Civil Rights Events

Urban Blacks and Law Enforcement

Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, 37, a social psychologist with Wayne State University’s Lafayette Clinic, conducted [between November 1967 and February 1968[ the study in which 286 Detroit policemen, including 36 Negro officers, were interviewed in their homes by 20 clinic staff members

The 4,800-man force is 92 per cent white, Mendelsohn noted, adding that the potential for racial conflict could not be exaggerated.

His study concludes:

--Most white policemen reject the idea that Negroes are victims of social injustice.

--Few white officers believe that good will come of the 1967 Detroit riot, and those who do believe so say it will be a form of appeasement.

--Most white patrolmen have little knowledge of the law-abiding Negro community in Detroit, although their superiors have a “higher evaluation” of the black community, possibly because they come into contact with all its elements, “not just persons involved with possible criminal offenses.”

To many white patrolmen, Mendelsohn says, an upheaval like the riot is proof that Negroes as anti-social and lawless people is correct. And so some, he says, disturbances represent justification for “taking revenge” against Negroes.

White and Negro officers, Mendelsohn said, disagree only on questions involving race. They were in substantial agreement, he said on issues limited to police work – the need for more money, the fact that Detroit police did a good job in policing the riot and that looters, not innocent bystanders, were arrested.

Among lower echelon white officers, the study says Negroes are considered a “privileged minority, susceptible to the influence of agitators,” who, the white police believe, are capable of galvanizing blacks into violent action even though the Negroes “are without grievances.”

The study reveals that the majority of white policemen feel blacks are treated either the same as whites or favored by schools, welfare agencies, stores and law enforcement agencies and in the area of jobs. Housing is the only area where a substantial number of white patrolmen see discrimination.

Nearly 25 per cent of the white officers interviewed said rioters should be shot, which 8.3 per cent of the Negro men on the force believed so.

Close to 90 per cent of Negro officers said they felt blacks were treated unfairly by the police, compared with the 16 per cent of white inspectors and 7 per cent of white patrolmen who felt this is the case.

Mendelsohn says the views held by the officers tend to correspond with those held by the society from which they come – generally, the working class.

Police officers’ attitudes are formed well before they become police officers, Mendelsohn says, adding that the attitudes of the societies from which they come “remain of considerable influence through the rest of their lives” (Psychologist’s Study 13).

There were positive signs on the racial front in 1967. Congress had recently passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. On June 12, the Supreme Court ended state bans on interracial marriage. On Aug. 30, Thurgood Marshall was confirmed by the Senate as the first African-American on the Supreme Court. In the fall, Carl Stokes won election as the first African-American mayor of a major U.S. city, in Cleveland.

Yet the rioting of '67 showed with vivid clarity how far America had to go and how dangerous the racial climate had become. In this sense, '67 was a harbinger, marked by riots July 12-17 in Newark, New Jersey, where 26 people died, July 14 in Plainfield, New Jersey, July 19 in Minneapolis, July 23-27 in Detroit, July 20-Aug. 3 in Milwaukee, just to name a few (Walsh 2).

In her new book, “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime,” …, Harvard historian Elizabeth Hinton pinpoints the moment when things started to go sour.

…

Demographic forces were in part to blame …. After World War II, black migration out of the South accelerated — between 1940 and 1980, roughly 5 million black Southerners moved to cities in the North and West. Places like Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia and Harlem grew into major black metropolises. Economists Robert Fairlie and William Sundstrom estimate that the South lost about 17 percent of its workforce between 1940 and 1960 alone.

But as they arrived in the North starting in the 1940s, black workers learned that jobs weren’t as plentiful as they had hoped. Fairlie and Sundstrom say that between 1880 and 1940, the unemployment rate for black and white men was more or less the same. After 1940, their fates began to diverge. In 1950, the white unemployment rate was around 4 percent, but the black unemployment rate was around 7 percent. That inequality has persisted to this day.

