Abstract
In 1994, Nicholas Heyward Jr., a thirteen-year-old African American boy, was playing with a plastic toy gun in the Brooklyn, New York housing complex where he lived when a housing cop shot and killed him. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani blamed the young teen’s death on the toy gun he was holding. The media followed suit, and the Brooklyn district attorney refused to indict the officer. Heyward’s death, referenced in Cathy Schneider’s new book, Police Power and Race Riots, is remarkably similar to that of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, who was shot by white police officers in a Cleveland, Ohio playground one decade later. Only this time, after a grand jury failed to indict the officers who killed Rice, protests broke out—an increasingly common occurrence during 2015, the year that the #BlackLivesMatter campaign emerged as a force with which politicians and policymakers were forced to reckon. 1
A resurgence of rebellion and violence also appeared in France in 2015. Ten years after France’s urban riots following the death of two minority boys hiding from the police in an electricity substation in one of Paris’s suburban banlieues, the other subject of Schneider’s transcontinental study, French citizens born to Algerian immigrants and raised in a neighboring Parisian banlieue attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical weekly newspaper, and a kosher supermarket. 2 Following the attacks, France’s prime minister said the country was at the mercy of “territorial, social and ethnic apartheid.” 3 Taken together, these incidents reveal that French banlieues, much like poor urban cities throughout America, remain in crisis.
This current urban crisis is, in large part, due to the fraught relationships among police, federal authorities, and minority citizens. Fortunately, three new books, David F. Krugler’s 1919, the Year of Racial Violence; Cathy Schneider’s Police Power and Race Riots; and Malcolm McLaughlin’s The Long Hot Summer of 1967, explore these relationships in studies that span different temporal moments, geographic locations, and moments of violence. Despite their distinct subject matter, the authors share a central point of inquiry: why does racial violence happen and how do citizens, politicians, activists, and police respond to it? As French officials continue to investigate the Parisian attacks, and black activists struggle to translate street protest into sustained political change, the studies taken up here offer important insights into our present moment.
Much has been written about Chicago’s 1919 race riot, including William Tuttle’s foundational text Race Riot. Seldom, however, is it contextualized not only as part of a “red summer” but also as part of a long year of violence. 4 In his newest book, David Krugler, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin–Platteville, shows how Chicago was one of almost a dozen sites of racial violence in 1919, a watershed year of bloodshed and turbulence. By widening the historical lens to capture several cities beyond the brink, the extent of racial terror, the capricious nature of white mob violence, and the entrenched barriers to racial equality in the aftermath of World War I come into focus.
At the heart of Krugler’s meticulously researched study are the African American citizens who mobilized self-defense forces against white mobs—mobs that formed for a wide array of reasons: “to drive blacks from industrial jobs or white neighborhoods; to punish blacks for their wartime prosperity; to ‘protect’ white women against the alleged depredations of black men” (p. 4). In response, black self-defenders from all walks of life—doctors, steel workers, sharecroppers, veterans, active-duty servicemen, and even teenagers—challenged antiblack collective violence, a term that Krugler uses to argue that African Americans did not spontaneously riot as much as deliberately resist.
Krugler situates his study at the intersection of national trends and the local conditions that set the stage for each episode of racial violence. Collectively, the events reveal a nascent New Negro identity that inspired veterans to assert their rights to citizenship, making them the de facto leaders of a more united black front of resistance against white citizens’ impulses to reassert supremacy. However, white lawmakers, white police officers, and white citizens blamed blacks for the violence, arrested them at disproportionate rates, and publicized inaccurate accounts of what happened to an eager press. But African Americans refused to yield. Instead, Krugler argues, they waged a three-front attack against white-led violence: they armed themselves; mobilized the black press to publicize the truth about lynch mobs and race riots; and pursued justice through the courts.
