyond.
“Those streets were safe while they were there!” Thomas said.
The squad, described in Ebony magazine as “Bronze Gang Busters,” was led by Dick Anderson, whom Thomas noted was “Marian Anderson’s first cousin. And he was put in charge of finding 60 African American men who he put on the streets of Philadelphia to fight crime.”
Wyche served as a homicide detective and, according to his daughter, “my father and his squad had a 98% arrest and conviction rate. So they were fighting crime!”
Wyche’s service also extended to the civil rights movement. Thomas said King personally selected the detectives who would protect him.
“Martin Luther King hand-picked those detectives that he wanted around him,” she said. When King visited Philadelphia, Detective Wyche was right by his side as part of his security detail.
Thomas shared a 1965 letter from King thanking Wyche for his protection, even as King questioned whether he truly needed it. She summarized the message: “Basically, Martin Luther King says, ‘while I feel very humbled by your protection, I really don’t feel it necessary.'”
King’s assassination three years later deeply affected Wyche.
“He said ‘That never would have happened on my watch. He said ‘if he would have been in Philadelphia, that never would have happened,'” Thomas recalled.
Today, Wyche’s story is being passed down to younger generations. Family members point him out in old photos and share memories of his work as a detective, his later role as an administrator at Germantown High School, and his life as a father of six. Thomas remembered late-night moments when “he would come home in the middle of the night if he was out on a case, my mother would wake us up to come and have ice cream with him.”
Wyche died in 2011, but his daughter said his impact endures.
“He was just a man of integrity. And that’s what I want people to know about him,” she said.
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