3. Representatives of Their Race
1. National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Officials (NOBLE), Justice by Action (Turner Publishing, 1998), 8.
2. Thomas A. Johnson, “Black Police Officials Establish Organization in Effort to Expand Influence in Criminal Justice Field,” New York Times, September 9, 1976.
3. NOBLE, Justice by Action, 8; Johnson, “Black Police Officials Establish Organization.”
4. Athelia Knight and Eugene Robinson, “Barry Picks Maurice Turner to be D.C. Police Chief,” Washington Post, May 1, 1981.
5. James Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem,” Esquire, July 1960.
6. An indispensable historical account is W. Marvin Dulaney, Black Police in America (Indiana University Press, 1996).
7. National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places, “Armstrong Manual Training Center,” July 17, 1996, 6, 7.
8. Alison Stewart, First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America’s First Black Public High School (Lawrence Hill Books, 2013), 2.
9. National Park Service, “Armstrong Manual Training Center,” 8.
10. Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Harvard University Press, 2001), 3–4.
11. Ibid., 4.
12. Gilbert King, Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America (HarperCollins, 2012), 17, 91, 139–41.
13. Hadden, Slave Patrols, 71.
14. Dulaney, Black Police in America, 13. Although we typically think about the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause as protecting criminal defendants, central to the original vision was the promise of protection from violence. Many Reconstruction legislators argued that the Fourteenth Amendment was necessary to ensure that all citizens, including recently freed slaves, would receive state protection from private violence. See, e.g., James Forman, Jr., “Juries and Race in the Nineteenth Century,” Yale Law Journal 113 (2004): 917.
15. Harold N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the South, 1865–1890 (University of Georgia Press, 1996), 42.
16. V. L. Wharton, The Negro in Mississippi, 1865–1890 (Harper and Row, 1965), 167–68. See also Hubert Williams and Patrick V. Murphy, “The Evolving Strategy of Police: A Minority View,” Perspectives on Policing 13 (January 1990).
17. U.S. Congress, Senate, Municipal Election in Jackson, Mississippi, 50th Congress, 1st sess., 1988, S. Misc. Doc. 166.
18. Dulaney, Black Police in America, 17.
19. Ibid. Population data from “Area, Natural Resources, and Population,” Statistical Abstract of the United States 1910 (U.S. Census Bureau, 1910), 36–42.
20. Dulaney, Black Police in America, 17, 23; Robert M. Fogelson, Big-City Police (Harvard University Press, 1977), 124.
21. The Urban League survey can be found in National Urban League, “Negro Police Officers in 76 of the Largest United States Cities” (1932), Box 6: A37, Part 6: Southern Regional Office, General Office File, 1919–1979, Urban League Papers, Library of Congress. The NAACP survey can be found in “NAACP Negro police questionnaire, 1948–49,” Box II: A451, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress.
22. Charles Kirk Pilkington, “The Trials of Brotherhood: The Founding of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 69, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 55, 57.
23. Untitled report on the need for black police officers in Atlanta, Southern Regional Council (undated, appears to be from 1936), Box 6: A69, Part VI: Southern Regional Office, General Office File, 1919–1979, Urban League Papers.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. NAACP, Wanted: Negro Police for Negro Districts in Atlanta, November 1937, Box 1: G44, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress.
27. Marion E. Jackson, “Sentiment Mounts for Negro Police,” Atlanta Daily World, July 23, 1947.
28. “Speakers Voice Sentiment for Negro Police,” Atlanta Daily World, September 24, 1947.
29. “Pleas for Negro Police Heard Here Wednesday,” Atlanta Daily World, November 27, 1947.
30. William Gordon, “Atlanta Council in Wrangle Over Hiring of Negro Police,” Chicago Defender, December 6, 1947.
31. Dulaney, Black Police in America, 43.
32. “Atlanta Gets Race Police with Limited Power,” New Journal and Guide, December 6, 1947.
33. “Atlanta Council in Wrangle Over Hiring of Negro Police.”
34. Atlanta City Council Minutes, December 1, 1947, pp. 86–87, Row 5, Section B, Shelf 5, Volume 45 of Atlanta City Council 10/6/1947–5/2/1949, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center; “Council, Hartsfield Give Okay to Negro Police,” Atlanta Daily World, December 2, 1947.
35. “The Long Awaited Dream Comes True,” Atlanta Daily World, December 3, 1947.
36. Martha G. Fleming, “Atlantans Pay Tribute to City’s First Black Police,” Atlanta Daily World, November 6, 1977; Atlanta City Council Minutes, December 1, 1947, p. 87.
37. Fleming, “Atlantans Pay Tribute to City’s First Black Police.”
38. Dulaney, Black Police in America, 56; NOBLE, Justice by Action, 10.
39. C. Lamar Weaver, “New Police Welcomed to Active Duty,” Atlanta Daily World, May 2, 1948.
40. “Throngs Thrilled by New Atlanta Officers,” Atlanta Daily World, April 4, 1948.
41. Weaver, “New Police Welcomed to Active Duty.”
42. Brian N. Williams and J. Edward Kellough, “Leadership with an Enduring Impact: The Legacy of Chief Burtell Jefferson of the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, D.C.,” Public Administration Review 66 (November/December 2006): 813.
43. To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights (Government Printing Office, 1947), 89.
44. Kenesaw M. Landis, Segregation in Washington: A Report of the National Committee on Segregation in the Nation’s Capital, November 1948, 83.
45. Coates, “The Case for Reparations.”
46. Constance McLaughlin Green, The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital (Princeton University Press, 1967), 319; Martha Derthick, City Politics in Washington, D.C. (Joint Center for Urban Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, 1962), 122. In 1906, Kelly Miller, the founder of Howard University’s Sociology Department, discussed how trade unions kept blacks in low-paying jobs. “The trades unions, either by the letter of the law or by the spirit in which it is executed, effectually bar the negro from the more remunerative pursuits of trade and transportation. The negro workman is thus compelled to loiter around the outer edge of industry and to pick up such menial work or odds-and-ends pursuits as white men do not care to undertake.” Kelly Miller, “The Economic Handicap of the Negro in the North,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 27 (May 1906): 84. Little had changed in forty years.
47. Ben Segal, “The Practices of Craft Unions in Washington, D.C., with Respect to Minority Groups,” in Civil Rights in the Nation’s Capital: A Report on a Decade of Progress (National Association of Intergroup Relations Officials, 1959), 34.
48. Green, The Secret City, 319.
49. Landis, Segregation in Washington, 63.
50. Ibid., 64.