In the early 1960s, politicians began to describe the concentration of black urban poverty as “social dynamite.” …

… As Hinton writes, Johnson’s War on Poverty “is best understood not as an effort to broadly uplift communities or as a moral crusade to transform society by combating inequality or want, but as a manifestation of fear about urban disorder and about the behavior of young people, particularly young African Americans.”

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… For urban African Americans, the War on Poverty could better be described as a war on the culture of poverty. Politicians did see the connection between poverty and crime. They recognized how one fed the other, and vice versa. But instead of trying to create jobs or substantially increase welfare payments to families, they fixated on what the influential Moynihan report, echoing the views of many social scientists, called in 1965 the “social pathologies” of black urban life.

“In a word, a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure,” concluded the report. “The object should be to strengthen the Negro family so as to enable it to raise and support its members as do other families.” For all its good intentions, the Moynihan report reinforced the idea that there was something particularly wrong with black America — that centuries of slavery and oppression had inculcated dangerous habits.

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“Negro poverty is not white poverty,” Johnson said. “Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences — deep, corrosive, obstinate differences — radiating painful roots into the community, and into the family, and the nature of the individual.”

Johnson’s War on Poverty had a fatal fixation with reforming individuals instead of addressing the larger economic problems, Hinton says. In the book, she describes it as a short-sighted approach, “committing to vocational training and remedial education programs in the absence of job creation measures or an overhaul of urban public schools.” …

… Starting in the summer of 1964, race riots ripped through Northern cities including New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Rochester, N.Y. Hundreds of people were injured, and thousands were arrested. The riots began with clashes between police and black citizens. In New York City, for instance, 15-year-old James Powell was killed by an off-duty white police officer, which led to six violent days of marching, looting and vandalism in Harlem. “The ‘social dynamite’ that had worried policymakers and officials at the outset of the decade had finally exploded, despite the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ prevention efforts,” Hinton writes.

By 1965, Johnson had formulated a new initiative, what he called a “War on Crime.” He sent to Congress a sweeping new bill that would bulk up police forces with federal money and intensify patrols in urban areas. This would be the first significant intrusion of the federal government into local law enforcement, and it was the beginning of a long saga of escalating surveillance and control in urban areas.

In particular, Johnson played up the military flavor of the reforms. “We are today fighting a war within our own boundaries,” he said in 1966, likening the black urban unrest to a domestic Vietnam. His initiatives provided money for police to arm themselves with military equipment — “military-grade rifles, tanks, riot gear, walkie-talkies, helicopters, and bulletproof vests,” Hinton writes. As the riots intensified through the rest of the ’60s — some estimate over 700 incidents occurred between 1964 and 1971 — the administration increasingly began to shift money away from the War on Poverty and toward the War on Crime. “Policy makers really feared a large-scale urban rebellion,” Hinton says. “They were really worried about black youth, and had a number of racist notions about their propensities for crime and drug addiction.”

These same ideas permeated Johnson’s anti-poverty efforts. … Both programs were propelled by concerns about civil unrest in black communities, and both were influenced by the administration’s opinion that poor urban black people suffered from a cultural deficit, even if it wasn’t of their own making.

Subsequent administrations expanded and intensified the crime-fighting programs that Johnson had created. They sent undercover officers to go into black neighborhoods and ensnare criminals. They camped out in black communities waiting for crime to happen. They funded the creation of special-tactics forces — SWAT teams — in part out of fear of race riots and the Black Panthers. The War on Drugs, which began under Nixon but reached its height under Reagan, added hundreds of thousands of people to the correctional system. Intensified policing created a growing population of prisoners, which set off a boom in prison construction.

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… Both the left and the right were unwilling … to make the drastic investments in jobs, housing and human development that black urban communities demanded and needed.

In 1967, Johnson set up a mostly liberal task force to investigate the race riots. The Kerner Commission, as it was called, handed back a white-hot report that blamed the uprisings on the dearth of economic opportunity in poor black neighborhoods. Johnson’s War on Poverty, they said, was hardly doing enough. “To pursue our present course will involve the continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values,” the report warned.

