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 THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF POLICE
BRUTALITY IN AMERICA

This handbook offers a comprehensive historical overview and analysis of police brutality in US
history and the variety of ways it has manifested itself.
Police brutality has been a defining controversy of the modern age, brought into focus most
readily by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the mass protests that occurred as a result
in 2020. However, the problem of police brutality has been consistent throughout American
history. This volume traces its history back to Antebellum slavery, through the Gilded Age, the
Progressive Era, the two world wars and the twentieth century, to the present day. This handbook is
designed to create a generally holistic picture of the phenomenon of police brutality in the United
States in all of its major lived forms and confronts a wide range of topics including:

• Race
• Ethnicity
• Gender
• Police reactions to protest movements (particularly as they relate to the counterculture and
opposition to the Vietnam War)
• Legal and legislative outgrowths against police brutality
• The representations of police brutality in popular culture forms like film and music
• The role of technology in publicizing such abuses, and the protest movements mounted
against it

The Routledge History of Police Brutality in America will provide a vital reference work for students and
scholars of American history, African American history, criminal justice, sociology, anthropology,
and Africana studies.

Thomas Aiello is professor of history and Africana studies at Valdosta State University. He is the
author of more than 20 books and dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles. He holds PhDs in
history and anthrozoology.
 THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORIES

The Routledge Histories is a series of landmark books surveying some of the most important topics and
themes in history today. Edited and written by an international team of world-renowned experts, they
are the works against which all future books on their subjects will be judged.
The Routledge History of the Domestic Sphere in Europe
Edited by Joachim Eibach and Margareth Lanzinger
The Routledge History of Poverty, c. 1450–1800
Edited by David Hitchcock and Julia McClure
The Routledge History of the Second World War
Edited by Paul R. Bartrop
The Routledge History of U.S. Foreign Relations
Edited by Tyson Reeder
The Routledge Global History of Feminism
Edited by Bonnie G. Smith and Nova Robinson
The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World
Edited by Katie Barclay and Peter N. Stearns
The Routledge History of Modern Latin American Migration
Edited by Andreas E. Feldmann, Xóchitl Bada, Jorge Durand and Stephanie Schütze
The Routledge History of Loneliness
Edited by Katie Barclay, Elaine Chalus and Deborah Simonton
The Routledge History of Police Brutality in America
Edited by Thomas Aiello
The Routledge History of Antisemitism
Edited by James Wald, Mark Weitzman, and Robert Williams
For more information about this series, please visit:
https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Histories/book-series/RHISTS
THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY
OF POLICE BRUTALITY IN
AMERICA

Edited by Thomas Aiello

Designed cover image: Protest against police killing people of color in the USA (Black Lives
Matter), Vermont State House and surrounding streets, Montpelier, VT, USA. John Lazenby/
Alamy Stock Photo.
First published 2023
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Thomas Aiello; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Thomas Aiello to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the
authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form
or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

ISBN: 978-0-367-62610-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-62615-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-10996-9 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969

Typeset in Bembo
by MPS Limited, Dehradun
 CONTENTS

List of Tables x
List of Figures xi

Introduction 1
Thomas Aiello

SECTION 1
Police Brutality and Race Before World War II 11

1 Slavery and the Transformation of Southern Policing 13

Glenn McNair

2 Policing in Gilded Age Urban Hubs 25

Malcolm D. Holmes

3 Mob Brutality in Robert Charles’s New Orleans 38

Adam Malka

4 Urban Policing and Race Riots in the Era of World War I

and the Red Summer 49
Adam J. Hodges

5 “Killers Who Hide Behind Badges”: Race and Police Brutality in the Jim
Crow South 61
Jeffrey S. Adler

v
 Contents

SECTION 2
Police Brutality and Unionism in the United States 73

6 Policing the Nineteenth-Century American Labor Movement 75

Matthew Hild

7 Police Unions and Violence in the Twentieth Century United States 85

Lisa Phillips

SECTION 3
Police Brutality and Race After World War II 95

8 The Policing of Black Resistance in World War II 97

Margarita Aragon

9 American Policing and the Struggle for Black Civic Rights 108
Jonathan Simon

10 Walking the Tightrope of Self-Defense: Imagery, Rhetoric,

and Commemoration of the Black Panther Party 117
Cheryl X. Dong

11 “I don’t mind dying”: Police Violence, Resistance,

and the Urban Uprisings of the 1960s 132
Max Felker-Kantor

SECTION 4
Police Brutality Against Immigrant and Ethnic Groups 145

12 Vigilante Policing in Asian American Communities in the

Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries 147
Stephanie Hinnershitz

13 Latinx Populations and Policing 159

Lorena Oropeza

14 Islamophobia: Supplement for Anti-Black Racism and Policing 182

Stephen Sheehi

15 From A. Mitchell Palmer to Joe McCarthy: Police Brutality in

the Fight Against Communism 196
Regin Schmidt

vi
 Contents

SECTION 5
Police Brutality and Protest in the Era of Vietnam 209

16 Behind the Billy Club: Chicago Police and the Violence at the
1968 Democratic National Convention 211
Frank Kusch

17 Police Brutality and the Student Movements of the 1960s 224

Kathryn Schumaker

SECTION 6
The Legal and Legislative History of Police Brutality 237

18 Police Brutality and the Nonhuman 239

Thomas Aiello

19 Brutality at the Bar: The Supreme Court and Police Misconduct 250
Thomas Aiello

20 Chasing the Illusion of Police Reform under Capitalism 260

Jillian Aldebron and Rodney Green

21 President’s Task Force on Twenty-First-Century Policing 281

Frederick W. Turner II and Brent Hoosac

SECTION 7
Cultural Representations in Literature, Music, and Film 299

22 Not Only Compton: Gangster Rap, Policing, and Protest 301

Felicia Angeja Viator

23 Police Violence in Film from Blaxploitation to New Black Realism 314

Katharine Bausch

24 Police Brutality and the Black Arts Movement 324

James E. Smethurst

25 From Dragnet to Brooklyn 99: How Cop Shows Excuse,

Exalt, and Erase Police Brutality 333
Susan A. Bandes

vii
 Contents

SECTION 8
Alterity and Brutality in the Late-Twentieth Century 345

26 Policing, the Bar, and Resistance 347

William Elijah Hicks

27 Anti-Brutality Activism and Neighborhood Anti-Crime

Activism During the 1970s 364
Christopher Lowen Agee

28 The Multiple Meanings of the Assault on Rodney King: Revisiting

Grassroots Discourse After the Los Angeles Rebellion of 1992 376
Kamran Afary

29 Police Brutality in 1990s New York City: The Scars of

Zero Tolerance and community Struggles for Justice 388
Paula Ioanide

30 Enacting and Enabling Violence: Policing Indigenous Communities 404

Barbara Perry

SECTION 9
Police Brutality in the Twenty-First Century 421

31 Make Visible: Akua Njeri, Breonna Taylor, and Critical Amplification

of Police Brutality 423
Aaminah Norris, Nalya A. F. Rodriguez, Maha Elsinbawi,
Abigail Cohen, and Dale Allender

32 #BlackLivesMatter 436
Louis M. Maraj

33 Smartphones as Technologies of Accountability: Exposing and

Investigating Police Brutality Using Smartphone Cameras 448
Ajay Sandhu

34 Police Brutality and the Militarization of Policing 460

Lesley J. Wood

viii
 Contents

SECTION 10
Conceptual and Pragmatic Issues in Police Brutality 471

35 To End Police Brutality, We Must End the Police 473

Meghan G. McDowell

36 Police Terror as Totality: Reformism and the Ensemble of

Counterinsurgency 485
Dylan Rodríguez

37 Police Unions: The Police Shield for Abuse and Brutality in America 497
Perry L. Lyle

38 All It Takes Is One Block: A Case Study of the History of

Police Brutality in Public Health 513
Alyasah Ali Sewell

Index 524

ix
 TABLES

0.1 Number of Police Killings 8

20.1 Complaints, Serious Disciplinary Allegations, and All Serious Allegations,
2001–2019 269
20.2 Serious Disciplinary Allegations LAPD 271
20.3 LAPD Officer Involved Shootings, 2005–2019 272
31.1 Graph of Google Trends on Searches for Njeri, Taylor, and Hampton
in 2021 428
31.2 Google Trends on Police Violence against Black People,
Between March 2019 and December 2021 428
31.3 YouTube Video Data 429
31.4 Twitter Data on #BreonnaTaylor 431
31.5 YouTube Video Data Table 432
A1 Table of Themes Highlighted in Tweeted Articles 433
37.1 Comparison of the Police Officer Bill of Rights versus ordinary
Civilian Rights 506

x
 FIGURES

12.1 Caricature of Yellow Peril, “The Yellow Terror In All His Glory,” 1899, Private
Collection, Public Domain 153
20.1 Complainants by Race/Ethnicity per 1,000 population of Corresponding
Race/Ethnicity, 2006–2017 270
20.2 Arrests per Year in City of Los Angeles 273
37.1 Use of Force Continuum 504

xi
 INTRODUCTION
Thomas Aiello

Willie Watson was a drinker. He was a turpentine and pulpwood worker with a wife at home and
eight children, the oldest only 13 years old. But Willie Watson was a drinker. He had begun
drinking on Thursday, and continued into the next day, Friday May 4, 1951, until he passed out on
a bench less than a half-mile from his home on the south side of Valdosta, Georgia.1
It was there that the policemen found him. Lieutenant Hugh Flowers and his son, officer
Raymond Flowers, saw Watson slumped over, sleeping on the bench. When they called out to
Watson and he didn’t answer, the two left their car and began beating the sleeping man with their
nightsticks. They searched him and pulled the pocketknife from his pants, then continued the
beating. Watson woke to the attack confused and disoriented, struggling to escape from his assai-
lants, only to find that his torment was only beginning. The officers pulled out their guns and began
firing. Two bullets hit Watson in the legs, another in his abdomen, as he fell and died, never fully
roused from his drunken stupor.2
The police’s version of the story was different. In their version, the officers had stopped to see if
the sleeping Watson was drunk. They tapped him lightly to wake him up, when the Negro began
swinging his knife erratically, cutting the elder Flowers on the hand. His son then responded by
trying to arrest the attacker and place him in the squad car. It didn’t work, and Raymond Flowers
called for backup. When he did, Watson kicked Hugh Flowers in the stomach and continued to
attack both before the officers were finally forced to shoot him.3
It was another in a long line of official abuses in the region. The systematic police brutality that
existed in the smalltown South in the decade following World War II was a brutality that was
fundamentally dependent upon a racist culture in the police force and carried out by white officers
who abused the rights of Black citizens, assuming that their status as policemen and the racial
assumptions of all-white juries would protect them. The broader criminal justice system served as
both a rubber stamp for police decisions about Black criminal guilt and a bulwark against possible
repercussions for police behavior.
Such was the case in Valdosta, the seat of Lowndes County, a small city in Southwest Georgia
with a population of 20,000, the moderately urban hub of a decidedly rural region. The murder of
Willie Watson would bring federal charges and national attention, but it did not exist in a vacuum. It
was part of a culture of racist postwar police brutality that existed in Valdosta and Southwest
Georgia, and, like other public instances of police brutality in the postwar North and in the twenty-
first century, sparked civil rights activism in the city and the region, served as a driver of that activism
rather than a deterrent.4

DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-1 1
 Thomas Aiello

Such might not be entirely surprising, as the nature of reciprocal relationships tells us that the
creative role of police brutality, its ability to drive civil rights activism rather than stanch it, is a
fundamental part of reciprocation. What is less analyzed in studies of southern rights activism and
police brutality is that relationship at the local level prior to the conventionally understood civil
rights movement after Brown. My article, “‘Not Too Far Removed from Slavery’: Police Brutality
and Rights Activism in Valdosta, Georgia, 1945–1955,” published in the Journal of Civil and Human
Rights in 2019, told this story. It argued principally, using the example of the rural postwar South,
that police brutality was not one thing—it looked fundamentally different at different points in time
and space.
The historiography of police brutality in the United States, for example, usually frames the
phenomenon in urban settings, one that has existed since the first police forces of the antebellum
period and was given its ultimate succor in the development of ethnic enclaves policed by white
cops in the throes of the Great Migration and proliferating in the aftermath of World War II. Urban
policing existed, in the words of James Baldwin, “to keep the Black man corralled up here, in his
place.”5 As Leonard Moore has noted in his groundbreaking study of postwar New Orleans, “In
many ways white police officers institutionalized an informal culture of police brutality toward
African Americans and they emerged as the protectors of white privilege and the opponents of Black
progress.” The historiography presents an analysis that interprets police brutality as a function of the
structure and culture of policing. The violence of southern policing is in no way ignored by
historians, but is framed less as a function of racism in policing—as a systemic problem within the
profession and concept of police work itself—and more as a function of southern racist culture,
broadly considered, of which policing is a constituent part.6
Moore’s conclusions about the metropolitan South in the postwar period are not universally
applicable to the smalltown South. In larger cities, for example, Moore argues that Black rights
demands prompted police to act retributively as agents for whites and whiteness, leading officers to
“develop an ‘us versus them’ them mentality” that assumed policing “existed for the protection of
whites only.” It was an understandable phenomenon, but one that would be reversed in less
populated towns, as there police brutality did not develop its racial “us versus them” mentality after
rights demands. Race-based police brutality was a priori to Black agitation. It was the cause rather
than the consequence of Black rights activism. There was also no demographic shift in places like
Valdosta because of postwar suburbanization as there was in places like New Orleans. Moore’s
metropolitan analysis describes the postwar Ku Klux Klan as dynamic and publicly visible, using that
visibility and reputation to do its intimidating work without resorting to lynchings. That lack of
overt terrorism left “the local police department, with the support of politicians, segregationists,
district attorneys, and judges,” to carry out “extralegal violence against African Americans.” With
rural white terrorists far more willing to exert themselves publicly in overt acts, however, Moore’s
analysis does not apply to smaller southern urban areas.7
Robin D.G. Kelley has argued much the same for Depression-era Birmingham, Alabama. A 1933
May Day protest in Birmingham, for example, was disrupted by police, with aid from the KKK and
the White Legionnaires. They had done the same for a Scottsboro protest the previous year. In
1934, Birmingham witnessed several police murders of Black men, all committed without
consequence. Little was done, however, as the Communist Party’s International Legal Defense and
the NAACP, both conducting individual efforts against police brutality, could not find common
ground to join forces in the effort. After a man was found beaten and tortured to death in police
custody after being arrested for insulting a white man, Black leaders in Birmingham asked the
Southern Negro Youth Congress to investigate police brutality in the metro area. That, too, did
little to stop the problem. Under the leadership of police chief E.L. Hollums, Birmingham’s
Depression-era experience with police brutality was, as Kelley explains, “overwhelming.”8

2
 Introduction

And the story of the South, whether urban or rural, is just one in a much larger picture of police
brutality, one that most commonly and infamously has played out in the United States in northern
and western urban industrial hubs but extends in time to the country’s early colonial roots and in
space to all of its many borders.9 As Glenn McNair demonstrates in this volume, the roots of police
brutality began in slave patrols, wherein white authorities used violence against Black lives and
bodies as a form of containment for slave labor. It was during the antebellum period when slave
patrols reached their apotheosis, and during that same period when the first urban police forces were
created. Boston founded its first police force in 1838, and by the time of the Civil War, all of the
nation’s metropolitan hubs had them. Malcolm Holmes explains that those forces were notoriously
violent, often marshaling their aggression in service to controlling immigrant populations and
supporting city political machines. As Adam Malka notes, however, urban police forces in the South
used policing to enforce a racial hegemony developed thorugh the slave system, leading to violent
sweeps in service to functional apartheid states.
But it wasn’t just southern police forces using such tactics. As the nineteenth century became the
twentieth, and the country watched as the world went to war, a series of race riots, abetted by law
enforcement, swept the country, reaching both urban and rural centers and generating tens of
thousands of casualties. The bulk of that violence centered around what James Weldon Johnson
dubbed the Red Summer of 1919. But the first surge in race-related attacks, which had always
maintained a baseline level of constancy, came at the war’s beginning rather than its end. A broader
view of Red Summer places its onset at 1917 and its conclusion in 1921, from the race riot in East
St. Louis, accompanied by another in Philadelphia, in 1917 to the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, better
encapsulating the breadth of racial violence from the era by including the period at the onset of US
involvement in the war and the full run of its economic aftermath.
East St. Louis, for example, was approximately 10% Black, and virtually everything within its
bounds was segregated. In February 1917, 470 Black workers were hired as scabs for an American
Federation of Labor strike in the city, only fueling racial tensions between the Black and white
working class on both the Missouri and Illinois sides of the Mississippi River. On July 1, several
white men drove through a Black neighborhood firing guns. Soon after, two white plainclothes
officers walked through the same neighborhood and were shot and killed, probably by residents who
believed that the undercover cops were there to do them harm. Angry white mobs sought revenge,
including police, killing and mutilating Black residents, burning Black homes and businesses. At the
riot’s end, 35 Black residents and 8 white assailants were killed, and hundreds were left homeless.10
Five years later, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, violence erupted on May 31, 1921, caused by both esoteric
and pragmatic factors. More broadly, Black Tulsa had thrived in the wake of World War I. Its business
district, known as Black Wall Street, was an affront to a white population that had not experienced a
commensurate financial boon. More immediately, a Black man, Dick Rowland, was falsely accused of
raping a white woman, and, fearing a lynch mob, a group of Black men assembled at the jail house to
protect him. A white mob inevitably arrived, and the two groups exchanged fire, killing several white
and Black men. The violence continued, fueled by the white assumption that any Black self-defense
was an affront to white citizens of Tulsa, and the next day, a mob of 500 white men confronted a mob
of about 1,000 Black men. Attackers burned a church full of people, and as the congregants ran out,
whites began picking them off one-by-one. More than four square blocks in the Black neighborhood
were burned to the ground. As many as 300 Black residents and 20 whites were killed in the
catastrophic violence.11
In between these two poles was Johnson’s Red Summer. Chicago of 1919, for example, had
double the Black population of 1916, a result of the first major wave of the Great Migration, leading
many white residents to mass resentment, which soon gave way to anger. It was an attitude
“nurtured on the killing floors in the stockyards, on all-white blocks threatened with black occu-
pancy, and in parks and on beaches that were racially contested,” as historian William Tuttle has

