The new force radiating out from Ferguson soon reached Atlanta. On the night of September 25, 2016, it struck Tex McIver’s world like a bolt of lightning. The differences in polarity between the negative cultural electrons of Tex’s apparent fear of black people and the positrons of the Black Lives Matter movement ignited that strike. Try as he might, Tex could not roll back the booming flash that he had fairly asked for.
A continuous chain of new cases of allegedly racist police shootings and law enforcement brutality all across America added new energy and new focal points for the umbrella of black activism that is typically described collectively as the Black Lives Matter movement.[1] Surprisingly (or not), no government agency maintains a comprehensive database of “officer-involved” shootings, much less complaints of lesser brutality. A Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) database relies on voluntary reports from local police agencies but only logs about half of all police shootings nationwide, according to the Washington Post newspaper. The paper has filled much of the void with its online database of shootings by on-duty police officers, starting in 2015. The database shows that police officers consistently shoot about one thousand people a year. Half of those shot are white. But in 2020 blacks made up only 13.4 percent of the U.S. population, compared to whites at 76.3 percent.[2] Given this gross difference in population, blacks are shot by police at a demonstrably higher rate than whites.[3]
Georgia was no different, according to a comprehensive investigation by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2015. The newspaper reported that only sixteen of more than six hundred police agencies in Georgia reported their police shooting data to the FBI. The investigation found twice as many police shootings in Georgia than were reported to the federal agency.[4]
Database or not, names like Eric Garner, who died in July 2014 while locked in an unlawful police chokehold by a New York City police officer; Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old boy shot to death by Cleveland police while playing with a toy gun in November 2014; and Freddie Gray, a Baltimore man who died in a police van under suspicious circumstances in April 2015, have been memorialized. No longer were stories like theirs reported only as “a small blurb in the local daily paper” that quickly faded from memory—they became “the lead story on the national news” and began to have national impact in politics and policy thinking.[5]
In the two years preceding Diane McIver’s death, the network of remembrance and protest spread to Atlanta.
Georgia was fertile ground, according to two polls released by the Atlanta Journal Constitution newspaper in January 2015. One poll found that less than half of Georgians thought that race relations in America had improved in the thirty years since 1985. The majority was split between those who thought that things had gotten worse and those who thought they had stayed the same. There was little difference between the races in these overall views of relations between them.[6]
A more dramatic divide was revealed by the other poll, which looked at views about the criminal justice system in general and the police in particular. More than half of Georgians thought blacks and other minorities were not treated with the same dignity and respect as whites in Georgia’s criminal justice system. Only a bare majority of 52 percent were confident that blacks and whites get equal treatment from police in Georgia.
The racial differences of opinion were stark regarding police treatment. A total of 85 percent of black respondents thought that the criminal justice system was not colorblind—only 36 percent of whites felt the same. And where 75 percent of black respondents thought that police didn’t treat them equally with whites, 70 percent of whites thought that the opposite was true.[7]
This division in the views of blacks and whites was not unique to Georgia. A Pew Research Center report in October 2017 found that the national partisan divide in views on racial equity had grown over the past several decades. Democrats were increasingly likely to take racially liberal positions, whereas Republican views remained relatively stable. A total of 81 percent of Democrats thought the country should do more to promote equal rights for blacks, whereas only 36 percent of Republicans thought so. More than 80 percent of blacks thought more needed to be done.[8] The partisan division over issues of race and law enforcement remains a major source of deep polarization in American society and politics.
Mary Hooks, an Atlanta activist, traveled to Ferguson to join the protests after Michael Brown’s death. Organizers in Ferguson urged supporters like Hooks to return to their homes and raise issues of law enforcement violence in their own communities.[9] Back in Atlanta, Brooks connected with another activist, Dre Propst. The two organized the standing-room-only inaugural meeting of the Atlanta chapter on December 17, 2015, at the Big Bethel A.M.E. church on Auburn Avenue.[10] In Hooks’s view, the new movement was about more than black men being killed by police. It extended as well to the lack of affordable housing, high unemployment rates and poverty levels, and substandard public education.[11]
The new movement was born out of a new generation with a new voice and a new way of doing things.
“This is not your granddaddy’s civil rights movement,” said Mary Hooks. “We’re not sitting around and waiting for someone in a suit to come save us.” She described the new movement as “a polarizing force in Atlanta, a group that will make people choose sides.”[12]
The older generation of activists were confounded more by the confrontational attitude of the millennials of Generations X, Y, and Z, and their ways of organizing social action, than by their substantive demands. “The city of Atlanta is having a real problem when it comes to social activism and the new school leaders that are rising,” journalist Mo Barnes wrote in Rolling Out magazine. “No longer is Atlanta seeing social movements that have roots in the Black church, but rather movements that have roots in social media, coffee shops, living rooms and the streets by young millennials.”[13]
Some black leaders were outspoken in their criticism of the new movement. Andrew Young, an icon of the older generation and former mayor of Atlanta, called the new activists “brats” while speaking to members of the Atlanta Police Department.[14] Young reportedly thought that the activists of the new generation were not making any real sacrifices comparable to the ones that he and his peers made. “I knew I was gonna get beat up when I confronted the police, but they know they’re gonna get away with it,” Young, then eighty-four years old, was quoted as saying. “It’s a cheap shot.”[15] Another older generation leader, Bernard Lafayette, who was active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, criticized the new movement’s lack of a hierarchical national organization. “It’s one thing to have protests,” he said. “It’s another thing to have a movement.”[16]
The more youthful activists were just as outspoken in their criticisms of the old guard and in some cases of the “Atlanta Way” in general.
“We’re tired of marching, singing ‘We shall overcome,’” Atlanta chapter co-founder Dre Propst said.[17] “It’s like we live in a dystopian future where all the civil rights leaders have gone wrong,” said one twenty-two-year old college student. Another said, “Young people think the NAACP is a group that speaks but doesn’t act.”[18]
A deeper current ran through the young activists’ criticisms. Some claimed that the lauded “Atlanta Way” worked only for Atlanta’s black elite, who were accused of ignoring the city’s black poor. “The city too busy to hate is also too busy to care about people that they’ve left behind,” said Khalid Kamau, a Democratic national convention delegate for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.[19]
Eventually leaders of the older generation either learned to work together under the umbrella of Black Lives Matter or were simply made irrelevant by the new wave’s operational methods. “In the 1960s, organizing and informing students was likely a function of underground newspapers,” wrote one analyst. “Today, a protest is just a tweet away, and social media is used to keep college students connected and engaged during school breaks.”[20] Whereas old-style protests were the products of a careful process of planning meetings, training sessions, and marshals monitoring the conduct of demonstrators, the new protests were often spontaneous, fluid confrontations. “The hashtags, like #ICantBreathe and #NoJusticeNoPeace, gave the Black Lives Matter movement visibility,” according to an analysis by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “People knew what to search to find out who was leading the rallies both in the streets and online.”[21]
Polling showed that the opinions of Americans about police behavior and the Black Lives Matter movement were sharply divided along racial lines at the same time that the movement was taking root in Atlanta.
A PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll in September 2015 found that, when asked whether African Americans and whites have the same opportunity for equal justice under the law, 87 percent of African Americans said no and 11 percent said yes. On the other hand, 50 percent of whites said yes and 46 percent said no. Regarding Black Lives Matter specifically, 65 percent of African Americans thought it focused attention on the real issues of racial discrimination. Only 25 percent of whites agreed that the movement focused on real issues. A total of 59 percent of whites thought that Black Lives Matter distracted attention from the real issues of racial discrimination, an assessment with which only 26 percent of African Americans agreed.[22]
A New York Times/CBS News poll in July 2016 asked Americans whether police are more likely to use deadly force against a black person than a white person. Three-quarters of African Americans respondents answered yes. But only about half as many white people agreed. A total of 56 percent of whites thought that the race of a suspect made no difference in the use of force. Only 18 percent of black Americans said race made no difference in police treatment. Asked to rate their local police department, four out of five whites said the department was doing an excellent or good job. A majority of blacks answered that their department was doing only a fair or poor job. More than two-fifths of black people said the police made them feel more anxious than safe, while whites and Hispanics said police make them feel safer.[23]
These different views about law enforcement were reflected in answers to the same poll’s questions about the aims and the approach of the Black Lives Matter movement. A total of 70 percent of African Americans sympathized with the movement, compared with only 37 percent of whites. Among all Americans, 41 percent agreed with the movement, 25 percent disagreed, and 29 percent had no opinion either way. Support correlated directly with age. A total of 50 percent of adults younger than thirty agreed with the movement, compared to 20 percent who disagreed. Among adults forty-five and older, 36 percent agreed and 29 percent disagreed.[24]
But a significant change—perhaps driven by universal outrage over the widely publicized death of George Floyd under a policeman’s knee in Minneapolis—became apparent in the spring of 2020. White opinion swung around to largely approve of the movement. One factor at work was the impact of social media, which enabled young black persons to document interactions with police that they thought were unjust. This documentation “exposed their white friends and family members to their experiences.”[25] “Public opinion on race and criminal justice issues has been steadily moving left since the first protests ignited over the fatal shootings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown,” wrote a pair of writers for the New York Times in June 2020. “And since the death of George Floyd in police custody on May 25, public opinion on race, criminal justice and the Black Lives Matter movement has leaped leftward.”[26]
It is fairly obvious on which side of the divide in opinion Diane and Tex McIver fell, given their demographics and sponsorship of a Blue Lives Matter sign. Like Black Lives Matter, the Blue Lives Matter movement is a loosely organized national coalition. It is widely seen as “a rebuttal to Black Lives Matter . . . [insisting] that we pay more attention to killer cops than to cops killed in the line of duty.”[27] A series of demonstrations in Atlanta from early July until the very day that Tex shot Diane in the back brought the Black Lives Matter movement to their door.
Black Lives Matter activists originally marched in Atlanta to protest the deaths of two African American men who were shot to death by police within two days of each other in other cities. Demonstrators would soon focus on police shootings in Georgia. In the meantime, a mass shooting of police officers in Dallas sparked angry criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement.
On July 5, 2016, Alton Sterling, a thirty-seven-year-old black man, was shot dead at close range by two white police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The next day a white police officer in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, shot to death another black man, Philando Castile. On Friday, July 8, protestors took to the streets in cities across America. One of the largest protests was in Atlanta, where ten thousand were reported to have joined a march through downtown.[28]
On the same day as these demonstrations, a black gunman opened fire from a parking building on police officers who were on duty monitoring the march in Dallas. Five officers—Lorne Ahrens, Michael Krol, Michael J. Smith, Brent Thompson, and Patrick Zamarripa—were killed by the sniper. Seven other officers and two civilians were wounded. The shooter told police during an ensuing standoff that “he was upset about the recent police shootings . . . [and] wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”[29] The standoff ended when the shooter, an Army veteran, was killed by a bomb-bearing police robot.
The confluence of Black Lives Matter demonstrations and the murder of five police officers ignited a furious backlash from law enforcement officials and conservative opinion makers. Among the latter was Derryck Green, a member of a national network of black conservatives. In an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution two weeks later, Green attacked the Black Lives Matter movement, declaring that “movement activists have intentionally increased its inflammatory anti-white racial hatred . . . [and] defiantly increased its anti-cop rhetoric.” Black Lives Matter, Green charged, “was indeed the catalyst for [the Dallas shooter] to act on his racial anger and paranoia.”[30]
The Dallas police shooting and the criticisms it generated did not stop Atlanta’s activists from continuing to demonstrate throughout the next week. The new movement’s eagerness for direct and uncomfortable confrontations brought them to Buckhead, where they aimed directly at the upscale lifestyle of its white elite and high-end shopping centers. “We want to be able to touch this demographic here,” one activist leader said.[31] The demographic there included the McIvers.
Mayor Kasim Reed eventually agreed to meet with some of the protest leaders. The amorphous nature of Black Lives Matter leadership led to friction and criticism about the meeting from within the movement.[32] Atlanta’s police force earned praise from both the mayor and black leaders for its restraint in handling the protests.[33] Richard Rose, president of the Atlanta branch of the NAACP, called police behavior “exemplary.”[34] Observers beamed about the Atlanta Way. “Part of the winning formula was one employed by Police Chief George Turner in having police not arrive in riot gear,” columnist Bill Torpy wrote. “If you don’t start out antagonistic, then things are less likely to slide into chaos.”[35]
(Four years later, in June 2020, things would change. Police, “most protected by full body armor and face shields,” fired tear gas and nonlethal projectiles to break up a demonstration in front of the state capitol. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the incident was an example of “the combative tactics that law enforcement agencies have used to suppress the uprising sparked by the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.”[36])
By the end of September, when Tex and Diane spent their last weekend at the ranch, demonstrators in Atlanta had zeroed in on police actions in Atlanta and were again on the march, including regular disruptive visits to Buckhead.
There was reason enough. A study of police shootings in Georgia published by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in December 2015 found that almost half of the 184 Georgians shot and killed by police since 2010 were unarmed or shot in the back. About three out of five blacks were unarmed or shot in the back, compared to about two out of five whites. A total of 78 percent of the officers who discharged their weapons were white. And police fatally shot black residents at a rate twice that of whites.
By no means were all of these police shootings unjustified. A majority of the 184 shootings analyzed by the newspaper involved “dangerous situations with people who were threatening the officers or others with guns or other weapons. About one-quarter had discharged a firearm before or during the fatal encounter with police. But when the shooting appeared questionable, the system always ruled in favor of the officer.”[37]
There was a systematic reason embedded within Georgia’s criminal justice system that tipped the odds in favor of the rare police officer who was charged with a crime after shooting someone. Until recently, Georgia was the only state in the union that gave police officers the right to sit in on the entire deliberations of any grand jury looking at their conduct. Witnesses are not allowed to hear the testimony of other witnesses before grand juries, to maintain the secrecy of the proceedings and to prevent their tailoring their testimony based on what they hear others say. In federal grand jury proceedings, for example, only the jurors, the prosecutor, the witness being questioned, a court reporter, and interpreter (if needed) may be in the courtroom during the hearing.[38] In Georgia practice, police officers not only had the right to sit in on other witnesses’ testimony, but were privileged to give a statement at the end of the grand jury’s deliberations that could not be questioned by prosecutors or grand jurors.[39]
Faced with mounting criticism about the unbalanced scale of Georgia’s grand jury proceedings, the state legislature changed the rules. Today, Georgia law enforcement officers under scrutiny are no longer allowed to sit in on the testimony of others. If they choose to make a statement before the grand jury, they are now subject to the usual process of questioning by grand jurors and cross-examination by prosecutors. In the opinion of some observers, these changes “leveled the playing field.”[40] A final test before the new rules went into effect was coming. An Atlanta police officer’s shooting of an unarmed black man on June 22, 2016, caught the attention of Black Lives Matter activists, who warned that they were watching how the case was handled.
