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THE NATION'S LARGEST AFRICAN AMERICAN ORAL HISTORY ARCHIVE
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September 22, 2017 - Vol. 1, Issue 3
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Dear Subscribing Institutions, Friends and Supporters:
Welcome to this week's edition of
The HistoryMakers Digital Archive Newsletter
. This week, we touch upon only a few notes of the great, multi-generational dissonance between the African American community and the police department. For some HistoryMakers, recollections of police brutality and growing up in fear within a skewed social order count among their earliest childhood memories.
For this issue, join us in contemplating the evolution of policing in the black community, from the Southern slave patrols to a crime punishable sometimes by death--walking while black in America.
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Reverend Abraham Woods, Jr.
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The Honorable Thelton E. Henderson
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John S. Dempsey and Linda S. Frost state in,
‘An Introduction to Policing,’
that,
“Many police historians and scholars indicate that the slave patrols of the American South were the precursor to the modern American system of policing.”
2
These new, post-Reconstruction Southern police forces in the Jim Crow era-South exposed white police officers whose heritage, according to Gunnar Myrdal in the 1944, '
An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy,' “Has taught him to despise the Negroes, and he has had little education which could have changed him.”
3
Of this racial history of police departments, former police officer and HistoryMaker
Patricia Hill
similarly states,
“The most disenfranchised whites were chosen to be the patrollers because they were the ones that would try to make sure the blacks were kept at the subservient level”
4
[Patricia Hill, THMDA 1.4.2]
.
Stephen J. Schulhofer details the establishment of loitering and vagrancy laws in
‘More Essential Than Ever: The Fourth Amendment in the Twenty First Century’
:
“After the Civil War, laws like these were widely used in the South to arrest newly freed blacks, who were then convicted of vagrancy and loitering and consigned to forced labor to pay off their fines.”
5
During the Civil Rights Movement, pastor, civil rights leader and HistoryMaker
Reverend Abraham Woods, Jr.
recalls the use of vagrancy laws to prevent the black community from protesting in Birmingham, Alabama:
“One day, we were meeting with them at Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth’s home. And the police came and they arrested these ministers. And we said, ‘Well, why are you arresting these fellows?’ And they said, ‘We’re going to charge them as being vagrants.’ We said, ‘These men are outstanding pastors in their cities.’ Nevertheless, they arrested them on the charge of vagrancy”
6
[
Reverend Abraham Woods, Jr., THMDA 1.4.1]
Similarly, former Senior U.S. District Judge and HistoryMaker
Thelton E. Henderson,
while working as an attorney for the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice in the early 1960s, remembers: “
I got arrested for nothing. I say, ‘Driving while black.' They said, ‘Let’s see your driver’s license.’ I pulled out the driver’s license which was in a plastic thing, and I held it out. And, next thing I know, this billy club came and whacked me on the hand, and, blood started spurting out...so, they’re gonna arrest me”
7
[The Honorable Thelton E. Henderson, THMDA 1.3.5].
In 2004, founder of Chicago’s Center for New Horizons and HistoryMaker
Sokoni Karanja
recalls being harassed and arrested by a police for merely walking his dog, Phoebe, while black on Chicago’s South Side:
“A policeman yelled at me and asked me if I had a license for the dog…It ended up there were eleven policemen that jumped me in the block at Douglas and threw me to the ground, took my vicious dog, put it in the car and took it home to my wife, told them that they had to take me down, you know 'cause I was speaking irrationally walking along the street. So they broke my glasses and split my head open as they threw me to the ground and then took me to the hospital in handcuffs and it was a black man walking his dog, you know”
8
[
Sokoni Karanja, THMDA 1.5.4].
As social justice activist and HistoryMaker
Angela Davis
notes in her book,
‘Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment,’
this was
“A pivotal marker of racial violence against black men in the twenty-first century. Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman, a white man who called the police when he saw Martin walking in his neighborhood"
and "
looked ‘suspicious.'’”
9
Lawyer and HistoryMaker
Bryan Stevenson
added in his chapter, “A Presumption of Guilt: The Legacy of America’s History of Racial Injustice,”
“As in South Africa, Rwanda, and Germany, America desperately needs to commit itself to a process of truth and reparation. We need to own up to the way racial bias and legalized racial subordination have comprised our ability to implement criminal justice.”
10
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FEATURED FROM THE ARCHIVE:
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"Blue Veins and Black Bodies"
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD'S CURATED MIXED-TAPE
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Khalil Gibran Muhammad
, HistoryMaker, professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, as well as a leading scholar on American criminal justice, curated the
Blue Veins and Black Bodies: Stories of Policing in America
video mixtape on the theme of policing in black America. The mixtape offers a historical perspective that complicates the contemporary view of the problem.
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NEW CONTENT IN
THE HISTORYMAKERS DIGITAL ARCHIVE
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This week,
6
new interviews were added to The HistoryMakers Digital Archive:
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Michele Norris
Radio host and television news correspondent Michele Norris (1961 - ) was the host of National Public Radio's (NPR) "All Things Considered".
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Monroe Anderson
Journalist and editor Monroe Anderson (1947 - ) was the press secretary for Chicago mayor Eugene Sawyer.
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BUSINESS AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP
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John Hooker
Energy executive John Hooker (1948 - ) was a senior vice president of Commonwealth Edison.
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Wayne M. Hewett
Corporate chief executive Wayne M. Hewett (1964 - ) was the Vice President and CEO of Momentive Performance Management for the General Electric Company.
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Bishop Imagene Stewart
Civil rights activist and pastor Bishop Imagene Stewart (1942 - 2012 ) founded the House of Imagene Shelter and Women’s Center in Washington, D.C.
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Kenneth L. Coleman
Technology executive Kenneth L. Coleman (1942 - ) held positions at Activision, Inc., Silicon Graphics, Information Technology Management, Accelyrs, City National Bank, MIPS Technologies, and United Online.
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1. Kena Betanour, Untitled, New York, 2016, AFP, Getty Images. Found at:
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-patrisse-cullors-black-lives-matter-2017-htmlstory.html
2. John S. Dempsey, Linda S. Frost, 'An Introduction to Policing,' Eighth Edition, Cengage Learning, January 1, 2015, p. 9
3. Gunnar Myrdal, 'An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Volume 2,' Harper & Brothers, 1944
4.
Patricia Hill (The HistoryMakers A2002.081), interviewed by Larry Crowe, June 25, 2002, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 4, story 2, Patricia Hill describes what the African American Police League does with the black community in Chicago, Illinois
5.
Stephen J. Schulhofer, 'More Essential Than Ever: The Fourth Amendment in the Twenty First Century,' Oxford University Press, July 9, 2012.
6.
Reverend Abraham Woods, Jr. (The HistoryMakers A2007.107), interviewed by Denise Gines, March 23, 2007, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 4, story 1, Reverend Abraham Woods, Jr. recalls the wrongful arrest of Montgomery preachers
7.
The Honorable Thelton E. Henderson (The HistoryMakers A2004.044), interviewed by Loretta Henry, April 7, 2004, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 3, story 5, The Honorable Thelton E. Henderson describes his field experiences working for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department, pt. 2
8.
Sokoni Karanja (The HistoryMakers A2005.004), interviewed by Larry Crowe, January 7, 2005, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 5, story 4, Sokoni Karanja details his experiences with police harassment
9.
Angela J. Davis, 'Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment,' Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2017. Introduction, p. xii
10. Angela J. Davis, 'Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment,' Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2017. p. 5
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