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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 December 2021
This is a critical historiographical essay animated by the research question of how the decisions of police and sheriffs illuminated and drove the transformation of white supremacy through different forms from emancipation to the end of Jim Crow segregation. It situates this focus amidst current methodological trends that stress structural oppression and argues that law-enforcers’ agency could illuminate discussions among historians and other scholars about the relationship between formal and informal law alongside the rise of the modern criminological state. The historical importance of enforcers is accentuated in the story told in each section—the shifting demographics of enforcement during Reconstruction; the inequalities of policing alongside lynching in the last decades of the nineteenth century; the complex interplay between policing and segregation statutes, colorblind criminal law, and mob violence in the Jim Crow South; the concurrent modernization of racialized policing nationwide; and the displacement of informal mob law and formal racial caste by a national regime of extralegal police violence, unequal patterns of incarceration and execution, and federal protections of civil liberties and civil rights.
He thanks Dylan Penningroth, Gabriel Beringer, Kavitha Iyengar, Giuliana Perrone, Jack Del Nunzio, Arthur Ghins, Antong Liu, Julia Netter, Lowry Pressly, Jonathan Simon, and the editorial team at Law and History Review for their very helpful comments on various versions and parts of this manuscript.
1. Burghardt Du Bois, W. E., “The Position of the Negro in the American Social Order: Where Do We Go From Here?” The Journal of Negro Education 8 (1939): 553–54Google Scholar; see also, Silvan Niedermeier, The Color of the Third Degree: Racism, Police Torture, and Civil Rights in the American South, 1930–1955, trans. Paul Cohen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 18.
2. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1962 [1944]), 535–37.
3. See, for example, Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
4. Michael J. Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society: 1874–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). Niedermeier, The Color of the Third Degree, focuses on police torture's modernizing substitution of mob violence. On the death penalty see Vivien Miller, “Hanging, the Electric Chair, and Death Penalty Reform in the Early Twentieth-Century South,” in Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South, ed. Amy Louise Wood and Natalie J. Ring (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 170–91; and Seth Kotch, “The Making of the Modern Death Penalty in Jim Crow North Carolina,” in ibid.,192–214.
5. Economist Lisa D. Cook has divided the empirical research into explanations of “lynching as an outcome” and the use of lynching “to explain other outcomes.” Factors in the first category include “a relatively large and immobile black population, depressed economic conditions among whites, perceived or real social or economic threat posed by blacks against white interests, the presence of a relatively more powerful Democratic Party, and inadequate legal [penalties] for significant crimes.” Cook, “Converging to a National Lynching Database: Recent Developments and the Way Forward,” Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 45 (2012): 55–63, at 55.
6. Sekhon, Nirej S., “Redistributive Policing,” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 101 (2011): 1171–226Google Scholar, at 1171–73.
7. Roberts, Dorothy E., “Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism,” Harvard Law Review 133 (2019): 85Google Scholar. See also, Roberts, “Constructing a Criminal Justice Free of Racial Bias: An Abolitionist Framework,” Columbia Human Rights Law Review 261 (2007): 284–86.
8. See Amy Kate Bailey and Stewart E. Tolnay, Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 10–15.
9. Elizabeth Hinton and DeAnza Cook, “The Mass Criminalization of Black Americans: A Historical Overview,” The Annual Review of Criminology 4 (2021): 261–86, Abstract.
10. For a broad exploration of “caste” in African American history see Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents (New York: Random House, 2020), 151–58. Wilkerson's theorization stresses enforcement and terror among the characteristic pillars of caste, but with more discussion of slavery and recent history than of the century after emancipation.
11. Robert M. Cover, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process (New Haven,CT: Yale University Press, 1975).
12. Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2008).