The basic facts were fairly simple. Police officer James R. Burns responded to a nighttime call for backup from an off-duty officer who had spotted a “suspicious person” in an apartment complex. As Burns drove into the complex, he saw a vehicle’s headlights turn on. The car drove toward Burns’s car. A black man, Deravis Caine Rogers, was behind the wheel. Rather than stopping when Burns flashed his blue lights, Rogers drove around Burns’s vehicle. Burns shot into the moving vehicle as it passed him, without knowing who the driver was or anything about him. A bullet struck Rogers in the head, killing him.
The police department’s internal affairs investigation determined that Burns had no reason to fear for his life. His shooting into Rogers’s car and killing him was therefore an unnecessary, excessive use of force. Burns was fired within days of the shooting. In a move credited with defusing tensions over the police shooting death, Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard did not wait for a grand jury to act. He charged Burns with felony murder, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and violation of his oath of office.[41]
A grand jury was convened at the end of August 2016. A consortium of activists including Black Lives Matter held an overnight vigil at the courthouse to draw attention to the case.[42] The grand jury was operating under the old rules, so Burns was allowed to sit in. Nevertheless, the next day the grand jury indicted Burn on five felony counts: murder, aggravated assault, two counts of violating his oath of office, and one count of making a false statement.[43] This indictment was quashed because of an evidentiary technicality before the grand jury.
Burns was promptly indicted a second time. But at this writing, four years later, his case has still not gone to trial.
While the McIvers were spending their last weekend at the ranch in Eatonton, protesters were raising the ante in Atlanta. Activists marched in both downtown Atlanta and Buckhead on Friday night, September 23, and Saturday, September 24. Tex shot Diane the night of Sunday, September 25.
“It is in fact an escalation,” NAACP Chapter President Francys Johnson said of the Friday night downtown march. “We aren’t asking anymore. We’re demanding.”[44] One of the organizers of the Buckhead protest complained that white police officers involved in killings of black people protected such wealthy areas and shopped in them. Police, he said, “murder us and slaughter us through the streets of our neighborhood and then they run back here to Buckhead, where they continue business as usual.”[45]
The protests continued on Saturday, when entrances to the Lenox Square Mall in Buckhead were temporarily blocked.[46] On Sunday, the day the McIvers played their last round of golf together in Putnam County, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a lengthy frontpage profile of the Black Lives Matter movement and its origins.[47]
If Tex McIver was telling the truth, whatever else was on his mind, and however unreasonable his fear might be judged, he was probably aware of the weekend’s demonstrations in Atlanta and Buckhead. But there was something else that informed the views of Tex McIver, most white Americans, and the nation’s police forces on the Black Lives Matter phenomenon. That something else is the lens of racial perception created by centuries of slavery and by the Jim Crow era’s attacks on people of color.
In its simplest articulation, police violence against black people is blamed on racial bias. Police officers are easily dismissed in this view as simply and inherently “racist.” There are other strong forces at work, however. These include a universal culture of police organizations, increased militarization of law enforcement and a corollary “warrior” attitude, unrealistic expectations that policy-makers have piled on police forces’ missions, networks of cultural and political support that defend police violence as necessary to keep law and order, and infiltration to some degree of law enforcement ranks by white supremacists and related vigilante groups.
“[T]he behavior of police only makes sense when viewed through the lens of culture,” John P. Crank, a professor of sociology and criminology, wrote in Understanding Police Culture.[48]
There are many views of what culture is generally and what police culture is in particular. To Crank, culture is “how we act out our moral and social identities.” It is not something apart from who we, including police officers, are. It is rather “a self-affirming blend of our traditions—the world past—and the world of today that we see around us and on which we act.”[49] With a few moments of thought, one can easily generate a long list of subcultures that define each of us in many such ways, some of which we might move in and out of in a single day—the culture of professional athletes, an office or corporate culture, the culture of academia, the culture of a religious denomination, the cultures of ethnic and gender identities, the culture of gun enthusiasts, and so forth. These cultures help define who we are and what we do.
Police culture “covers a lot of intellectual and emotional territory,” Crank writes. He summed that territory up as follows:
Police organizational structures, policies, behaviors, arrest patterns, corruption, education, training practices, attitudes toward suspects and citizens, forms of patrol, and all other areas of police work—the whole ball of wax—are witnessed and practiced through the lens of culture. All areas of police work have meaning of some kind to cops, and as every reformer and chief who has sought to change any organization knows, these meanings tend to bind together in sentiments and values impossible to analytically separate and individually change.[50]
Crank examines in convincing detail what he calls the component “themes” of the police culture. These themes include the patrol officers’ need for territorial dominion over their beat, police use of sanctioned force, the gun culture endemic to American policing, police officers’ abiding suspicion of situations and of people inherent in the ambiguous “twilight world” in which police operate, danger and anticipation of danger, the need to keep an “edge” to dominate dangerous people and control situations, police solidarity, and the moral judgments that police make about the civilian citizenry (their “other”), and other factors.
The use of force is the most emotionally charged of these themes of police culture. Crank suggests it puts the police in a difficult bind. “We want police to use force when they must, but to avoid it unless absolutely necessary,” he writes. “We then ask cops to deal with our most profound social problems and to use whatever force is necessary to shelter us from the criminal and the uncivilized. We complain bitterly when police do not quickly resolve problems we ourselves cannot handle. It is a contradictory and impossible responsibility.”[51]
In sum, we have criminalized and then handed to police in America a bundle of our most difficult and complex social problems—drug abuse, homelessness, untreated mental illness, domestic abuse, and illegal immigration, among others, all fairly crackling with the potential for some level of violence. We then act as if society’s job is done. But the job is not done at all. The underlying structural problems still exist. When one of these problems pops out of the seams of society, we expect the police to push the problem back into the invisible underworld, with force if necessary—but not with too much force, a blurred line that we are happy to sharpen retrospectively.
Georgia police officials described the problem in the context of the July 2016 meeting of protestors with Atlanta’s mayor. “Law enforcement today is not so much crime-fighter—you are a social worker with a gun,” Doraville Police Chief John King said. Dunwoody Police Chief Billy Grogan echoed the thought. “Law enforcement is on the front line and it has to deal with a lot of bigger society issues, such as substance abuse and mental health issues and a lack of educational opportunities, unemployment, single-parent homes. . . . All those kinds of issues somehow or another get woven into what we have to do in our jobs.”[52]
Given the scope of their charge, police and the police culture constantly interact with people of all races, ethnicities, and socio-economic status. Whether it’s a burglary of our premises, being stopped for a traffic offense, or reporting the obnoxious and apparently threatening public behavior of a ranting mentally ill person, sooner or later most Americans are going to have some contact with the police, acting in one of the many roles that we have assigned them. White people also get stopped, questioned, and arrested. But race and racially sorted signals often determine how interactions with police are handled and their end results.