3
 Thomas Aiello

explained. On July 27, 1919, Eugene Williams was swimming in Lake Michigan and inadvertently
drifted over into the “white” section of the lake. He was stoned by white people and drowned. The
police didn’t arrest anyone. Instead, they arrested a Black man who complained that they weren’t
doing their jobs. That incident set off a week of violence that left 23 Black deaths and 15 white
deaths. More than 500 were injured and almost 1,000 left homeless.12
There were similar conflicts in cities like Houston, Omaha, Knoxville, Charleston, Philadelphia,
and Washington, DC. But such incidents were not limited to urban centers. There were also race
riots in Waco and Longview, Texas, and in even smaller communities like Elaine, Arkansas.13 In fall
of 1919, Black sharecroppers in and around Elaine attempted to organize a union and withhold their
cotton crop from market until they received a higher price. When deputy sheriffs tried to break up
an organization meeting, one of them was killed. In retaliation, whites in the region went on a
rampage, killing dozens of Black farmers. After the massacre, no whites were arrested, but 12 Black
men were convicted of the deputy’s murder. They were sentenced to death, and 67 other Black
men were given long prison sentences of up to 20 years in retributive show trials. The NAACP
worked diligently on the sharecroppers’ behalf, and in 1923 the Supreme Court overturned their
convictions, but the association was powerless to compensate for the lives lost.14
Much of the violence in those urban areas was caused by tensions resulting from the Great Migration.
Between 1910 and 1940, 1.75 million Black people left the South, doubling the Black population outside
of the region. People escaped because of agricultural problems, Jim Crow, racial violence, or other reasons.
Most went to urban hubs in the north. Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Pittsburgh, Cleveland,
Detroit. Others moved to urban hubs within the South itself. All of them provided new targets for police
forces seeking to protect a perceived white American hegemony in the face of radical demographic change.
Meanwhile, as Jeffery Adler explains, in his essay in this volume in the South that so many residents fled,
policing served much the role it always had, while also seeking to pressure potential Black migrants into
staying in the region, lest white business and farm owners lose its most pliable labor force.
The growing population of urban industrial hubs through migration and immigration also
facilitated the growth of trade unionism to protect increasingly vulnerable workers. The robber
barons of the Gilded Age developed their wealth through a lack of regulatory policies to curb
monopolistic expansion and protect the rights and safety of workers. Low pay, on-the-job injuries,
and other problems sparked the growth of unions in America. The principal labor organization of
the 1880s was the Knights of Labor, founded in Philadelphia in 1869. It was a conservative group by
modern standards, but as factory conditions worsened, labor radicalism grew.15
It found its most comfortable home in Chicago, the city most emblematic of demographic
instability. Chicago had 50,000 residents in 1850. It had 500,000 in 1880 and 1,700,00 in 1900, a
growth fueled by railroads, the Chicago stockyards, and the dangerous and exploitative meat
processing industry. The city’s local labor organizations were made up largely of immigrants and
included a significant anarchist population. On May 1, 1886, many of those unions planned a
general strike to argue for an eight-hour workday. The strike met with violent reaction from the
police. Two days later, another strike provoked another police attack that killed four people. Then,
on May 4, anarchists held a protest meeting at Haymarket Square. The rally began peacefully, but
when police showed up, someone threw a bomb into the crowd of officers, and the police opened fire.
The violence left 50 people wounded and ten dead; six of the dead were policemen. In response, eight
of the anarchists were convicted (without evidence) of conspiracy to commit murder.16
As Matthew Hild and Lisa Phillips describe, in their own chapters herein Haymarket was notorious,
but it wasn’t an outlier. Police forces often became tools of corporate interests to break strikes and force
vulnerable workers back into impoverished and dangerous conditions. Police brutality in labor relations
didn’t always lead to body counts like those of Haymarket, but in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies, policing and police violence was often used against those who, in idealized representations of law
enforcement, officers were supposed to protect.

4
 Introduction

Again, however, so much of those confrontations built themselves on race. While the aggregate
number of race riots during the Second World War was fewer than the First, they were still pre-
valent and deadly. Another major wave in the Great Migration led to escalating racial tensions over
housing, control of space, and access to employment. In the summer of 1943, for example, one of
the bloodiest of these riots happened in Detroit, where white and Black workers had been fuming
for months. With all these tensions in place, events finally spilled over in June. The setting was Belle
Isle, the segregated city beaches on the Detroit River. When Black swimmers moved into the
“white” part of the river, the white swimmers attacked. Soon more than 200 sailors from a nearby
naval base joined them. Word of the battle spread through the city, with Black neighborhoods
fuming and white mobs roaming the business districts looking for new victims, abetted by local
police. Law enforcement’s complicity and inaction forced the arrival of more than 6,000 federal
troops to calm the violence, and at its end, there were 34 dead and more than 700 injured. Twenty-
five of the victims were Black, and of those 17 were killed by white policemen supposedly tasked
with stopping the violence.17
A generation later, race riots would again erupt in urban areas across the country. Detroit,
Newark, and Harlem all fumed at the socioeconomic consequences of segregation and racism. The
Voting Rights Act of 1965 had become law, and had been a clear victory, but for many it wasn’t
enough. That same year, almost 30% of Black households lived below the poverty line, while
roughly 8% of white families did. The Black unemployment rate was around 8.6%, double that of
4.3% for whites. Kenneth Clark famously argued that “the masses of Negroes are now starkly aware
of the fact that recent civil rights victories benefited a very small percentage of middle-class Negroes
while their predicament remained the same or worsened.”18
Many of them, particularly in urban areas, began to show their displeasure in new ways. The
people of Watts, Los Angeles, for example, were largely unconcerned about the Voting Rights Act
passed that year. They had other problems to deal with. Unemployment in Watts wasn’t 8.6%. It
was 31%. It was an inner-city Black neighborhood policed by whites, and police brutality was
rampant. On August 11, 1965, after a traffic stop drew a crowd and the police called for backup,
people began throwing rocks at the cops, leading to a wide-ranging uprising that continued for a
week. The governor of California called in the National Guard to lock down the area. In the end,
the Watts uprising caused almost forty million dollars in property damage. More than 4,000 people
were arrested; there were almost a 1,000 casualties, and 34 people were killed—many of them by the
police and National Guard. Margarita Aragon and Max Felker-Kantor parse the role of policing in
these two waves of racial violence in the 1940s and the 1960s.19
Between those two poles was the classical civil rights movement, the organized effort by the Black
population to fight segregation, job discrimination, and voting restrictions in the South and
throughout the nation. Activists were fighting against behaviors abetted by the legal apparatus, making
law enforcement the tip of the spear in fighting against the efforts of the movement. Nowhere was
that more apparent than in Birmingham, Alabama, where activists turned in the summer of 1963.
Eugene “Bull” Connor had been infamous for decades as a staunch bigot and Democratic Party
politician. He had served as a state congressman, as the state’s Democratic Party representative, and
he had engaged in confrontations with various civil rights leaders over the years. In April 1963,
Connor had run for mayor, but lost, mostly because there was a faction of Birmingham residents
who were upset by the reputation Birmingham had accrued as a racist bastion. Instead, he retained
his traditional position of Public Safety Commissioner, a glorified police chief.20
Connor’s intransigence is why the movement decided to emphasize Birmingham. The non-
violence of Martin Luther King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference only worked if it
was placed in stark public contrast to virulent racism. So in April 1963, after Connor’s mayoral loss,
King and the SCLC began “Project C” (which stood for “confrontation”) to take advantage of an
official who they knew would respond harshly to their tactics. The city was already caricatured as

