The Streets Belong to Us

Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification

Anne Gray Fischer

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781469665054
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Police power was built on women's bodies. Men, especially Black men, often stand in as the ultimate symbol of the mass incarceration crisis in the United States. Women are treated as marginal, if not overlooked altogether, in histories of the criminal legal system. In The Streets Belong to Us —a searing history of women and police in the modern United States—Anne Gray Fischer narrates how sexual policing fueled a dramatic expansion of police power. The enormous discretionary power that police officers wield to surveil, target, and arrest anyone they deem suspicious was tested, legitimized, and legalized through the policing of women's sexuality and their right to move freely through city streets. Throughout the twentieth century, police departments achieved a stunning consolidation of urban authority through the strategic discretionary enforcement of morals laws, including disorderly conduct, vagrancy, and other prostitution-related misdemeanors. Between Prohibition in the 1920s and the rise of "broken windows" policing in the 1980s, police targeted white and Black women in distinct but interconnected ways. These tactics reveal the centrality of racist and sexist myths to the justification and deployment of state power. Sexual policing did not just enhance police power. It also transformed cities from segregated sites of "urban vice" into the gentrified sites of Black displacement and banishment we live in today. By illuminating both the racial dimension of sexual liberalism and the gender dimension of policing in Black neighborhoods, The Streets Belong to Us illustrates the decisive role that race, gender, and sexuality played in the construction of urban police regimes.

1 Making the Modern City

Sexual Policing and Black Segregation from Prohibition to the Great Depression

During the 1920s Black residents in the urban North bore witness to a perplexing—and infuriating—development: even as the borders of segregation hardened around them, more whites were streaming into their neighborhoods. After red-light districts were shut down, Black journalists reported with outrage that their neighborhoods were becoming “infested with these loose white women.” White men indulged in nightly invasions too. But it was the white women who roused police attention as officers enforced racial segregation. During Prohibition, the injury of segregationist policing was added to the insult of white defilement of the spaces where Black residents lived, learned, and worshiped.¹

In 1924 an editorial in the Black-owned Chicago Defender decried this state of affairs with a dispatch from the city’s white press. “Secret service operatives and the city police joined forces,” the editorial’s author quoted from a white daily. “They struck through the [predominantly Black] near South side to end exploitation of white girls by Negro resort keepers.” White Progressive reformer Jessie Binford, a Hull House resident and director of the Juvenile Protective Association, had sounded the alarm on the alleged “exploitation of white girls” on Chicago’s South Side. The Defender editorial protested Binford’s selective concern for “white girls” and her indifference to “girls NOT white, those of brown and yellow skin.” Binford shared the prevailing priorities of too many other white reformers, which the Defender author sarcastically summed up as follows: “Save the white girl—to hell with all OTHER girls.”²

Sexual policing in the 1920s was driven by an abiding preoccupation with rescuing white womanhood that increased the vulnerability of Black people, and in particular Black women, to violence by white men and police officers alike. “THE WHITE GIRL!” the Defender author wrote. “Around her is thrown the armed protection of civilization.” By 1924 this “protection” was literally armed with a blackjack, a gun, and a badge.³

Police of the 1920s were the beneficiaries of Progressive-era moral crusades to expand legal infrastructure on behalf of white purity. Reformers who had fought to abolish red-light districts in the first two decades of the twentieth century empowered police departments with the legal tools to repress—rather than merely manage—urban prostitution. Despite their expanded repertoire of morals laws to shutter red-light districts, police officers and politicians were loath to relinquish this lucrative source of shared payoffs. But the reformers’ onslaught was too intense to be ignored, so authorities conceded—with a catch. The resulting “shutdown” of segregated districts during the Progressive era amounted to a relocation of red-light districts to Black neighborhoods.⁴

Law enforcement authorities exploited racial inequality to project an image of repression while maintaining moral enforcement’s profitability. Police deployed their discretionary power to channel the flow of an urban faucet, permitting the inundation of white men into Black neighborhoods, aggressively policing white women’s interracial sociability, and erratically targeting Black women for morals offenses. Police had helped to erect Black vice districts, and now they enforced morals violations (or withheld enforcement for a fee) on the same streets, creating a doubled segregation: segregated vice and racially segregated Black residents. This transformation—more advanced in cities like Chicago and New York, but soon to become the national policy—set the twentieth-century logic and practice of urban policing in motion.⁵