“Police behavior is mobilized by characteristics of dress, behavior, and attitudes,” Crank observes. “These are often associated with membership in minority groups. The color of someone’s skin, style of dress, or accent—symbols of cultural difference—become symbolic shorthand for identifying suspicious characters.”[53]
As much as structural factors inherent in police culture help explain the attitudes of police toward blacks and ethnic minority communities, there is another, much greater force at work everywhere in America. Crank argues that effectively dealing with this problem is neither a question of sorting out “bad apples” nor one of re-educating officers who have racist or prejudiced personal attitudes (however useful these efforts may be). To come to grips with the force driving police racism we must “look at the history of police in the United States to understand how racism has been a pervasive characteristic since [police] agencies were first founded.”[54]
The problem by no means ends with a review of police history and its effects. Society’s rule makers today still exploit the mechanisms of law and order for their own class benefits. “The police do what we want them to do. They cannot change because we will not change.”[55] We live in “a self-described free society that is unable to cope with the most consequential problems of simple human equality, lacking even a common language that would allow us to speak about shared values.” We hide behind tough law enforcement to protect our economic interests and personal wealth, and to keep “dangerous” persons, real or imagined, away from us. Our politics is “too often a charade of moral righteousness and chastising zeal” through which we “justify outrageous punishments for inconsequential crimes, destroying generations of Black youth through imprisonment, and through the panopticon of a growing urban gulag in many of our largest cities.”[56]
In the twenty-first century, lacking a meaningful or even civil language, our on-the-ground discourse has in its worst form become shouts and cries among baton-wielding armored police, torch-bearing rioters, and heavily armed vigilantes, increasingly punctuated by gunshots.
History, heritage, and legacy are curious subjects in American cultural discourse. In some contexts, we are happy to acknowledge the effects of the past on our lives today. In other contexts, we ignore or deny the same mechanism of past cause and present effect.
We are quite willing to acknowledge what we deem to be the good and noble effects of people like George Washington and events like the Revolutionary War in the historical past. We praise them as the events and the people that made America great. At the same time, we prefer to turn our faces away from the ugly events and people in our past, and their consequences for today—slave masters, ethnic cleansing, land theft, slavery, and government-imposed and -supported racial and ethnic discrimination and oppression.
Why do many American minds have so much difficulty discussing, much less acknowledging, the very real effects on today’s society and culture that slavery, the systematic oppression of the Jim Crow era, and enforced segregation have had? This is a conversation that we often talk about having, usually in times of racial stress, but rarely get around to engaging in any sort of common language. On the contrary, the languages spoken on opposing sides of the trenches of a polarized America use the very same words—freedom, opportunity, fairness, and so forth—to mean very different things.
Some black minds share this aversion to our ignoble history and its effects. “[F]or some African Americans stories of slavery should be erased as well because they are shameful and better forgotten. For, they argue . . . such stories are likely to disempower contemporary generations of African Americans.”[57]
In one way, this inability to talk about the unpleasant things in our national past is the inverse of the mass mind’s inability to grasp the long-term, incremental future effects of human-caused environmental degradation. Like so many dung beetles, we can seemingly only roll today’s ball of clay a few inches forward, heedless of the unpleasant horizon looming ahead of us. Whither we are bound we know not. Nor do we much care to know. Just so, the selectively closed mind cannot or will not look critically back at the horizon receding behind it. That mind cannot or will not grasp that the bad things and bad people of the past have affected the present as much as the good things and the good people. Nor can it conceive of the possibility that the good people of the past may actually have a mixed record and have even been downright evil in some ways. Such a mind in denial can only belligerently insist that what’s done is done and “no one in my family ever owned a slave.”
In another way, the closed mind is plainly a result of ignorance, of an educational system that has erased the bad part of history and distorted the good.
Even when we force ourselves to look back at slavery, the vast majority of Americans think of it as a relatively tiny historical cul-de-sac, nestled somewhere inconsequential in the piney woods of the South, definitely off of the great and inspiring interstate highway of American history. “Generally, Americans believe that slavery was an exclusively southern phenomenon. They date it from the decades immediately preceding the Civil War, and think of it as a relatively minor part of the American story.”[58] Okay, we are inclined to think, there were some charming old plantations and life may have been tough for the slaves (or not, for those who hold to the Lost Cause myth of slaveholder paternalism). But that was just a weird agricultural side show that had nothing to do with the dynamic engine of capitalism, liberty, and frontier grit that swept America to greatness.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Slavery was not a cul-de-sac off of the American mainstream. Slavery’s norms and its brutal production of wealth lay at the beating heart of the great American engine of free enterprise and free men. Slavery and cotton literally made the economy of post-Colonial America, which was cut off from the benefits of the erstwhile mother country’s system of trade. Slavery’s wealth production, the cotton trade, laid the financial foundation that made possible the brawn of America of today. And its scars still mar the face of our society.
The roots of this ignorance of history can be found in the American educational system. A typical public school textbook of the late 1940s and 1950s—when many of American leaders of today and the recent past were getting their basic education—told students that “the abolition of slavery may not have been the best thing for blacks because ‘slaves had snug cabins to live in, plenty of food to eat and work that was not too hard for them to do.’ Then, as if to reaffirm the expected student conclusions, the text added, ‘Most of the slaves seemed happy and contented.’”[59] College textbooks written by acclaimed historians were even worse. In 1950, one of the most popular college textbooks, written by Samuel Eliot Morrison and Henry Steele Commager “suggested that white abolitionists may have been more upset about slavery than were the slaves themselves. ‘As for Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears,’ they argued, ‘there is reason to believe that he suffered less than any other class in the south from the “peculiar institution.”’”[60]
History education today is not much better. A total of 80 percent of the nation’s colleges do not require education in American history. It is therefore not surprising that in a recent survey a majority of college students “could not identify such names as Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson, and many believed that George Washington was the president during the War of 1812 . . . many students in the South believe that Jefferson Davis was president of the United States during the Civil War.”[61] Distortions such as these are actively promoted by such groups as the United Sons of Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the Southern Heritage Coalition.[62]
When historians talk about slavery and its effects, they are often charged with “presentism,” that is, using twenty-first-century morality to judge the past. “Yet twenty-first-century Americans cannot excuse those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the argument that they were simply conforming to the accepted norms of their era, for many in the Revolutionary era understood the contradiction clearly and said so.”[63]
In terms of the law and law enforcement, American slavery embodied the “inside/outside” system that historian Sven Beckert described in his master work about plantation slavery and its worldwide effects, Empire of Cotton. Beckert contrasted the rules of law that imperial powers, such as colonial Great Britain, observed within their own countries for their native citizens, and the very different rules that they imposed for naked gain on the people that they conquered and exploited:
The “inside” encompassed the laws, institutions, and customs of the mother country, where state-enforced order ruled. The “outside,” by contrast, was characterized by imperial domination, the expropriation of vast territories, decimation of indigenous peoples, theft of their resources, enslavement, and the domination of vast tracts of land by private capitalists with little effective oversight by distant European states. In these imperial dependencies, the rules of the insider did not apply. There, masters trumped states, violence defied the law, and bold physical coercion by private actors remade markets.[64]
What were the most basic rights of the “inside” system of Great Britain, the imperial power from which the legal system of the American colonies and the United States sprang? In the mid-eighteenth century, shortly before the American Revolution, an English jurist and legal scholar, Sir William Blackstone, published a set of books titled Commentaries on the Laws of England in which he set out a precise and vigorous answer to that question.