One of Krugler’s most welcomed contributions is his emphasis on black citizens’ insistence on armed self-defense decades before activists like Robert F. Williams or organizations like the Deacons for Self-Defense and the Black Panther Party. 5 For African Americans in the aftermath of World War I, the act of bearing arms—or even the threat of doing so—helped them protect their communities against antiblack collective violence, setting a militant tone for the black freedom struggle. Equally important is Krugler’s documentation of government efforts to disarm African Americans and obstruct their Second Amendment rights to obtain weapons. This in particular offers important avenues of inquiry to scholars studying armed resistance during the traditional phase of the civil rights movement. 6
Second, Krugler documents the black press’s battle to publicize the truth about the riots. Using eyewitness accounts and affidavits, the black press disabused the stereotype of the black aggressor. They also celebrated resistance to white mob violence and championed the arrival of the “New Negro,” “one who had served his country in the fight to make the world safe for democracy” (p. 5). Here, Krugler positions fiery writers and editors as both the representatives and messengers of the New Negro spirit. But they were not on the streets fighting to defend their communities. Were the riots “more proof of African Americans readiness to take up arms in self-defense” (p. 142) as he suggests, or were they evidence of the New Negros’ desire for communities to act out these impulses? The efficacy of this second-front is debatable. New Negro writers certainly hoped that documenting cases of mob violence would help black self-defenders avoid prosecution. However, by Krugler’s own admission, “the rhetoric of the New Negros was eloquent, their reasoning elegant; but . . . their ability to shape judicial outcomes proved limited” (p. 214).
Third, Krugler argues, African Americans fought for justice in the courts, thanks in large part to the efforts of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which pursued legal battles by “providing attorneys for black defendants, and by pressuring authorities to prosecute whites who had committed acts of violence” (p. 5) across the United States. Success in this arena, Krugler explains, was intertwined with victories in the press, where journalists’ fight to establish factual accounts of mob violence often bolstered the NAACP’s effectiveness in the courts. While his argument—that blacks waged a three-pronged attack against antiblack collective violence—will not surprise scholars of the civil rights movement, he superbly blends the actions of average citizens with those of black elite to show how African Americans asserted their agency in the face of white mob violence in the aftermath of World War I.
After a watershed year of racial terror, Krugler notes that episodes of antiblack collective violence did not completely stop but they never reached the same levels again. What caused these particular riots to subside? And what caused new riots to erupt decades later? Cathy Schneider, an associate professor in the School of International Service at American University, takes up these questions in her transcontinental comparison of policing and urban unrest in Paris and New York. Schneider’s premise is that even with vastly different political, legal, and economic conditions, a striking linkage exists between the violent confrontations in the United States following the killing of a fifteen-year-old black youth by a New York City police officer three weeks after Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and those in France after the fatal electrocution of black and Arab teenagers following a police chase into an electrical substation outside of Paris in October 2005.
Framing Schneider’s study are three guiding questions. Why do such similar interactions appear between police forces and minorities in such different settings? Why did these interactions lead to riots in New York and hundreds of other cities in the United States during the 1960s and in Paris and across France in 2005? And why did riots become so rare in post-1960s New York and 2005 Marseille, even when police brutality and racial profiling spread? To answer these questions, Schneider utilizes more than fifteen years of intermittent ethnographic and participant observation in New York City and greater Paris with a wide variety of subjects, including community-based groups, former radical party militants, police officers, and the parents of those killed by police in both France and the United States.
Schneider’s main contribution is showing how the state activates racial boundaries and how police enforce them in countries with such different cultural and political traditions as France and the United States. France, she points out, is “a country with a strong central apparatus, a national police force, common law tradition, and elimination of racial categories in census and law” (p. 8). This stands in stark relief to the United States, where police are “locally controlled, in a federal state with statutory law and multicultural traditions” (p. 8). Yet in each country, police interact with minority residents—black and Arab and Latino and African American, respectively—with striking similarities. In both cases, police violence resulted in the death of one or more minority teenagers; ensuing uprisings spilled out from the site of their deaths to surrounding neighborhoods and distant towns and cities; and each state used the riots to rationalize harsh criminal policies aimed at poor minority youth—launching the war on drugs in the United States and harsh criminal policies in France (p. 3).