Morals policing became the terrain on which authorities enforced racial segregation and the boundaries of race in modern cities. Officers, vigilantly patrolling the color line in the new segregated vice districts, determined which women were deserving of their “armed protection” and which were not—a project of race-making as much as it was of gender-making. Even as the moral force of reform waned during Prohibition and poor white women were increasingly scorned as “problem girls” rather than victims, the enduring preoccupation with white female purity necessarily had an impact on the ways that Black women were policed. Indeed, the criminalization of white women, particularly those engaging in interracial socialization, brought the full weight of the Progressive-era criminal apparatus to bear on Black neighborhoods.⁶

The relocation of segregated vice districts to racially segregated Black neighborhoods cemented the relationship between police and Black residents in the twentieth century. On the one hand, police practiced violent neglect: they permitted, and profited from, vice activities in Black neighborhoods, and this neglect communicated to the city that Black neighborhoods were sites of sexual deviance and lawlessness. On the other hand, police practiced violent action: they erratically and aggressively targeted Black communities for morals violations. Black women were at once vulnerable to arrest while also profoundly unprotected from the depredations of white men turned loose on the city’s vice playground. The protests of Black residents like the author of the Defender editorial made these developments visible by persistently calling out the white hypocrisy and state force that rendered their neighborhoods vulnerable to a toxic combination of police neglect and arrests. Morals policing exemplified a pattern of police action and abandonment in segregated Black neighborhoods that would reign across the twentieth century.⁷

Prohibition ended in scandalous failure, leaving police publicly discredited and widely reviled. Police departments were called to account for long-standing practices of lawlessness, extortion, and brutality in the enforcement of morals laws. From the rubble of Prohibition, police leaders mobilized to reclaim the authority of besieged law enforcement. They found redemption by rebranding officers as muscular, punitive “crime fighters.” Led by national figures like the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, law men trumpeted “scientific” data gathering and cutting-edge weapons and surveillance technologies. The effectiveness of crime-fighting policing was measured in high arrest rates, which the FBI started to collect, standardize, and circulate in 1930.⁸

Crime-fighting proponents had little to say about sexually profiled women, preferring instead to rivet the public’s attention with the capture of high-profile gangsters. But their newly collected statistics spoke louder: police departments leaned on sexual policing to shore up their crumbling legitimacy, kicking morals enforcement into overdrive. During the economic crisis of the Depression, women were arrested at a much faster rate than men and increasing numbers of women were raked into the law enforcement machinery. The rates of arrest for Black women during the Depression were wildly haphazard from city to city and, in a single city, from month to month. Intensifying police action, especially in Chicago and New York, foreshadowed the systematic arrests that Black women would ultimately confront on city streets nationwide.⁹

As police departments emerged from the scandal-ridden aftermath of Prohibition, the arrest rates of women became a key measure of police activity and power. And despite fluctuations in arrests, the framework for this new post-Prohibition police regime was firmly in place by the 1930s: future morals enforcement policies would be enacted on a racial urban landscape that police had created with a combination of violent force and neglect. Vice districts were confined to Black neighborhoods, and through these urban sites, police enforced racial segregation in cities nationwide. In the interwar decades between Prohibition and World War II, sexual policing to enforce white purity created the conditions of urban Black repression—and Black protest—that would propel the future of twentieth-century cities.

From Segregated Vice to Racial Segregation

In the early 1900s, when Progressive-era reformers mobilized to shut down red-light districts, they issued their demands on behalf of exploited white womanhood. Segregated red-light districts were downtown fixtures in postbellum cities that served an important political function: the graft they generated funded election campaigns and sealed political loyalties. Responding to the massive shutdown campaign, police and politicians met reformers halfway: instead of abolishing vice districts, they routed them to Black neighborhoods, which housed residents with the least political power in the city. The reformers’ preoccupation with white purity and the presumption of Black immorality made this a tolerable relocation. Sociologist Walter Reckless described this trade-off in his study of Prohibition-era prostitution in Chicago: while he found that commercial sex had moved deeper into the Black Belt, he felt it was nevertheless “important to note that in the twenty years of public suppression there were relatively few underworld invasions of good residential areas.”¹⁰