American legal scholar Albert W. Alschuler called the Commentaries “the most influential law book in Anglo-American history.”[65] The books had a major impact on the development of American common law. They are still occasionally cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in its discussions of the historical roots of modern law.[66] One thousand copies of the English edition of what is popularly known simply as “Blackstone” were sold in the American Colonies before the first American edition appeared in 1772. One year before the Declaration of Independence, Edmund Burke remarked that nearly as many copies of the Commentaries had been sold on the American side of the Atlantic as on the English side. Chief Justice John Marshall and President Abraham Lincoln were among the many American luminaries who read the Commentaries not only for their education in the law (there were no law schools in their times) but also for their general education. Historian Daniel Boorstin said that no book other than the Bible had so great an influence on the development of American institutions.
Blackstone wrote about the most fundamental rights of the English people in a powerful exposition. He declared that all individuals possess three “absolute rights, . . . vested in them by the immutable laws of nature.” These were the rights of personal security (“a person’s . . . enjoyment of his life, his limbs, his body, his health, and his reputation”), personal liberty, and private property. This right to personal liberty “consists in the power of . . . removing one’s person to whatsoever place one’s own inclination may direct without imprisonment or restraint unless by due course of law. . . . [I]t is a right strictly natural [and] the laws of England have never abridged it without sufficient cause.”[67]
Notwithstanding Blackstone’s influence on American legal thought, his stirring declaration of the “absolute rights” of individuals was turned inside out for black people by the mechanisms of the inside/outside system that were a central part of America’s legal system for most of its history (and in the opinion of some a system still central today).
Rather than having a right to own private property, black slaves were the property of their white masters, conceptually no different from those same masters’ cattle, dining room tables, or bedsteads. The rights of personal security—“the enjoyment of his life, his limbs, his body, his health, and his reputation”—and personal liberty—“removing one’s person to whatsoever place one’s own inclination may direct without imprisonment or restraint”—were simply erased for black slaves and free blacks.
For the most part, this perversion of the rights declared in one form or another from the Magna Carta of 1215 to the Declaration of Independence in 1776 was driven by the engine of economic greed. Slaves were essential tools of the industrial or factory system of agricultural production embodied in the plantation, and the work demanded of them—forced upon them—could not or would not be done as profitably by free persons.
But from the most ancient of times another dark, primal force drove that part of the law of slavery that dealt with the definition of crimes, the “law and order” enforcement mechanism, and state-sanctioned punishments. That force was fear. The criminal justice system for slaves has always been ultimately based on brutal and cynically instructive force inspired by the blood-cold, stomach-churning, tingling fear of the slave by the master.
Slavery has been around since at least the beginning of recorded time. It has always been cruel, and it has always been based on physical violence. There has never been a benign slavery, except in the counterfactual narratives of Lost Cause fantasists, the narcotic dreams of generally misguided but in some case outright racist academics, and the confabulations of cynical and ignorant politicians.
The violence that sustains slavery is potential as well as kinetic.
Not every slave in history has been branded, kicked, punched, hung in excruciating pain from their thumbs or elbows, made to stand for hours under a blazing sun or in a freezing winter’s cold, repeatedly raped, whipped with sticks or leather lashes, stabbed, mutilated, castrated, had their breasts cut off, been beaten to death, shot to death, starved to death, or worked to death. They didn’t have to be. The horrific suffering and brutal deaths of individual slaves in all of these ways and means served well enough to forcefully evidence the master’s limitless, unquestioned power over the mass of his slaves.
Even nominally free persons can be induced to endure oppression and obey unpleasant orders with only a modicum of actually imposed violence. The state’s mere potential power to inflict violent pain is often enough to ensure servitude. Thus the great bulk of the good citizens of authoritarian regimes have concluded that overt resistance will only result in pain or death that they can otherwise avoid by simply going along with the state’s mandates and following the herd. What happens in the bloody cellars of the secret police, or in the nominally secret but usually well-known hell of state concentration camps is best ignored for one’s own good and the good of one’s family.
Beyond naked power, the victims of state violence are often transformed into enemies of the people. The nation’s good citizens are persuaded that the state’s victims deserve every bit of pain inflicted on them—Jews, Roma people, Armenians, Kurds, homosexuals, political prisoners, undocumented aliens, black slaves, and people of color. The list is endless.
This potential for violence, whether arbitrary in an instant or calculated as a behavioral norm, is where the narrative of paternal or benevolent slavery crashes on the rocks of reality. No matter how “kind” or “benevolent” a master or mistress (and, yes, there were many female slave mistresses in the antebellum South) might have been—putting aside for the sake of argument the underlying and ineradicable brutality of involuntary servitude—a split second’s anger, displeasure, drunken rage, psychopathic whim, or even the petulance of a slave master’s child could and often enough did result in horrific consequences for the slaves of “benevolent” masters throughout history.
Slave masters have also always known that the potential for violence is a two-way street. Behind the mask of the slave’s compliance lay a face twisted in a howl of pain and anger.
Slavery’s apologetic fabulists—including the American historians discussed earlier—have spun gauzy narratives of the slave’s contentment with, even grateful submission to, the fantastic benefits of human bondage. But history has proven time and again that within every slave lies the potential to strike out against the master for freedom, revenge, or simply a moment’s dignity. Resistance and rebellion lay deeply coiled under every slave system. To claim otherwise, to insist that slaves actually liked being slaves—as America’s smugly libertarian slaveholders ironically often did to justify their own savage inhumanity—is to deny the core premise of human dignity upon which the noble ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are supposedly based.
It is also to ignore evidence of slave discontent from the revolt led by the Roman slave Spartacus in 73–71 BCE, to Toussaint l’Overture’s rebellion in Saint Domingue (Haiti) at the turn of the nineteenth century, to Nat Turner’s Rebellion in Virginia in 1831, and to scores of other acts of organized, violent resistance throughout history and geography—not to mention the supposedly compliant slaves’ subtle daily sabotage or quiet defiance and obstruction of the master’s ends. Barns were burned, tools were broken, and masters were poisoned by resistors who are nameless today.
Rome’s slaveholders knew and feared the self-evident fact of the potential for violent slave resistance. The wisest among them warned slaveholders that they had as many enemies as they had slaves. Cruel and collective punishments of Roman slaves were intended precisely to fend off or contain slave resistance.