The commission argued for “national action on an unprecedented scale”: among other things, the immediate creation of 2 million jobs, the establishment of a basic minimum income and the allocation of 6 million units of affordable housing within five years. Essentially, Hinton says, it was a Marshall Plan for black America — a mind-bogglingly huge investment in a distressed community.

Obviously, those economic reforms didn’t happen. Instead, the Johnson administration continued to treat urban black poverty and urban black unrest as a problem of discipline, not a problem of denied opportunity (Guo 1-10).

Black supporters … did not envision that their short-term calls for law enforcement solutions to crime and violence would become the sole response, while the long-term solution of addressing the social problems that gave rise to the problems in the first place would not follow. …

African Americans wanted more law enforcement, but they didn’t want only law enforcement. Many adopted what we might think of as an all-of-the-above strategy. ... But because African Americans are a minority nationally, they needed help to win national action against poverty, joblessness, segregation, and other root causes of crime. The help never arrived. .... So African Americans never got the Marshall Plan — just the tough-on-crime laws.

… One of the major goals of the civil rights movement was to enlist black police officers. The purpose was twofold: to end discrimination in the police force and to curb police brutality against the black community. However, neither goal was realized. …

Professor James Forman, author of Locking Up Our Own, wrote: “The case for black police had always been premised on the unquestioned assumption of racial solidarity between black citizens and black officers.” However, Forman’s account reveals that the “blacks who joined police departments had a far more complicated set of attitudes, motivations, and incentives than those pushing for black police had assumed. The reality of employment discrimination meant that many black officers signed up to obtain a good job that was stable, secure, and offered good benefits. These officers did not conceive of their role within the police departments as an extension of the civil rights movement. Indeed, according to Forman, some did not view their work as racially significant.

Forman also highlights the racism that many black officers faced in the department. … Both the racism that limited the job prospects of blacks and the racism that existed within police forces “made it less likely that [black officers] would do what many reformers hoped they would: buck the famously powerful police culture. The few who tried paid a high price.” “Even those black officers inclined to use their political capital to fight police brutality would often find themselves in the minority. Most of their colleagues — black or white — wanted to fight for wages, benefits, and an equal shot at promotions.”

… Forman illuminates the influence of class differences within black communities. He argues that middle-class blacks would often advocate for more policing against the lower-class blacks who were engaged in crime. Citing a handful of studies showing that black police were just as physically abusive as their white colleagues and sometimes even harsher, Forman concludes that “[i]t turned out that a surprising number of black officers simply didn’t like other black people — at least not the poor blacks they tended to police.” … He notes that “[w]hen some blacks (usually middle class) demanded action against others (usually poor), many ‘pro-black’ officers responded with special enthusiasm.” … Forman is entirely right to note that black-on-black policing was not characterized by intraracial harmony. The end result was that while many police forces eventually integrated, the goal of reducing police violence against black communities was largely unattained (Carbado and Richardson 8-10).

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, otherwise known as the Black Panther Party (BPP), was established in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. The two leading revolutionary men created the national organization as a way to collectively combat white oppression. After constantly seeing black people suffer from the torturous practices of police officers around the nation, Newton and Seale helped to form the pioneering black liberation group to help build community and confront corrupt systems of power.

The Black Panthers established a unified platform and their goals for the party were outlined in a 10-point plan that included demands for freedom, land, housing, employment and education, among other important objectives.

In 1966, police violence ran rampant in Los Angeles and the need to protect black men and women from state-sanctioned violence was crucial. Armed Black Panther members would show up during police arrests of black men and women, stand at a legal distance and surveil their interactions. It was “to make sure there was no brutality,” Newton said in archival footage …. Both Black Panther members and officers would stand facing one another armed with guns, an act that agreed with the open carry law in California at the time. These confrontations, in many ways, allowed the Panthers to protect their communities and police the police.

