White Power

Policing American Slavery

Gautham Rao

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781469694849
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469688862
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Beginning in the colonial era and growing through the American Revolution and the Southern plantation system, slaveholders’ violent police regime continued after Emancipation, through Reconstruction, to today. Moving across time, space, and place, White Power uncovers how slaveholders created their own white supremacist police and government to deny Black people rights, power, and humanity.

Legal historian Gautham Rao introduces us to laws that empowered white people to forcibly exercise their desired racial superiority over Black people, shows how they spread from the South throughout the nation, and traces the rebellions, fugitivity, activism, and legal systems that challenged them. Rao’s narrative includes slaveholders, lawmakers, and the Ku Klux Klan, dramatic escapes by runaway enslaved people, abolitionist activism in courtroom showdowns, and pitched battles between white paramilitaries and enslaved rebels. He offers a new interpretation of the history of policing in the US, centering the institution and legacy of slavery and speaking to the origins of today’s persistence of white vigilance, white supremacist militia groups, and white racist cops determined to maintain power over Black people by force. Equally determined, however, was Black Americans’ refusal to accept it.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• White
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Note on Language
• Halftitle Page
• Prologue. Highway 17, Rantowles. Fourteen Miles West of Charleston, South Carolina
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Invention of White Power
• Chapter 2. The Age of Insurrection
• Chapter 3. Runaways and Revolution
• Chapter 4. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Runaways
• Chapter 5. Nat Turner’s America
• Chapter 6. Slavery Captures the Federal Government
• Chapter 7. A House Divides
• Chapter 8. The Civil War
• Chapter 9. The Reorganization of White Power
• Chapter 10. Anti-Lynching and the Eclipse of Slave Policing
• Epilogue. The Right to Violence
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index