The new segregated vice districts served the same function as earlier red-light districts: money trees for political machines. During Prohibition, a cut of police payoffs continued to be funneled into municipal election slush funds in cities from Los Angeles to New York. So even as reformers congratulated themselves on their victory over vice, police still managed, rather than stamped out, the business of sex, gambling, and liquor. But now, Progressive-era legal reforms designed to repress prostitution delivered to police departments the mandate—and broad discretion—to arrest virtually any woman on city streets deemed sexually suspect.¹¹

The question of which women would be collared under these new conditions was another matter. Though urban authorities would not settle on a systematic urban policy until after World War II, the informal policy in the interregnum would define the relationship between police and Black residents throughout the twentieth century. Three dynamics characterized the Prohibition-era relocation of vice to Black neighborhoods. First, as police routed vice into these neighborhoods, they played a key role in cultivating the image of Black neighborhoods as sites of—and Black residents as agents of—sexual deviance and lawlessness. Second, as police, politicians, academics, and the white press circulated this prevailing myth of Black sexual immorality and criminality, they justified residential segregation and naturalized spatial hierarchies of race, lashing Jim Crow logics onto local police practices. And finally, the creation of racially segregated vice districts contributed to the material degradation of Black neighborhoods, justifying further and more aggressive police action. In other words, police officers erratically and aggressively enforced morals violations in Black neighborhoods that they themselves permitted. Black residents consistently protested that vice policing simultaneously created violent conditions of state neglect and criminalization in their neighborhoods.¹²

Black residents were now forced to confront a new invasion in their neighborhood: white people. “Most of the vice complained of by these so-called protectors of white morality, if there be such a thing, is imported into the ward by white outsiders,” a Chicago Defender editorial wrote. In 1922 a Black politician flipped the script on Black deviance and white respectability by arguing that “the Negro suffers more from imported vice than from domestic vice” as white people descended on the Black neighborhood “to degrade and demoralize our section.” Certainly poor and working-class Black residents worked in sex, gambling, and liquor businesses to compensate for the discriminatory and exploitative licit job market. But Black leaders, predominantly (though not exclusively) elite and middle class, angrily condemned the transformation of their neighborhoods into police-sanctioned red-light districts.¹³

This white influx mainly consisted of so-called slummers. These were mostly middle-class white men visiting Black neighborhoods for what one Black newspaper derided as a “moral holiday” only to return to their “good residential areas” with their respectability untarnished. Black residents especially resented what a Defender journalist referred to as “white men streaming in and out of the place in a continual parade.” While middle-class white women occasionally accompanied men for a thrill, Black vice districts (like their red-light predecessors) were policed to limit these sites to male pleasure. As one bar manager noted in 1927, he was “given friendly advice by coppers … that they will let me run this place and … there will be no trouble as long as I keep the women out.” The slummers who came to Black neighborhoods to solicit women for sex degraded Black women by presuming every woman’s sexual availability and harassing them. “White men drive up and down Central Ave and molest women and young girls to and from church,” one man wrote from a Black neighborhood in Los Angeles. “Oh God please give us a decent place for our women and children to live in.” By treating Black neighborhoods as their personal vice playland, white men helped to define Black neighborhoods as “synonymous with immorality and license,” the editors of the Pittsburgh Courier protested.¹⁴

A national realignment was under way. In many southern cities, segregated vice districts had been located in Black neighborhoods since at least the turn of the century. The relocation of red-light districts reflected a convergence of North and South. “It has long been the policy of southern cities to leave the colored part of the town ‘wide open’ and in addition to that to center in the colored portion much of the vice of the white population,” Arthur Spingarn, a Jewish leader in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), wrote in 1918, describing what ultimately became the reigning policy nationwide. “When a southern city was ‘cleaned up’ it has meant too often that the dregs were simply swept from the white into the colored section.” Urban prostitution policy became racially segregated nationwide—and even in southern cities where the segregated vice district had already been...