Let Us Alone

The Origins of Baltimore's Police State

Michael Casiano

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9780252088889, 9780252046773
• eBook ISBN: 9780252048326
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

By the early twentieth century, postbellum assaults on civil rights and the advent of Jim Crow expanded Baltimore's law enforcement into a vast network designed to oppress Black people. Michael Casiano's history charts the institutional consolidation of the city's post–Civil War police state. Authorities in Baltimore organized and established municipal power in distinct but connected sites that included jails, areas of political and social activism, public schools, street corners, courtrooms, and homes. Casiano analyzes policing in light of two parallel and inextricable realities of the city's governance. First, policing evolved from an inefficient and vigilante-driven system into a modern and paramilitary endeavor focused on suppressing citizens and maximizing the power, wealth, and reach of capitalists. Second, decades of racial antagonism shaped Baltimore policing into an apparatus primarily oriented around subduing Black freedom. A compelling urban history, Let Us Alone uses voices from all levels of society to examine police power, incarceration, and the perils of being Black in post–Civil War Baltimore.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 “This Modern Hades”: Jails, Asylums, and the Business of Punishment in Post–Civil War Baltimore
• 2 “Silk Stocking Aristocracy”: Police, Reform, and the Racialization of Crime in the Late Nineteenth Century
• 3 “With the Power of the Law”: The Carceral Dimensions of Charity, Social Science, and Public Schools
• 4 “If I Had Told What I Know”: Drug Enforcement and the Streets of Early Twentieth-Century Baltimore
• 5 “I Ask Mercy at Your Hands”: The Case of Henry Alfred Brown, Third-Degree Torture, and Black Grassroots Responses to Judicial Inequality
• 6 “Policemen Were the Biggest Liars”: Demystifying Public Order and the Erosion of Black Privacy during the Roaring Twenties
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover