Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South

African Americans and Law Enforcement in Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans, 1920–1945

Brandon T. Jett, David Goldfield

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780807175552
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

Winner of the Florida Book Award general nonfiction category Throughout the Jim Crow era, southern police departments played a vital role in the maintenance of white supremacy. Police targeted African Americans through an array of actions, including violent interactions, unjust arrests, and the enforcement of segregation laws and customs. Scholars have devoted much attention to law enforcement's use of aggression and brutality as a means of maintaining African American subordination. While these interpretations are vital to the broader understanding of police and minority relations, Black citizens have often come off as powerless in their encounters with law enforcement. Brandon T. Jett's Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South, by contrast, reveals previously unrecognized efforts by African Americans to use, manage, and exploit policing. In the process, Jett exposes a much more complex relationship, suggesting that while violence or the threat of violence shaped police and minority relations, it did not define all interactions. Black residents of southern cities repeatedly complained about violent policing strategies and law enforcement's seeming lack of interest in crimes committed against African Americans. These criticisms notwithstanding, Blacks also voiced a desire for the police to become more involved in their communities to reduce the seemingly intractable problem of crime, much of which resulted from racial discrimination and other structural factors related to Jim Crow. Although the actions of the police were problematic, African Americans nonetheless believed that law enforcement could play a role in reducing crime in their communities. During the first half of the twentieth century, Black citizens repeatedly demanded better policing and engaged in behaviors designed to extract services from law enforcement officers in Black neighborhoods as part of a broader strategy to make their communities safer. By examining the myriad ways in which African Americans influenced the police to serve the interests of the Black community, Jett adds a new layer to our understanding of race relations in the urban South in the Jim Crow era and contributes to current debates around the relationship between the police and minorities in the United States.

CHAPTER 1

Crime, Race, and the Development of Police Departments in the Urban South

“The average citizen holds the policeman in contempt or fear or does not consider him at all,” stated Jack Carley, a reporter for the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, in 1924.1 In fact, throughout much of the early twentieth century, police departments across the nation dealt with a crisis of legitimacy as urban dwellers viewed them as ineffective, inept, dangerous, and corrupt.2 In the South, these critiques emerged at the same time that southern civic boosters embraced the mantra of the “New South,” promoted economic diversification, and encouraged urban expansion. As more and more people flooded into southern cities, fears about crime, race relations, economic changes, and corruption consistently rose to the fore as city officials championed the benefits of the New South ideology but also struggled to combat the problems that accompanied it. Through the police, these officials attempted to assuage local concerns of problems associated with rapid urban growth. This proved especially difficult in southern cities as many recent migrants from the countryside were traditionally distrustful of formal legal institutions and instead preferred extralegal methods of social control.3

To overcome the popular perceptions of police as corrupt and ineffective, the police departments in Memphis, Birmingham, and New Orleans underwent incredible transformations in the first half of the twentieth century. As in so many other cities across the United States, the departments in these three cities began to professionalize.4 Beginning in some of the country’s larger urban centers, such as New York and Chicago, in the late nineteenth century, reformers worked to disassociate police departments from politics, attempted to limit corruption within city government and the police, and pushed for increased efficiency through the centralization and specialization of police forces and integration of technology.5 By the 1920s, then, many police departments fundamentally differed from their nineteenth-century predecessors. Promoters of the police departments worked to change the popular conception of police as corrupt and ineffective and instead implored citizens to understand “the force and what it represents—safety for your homes and those you love.”6

Safety for white southerners, however, was largely defined in racialized terms as crime and blackness became interlinked in the minds of urban whites.7 Southern whites viewed African Americans as inherently violent and criminally inclined, and during the 1920s and 1930s, those fears heightened as more African Americans migrated to urban areas and challenged the Jim Crow racial hierarchy with greater success. A spike in crime in the mid-1920s only exacerbated white concerns over urban African Americans.8 Extralegal justice proved incapable of assuaging white fears and, as a result, city officials turned to the enhanced criminal justice institutions to control urban African Americans. These officials attempted to instill institutions such as the police with legitimacy in the eyes of the white public. Criminologist Tom R. Tyler argues that police officers gain legitimacy by “acting in ways that will be viewed as fair.”9 In the Jim Crow South, police departments sought legitimacy from white southerners by appealing to their racist instincts and demonstrating their capacity to monitor and control large urban black populations. What appeared as “fair” to white southerners focused on more effective and intrusive policing of urban blacks. Policing strategies incorporated aggressive and abusive treatment of African Americans as officers’ crime-fighting strategies largely focused on solidifying the Jim Crow racial hierarchy by enforcing segregation, arresting more black residents, and monitoring and harassing black political and labor organizations.10