While the parallels are thought provoking, one cannot help but wonder how to apply her findings across continents and time periods without sufficient geographic or racial context. Asking why, for example, Marseille, a city nearly 500 miles from Paris did not burn in 2005 would seem like asking why a city as far west as Columbus, Ohio, or as far south as Wilmington, North Carolina, had different patterns of racial unrest than New York City. Similarly, the New York neighborhoods where Schneider conducted field research were predominantly Puerto Rican, but she comfortably generalizes to residents of other stigmatized minority neighborhoods. Despite the fact that minorities fell on the same side of the racial divide between police officers and nonwhites, each group had both their own histories with the police and conflict with each other to make one cautious of conflating them for the sake of argument.
Schneider’s interviews with police officers, on the contrary, offer careful nuances and complicated answers to questions about how cops negotiate their roles as intermediaries between federal and municipal authorities on one hand and minority communities on the other. Her findings indicate that officers feel undervalued and in the uncomfortable position of executing policies “that are not of their own making” (p. 250). Yet in positioning them this way, she denies agency to the police, who, she argues, reflect the larger structural dynamics created by the state. “Police are not independent actors,” she claims, but, instead, “carry out the directives of the state and its more powerful constituents” (p. 254). By arguing that police work is intrinsically racial because crime control has been politicized and society has been racialized, Schneider does not hold police accountable for the boundaries they violently enforce.
Schneider’s assertion that U.S. riots became rare because social movements, courts, and other institutions offered avenues of redress, however, will be most contentious among scholars. She argues that the post-1960s response to police violence in the United States has been largely nonviolent, including “individual and collective action; organizing protest marches and civil disobedience; petitioning district attorneys, federal prosecutors, political officeholders, and members of the Department of Justice; and filing civil law suits” (p. 27). But as Malcolm McLaughlin suggests in The Long Hot Summer of 1967, more pessimistic reasons explain the rarity of riots. Local police departments, for example, readily contained small disturbances in cities across the country. When they found themselves overwhelmed, state forces, the National Guard, and even the U.S. Army were prepared to intervene. It is, in fact, difficult to look at the post-1960s era as one with vibrant race-based social movements or revolutionary action, because, as McLaughlin suggests, much of it was quashed by police forces.
Were protests and rallies, appeals to local and federal politicians, the execution of civil suits, and organization participation enough to dampen urban unrest? Perhaps. But Schneider’s use of language like “disciplined organizations” and “trusted leaders from whom to take guidance” (p. 251) is too vague to accept without further context. One of the most important lessons from the civil rights movement—and one that the #BlackLivesMatter campaign has taken to heart—is that hierarchical, centralized leadership is not always in a community’s best interest. Moreover, her focus on centralized leadership and political victories denies politicians like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon their “achievements” in the field of law and order. To dismiss their influence because they did not “successfully turn a punitive stance toward crime and poverty into a landslide victory” (p. 75) as did Ronald Reagan is to deny law and order its historic—and widely popular—roots in the 1960s.
The issue of how politicians politicized urban unrest and leveraged it into widely accepted crime policy is one part of the story. In The Long Hot Summer of 1967, Malcolm McLaughlin, a senior lecturer in American studies and history at the University of East Anglia, employs the year 1967 to demonstrate how urban rebellion was politicized and leveraged by constituents on both sides of the racial divide. He is less concerned by the patterns of violence that connected the events of 1967 but by the policy decisions that stemmed from them. In particular, he argues that the idea of a long, hot summer became a political football between police officers and politicians demanding law and order, black militants demanding political power, and white liberals demanding funding for the Great Society.
