Were Are We and How Did We Get Here?
After the Civil War, in an era known as Reconstruction, free black Americans made tremendous strides in a relatively short period of time. However, white southerners still resented losing the war and held onto their perverted value system regarding African-Americans. Thus, white southerners instituted a set of law, policies, and practices that we commonly refer to as the Jim Crow south. This included looking the other way while terrorist organizations such the Ku Klux Klan, unofficial militias and impromptu mobs terrorized African-Americans on a daily basis. The north was largely unconcerned with what was going on in the south. Northern cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, New York and Dayton, Ohio had become booming industrial hubs. Their biggest concern with regard to race was the policing of the newest wave of European immigrants, whether it was the Polish, Italians, Irish, etc.…
Beginning in the early 20th Century African-Americans started escaping the terror of the south to take advantage of and find work in the industrial cities of the north. Over a period of three decades, the black population in northern cities exploded. By this time the northern cities had formalized their police departments and had a history of organizing them against their poor white residents. However, as black southern migrants continued to arrive, white Americans became less concerned about one’s European country of origin and focused on the fact that they were all white. Northern police departments were still policing their poor, but now the poor in the north, included the new black migrants from the south.
By the late 1920’s it was clear that the largely unregulated American industrial revolution was unsustainable. The American economy fell apart and the great depression crept in. Americans lost faith in the conservative politics of President Herbert Hoover and elected the “progressive” Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. Roosevelt implemented a set of laws, policies and practices known collectively as the “New Deal.” These policies essentially amounted to the creation of American wealth by the federal government to be distributed to the average white working American. However, white politicians, to some extent, including Roosevelt himself, ensured that African-Americans would not benefit from the best parts of the new deal policies. When the federal government was deciding where it would invest its money, they systematically assessed each American city and colored-in in red the parts of the city where the black migrants from the south settled and labeled those sections of the city “fourth grade.” Signaling to the banks responsible for reinvesting government funds, not to invest in those areas. This did little to impact the already racist and segregated south, but exacerbated the segregation in the north.
In the face of this discrimination black Americans began to organize, mobilize, revolt and up rise. Black “ghettos” in the north were well established in 1954 when the Supreme Court reversed the doctrine of “Separate but Equal” ending legal segregation around the country. Whites resisted the integration of blacks into their now established suburbs, this resistance further distressed race relations between whites and blacks around the country. Black movements increased and varied from the Christian based civil rights movement that we associate with Martin Luther King Jr. to the black nationalist movement that we associate with Malcolm X, to the Black Power movement that we associate with the Black Panther Party. When it became apparent in the late 1960’s that these movements alone weren’t going to change the value system of white Americans, black uprisings started to intensify. Most businesses followed the whites into the suburbs, where the government generated wealth flowed freely. Many of the businesses that stayed or popped up in the ‘ghetto’ were predatory in nature. These businesses, along with others businesses burned throughout 1968 sparked by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, who despite signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, was always resistant to the movement. Before he left office in 1968, he signed into law the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act. This legislation allowed the federal government to appropriate funds to assist local law enforcement agencies in equipping themselves with military style equipment to squash the uprisings happening in American cities. While President Johnson was signing this legislation into law, then Candidate Richard Nixon, was stoking the fears of white America campaigning on the restoration of “law and order” and speaking for the “silent majority.” After the rebellions were successfully quashed now President Nixon declared a war on drugs in 1971. Drugs indeed were a general American problem. However, the illicit drug trade found its way into the divested communities that the federal government deemed “fourth grade” decades earlier. However, the war on drugs wasn’t fully waged until President Ronald Reagan again declared a war on drugs in 1982. Up and until a few years earlier, fresh out of the Vietnam war, the Cold War was the political issue of the day. In preparation for another “hot war” and in an attempt to stop the proliferation of socialism and/or communism, America produced an abundance of firearms and funded a war against a socialist government in Nicaragua by looking the other way while rebels trafficked cocaine into America. Both the guns and the cocaine, later mixed with baking soda to become crack-cocaine, found its way into the divested American cities. The presence of an extremely addictive substance created an illicit unregulated market for a product in high demand, much like the prohibition era of the 20’s.
The Police departments that had been equipping themselves with military equipment over the past decade in anticipation of a race revolt, now had a different reason to wage war against a community. When it came to patrolling urban communities, any principles resembling “community-policing”, were replaced by rules of engagement meant for war. The optics of “the boys in blue” waging war against the “bad people” destroying their own communities by committing crimes and selling drugs was insurmountable. The narrative served to promote age old tropes about black people that suggested that they were less than human and criminal by nature. These same sentiments held by white southerners after the civil war that fueled the violence in the Jim Crow south of the Ku Klux Klan, unofficial militias, and impromptu lynch mobs, reemerged as generally accepted notions that now fuel the state sanctioned violence of American law enforcement. Unable to overcome this perverted value system, police have free range to kill a man for selling loose cigarettes in New York, or stealing tobacco from a corner store in Missouri, or playing with a toy gun in his own neighborhood in Ohio, or exercising his right to own a gun in Minnesota, or running form the police in Maryland, or selling CDs in Louisiana, or driving a car in Texas, or sleeping in your bed in Kentucky. This value system led an officer to believe he had the right to publicly lynch a man with his knee for eight minutes and forty-six seconds; and because we cannot escape this violence, we stand against it. But they anticipated this, they equipped themselves for this moment, they used that equipment to wage war in a community and they use it to prevent us from fighting back.