13. Hendrik Hartog, “Pigs and Positivism,” Wisconsin Law Review 899 (1985): 935.
14. Lae'l Hughes-Watkins, “Moving Toward a Reparative Archive: A Roadmap for a Holistic Approach to Disrupting Homogeneous Histories in Academic Repositories and Creating Inclusive Spaces for Marginalized Voices,” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies 5, Article 6 (2018), https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol5/iss1/6 (August 25, 2021). See also Kidada E. Williams, “Reconsidering the Lynching Archive,” Reviews in American History 41 (2013): 501–6.
15. See, for example, Aleen J. Ratzlaff, “Ida B Wells and Coverage of Lynchings and Antilynching Efforts in Selected Mainstream Newspapers, 1892–1894,” in After the War: The Press in a Changing America, 1865–1900, ed. David B. Sachsman and Dea Lisica (New York: Transaction Publishers, 2017), 247–68; Jean, Susan, “‘Warranted’ Lynchings: Narratives of Mob Violence in White Southern Newspapers, 1880–1940,” American Nineteenth Century History 6 (2005): 351–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gustafson, Kristin L., “Constructions of Responsibility for Three 1920 Lynchings in Minnesota Newspapers,” Journalism History 34 (2008): 42–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16. “Latest Developments of the Situation in South Carolina,” The Nashville Tennessean, July 6, 1871, 2.
17. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches, Twelfth Edition (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1920 [originally published 1908]), 178. Recent scholarship has challenged Du Bois's argument. For an account of police discipline aimed at “poor whites,” see Keri Leigh Merritt, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). On racial policing and liberalism through the Civil War see Adam Malka, The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
18. For example, Ayers describes a Savannah police force in 1875 in military imagery: disciplined and dressed like the Confederate Army. Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South, Reprint edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 173.
19. Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 247.
20. Eric Foner, Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction, revised edition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996 [originally published 1993]), xvii, xxvii.
21. Rousey, Dennis C., “Black Policemen in New Orleans during Reconstruction,” The Historian 49 (1987): 223–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 225–26.
22. Ibid., 228, 230, 232.
23. Walter M. Burton, of Union County, Texas, had to rely on a white deputy for arrests. In 1876, Democrats in Jefferson County, Mississippi, passed a new bond requirement to keep Black people out of sheriffs’ offices. Foner, Freedom's Lawmakers, 33, 110.
24. “Outrages in the Southern States,” The Manchester Guardian, October 31, 1871, 5.
25. Foner, Freedom's Lawmakers, 54, 28, 79.
26. Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 263, 249.
27. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963 [originally published 1935]), 699, cited by Latonya Thames Leonard, “Veneer of Civilization: Southern Lynching, Memory, and African-American Identity, 1882–1940” (PhD diss., University of Mississippi, 2005), 7.
28. Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 263.
29. Ibid., 264.
30. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 173, 223, 224, 227.
31. K. Stephen Prince, “The Trials of George Doyle: Race and Policing in Jim Crow New Orleans,” in Wood and Ring, Crime & Punishment in the Jim Crow South, 29, 22. Prince notes that the presence of Black police officers had represented a tension between the ideas and practice of white supremacy, ibid., 18.
32. Quoted in Laylon Wayne Jordan, “Police and Politics: Charleston in the Gilded Age, 1880–1900,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 81 (1980): 35–50, at 35.
33. This periodization traces to Rayford W. Logan, whose The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York, Da Capo Press: 1997), is an expansion of his The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901 (New York: Dial Press, 1954), both of which focus more on national politics than local policing.
34. Jordan, “Police and Politics,” 49.
35. See Matthew J. Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866–1928 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996).
36. William J. Stuntz, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 40. Indeed, the historiography focusing on the period's policing institutions, even when exploring racial tensions, typically centers on the class construction of the urban North. See Sam Mitrani, The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850–1894 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013).
37. Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Anchor Books, 2008), 63–64.
38. Michael J. Pfeifer, “At the Hands of Parties Unknown? The State of the Field of Lynching Scholarship,” Journal of American History 101 (2014): 832–46, at 844.
39. Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 1.