McLaughlin criticizes Great Society liberals for their elite pretensions about poverty and their top-down response of economic and social management to the riots. Liberals, he contends, placed such abiding faith in the promise of the Great Society that they misunderstood the nature of urban rebellion, which they believed was caused by poverty. As McLaughlin argues, the Kerner Commission’s report best reflected the “fundamentally undemocratic set of assumptions about the urban poor” (p. 24). Although the report represents just one example, McLaughlin contends that this document had the most deleterious effects on urban communities because it linked race, poverty, and urban unrest in ways that proved difficult to untwine. Like most conventional liberal wisdom of the time, the Kerner report quashed the notion that the riots might represent a genuine rejection of the prevailing order. Their refusal to see the failures of the liberal program in meeting the grievances of the ghetto reveals a political shortsightedness on behalf of Democratic Party politicians. Despite this shortsightedness, McLaughlin argues that liberals limited get tough solutions to the field of riots. However, a new body of scholarship that holds liberals accountable for the decades-long focus on police enforcement in black communities and the expansion of the federal carceral state, which disproportionately imprisons blacks and Latinos, challenges this assertion. 7
As McLaughlin illustrates, the idea of the long, hot summer captivated the imagination not just of liberals, who spoke of the ghetto’s supposed social pathology, and conservatives, who condemned African Americans for their moral failings, but also of black militants who used the idea as a rallying cry to forge connections with a more global anticolonial community, escape the narrow confines of liberalism, and declare how far they were willing to go to achieve their political objectives. Riots were not, as Schneider contends, the last resort for a community out of options. Instead, McLaughlin contends, riots illustrated the need for radical transformations in American life and opened a window of political creativity, which found its expression in black communities that lay in ashes. But liberals refused to locate a political message in the summer unrest, continuing instead to insist that it was “the result of frustration and anger caused by discrete, specific grievances, all of which could be remedied within the existing system” (p. 98).
In the end, McLaughlin offers an engaging and streamlined national story about the failings of Great Society liberalism. By virtue of casting a wider lens, he does not always tease out local nuances. In his case study of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) Poor People’s Campaign, for example, he portrays the national demonstration as victim of the Johnson administration’s repressive surveillance measures and police tactics. The demonstration was certainly under intense surveillance thanks to unprecedented coordination between armed forces, the National Guard, and city police. But the campaign was also at the center of battles between SCLC, local civil rights activists, black politicians, and D.C. residents who had just lived through the worst riots in the capital’s history following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. one month earlier. Tensions mounted not only due to repressive law and order measures but also because SCLC waged a campaign run primarily by white organizers who focused on national concerns and ignored Washington’s radical voices, racial tensions, and local organizations. That said, McLaughlin convincingly reveals how the riots were politicized on both sides of the political divide and how they both reflected and catalyzed radicalization within communities.
Collectively, the studies reviewed here reveal how the urban poor became pitted as enemies of law and order, thereby providing political justification and popular support for the mobilization of armed forces against minority communities. In response, New Negroes and, later, Black Power activists challenged assumptions about racial inequality, citizenship, and belonging. But minorities continued to be targeted as “apostles of violence,” blamed by citizens and politicians alike for outbreaks of racial violence. Today’s #BlackLivesMatter protests may play out differently on the streets, but the messages disseminated in the press replicate those of an earlier era, at least from rightwing news outlets like Fox News. As for the courts, which both Krugler and Schneider suggest offered the possibility of legal retribution to past victims of racial violence, protesters no longer believe they offer black citizens a viable path to pursue justice against the police; in most instances, officers are cleared of wrongdoing, oftentimes before standing trial.
At the end of Police Power and Race Riots, Schneider concludes that politicians win elections by playing to racial fears, bolstered by voters who support attacks on racial and ethnic minorities in the name of security. If the cycle continues, she warns, then “racially targeted police violence will prevail” (p. 255). Perhaps this is true. But thanks to the #BlackLivesMatter campaign, activists have shone a spotlight on police abuse in cities from Chicago to New York to Ferguson, Missouri, where the Department of Justice released a sweeping condemnation of policing practices in 2015. What will happen when the national state distances itself from local police practices created by federal policies and treats cops as independent actors rather than agents of larger structural institutions? The studies examined here suggest that nothing short of political revolution will radically alter the relationships between police, federal authorities, and minority youth documented in the numerous riots taken up here, at the heart of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, or festering in Parisian estates.