Historians of slavery caution that the nature and conditions of any system of slavery are not static over time or place. To speak of the slavery of Greece, Rome, the West Indies, or the United States is to telescope into a single discussion at least decades and more often centuries of dynamic and multi-faceted institutions that adapted to economic fortunes and misfortunes, changes in supply and demand, wars, turmoil in governments, and pandemic diseases that wiped out local labor forces. The first slaves in the American colonies in the seventeenth century were ensnared in an institution that was very different from the plantation slavery of the early nineteenth century.
Nevertheless, there are certain fundamental conditions in addition to violence with which it is possible to characterize a system of slavery, even over long periods of time and across wide stretches of geographic place. One of these is the difference between a society with slaves and a slave society.
A society with slaves is one in which slavery is permitted and common, but not central to the regime’s economy. This is not to say that slaves were not integrated into the economy of a society with slaves. They might indeed have been laborers, skilled artisans, or extraordinary household or business managers as well as household servants. But even had these slaves disappeared, the social and economic life of that time and place would have gone on more or less unchanged.
In slave societies, on the other hand, the forced labor of slaves was essential to and in many cases the very foundation of that society’s social and economic life. Take away slavery and that time and place would suffer catastrophic economic and cultural collapse. The plantation slavery of the United States in the nineteenth century is an example of a slave society.
Another universal measure that one can use to describe slavery is that of race. Throughout most of the history of slavery from ancient times, race was irrelevant, no more than an incidental, largely unnoticed, and unremarkable characteristic of any given slave. Human beings of all races and ethnicities were enslaved for reasons other than their race. They were often the defeated warriors and hapless masses of people made subject to conquerors. In some times and places, they were simply human units of supply in a brutal trade that connected a supply of humans with distant demands for labor or servants. The very word “slave” derives from such a traffic in white Slavs of eastern Europe.
In the slave system of British North America, however, race became the very mark of a slave. To be black was not only a marker of race. It raised the legal presumption that the person so marked was—and inescapably should be—a slave. To be white raised the contrary presumption—that person was a free person. Some of the most contentious litigation in American legal history was brought by persons seeking either to prove that they were “white” and therefore free, or to prove that another person was black and therefore a slave. Suspicions raised outside of the courtroom often plagued white social life when a person was thought not to “look” or “act” white. These divisions between black and white and suspicions about where a person belonged also informed the actions of persons charged with keeping social order, from civilian neighbors, to organized slave patrols, and eventually to police establishments.
How the American system of slavery arrived and spread into a slave society based on race is a tale driven by the rise of the industrial production of two commodities—sugar and cotton—and the demands for labor and land that production demanded. It is also a tale of the surrender and distortion of state governance and religious doctrine to the naked greed and moral disintegration of the wealthy masters of those industrial enterprises.
Sweets have been valued from the earliest days of humanity. For most of history, sweets came from the products of the humble bee—honey. The first dated reference to honeybees was in Egypt about 5500 BCE. When humanity learned to produce sugar from cane, honey was pushed to the margins.
Sugar cane is native to Polynesia. It was first refined into sugar in India, about 700 BCE. For the next two thousand years, sugar cane moved westward. By the eighth century CE, production of sugar from cane was thriving in the Mediterranean basin, where Muslims established the first plantations to produce sugar. The plantation was not a new technology but a new way of organizing work—to structure human units to efficiently make a product grown and processed in one place and transported for profit to another.
Christians pushed the Muslims out and took over the trade, moving sugar plantations further and further west, first to Spain’s Canary Islands (off the coast of Morocco) and then in a great leap across the Atlantic to the New World. Sugar cane was introduced first to the island of Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and then to Brazil in the 1500s. Sugar cane production required intensive labor from a large work force. Slaves purchased from Africa provided that labor. A Brazilian saying went: “Without sugar, no Brazil; without slaves, no sugar; without Angola, no slaves.”
The next major leap was what was called the “Sugar Revolution” in the British West Indies. It began in Barbados, from which thousands of small British farmers were leaving. Many of them went to British North America—the Carolinas and Virginia. They and their farms were replaced by slaves and sugar plantations. Over a quarter of a million slaves were transported to Barbados—an island of only 166 square miles—in the eighteenth century. Barbados was for a time the world’s greatest producer of sugar, the fountainhead of a booming and incredibly profitable world trade. Cane also produced molasses and distilled rum.
A triangular trade emerged. Goods went from Europe (and in some cases from North America) to Africa, where they were traded for slaves. The slaves were transported to the West Indies and traded for sugar and rum. The rum and sugar were then carried back to Europe. Amsterdam became a major trading port. Elite and distant owners, shipbuilders, and merchants in Great Britain became wealthy on a scale previously known only to royalty. George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson—among the best of the good guys we are happy to idolize in American history—all had commercial interests in the slave society of Barbados.
Slavery was widespread in British North America by the time the British sailing vessel Anne made landfall at a place that was to become Savannah, Georgia, on February 1, 1733. The ship brought the first settlers to the new colony of Georgia, the realized dream of an English noble, James Edward Oglethorpe. Georgia was to serve two aims of the British empire. The first was strategic. The Spanish and the British were sparring over the territory between South Carolina and Florida. The new colony of Georgia was to serve as a buffer to Spain’s territorial ambitions. Its settlers could fight back against Spanish incursions.
The other aim was social benevolence. Unemployment, debt, and alcoholism were rampant in England’s society of deeply divided classes. Georgia was intended to be a refuge for poor English workers, a place where they could start fresh and build a new life based on their own labor. Transportation to the new colony and plots of land were to be provided on reasonable terms. The new colonists could find religious salvation, virtuous living, and a comfortable life. The founders specifically forbade slavery and plantation farming, both of which it was thought would undermine the virtues of the individual’s hard work on his own plot of land. Moral objections to slavery had nothing to do with it. Oglethorpe and other founders had interests in the slave-trading Royal African Company. If slavery was permitted, they thought, the settlers would soon lead immoral lives of luxury and idleness.
Within a generation, the benevolent system Oglethorpe envisioned collapsed. The small farm economy was a disaster. More importantly, plantation owners in South Carolina wanted to convert the new colony’s land to plantations producing rice, which at that time was a major coastal commodity. The rules were soon changed. Rice plantations and slaves came to Georgia.
The rice trade was profitable enough for coastal slave masters. But at the turn of the nineteenth century Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin set off another revolution in trade and slavery. Cotton fiber was in enormous demand to feed the machines of the industrializing British textile industry. Before the invention of the cotton gin, however, separating the fiber from the plant was a slow manual process, and one not suitable for varieties of cotton that could be grown on the lands of inland North America. The gin made the production of cotton fiber efficient. Plantation farming of cotton became highly profitable and increased the demand for land and slaves.
In Georgia, the new cotton economy curled in a reverse clockwise direction from the lower coast, across the uplands and to the southwest frontier. There was plenty of land, but it belonged to Native Americans. The Indians were soon forced off of their land, many transported further west. The pattern set in Georgia repeated itself as the cotton frontier pushed further west. More land was grabbed, and more slaves were imported—several million in an internal trade from the mid-Atlantic, where demand for slave labor had lessened.
By the third decade of the nineteenth century, King Cotton commanded the new nation’s economy and finances. The white masters of the king’s slave camps had two problems. The first was justifying the enslavement of millions of human beings in the face of Blackstone’s “absolute rights” and a Christian doctrine founded on “brotherly love,” healing the sick, feeding the poor, etc., etc. The second was keeping those millions of black human beings under control.
Law, religion, and government policy solved the first problem by dividing the people of the world into “races.” Boundaries were drawn and people were sorted according to the shambling, ad hoc social construct of race, dressed in the ostensibly disciplined clothing of pseudo-science. The white race was declared to be god’s favored child, destined to rule over the other races, and most especially the black race in the immediate case of American slavery. The black race, on the other hand, was declared to be fit only for servitude under god’s marvelous plan. Sorting human beings into races was the first grinding of the lens through which blacks in America came to be viewed.
Keeping control over millions of enslaved human beings was a challenge to American law and social order. The law bent to the will of the profiteering slave masters. The England of the absolute rights of humanity had no slave law as such. Human beings might work under onerous terms and conditions, but they were never the property of another human being bound for life. The colonial law of North America disposed of that inconvenience by declaring that black slaves were the property, chattels, of their owners. The owners were free to deal with that property as they wished for their own profit and leisure. Within certain theoretical but rarely enforced limits, slave masters could inflict any such hardships or punishments as they thought necessary to keep their slave force under control. In addition to physical punishments—lashings, mutilation, torture—masters were free to break up families and “sell down the river” any slave who proved to be uncontrollable.
In addition to the control exercised by individual masters, the community and society as a whole cooperated to enforce restrictions on the times and places slaves might gather, to question black persons found anywhere other than on the premises of their bondage. A primary tool for this enforcement was the “slave patrol.” The terms of service in a given slave patrol varied from time to time and place to place. It might be mandatory or voluntary, subject to organized supervision or not. The slave patrol’s purpose was described in the preamble to Georgia’s law in 1757. “Patrols should be established under proper Regulations in the settled parts thereof, for the better keeping of Negroes and other Slaves in Order and prevention of any Cabals, Insurrections or other Irregularities amongst them.”[68] Fear was realized in law. In a landmark article published in 1990, Hubert Williams and Patrick V. Murphy argued that the roots of modern policing are to be found in these slave patrols.[69]
Indeed, one can see the precursors of the nature and attitude of policing toward minority communities in the power and practices of the slave patrols, which
had full power and authority to enter any plantation and break open Negro houses or other places when slaves were suspected of keeping arms; to punish runaways or slaves found outside their plantations without a pass; to whip any slave who should affront or abuse them in the execution of their duties; and to apprehend and take any slave suspected of stealing or other criminal offense, and bring him to the nearest magistrate.[70]
“Understandably,” Williams and Murphy comment, “the actions of such patrols established an indelible impression on both the whites who implemented this system and the blacks who were the brunt of it.”[71] Racism was a mirror, an institution that not only oppressed millions but also projected fear and violence into the soul of those who made and enforced its laws.
The legal emancipation of slaves at the end of the Civil War presented America with a new problem. Black slaves had been the ultimate necessary condition of a large part of the country’s economic and financial system. Freed blacks could no longer be forced to work as slaves. Without low-cost labor, that system would collapse. The problem was dealt with—just as slavery had been—by the imposition of both legal and cultural constraints on people of color.
The law was shaped and distorted in many different ways to force blacks down into the mass of poorly paid and wretched mass labor. This included notorious “black codes” in the South which deliberately defined and punished many of the conditions and actions that free blacks might engage in, other than working on former plantations that had been converted into fortresses of so-called sharecropping. Thus, hanging out on a street corner or even on one’s own porch was turned into the notorious catch-all offense of “vagrancy.” It and other deliberately crafted minor offenses served as a net to scoop up free blacks, convict them of crimes, and force them to work off their penalty in a servitude that differed from slavery in little other than name. The laws restricting and punishing free blacks were not an invention of the South. They had been developed and refined by the North for decades.
Having herded people of color into notionally inferior “races” beginning in the antebellum slave era, the dominant American culture launched a new attack on every individual member of the black “race” to justify keeping them “in their place.” This was the relentless hurricane of distorted and stereotypical depiction of blacks in virtually every possible means of representation available to a developing modern society. From postcards to motion pictures, commercial advertising, books, newspaper, and magazines, even garden art, blacks were represented in the cruel and “comic” portrayals of what is sometimes called “Sambo art” as physically hideous or ludicrous, and culturally backward or dangerous.
The Jim Crow era was the second grinding of the lens of racial perception that distorts the view of many today. It was through these lens that Tex McIver viewed the world the night he drew his gun and then shot his wife to death.
For summaries as of mid-2020, see “Editorial: A Very Abbreviated History of Police Officers Killing Black People,” Los Angeles Times, June 4, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-04/police-killings-black-victims; CNN Editorial Research, “Controversial Police Encounters Fast Facts,” CNN, June 4, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2015/04/05/us/controversial-police-encounters-fast-facts/index.html. Also see generally Lowery, “They Can’t Kill Us All” for specific stories described in depth.
U.S. Bureau of the Census, “QuickFacts: United States,” https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/IPE120218.
“Fatal Force,” Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/.
“Unarmed, Shot in Back: Police Never Charged,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, December 20, 2015. (Available in newspaper archives.)
Lowery, “They Can’t Kill Us All,” 114.
“Ga. Racial Progress Uncertain: Relations Unchanged or Worse Since 1985, Poll Finds,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 12, 2015. (Available in newspaper archives.)
“AJC Poll Finds Stark Views on Police: Blacks, Whites Divided on Officers’ Conduct,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 13, 2015. (Available in newspaper archives.)
Pew Research Center, “The Partisan Divide on Political Values Grows Even Wider,” October 2017, 31–32, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2017/10/05/the-partisan-divide-on-political-values-grows-even-wider/.
“Black Lives Matter: An Activist’s Evolution to Lead a Local Movement,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 7, 2016. (Available in newspaper archives.)
Black Lives Matter Atlanta, “About,” https://www.blacklivesmatteratl
.org/about.html.
“Black Lives Matter: An Activist’s Evolution.”
“Black Lives Matter has ‘Changed the Conversation.’” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 1, 2016. (Available in newspaper archives.)
Mo Barnes, “Why There Is a Beef with Black Lives Matter Activists in Atlanta, Part 1,” Rolling Out Magazine, March 23, 2018, https://rollingout.com/2018/03/23/why-there-is-a-beef-with-black-lives-matter-activists-in-atlanta-part-1/.
Barnes, “Why There Is a Beef with Black Lives Matter Activists.”
Willoughby Mariano, “Black Lives Matter and Civil Rights Movements Confront Generation Gap,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 20, 2016, https://www.ajc.com/news/local-govt--politics/black-lives-matter-and-civil-rights-movements-confront-generation-gap/tnNrCB1gKKUOEgelsEoNVO/.
“Black Lives,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 25, 2016. (Available in newspaper archives.)
“Black Lives.”
Mariano, “Black Lives Matter and Civil Rights Movements Confront Generation Gap.”
“Black Lives.”