40. The extension of inquiry has found continuities beyond the temporal and spatial post-emancipation South, complicating the legal relationship between lynching and formal anti-Black oppression. See, for example, Amy Louise Wood and Susan V. Donaldson, “Lynching's Legacy in American Culture,” The Mississippi Quarterly 61 (2008): 5–25; Carrigan, William D., “The Strange Career of Judge Lynch: Why the Study of Lynching Needs to Be Refocused on the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the Civil War Era 7 (2017): 293–312CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Terence Finnegan, “‘Politics of Defiance’: Uncovering the Causes and Consequences of Lynching and Communal Violence,” Journal of American History 101 (2014): 850–51.
41. Pfeifer, “At the Hands of Parties Unknown?” 832–36. In important respects, attempts at synthesis are relatively new. As Pfeifer notes (833), C. Vann Woodward's “highly influential” tome has only two paragraphs on lynching. Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951). Pfeifer has urged examination across space and time and has sought to bring “mob violence in the west” and Southern lynching into a tale of the “larger cultural war over the nature of criminal justice.” Pfeifer, Rough Justice, 2.
42. Wood and Donaldson, “Lynching's Legacy in American Culture,” 15. Sociologists have also discovered a strong negative correlation across jurisdictions between instances of lynching and modern hate crime enforcement. Bailey and Tolnay, Lynched, 29, citing Ryan D. King, Steven F. Messner, and Robert D. Baller, “Contemporary Hate Crimes, Law Enforcement, and the Legacy of Racial Violence,” American Sociological Review 74 (2009): 291–315.
43. Pfeifer, “‘At the Hands of Parties Unknown?’” 837–41. Kidada E. Williams has emphasized how lynchings have “transformed” “victims’ families.” Williams, “Regarding the Aftermaths of Lynching,” The Journal of American History 101 (2014): 856–58, at 856. See also, Finnegan, “‘Politics of Defiance,’” 851; and Bailey and Tolnay, Lynched, 2.
44. As Estelle Freedman has written, “Police sometimes invoked the threat of the mob to extract confessions from black men accused of rape.” Freedman, Redefining Rape, Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 252. Kris DuRocher notes that lynch mobs frequently “placed girls in the front … when storming jails or courthouses” to discourage police and militia from responding with gunfire, showing that gender construction mediated the mob's de facto legal status. DuRocher, “Violent Masculinity: Learning Ritual and Performance in Southern Lynchings,” in Southern Masculinity: Perspectives on Manhood in the South since Reconstruction, ed. Craig Thompson Friend (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 46–64, at 56.
45. Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 41. Wood discusses one police chief who “forbade the selling of lynching photographs … because he deemed them ‘indecent’” (214).
46. Lee Ann Fujii, “‘Talk of the Town’: Explaining Pathways to Participation in Violent Display,” Journal of Peace Research 54 (2017): 661–73.
47. Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 29.
48. Cook, “Converging to a National Lynching Database,” 56.
49. Michael Weaver, “‘Judge Lynch’ in the Court of Public Opinion: Publicity and the De-legitimation of Lynching,” American Political Science Review 113 (2019): 293–310, at 296. “Lynchings” once regularly included non-lethal vigilante violence. See Ashraf H.A. Rushdy, American Lynching (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 29–30.
50. Bailey and Tolnay, Lynched, 7, 3.
51. Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 82.
52. Rushdy, American Lynching, 5, 17, 20. Emphasis in original.
53. See Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 8.
54. Cited by Rushdy, American Lynching, 5.
55. The phrase “lynching regime” appears in the literature but without much theorization. Its imprecision allows for inductive analysis. Michael Ayers Trotti uses it to accentuate differences between the West and the South. “The Multiple States and Fields of Lynching Scholarship,” The Journal of American History 101 (2014): 852–53, at 852. For an earlier use see Vijay Prashad, “Black Gandhi,” Social Scientist 37 (2009): 3–20, at 5.
56. Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 296.
57. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 79, 181, 182. Brundage also defines lynching as “extralegal violence,” ibid., 6.
58. Moore notes that “The most serious allegations of black-on-white crimes provoked not legal but vigilante punishment, and sheriffs again often found themselves in pivotal roles.” Toby Moore, “Race and the County Sheriff in the American South,” International Social Science Review 72 (1997): 54.
59. Bailey and Tolnay, Lynched, 19.
60. E.M. Beck, “South Polls: Judge Lynch Denied: Combating Mob Violence in the American South, 1877–1950,” Southern Cultures 21 (2015): 122–23.
61. Beck, “Judge Lynch Denied,” 126.
62. “Single-Handed Overawed Mob,” The Atlanta Constitution, March 29, 1904, 7.
63. Beck, “Judge Lynch Denied,” 127.
64. Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 296.
65. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 238. Ida B. Wells was especially focused on rebutting the association between lynching and criminality. See Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 60.
66. Cited by Rushdy, American Lynching, 19.
67. Ibid., 1.
68. James Elbert Cutler, Lynch-Law: An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1905), 276.
69. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Superior Race” (1923), in W.E.B. Du Bois, A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 477.
70. See Pippa Holloway, Living in Infamy: Felon Disenfranchisement and the History of American Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 81; and Anne Valk and Leslie Brown, Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South (New York: Springer, 2010), 13.
71. Richard Hofstadter, Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 23.
72. According to Muhammad, while Southern progressives often criticized Jim Crow and Northern racial liberals resisted the “rising tide of northern segregation, discrimination, and violence during the Progressive era,” their social scientific approach reaffirmed discriminatory assumptions. Muhammad, Condemnation of Blackness, 9, 27, 67, 158.
73. David Taft Terry, The Struggle and the Urban South: Confronting Jim Crow in Baltimore before the Movement (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019), 38, 39. In Northern Louisiana, enforcers of Jim Crow segregation aimed to tamp down the influence of “white working-class mobs,” according to Pfeifer, Rough Justice, 49.
74. See Rayford Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901.
75. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001 [originally published 1955]), 7.
76. Barbara Young Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 306.
77. Woodward, Strange Career of Jim Crow, 107.
78. Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007 [originally published 1992]), 433.
79. Welke, Recasting American Liberty, 326, 317.
80. Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 256.
81. “Will Separate Races on Cars,” 1900 August 7, Q17402, Montgomery Advertiser, August 7, 1900, 1, Alabama Department of Archives and History, 624 Washington Avenue, Montgomery, Alabama, 36130, https://digital.archives.alabama.gov/digital/collection/voices/id/2796 (August 26, 2021).
82. Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 133–35, 143–45, 153.
83. Ibid., 134–35.
84. Roger L. Rice, “Residential Segregation by Law, 1910–1917,” The Journal of Southern History 34 (1968): 179–99, at 181–82, 186–87.
85. Leon Litwack, How Free Is Free? The Long Death of Jim Crow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 18.
86. Litwack, Trouble in Mind , 264, citing Albon L. Holsey, “Learning How to Be Black,” American Mercury XVI (1929): 421–24, at 424.
87. Quoted in Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 231.
88. Toby Moore, “Race and the County Sheriff in the American South,” 50–61, at 53.
89. Valk and Brown, Living with Jim Crow, 9.
90. Brandon T. Jett, “Many People ‘Colored’ Have Come to the Homicide Office: Police Investigations of African American Homicides in Memphis, 1920–1945,” in Wood and Ring, Crime & Punishment in the Jim Crow South, 35, 38.
91. Ida B. Wells, Mob Rule in New Orleans, Robert Charles and His Fight to the Death (Chicago: 1900).
92. Mary Church Terrell, “Lynching from a Negro's Point of View,” The North American Review 178 (1904): 853–68, at 860.
93. Kevern Verney, Black Civil Rights in America (New York: Routledge, 2000), 63; and Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 316.
94. Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 316.