5
 Thomas Aiello

“Bombingham” because of repeated Ku Klux Klan violence and police brutality. Manning the
barricades against Connor and the Klan before SCLC’s arrival was Fred Shuttlesworth, a local
minister and civil rights leader.21
After a series of arrests, James Bevel, a veteran of the Nashville sit-in movement, suggested that
the effort could regain momentum by using children. It was a controversial tactic, to say the least,
but ultimately in early May thousands of kids from ages 6 to 18 took to the streets. Connor and his
police force didn’t care how young the protesters were. The police attacked them, sicked dogs on
them, arrested them. Connor ordered firefighters to turn giant water hoses on the children. And all
of it happened in front of the media, showing the nation and the world the consequences of violent
racialized policing.22
Less mainstream public sympathy was given to the Black Panther Party later in the decade, but
their own confrontations with police and public messaging again highlighted the role of police
brutality in Black life. The Panthers were founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland in
1966, three years after the Birmingham controversy. Though Oakland was far from the South,
however, police brutality was common. It was a majority Black city policed by a majority white
police force (there were only 16 Black police officers in Oakland), and with no authority to call for
protection against the authorities themselves, the Black Panthers needed a way to protect their
population from its abusers. They began following police officers with guns while they were in
Black neighborhoods, a legal but provocative gesture that often resulted in violent confrontations
sparked by police aggression. In the first four years of the Panthers existence, 34 had been killed in
shootouts and police raids. Members of the group firmly clung to their right to bear arms as a
constitutional guarantee that could help them ensure the safety of their neighborhoods, to help them
police a police that had demonstrated a lack of meaningful concern for minority and socio-
economically disadvantaged Oakland residents. Jonathan Simon and Simon Balto describe the role
of police brutality in the civil rights and Black Power movements, expanding from these brief
examples to evaluate the relationship between policing and race activism in the 1950s and 1960s.23
Racialized policing, however, was not solely a portrait in Black and white. Stephanie Hinnershitz,
for example, shows how Asian Americans were harshly policed in different eras in different ways.
Lorena Oropeza’s analysis of police brutality against Mexicans and Mexican Americans also demon-
strates different forms of violence over time. For both the Japanese and Mexican populations, the
apotheosis of that violence came during World War II. A series of incidents between Mexican
American youths and soldiers from Southern California military bases in 1943 led to a series of racial
conflicts known as the Zoot Suit Riots, which led to police crackdowns scapegoating the Mexican
victims of attacks by white enlistees. More systematically, Franklin Roosevelt’s February 1942
Executive Order 9066 directed the relocation and internment of first- and second-generation Japanese
Americans to special relocation camps. Almost 130,000, two-thirds of whom were American
citizens, were forced to abandon their possessions and move to flimsy barracks behind barbed wire,
watched at all times by armed guards.24
After both World Wars, violent policing also targeted suspected Communists in various
incarnations of paranoia about the spread of Soviet propaganda in the United States, a paranoia
matched in the post-Cold War period by a similar effort against Muslims, policing again becoming
an agent of social control through violent acts that served a palliative function for American fears of
difference and terrorist threat. Stephen Sheehi and Regin Schmidt examine both of these
outgrowths of police brutality in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Other paranoias, of course, were contained to more tightly defined eras, moral panics that gripped
the nation during times of specific crisis. Vietnam was one of those eras and violent policing was part of
the effort to squelch dissent for an unpopular military conflict. At the 1968 Democratic National
Convention in Chicago, as described by Frank Kusch, thousands of anti-war demonstrators showed up
to protest the nomination of Hubert Humphrey, who supported Lyndon Johnson’s position in

6
 Introduction

Vietnam. The Chicago police, as they had at Haymarket in the previous century, responded to the
protesters with violence, leading to abusive confrontations between protesters and officers.25
Two years later, at Kent State University, protesters were demonstrating against the war, and in
particular the US incursion into Cambodia. On May 1, there had been a massive demonstration, and
fearing that things might get out of hand at a second demonstration on May 4, Ohio’s governor
called out the National Guard. The Guard responded to the protesters by firing more than 60 rounds
into the crowd of students, killing four and wounding nine others. Kent State became a symbol not
only of American discontent with Vietnam, but with the government’s abuse of power—they were
killing their young overseas and at home.26
Kent State, however, was simply the most famous of many similar incidents, as massive protests
on campuses all over the country led 16 different states to call out the National Guard or other forms
of police patrol. Less than two weeks after Kent State, on May 14 and 15, student antiwar protests at
Mississippi HBCU Jackson State College brought out the Mississippi State Police. The state
troopers, responsible for so much police violence during the civil rights movement, responded to
the protests of Black students by firing into the crowd, shooting more than 300 rounds into the
group of students and into a nearby dormitory. They wounded 12 and killed two students who had
been watching events from dormitory windows.27 Kathryn Schumacher describes the broad history
of police brutality in response to the student movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Police brutality has also been more systematic in controlling other groups. The homosexual population
and the Native American population have suffered a variety of attacks by police in the course of developing
a visible presence in society and an organized movement for rights and recognition. In addition, while
there are many women in both of those groups, and in the others discussed here, gender itself has played a
decidedly unique role in how policing and police brutality has developed, particularly in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. Chapters that follow deal with each of these vital issues.
There are also prescient analyses of the legal history of police brutality and efforts at local, state, and
federal reform. Other chapters carry the story forward into the modern era, beginning with the
videotaped assault on Rodney King by the Los Angeles Police Department through the murders
of Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo by the New York Police Department, to rise of the
#BlackLivesMatter movement and its critique of police brutality and its activism to curb it. There
are analyses of body cameras and police surveillance, the role of police brutality on public health, and the
modern militarization of local police forces around the country. Meghan McDowell describes the police
abolition movement as a proposed possible solution to a systematic problem that has been a part of the
United States since there has been a United States. Then there are chapters on representations of the
phenomenon in American art and culture. James Smethurst reads the response to police brutality of the
Black Arts Movement, constituent as it was to late civil rights activism, while Katharine Bausch carries
the story forward through film, examining police brutality through television and film the lens of efforts
from Blaxploitation to New Black Realism. Felicia Viator assesses the response of hip-hop to instances of
police brutality and Susan Bandes analyzes procedural crime dramas on American television.
What follows, then, is a collection of some of the leading scholars on police brutality in the
United States parsing its history from all angles in an attempt to provide a comprehensive portrait of
the practice, one whose most recent apotheosis came in the summer of 2020 in response to a series
of police murders of Black men, symbolized must publicly by the image of George Floyd, murdered
by Minneapolis police 69 years and 1,300 miles away from the killing of Willie Watson.
Like Willie Watson, George Floyd was a drinker. He had battled prescription drug addiction.
And like Willie Watson, he was sitting calmly, not hurting anyone, when police accosted him. Floyd
was accused of passing a counterfeit 20 dollar bill on May 25, 2020, when Derek Chauvin and three
other officers pulled him from his car and began their attack. Chauvin handcuffed Floyd, put him on
the asphalt, and knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes, until well after he had died. The
protests that erupted around the country in the Urban Summer of 2020 sought justice for George