“Activism in Atlanta Reflects Our Changing World: New Movement Targets More than Racism, Has Wide Regional Impact,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 1, 2016.
“Millennial Activists Join Rallies for Civil Rights: A New Generation Provides Vitality to Social Movements,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 9, 2015. (Available in newspaper archives.)
Press Release, “PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll Demonstrates Both White and African American Residents Nationally Agree That Race Relations in the U.S. Have Deteriorated in Past Year,” PBS, September 21, 2015, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/press-releases/pbs-newshourmarist-poll-demonstrates-white-african-american-residents-nationally-agree-race-relations-u-s-deteriorated-past-year.
Giovanni Russonello, “Race Relations Are at Lowest Point in Obama Presidency, Poll Finds,” New York Times, July 13, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/14/us/most-americans-hold-grim-view-of-race-relations-poll-finds.html.
Russonello, “Race Relations Are at Lowest Point in Obama Presidency.”
Lowery, “They Can’t Kill Us All,” 15.
Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy, “How Public Opinion Has Moved on Black Lives Matter,” New York Times, June 10, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/10/upshot/black-lives-matter-attitudes.html.
Jeff Sharlet, “A Flag for Trump’s America,” Harper’s Magazine, July 2018, https://harpers.org/archive/2018/07/a-flag-for-trumps-america/. See also Maurice Chammah and Cary Aspinwall, “The Short, Fraught History of the ‘Thin Blue Line’ American Flag,” The Marshall Project, June 8, 2020, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/06/08/the-short-fraught-history-of-the-thin-blue-line-american-flag.
“Atlanta Protesters Call for Change, Peace; Thousands March in Rallies Organized by Civil Rights Groups,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 9, 2016. (Available in newspaper archives); John Ruch, “Black Lives Matter Protest March Held at Lenox Square Mall,” Reporter Newspapers, July 9, 2016, https://www.reporternewspapers.net/2016/07/09/black-lives-matter-protest-march-held-lenox-square-mall/.
Manny Fernandez, Richard Pérez-Peña, and Jonah Engel Bromwich, “Five Dallas Officers Were Killed as Payback, Police Chief Says,” New York Times, July 8, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/09/us/dallas-police-shooting.html.
Derryck Green, “Black Lives Matter has Failed Morally,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 24, 2016. (Available in newspaper archives.)
“Reed Praises ‘Exhausted’ Cops: Officers have Logged 6,000 Hours of Overtime; Activists Vow More Protests to Keep up Pressure,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 12, 2016. (Available in newspaper archives.)
John Ruch, “Black Lives Matter Protest March Held at Lenox Square Mall,” Reporter Newspapers, July 9, 2016, https://www.reporternewspapers.net/2016/07/09/black-lives-matter-protest-march-held-lenox-square-mall/; Collin Kelley, “Arrests Made in Third Night of Protests in Downtown Atlanta,” Atlanta INtown Paper, July 10, 2016, https://atlantaintownpaper.com/2016/07/arrests-made-in-third-night-of-protests-in-downtown-atlanta/; John Ruch, “Buckhead Black Lives Matter Protest Ends in Meeting with Mayor, Police Chief,” Reporter Newspapers, July 12, 2016, https://www.reporternewspapers.net/2016/07/12/buckhead-black-lives-matter-protest-ends-meeting-mayor-police-chief/.
“Reed Praises ‘Exhausted’ Cops.”
“NAACP: Atlanta Police ‘Exemplary’ during Protests,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 10, 2016. (Available in newspaper archives.)
Torpy at Large, “Protests Show the ‘Atlanta Way,’” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 21, 2016. (Available in newspaper archives.)
Alan Judd, “Police Turn Georgia Capitol Protest into ‘Battle Space,’” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 5, 2020, https://www.ajc.com/news/crime--law/for-police-protest-georgia-capitol-turned-into-combat/pmhfmZqW5X8l9zorWCW47M/?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_1269944.
“Unarmed, Shot in Back: Police Never Charged,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, December 20, 2015. (Available in newspaper archives.)
Allen, et al., Comprehensive Criminal Procedure, 993.
“Unarmed, Shot in Back: Police Never Charged.”
“New Grand Jury Rules for Ga. Officers Tested,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 7, 2017; “Five Georgia Officers Likely to Stand Trial in 2019 for Murder: 2015 Change to State Grand Jury Rules has ‘Leveled the Playing Field,’” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, December 16, 2018. (Available in newspaper archives.)
“Ex-cop’s Case Sign of Big Shift in Georgia; Murder Charge Comes in Wake of Shooting,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 17, 2016. (Available in newspaper archives.)
“24-hour Protest Puts Focus on Shootings: Grand Jury Convening Today in Case of Officer Charged in Slaying,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 31, 2016. (Available in newspaper archives.)
“Ex-Atlanta Cop Indicted in Fatal Shooting,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 1, 2016. (Available in newspaper archives.)
“250 March Downtown in Wake of Police Shootings,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 24, 2016. (Available in newspaper archives.)
John Ruch, “Black Lives Matter Protesters Block Lenox Mall, Call for Boycott,” Reporter Newspapers, September 25, 2016, https://www.reporternewspapers.net/2016/09/25/black-lives-matter-protesters-block-lenox-mall-call-boycott/.
Audrey Washington, “Black Lives Matter Protesters Demonstrate in Downtown, Buckhead,” WSB-TV 2, September 25, 2016, https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/black-lives-matter-protesters-demonstrate-in-downtown-buckhead/449937532.
“Black Lives.”
John P. Crank, Understanding Police Culture, second edition (Cincinnati, OH: Anderson Publishing Co., 2004), 2.
Crank, Understanding Police Culture, 3.
Crank, Understanding Police Culture, 3.
Crank, Understanding Police Culture, 97.
“Protesters, Reed Seek Common Ground Today on Easing Tensions with Police,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 18, 2016. (Available in newspaper archives.)
Crank, Understanding Police Culture, 257.
Crank, Understanding Police Culture, 258.
Crank, Understanding Police Culture, 264.
Crank, Understanding Police Culture, 266.
James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, eds., Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 215.
Horton and Horton, Slavery and Public History, 37.
Horton and Horton, Slavery and Public History, 41.
Horton and Horton, Slavery and Public History, 41.
Horton and Horton, Slavery and Public History, 42.
Horton and Horton, Slavery and Public History, 44.
Horton and Horton, Slavery and Public History, 39.
Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 38.
Albert W. Alschuler, “Rediscovering Blackstone,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, November 1996, Vol. 145, No. 1, 2.
See, for example, District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008).
Quoted in Alschuler, “Rediscovering Blackstone,” 28–29. The full text is available online at “Blackstone on the Absolute Rights of Individuals (1753),” Online Library of Liberty, https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/blackstone-on-the-absolute-rights-of-individuals-1753.
Quoted in Hubert Williams and Patrick V. Murphy, U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, “The Evolving Strategy of Police: A Minority View,” January 1990, 7.
Williams and Murphy, “The Evolving Strategy of Police.”
Williams and Murphy, “The Evolving Strategy of Police,” 8.
Williams and Murphy, “The Evolving Strategy of Police,” 8.