The party’s goal in increasing membership wasn’t aimed at recruiting churchgoers … but to recruit the everyday black person who faced police brutality. When black people across the nation saw the Panthers’ efforts in the media, especially after they stormed the state capitol with guns in Sacramento in 1967, more men and women became interested in joining. The group also took on issues like housing, welfare and health, which made it relatable to black people everywhere. The party grew rapidly — and didn’t instill a screening process because a priority, at the time, was to recruit as many people as possible.

In 1967, Newton was charged in the fatal shooting of a 23-year-old police officer, John Frey, during a traffic stop. After the shooting, Newton was hospitalized with critical injuries while handcuffed to a gurney in a room that was heavily guarded by cops. As a result of his hospitalization and arrest, Eldrige Cleaver took leadership of the Panthers and demanded that “Huey must be set free.” The phrase was eventually shortened to “Free Huey,” two words which galvanized a movement demanding for Huey’s release.

The sight of black men and women unapologetically sporting their afros, berets and leather jackets had a special appeal to many black Americans at the time. It reflected a new portrayal of self for black people in the 1960s in a way that attracted many young black kids to want to join the party — some even wrote letters to Newton asking to join. …

The Black Panthers furthered their agenda by appealing to what they believed journalists and photographers sought after to cover in the news. “They were able to establish their legitimacy as a voice of protest,” journalist Jim Dunbar said [in a documentary]. They leveraged their voices and imprinted their images in newspapers, magazines and television programs.

The party saw a serious need to nurture black kids in disenfranchised communities, so they spent about two hours each morning cooking breakfast for children in poor neighborhoods before school. “Studies came out saying that children who didn’t have a good breakfast in the morning were less attentive in school and less inclined to do well and suffered from fatigue,” former party member David Lemieux said in the documentary. “We just simply took that information and a program was developed to serve breakfast to children,” he added. “We were showing love for our people.” The party served about 20,000 meals a week and it became the party’s most successful program of their 35 survival programs.

Former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover feared the rise of the Black Panther Party so he created COINTELPRO, a secret operation, to discredit black nationalists groups. The Counterintelligence Program’s purpose was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” black nationalists’ activities. “We were followed everyday, we were harassed, our phones were tapped, our families were harassed,” former Black Panther member Ericka Huggins, whose parents were visited by the FBI, said in the film. Hoover regularly sent police officers letters encouraging them to come up with new ways to cripple the Black Panther Party. Though COINTELPRO didn’t make the party their only targets, 245 out of 290 of their actions were directed at the Black Panthers.

Hoover feared any growth of the movement and especially feared young white allies who united with black activists to support the movement. Through COINTELPRO, Hoover found ways to track, stalk and dig up information on the party, including planting FBI Informants throughout the party (Workneh and Finley 1-4).

Works cited:

Carbado, Devon W. and Richardson, L. Song. “The Black Police: Policing Our Own.” Harvard Law Review. May 10, 2018. Web. https://harvardlawreview.org/2018/05/the-black-police-policing-our-own/

Guo, Jeff. “America’s Tough Approach to Policing Black Communities Began as a Liberal Idea.” The Washington Post. May 2, 2016. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/02/americas-tough-approach-to-policing-black-communities-began-as-a-liberal-idea/

“Psychologist’s Study Show Needs of the Black Community.” Hillsdale Daily News. February 24, 1969. Web. https://newspaperarchive.com/hillsdale-daily-news-feb-24-1969-p-13/

Walsh, Kenneth T. “50 Years after Race Riots, Issues Remain the Same.” U. S. News. July 12, 2017. Web. https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2017-07-12/50-years-later-causes-of-1967-summer-riots-remain-largely-the-same

Workneh, Lilly, and Finley, Taryn. “27 Important Facts Everyone Should Know about the Black Panthers.” HUFFPOST. February 19, 2018. Web. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/27-important-facts-everyone-should-know-about-the-black-panthers_n_56c4d853e4b08ffac1276462