7
 Thomas Aiello

Table 0.1 Number of Police Killings

Year Number of Police Killings

2021 1,136
2020 1,127
2019 1,096
2018 1,144
2017 1,092
2016 1,070
2015 1,102
2014 1,049
2013 1,087 29

Floyd, but also for myriad other victims of police violence who didn’t receive the same level of
publicity. Meanwhile, Chauvin defended himself, like so many before him, by arguing that he
feared for his life, playing on tropes of animalistic Black aggression and white fear that had been
around since the days of the slave patrols. Since the death of Willie Watson.
In parts of the conservative media landscape, the legitimization of white police fear of Black ag-
gression served as an adequate defense of police violence. It is no coincidence that a week after Floyd’s
death, the Republican president, Donald Trump, ordered a variety of policing organizations in
Washington, DC, including the Secret Service, to move a group of peaceful protestors from Lafayette
Square. They used chemical irritants like tear gas and pepper balls. They threw flash grenades and
smoke canisters.28 As in the riots of the early twentieth century, police brutality begat police brutality,
justified through circular logic and the racialized tropes that generated the brutality in the first place.
Such justifications carried significant consequences. The number of Americans killed by police
each year has remained relatively consistent, averaging more than 1,100 annual victims (Table 0.1).
What began with early slave patrols metastasized over the years to systematic, institutionalized
violence that, while it still disproportionately targets Black men, affects and has affected a variety of
different groups in a variety of different ways. What follows is an effort to understand the devel-
opment of the phenomenon that created such statistics, the groups that it targets most frequently, the
ways that it has been represented in American art and media, and the historical efforts to fix or justify
it, always mindful that for all of the George Floyds and Brianna Taylors who become symbolic icons
of movements in death, there are in the more than one thousand annual killings many more Willie
Watsons, the lack of consequences for and publicity of their deaths creating the broadly permissive
atmosphere that maintains the consistency of such statistics.

Notes
1 Atlanta Daily World, 11 May 1951, 6; Valdosta Daily Times, 5 May 1951, 2; and Polk’s Valdosta City Directory,
1951 (Richmond, VA: RL Polk & Co., 1951), 271.
2 Atlanta Daily World, 11 May 1951, 6.
3 Valdosta Daily Times, 5 May 1951, 2.
4 Though less pronounced in Valdosta, such had been the case in the South before World War II’s end, as
well. Timothy Tyson has noted that during the war, white citizens depended on law enforcement officers
“to preserve racial etiquette.” The police, however, “were not always able to contain Black anger over
persistent police brutality.” Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams & the Roots of Black Power
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 33. More, of course, has been made of wartime
police brutality in the North. “During the war, police routinely conducted wholesale sweeps of West
Oakland,” Donna Jean Murch explains, for example. “In the subsequent decade, treatment of the African
American community worsened.” Murch describes how that brutality and access to public higher education

8
 Introduction

ultimately generated a new radicalism in the mid-1960s, but before southern migrants settled into their new
lives in Oakland and accessed quality public education, there was the persistent police brutality. Donna Jean
Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 38.
5 Baldwin was describing urban policing in the North, in Harlem, and in 1960, rather than in the decade
following World War II. His description, however, applies aptly to policing in the immediate postwar
South. James Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem,” Esquire 54 (July 1960): 70–76.
6 Leonard W. Moore, Black Rage In New Orleans: Police Brutality and African American Activism from World War
II to Hurricane Katrina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 1. Part of Ronald H. Bayor’s
Race and the Shaping of Twentieth Century Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996),
177–184 deals with race and policing in postwar Atlanta, another large metropolitan southern area. His
conclusions look much like Moore’s.
7 Moore, Black Rage In New Orleans, 1–2.
8 Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (originally published
1990; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 33, 71, 85, 123, 216–217. Quote from 206;
and Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, New York: Free Press,
1994), 84–87. This introductory portion is a crib of work first published as “‘Not Too Far Removed From
Slavery’: Police Brutality and Rights Activism in Valdosta, Georgia, 1945–1955,” Journal of Civil and Human
Rights 5 (Fall/Winter 2019): 34–67.
9 Some of the best book-length studies of that larger national image include Robert O. Self’s American Babylon:
Race and The Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Heather Ann
Thompson’s Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2004); Karl Johnson’s “Police-Black Community Relations in Post-War Philadelphia: Race and
Criminalization in Urban Social Space, 1945–1960,” Journal of African-American History 89 (March 2005):
118–135; Ryan Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper’s The War On Neighborhoods: Policing, Prison, and
Punishment in a Divided City (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018); Stuart Schrader’s Badges Without Borders: How Global
Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019); and Kenneth
Kusmer’s “African-Americans in the City Since World War II: From the Industrial Era to the Post-Industrial
Era,” Journal of Urban History, 21 (May 1995): 458–504. As the titles of such accounts suggest, police brutality is
an important part of those works but not their sole focus. Newer titles like Clarence Taylor’s Fight the Power:
African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City (New York: NYU Press, 2018), Simon
Balto’s Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2020), Max Felker-Kantor’s Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the
LAPD (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), Jeff Pegues’s Black and Blue: Inside the Divide
Between the Police and Black America (New York: Prometheus, 2017) center police brutality more directly.
10 Anne Rice, “Gender, Race, and Public Space: Photography and Memory in the Massacre of East Saint
Louis and the Crisis Magazine,” in Gender and Lynching: The Politics of Memory, ed. Evelyn M. Simien (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 131–172; and Charles Lumpkins, American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Riot
and Black Politics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008). Elliott Rudwick’s early historical monograph on
the East St. Louis race riot explains that racial violence had actually begun the previous year, actions
resulting more broadly from political shifts from Democrat to Republican and the immigration of a new
Black population, two phenomena that were not mutually exclusive. Elliott M. Rudwick, Race Riot at East
St. Louis (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1964). As he had in Brooks County in 1918, Walter
White went later to investigate the trouble in East St. Louis. Walter White, A Man Called White: The
Autobiography of Walter White (originally published 1948; Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 47–51.
11 Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1992); Alfred L. Brophy, Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921,
Race Reparations, and Reconciliation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002; and Lee E. Williams and
Lee E. Williams, Jr., Anatomy of Four Race Riots: Racial Conflict in Knoxville, Elaine (Arkansas), Tulsa, and
Chicago, 1919–1921 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 56–73.
12 William M. Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Atheneum, 1970), viii; Cameron
McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin,
2011), 114–126; Williams and Williams, Jr., Anatomy of Four Race Riots, 74–97; and Gary Krist, City of Scoundrels:
The Twelve Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (New York: Crown Publisher, 2012). See also
Robert T. Kerlin, The Voice of the Negro (1919), ed. Thomas Aiello (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2013).
13 Lee E. Williams, “The Charleston, South Carolina, Riot of 1919,” in Southern Miscellany: Essays in History in
Honor of Glover Moore, ed. Frank Allen Dennis (Jackson: University of Press of Mississippi, 1981), 150–176;
William Tuttle, “Violence in a ‘Heathen’ Land: The Longview Race Riot of 1919,” Phylon 33 (4th Qtr.