95. Ibid., 424.
96. “Brownsville is Raided,” The Atlanta Constitution, September 26, 1906, 3.
97. Chris Bray, “‘Every Right to be Where She Was’: The Legal Reconstruction of Black Self-Defense in Jim Crow Florida,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 87 (2009): 352–77, at 356, 377.
98. Muhammad, Condemnation of Blackness, 217.
99. Pfeifer, Rough Justice, 7, 27, 144. In his prequel The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2011), Pfeifer further developed the early chapters of this history.
100. Michael Ayers Trotti has suggested that Pfeiffer's “focus on state formation and the growing and contested power of law obscures” the many differences between Southern and Western lynching. Trotti, “The Multiple States and Fields of Lynching Scholarship,” The Journal of American History 101 (2014): 852–53, at 852.
101. Bailey and Tolnay argue that the state accommodated rather than rivaling mobs who seized victims “from the custody of sheriffs” or jails, and observe that judicial procedure was an unsatisfying substitute for ritual humiliation. Bailey and Tolnay, Lynched, 19.
102. Ashraf H.A. Rushdy finds inherent tension between democracy and customary terror, and at best “an uneasy coexistence” between the rational state and mob law. Rushdy, American Lynching, 3.
103. Looking at the discursive construction of lynching as a “righteous, even radically democratic institution,” Jesse Carr attributes the violence to “modernization, rapid industrialization, and cutting-edge… technologies.” Jesse Carr, “The Lawlessness of Law: Lynching and Anti-Lynching in the Contemporary USA,” Settler Colonial Studies 6 (2016): 153–63, at 154, 155, 158.
104. Terry, The Struggle and the Urban South, 38.
105. Williams, “Reconsidering the Lynching Archive,” 504.
106. Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 166.
107. Beck, “Judge Lynch Denied,” 135.
108. See Jesse Carr, State Sanctioned Web site, https://statesanctioned.com/view-by-form-of-collusion/ (November 17, 2021).
109. Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 296.
110. Jesse Carr, State Sanctioned Web site, https://statesanctioned.com/allen-brooks/ (August 26, 2021).
111. "Southern White Gentlemen Burn Race Boy at Stake," Chicago Defender, May 20, 1916, 1.
112. “Fiend Burned at the Stake for Assault and Murder,” Daily Picayune, September 29, 1902, https://statesanctioned.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/thomas-clark-daily-picayune-09291902.pdf (November 17, 2021).
113. See also, Ryan Hagen, Kinga Makovi, and Peter Bearman, “The Influence of Political Dynamics on Southern Lynch Mob Formation and Lethality,” Social Forces 92 (2013).
114. Beck, “Judge Lynch Denied,” 118, 119, 125, 126, 135–36.
115. Ibid., 118, 121, 128.
116. Captain's Order No 72, March 19, 1934, Box 3:9 Captain's Orders, January–April 1934, San Francisco Police Records, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
117. Risa Goluboff explains that “economic discrimination and exploitation” reduced apparent regional distinctions in segregation. Goluboff, Risa L., “Lawyers, Law, and the New Civil Rights History,” Harvard Law Review 126 (2013): 2319Google Scholar. Rothstein describes Berkeley's police chief alerting the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that a Black man had entered an all-white residential community despite the discriminatory federal mortgage loan regime. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2017), 66.
118. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 225.
119. Samuel Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform: The Emergence of Professionalism (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1977), 11. Walker writes that racial and ethnic tensions “overshadowed those of economic class” in modern policing, which he seeks to explain through a synthesis of “urbanization-social control and the Marxist” interpretation rather than explore how police made law (xiii).
120. Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform, 120–21.
121. Christopher Waldrep, African Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resistance from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 61.
122. “Police Save a Chicago Negro,” The Atlanta Constitution, September 7, 1900, 2.
123. “Sheriff Pays for Lynching,” Atlanta Constitution, December 7 1909, 1.
