I will be discussing the further mistreatment of black people that lead to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Were local laws meant to segregate black and white people. It marginalised black people by withholding the right to vote, the ability to hold a jobs, to receive an education and other chances.
Jim Crow Laws had it’s beginnings in black codes that started almost immediately following the 13th Amendment. These were strict local and state laws that created a legal way to force black citizens into indentured servitude and to control their lives. They found some freedom in the city’s from these laws in the early 1880’s, which upset white people who then demanded more laws to limit their opportunities. So, Jim Crow laws soon spread across the country with more force than before, depriving black people of what I mentioned earlier.
Pre-Civil Right’s Movement:
The legal system was stacked against Black citizens, with former Confederate soldiers working as police and judges. On top of KKK members being part of the lowest and highest parts of government. This made it hard to fight back against the Black codes which lead to unfair sentences to cruel labour camps. It was not much safer for those who fled the Jim Crow South with police officers being brutal and punitive in Northern cities.
The policing we know today started in 1909. August Vollmer refashioned the American police info the American military. His peers and Vollmer used military tactics, weapons and considered “[…] union organisers, immigrants and black people.”to be their enemies. Go reports in 1911 say that 11% of people arrested were black people but under James Robinson this grew to 14.6% in 1917. By the 1920’s, a quarter of those arrested were black people despite only making up 7.4% of the population.
The National Commission on Law, Observance and Enforcement in their investigation findings from 1931 - 1932, brought to light the realities of police brutality although it did not address racial disparities in it.In the Progressive Era, under Vollmer - style policing criminalised blackness by over policing their neighbourhoods, arresting and convicting them with longer sentences than their white counterparts. Policing grew harsher too. The introduction of State Police Forces and growing number of police during this time did not help the situation.
During the Civil Right’s Movement:
“We can never be satisfied as long as the N#gro is of the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality” - Martin Luther King (1963)
The aggressive tactics of using police dogs, fire hoses during peaceful protests such as the sit ins were horrific but it was the everyday violence and brutality of how they policed their communities that grew the rightful distrust of the police. The Freedom Riders also faced violence from the police as well as from civilians. It was only under presidential pressure that they gave them an escort but the police in Mississippi arrested them unfairly in May of 1961.
“The idea of police brutality was very much on people’s minds in 1963, following on the years, decades really, of police abuse of power and then centuries of oppression of African Americans” - William Pretzer (Senior History Curator)
Such as the ‘Bloody Sunday’ that occurred in Alabama in March 1965 where 600 peaceful protesters, protesting the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson by white police officer, were blocked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge by police sent by the governor of Alabama. They were viciously beaten and tear-gas was used by the police, dozens of protesters were hospitalised. Later that year, President Lyndon B Johnson started his ‘War on Crime’, he got congress to pass the Law Enforcement Assistant Act under which he supplied police with military grade which is a further militarisation of the police. It disproportionately targeted back neighbourhoods bringing things to how it was under Vollmer.
The deadliest riot was caused by a police officer harshly beating John Smith, a black taxi driver in Newark in 1967. The riot killed 26 and many others were injured. This is just another instance of the police abusing their power being the reason for retaliation. The commission concluded that “police actions were ‘final’ incidents before the outbreak of violence 12 of the 24 surveyed disorders” In 1968, Johnson got congress to pass the Omnibus Crime, Control, Safe Streets Act which diverted money from social programs and into the police. This of course didn’t do that since social programs are what help prevent crime and increasing the police forces money only served to cause continued discrimination.
This links into the theorist Karl Marx because of his view that law enforcement only works in favour of those in power and that crime control & punishment only serve to oppress the oppressed.
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