9
 Thomas Aiello

1972): 324–333; Matthew Lakin, “‘A Dark Night’: The Knoxville Riot of 1919,” Journal of East Tennessee
History 72 (2000): 1–29; Michael Lawson, “Omaha, A City in Ferment: Summer of 1919,” Nebraska History
58 (Autumn 1977): 395–417; and McWhirter, Red Summer, 41–54, 82–113, 170–181, 192–207.
14 Robert Whitaker, On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 2008), 55–320; Ida B. Wells-Barnett, The Arkansas Race Riot (Chicago: s.p.,
1920); Grif Stockley, Blood In Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas
Press, 2001); and Williams and Lee E. Williams, Jr., Anatomy of Four Race Riots, 38–56.
15 See Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1985); and Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons (New York: Harcourt, 1962).
16 See William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: WW Norton, 1991); and
James R. Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing that
Divided Gilded Age America (New York: Anchor Books, 2006).
17 Dominic J. Capeci, Jr., and Martha Wilkerson, Layered Violence: The Detroit Rioters of 1943 (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1991); and Robert Shogan and Tom Craig, The Detroit Race Riot: A Study in
Violence (Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1964).
18 Kenneth B. Clark, “The Present Dilemma of the Negro,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the
Southern Regional Council, Atlanta, 2 November 1967, 8.
19 Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,
1995); and Jerry Cohen and William S. Murphy, Burn, Baby, Burn! The Los Angeles Race Riot, August 1965
(New York: Dutton, 1966).
20 William A. Nunnelley, Bull Connor (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991).
21 See Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights
Revolution ∗New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001); Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and
National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997);
Andrew Manis, A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999); and Jonathan S. Bass, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin
Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 2001).
22 Ibid.
23 See Curtis J. Austin, Curtis Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party
(Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006); Paul Alkebulan, Survival Pending Revolution: The History of
the Black Panther Party (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007); Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin,
Jr., Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2013); Peniel Joseph, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New
York: Henry Holt, 2006); and Jane Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power
Icon (New York: The New Press, 2007).
24 For the Zoot Suit Riots, see Luis Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World
War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); and Maurizio Mazon, The Zoot-Suit Riots: The
Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002). For Japanese-American in-
ternment, see Stephanie D. Hinnershitz, Stephanie D. (2022). Japanese American Incarceration (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022); and Greg Robinson, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in
North America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
25 See Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic
Conventions of 1968 (New York: New American Library, 1968).
26 See James Michener, Kent State: What Happened and Why (New York: Random House, 1971); and Howard
Means, 67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence (Paris: Hachette Books, 2016).
27 See Tim Spofford, Lynch Street: The May 1970 Slayings at Jackson State College (Kent: Kent State University
Press, 1972); and Nancy K. Bristow, Steeped in the Blood of Racism: Black Power, Law and Order, and the 1970
Shootings at Jackson State College (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
28 Carol D. Leonnig, Matt Zapotosky, Josh Dawsey, and Rebecca Tan, “Barr Ordered Removal of Protesters,”
Washington Post, 3 June 2020, A1; Calvin Woodward, “AP FACT CHECK: Trump denies tear gas use despite
evidence,” Associated Press, 3 June 2020, https://apnews.com/2aa7979e6fb88948895407f127e5e5b6, ac-
cessed 20 January 2022; and Michael C. Bender, and Sadie Gurman, “Trump’s Show of Force Brings Rebuke,
Praise,” Wall Street Journal, 3 June 2020, A8.
29 Data from “2021 Police Violence Report,” Mapping Police Violence, https://policeviolencereport.org/,
accessed 20 January 2022.