124. Muhammad, Condemnation of Blackness, 216.
125. Ibid., 218.
126. Walker, A Critical History of Police Reform, 121–22.
127. Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 27, 29.
128. Hinton and Cook, “The Mass Criminalization of Black Americans,” 269.
129. Kali N. Gross, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 70.
130. Ibid., 136–37.
131. Muhammad, Condemnation of Blackness, 13, 43, 82, 192.
132. See Willard M. Oliver, August Vollmer: The Father of American Policing (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2017), 500.
133. Vollmer to R.C. Francis, November 9 1934, Vollmer, August 403 Correspondence and Papers, Letters Written by Vollmer, Box 43: November–December, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
134. Hinton and Cook, “The Mass Criminalization of Black Americans,” 270.
135. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Revised edition (New York: The New Press, 2012 [originally published in 2010]), 57, 60.
136. Muhammad, Condemnation of Blackness, 133, 192–198, at 193 and 198, 259.
137. Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 171.
138. Muhammad, Condemnation of Blackness, 249.
139. Shannon King, “A Murder in Central Park: Racial Violence and the Crime Wave in New York during the 1930s and 1940s,” in The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of the South, ed. Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 44, 50.
140. Verney, Black Civil Rights in America, 63.
141. "Scottsboro Boys Appeal from Death Cells to the Toilers of the World," The Negro Worker, May 1932, 8–9.
142. Niedermeier, The Color of the Third Degree, 15.
143. Hinton examines the “overall focus of domestic policy” retreating “from fighting poverty to controlling its violent symptoms.” Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 21. See also Alexander, The New Jim Crow.
144. Simon Balto's “intensely local book” argues that the core elements of enforcement leaving African Americans both “overpatrolled and underpotected” had been established in early twentieth-century city regimes. Balto, Occupied Territory, 5, 2.
145. Blacks alone were arrested and fined for public cursing on Alabama's South Bessemer line according to Kelley, Robin D.G., “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” The Journal of American History 80 (1993): 75–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 108.
146. Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966), for example, brought indirect federal regulation of coercive interrogations through the exclusion of evidence.
147. “Reign of Terror Charged to Police of Florida City,” The Atlanta Constitution, March 3, 1928, 1.
148. Report Rendered to ACLU and NAACP on the Killing of Stafford G. Dames, Jr, on July 27, 1937, NAACP Administrative File, Subject File: Discrimination: Police Brutality: Stafford Dames, July–September 1937.
149. William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb describe an incident in Pueblo, Colorado, in 1919, when a mob lynched two Mexicans out of vengeance for the murder of a police officer. They had kidnapped the wrong men from the local jail, from which law enforcement had taken the correct suspects for additional protection. Carrigan and Webb, “The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin or Descent in the United States, 1848 to 1928,” Journal of Social History 37 (2003): 411–38, at 419.
150. Brundage, Lynching in the New South, 239
151. Risa L. Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 112.
152. See Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch, 169–77. On the FBI's ironic posture, see Kenneth O'Reilly, “The Roosevelt Administration and Black America: Federal Surveillance Policy and Civil Rights during the New Deal and World War II Years,” Phylon 48 (1987): 12–25.
153. Waldrep, Christopher, “National Policing, Lynching, and Constitutional Change,” The Journal of Southern History 74 (2008): 589–626CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 618.
154. Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights, 142.
155. Daniel Kato, Liberalizing Lynching: Building a New Racialized State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 10, 18.
156. Beck, “Judge Lynch Denied,” 136.
157. In 1939, North Carolina's justice of the peace proudly recalled his much earlier time in the Red Shirts, armed with “rifles and shotguns” to deter Black voter registration, but was much more nuanced about lynching. Roger T. Stevenson, “Justice of the Peace,” in Such as Us: Southern Voices of the Thirties, ed. Tom E. Terrill and Jerrold Hirsch (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 262, 265, 267.
158. Toby Moore, “Race and the County Sheriff in the American South,” 53.