Crime in the Urban South

As a result of southerners’ embrace of the New South ideology, economic diversification across the region, and urbanization, myriad issues confronted city officials and residents in southern cities.11 While southern urban dwellers grappled with issues related to overcrowding, urban development and expansion, housing, diseases, healthcare, and political corruption, crime and violence proved to be one of the biggest concerns. Gambling, prostitution, and other illicit activities seemingly overran several New South cities. In Memphis, for example, a police report from 1900 declared, “the sale of cocaine has reached such an alarming extent that the department is unable to cope with its ravages.”12 As a river city and transportation hub, Memphis traditionally attracted a transient population that often partook in heavy drinking, gambling, and prostitution near the city’s port. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this trend continued, prompting one contemporary to claim that the city “attracts numerous conventions and is the mecca of thousands of pleasure-seekers, some harmless and some harmful to the good name and the welfare of the community.”13 Similarly, New Orleans’s historic reputation as a city of brothels, saloons, and violence continued into the early twentieth century. In 1907, reformer Carrie Nation described New Orleans as “too tough a place for me to tackle.” She concluded, “It is a very, very bad place.”14 Although the legendary bordellos of Storyville were shut down in 1917, prostitution and other illicit activities continued to thrive as part of an underground economy throughout the city.15 In Birmingham, one commentator noted that in 1920 “hold-ups and other crimes in Birmingham have become so prevalent that people may well ask themselves if it is safe to leave their homes after dark.”16

Homicide proved a particularly troubling problem, and southern cities routinely ranked among the most homicidal cities in the country.17 Although northern cities such as New York faced pressures similar to those of cities in the South, the homicide rates remained well below that of southern cities. Scholars suggest this regional distinction grew out of the honor culture of the South, the use of violence in maintaining white supremacy, and the weakness of southern legal institutions.18 The homicide rate in New York City, for example, remained under 6 per 100,000 throughout the first half of the twentieth century.19 On the other hand, Birmingham had some of the highest rates of violence in the country, and homicide rates in the city peaked at 89.6 homicides per 100,000 people in 1913. Although the homicide rate fell in the subsequent two decades, by 1930 Birmingham ranked as the fourth most homicidal city in the United States, with 128 total homicides and an overall homicide rate of 52.6 per 100,000. The homicide rate in New Orleans, although lower than in Birmingham, followed similar trends. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the city’s homicide rate hovered between 20 and 25 per 100,000. However, in the early 1920s the rate spiked, and by 1924 reached 32.5. Rates declined in the city throughout the 1930s and 1940s, but, as in Birmingham, remained much higher than the national average.20 Perhaps more than in any of its southern counterparts, crime and violence in Memphis reached alarming numbers. Despite all the efforts to modernize the city, in the first three decades of the twentieth century it ranked as the most homicidal city in the country. From 1882 to 1911, the average homicide rate was 47.1. Over the next five years, the average rate totaled 74.9.21 By 1923 the homicide rate in Memphis declined a bit, but remained highest in the country at 65 homicides per 100,000 residents.22 Statistician Frederick Hoffman found that “during the fourteen years ending with 1923, 1,274 persons have died as a result of homicide in the city of Memphis alone.”23 Homicide rates fluctuated throughout the first half of the twentieth century, peaked in the mid-to-late 1920s, then underwent sustained decline through the 1940s. Yet, in any given year, Birmingham, New Orleans, and Memphis consistently ranked among the most homicidal cities in the country.

Although the problems of crime and violence plagued southern cities in general, in the black community the problems were amplified. The economic, political, and social restrictions with which Jim Crow laws and customs saddled African American communities drove the higher rates. Black southerners faced higher rates of poverty than white southerners, they lacked access to many civic and social services, including health care, that were available to whites, and the criminal justice system often ignored black residents’ concerns and complaints.24 In Memphis, Birmingham, and New Orleans, the rates of homicide in the black community outnumbered the rates in the white community by a large margin. In 1922, for example, the homicide rate among the black community in Memphis was 145, compared to 24.5 in the white community. In Birmingham, the rates were 108 for African Americans and 26.7 for whites. Finally, New Orleans’s homicide rate was 57.5 in the black community and 9.8 in the white community.25 The migration of thousands of African Americans into cities such as New Orleans, Birmingham, and Memphis coincided with what seemed to be ever-increasing homicide rates, particularly among black residents.26 Across the country, blackness became tied to criminality as social scientists, criminologists, and social critics began to use high rates of crime, arrests, and incarceration for African Americans as proof of the inherent criminality of black Americans. As a result, southern whites grew more and more fearful of African Americans.27 In an article examining violent deaths in Atlanta, Birmingham, New Orleans, and Memphis from 1921 to 1922, authors J. J. Durrett and W. G. Stromquist stated, “It thus appears that our real problem, insofar as homicides are concerned, arises in the killing of negroes by negroes.”28

Commentators and scholars on crime in the early twentieth century typically described the high rates of violence in the black community in disparaging ways. Discourses of crime and blackness became commonplace beginning in the 1890s as scholars and social critics began using statistics regarding imprisonment rates to discuss crime in racialized ways. As historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad has argued, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “the statistical rhetoric of the ‘Negro criminal’ became a proxy for a national discourse on black inferiority.”29 In his seminal work Race Traits and Characteristics (1896), statistician Frederick L. Hoffman declared definitively, “Without exception . . . the criminality of the negro exceeds that of any other race of any numerical importance in this country.” Moreover, he did not see the problem abating any time soon. Hoffman wrote, that until “the negro learns to respect...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 Crime, Race, and the Development of Police Departments in the Urban South
• CHAPTER 2 African American Responses to Crime in the Urban South
• CHAPTER 3 Police Investigations of African American Homicides
• CHAPTER 4 African Americans and the Police in Black Stolen-Property Cases
• CHAPTER 5 African Americans and the Police in Assault Cases, 1920–1945
• Conclusion
• Notes
• A Note on Sources
• Bibliography
• Index