10
 SECTION 1

Police Brutality and Race Before

World War II
 1
SLAVERY AND THE
TRANSFORMATION OF
SOUTHERN POLICING
Glenn McNair

The evening of September 26, 1858, was cloudy, dark. John Howard stood on the main campground
in Bibb County, Georgia. A camp meeting of local Blacks and Whites was in full swing. He had been
summoned there by William Bone, captain of the county vigilance committee. Howard was a
patroller, and he and several other men were there to find and arrest slaves selling liquor. Soon after his
arrival, they had caught two enslaved “boys” with “spirits” and began to whip them. As they were
flogging the pair, Howard heard “the rattling of tin buckets” and turned to see a Black man running
towards him, chased by a White man. The pursuer was Thomas Bagby. Bagby was not a member of
the patrol but had shown up because he wanted to help in the searches and arrests. Howard and the two
enslaved men he had just whipped grabbed and held the fleeing man, Jacob, another slave. Bagby
caught up to the group; he took one of Jacob’s arms and Howard the other. As the patrollers walked
Jacob off the campground he attempted to break free. Bagby suddenly saw that he had a knife in his
right hand. The three men scuffled and fell to the ground. Bagby jumped on top of Jacob, and one of
the flogged Black men grabbed his left arm. Jacob’s right hand flashed upward several times. The knife
struck Bagby in the stomach, just above his right hip. Captain Bone and several other White men ran
up; one of them put his foot on Jacob’s neck and the others were able to subdue him. Bagby
succumbed to his wounds and died at 3 or 4 o’clock in the afternoon several days later. On November
15, 1858, Jacob was put on trial for murder in Bibb County Superior Court. He was convicted
and hanged.1
The deadly confrontation between Jacob and Thomas Bagby was the outcome of a system of
policing structured by the imperatives of human bondage. Police officers are “people authorized by a
group to regulate interpersonal or intragroup relations through the application of physical and/or moral
persuasion.”2 In colonial America, policing—in both the North and the South—was a community
affair. Official authority was vested in a few men who called on others when needed to address
specific internal or external threats. Crime and disorder were such that these small units of police
volunteers were thought sufficient to handle them. As the nineteenth century progressed, policing in
the two regions diverged. As the North urbanized and industrialized large police departments of paid
officers replaced the ad hoc citizen forces in big cities. This modernization and professionalization of
policing continued for the remainder of the century. In the South, however, slavery demanded that
the entire White population involve itself in policing the entire Black population. Rather than
becoming an increasingly public responsibility, southern policing remained and became an even
more private one. As a result, the number of police officers remained small in comparison to the
North. Their reach and enforcement powers, however, extended far beyond what their numbers

DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-3 13
 Glenn McNair

would suggest. Furthermore, in significant respects southern police forces were decades ahead of
their northern counterparts. They began wearing uniforms and carrying weapons at the end of the
eighteenth century, and several southern cities had police guard units with well over 100 officers,
which northern cities would not surpass until the 1840s. Most importantly, Southerners began
patrolling to prevent crime, the practice most closely identified with modern policing. This
evolution in law enforcement occurred because White Southerners feared African Americans as
dangerous internal enemies.
In pre-modern England, policing was based on the mutual pledge system, which dated back to
the tenth century. The men of a community banded together as needed to protect themselves from
outlaws or to come to each other’s aid in other times of distress. Ten families constituted a “tithing”;
each tithing was governed by a tithingman. All men over 15 years of age in the tithing could raise
the “hue and cry” (a loud call for assistance) when they detected a crime, and neighborhood men
were required to respond to it. By the 1400s, the position of tithingman had evolved into that of
town constable, who was empowered to draft citizens into a night watch, mostly for fire prevention.
Ten tithings made up a “hundred,” which was under the authority of a shire-reeve (later shortened
to sheriff), whom the king appointed to enforce the law. He had the power to call together the men
of the hundred in a posse comitatus to pursue fleeing felons. The shire-reeve system worked well in
rural areas but much less so in urban ones. Night watches and day constabularies were established in
larger cities like London, Manchester, and York. Unlike their rural counterparts, the urban systems
were not particularly good at preventing crime or even reacting to it. Overall, law enforcement
remained local and decentralized.3
The American colonists continued this system of community-based policing. Eventually every
colony hired constables and marshals and established militias and night watches made up of all free
adult men. The constable was the chief law enforcement officer in cities and towns. He had the
power to arrest suspicious persons and minor offenders, execute warrants and serve other court
orders, inspect taverns for orderliness, supervise town watches, collect local taxes, maintain custody
of lost items, find and arrest runaway servants, and place arrested persons in the stocks or jails, along
with other responsibilities relating to public safety, health, and order.4
Communities generally hired only one or two constables to serve one-year terms. Even large
cities had few constables: Charlestown had five in 1685, New York City one in 1686, Newport had
two in 1688, and Boston employed eight in 1690. Constables only worked during the daytime
hours. They were not paid but were allowed to keep a portion of the fees they collected. Given the
position’s low pay and status, it was a difficult one to fill. In Boston, for example, the city imposed a
£28 fine for failing to serve, but many men chose to pay the fine rather than take the job. The
public often ridiculed constables and rejected their authority, refusing to be summoned or arrested.5
As in urban England, the American constable system proved inadequate for preventing and
controlling crime in the disordered colonial environment. Native Americans and foreign enemies
were the main public safety concerns. The colonies turned to militias and night watches to meet the
challenge. All free White men were expected to make themselves available for militia duty. Initially,
militias provided defense against the threatening Indians and foreign adversaries, but by the middle
of the eighteenth century these functions were increasingly the responsibility of special British-
commanded military units. Threats from outsiders receded over the decades but were replaced by
transient populations and more and more criminals as cities grew in number and size. As areas along
the Eastern Seaboard became more crowded, more diverse, and more conflict-ridden, the militia’s
mandate evolved from external defense to combatting localized threats and providing internal
security. In New York and parts of New England, for instance, the militia became the basis of the
night watch, and in emergencies could be called upon as part of the posse comitatus.6
In the North, all men were also expected to serve on the night watch on a rotating basis. The
most common emergencies to which the watch was expected to respond were “fires, Indian attacks,

14
 Transformation of Southern Policing

wild animals, runaway slaves, thieves, and grave robbers,” as well as “suppressing disorder, arresting
drunks, and enforcing the curfew.” Like constables, most night watchmen were drawn from the
lower classes; they had no training and were poorly paid—if they were paid at all. Men could avoid
watch duty by paying a fine or hiring a substitute. Boston established perhaps the best known night
watch in 1631. It began as a military watch but quickly became a civilian one in which every able-
bodied man was required to serve. The watch operated under the supervision of a constable from
sunset until around 4:00 a.m. In 1654, the city employed two bellmen at six shillings each; after a
massive fire in 1677, the number of bellmen was increased and fire duty was added to the list of
watch responsibilities. The number of watchmen and the amount of money Boston devoted to the
watch continued to increase over the decades. Most American cities established and expanded their
night watches in like fashion.7
America underwent a profound transformation from the turn of the nineteenth century to the Civil
War. The Louisiana Purchase and lands acquired after the Mexican War greatly enlarged the country.
Rapid economic growth produced by industrialization in the North and cotton cultivation in the
South accompanied this territorial expansion. The nation also underwent significant demographic
change, with millions of immigrants pouring into the country. As a result of these developments,
conflict between White Protestant Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, European
immigrants, and Mexicans escalated. Nativism and racism were rampant in the Northeast, leading to
multiple riots in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and other population centers; by the 1830s and
1840s, ethnic conflict was a feature of most major cities. These social divisions played themselves out in
politics through an expanded electorate, which became increasingly polarized around issues of labor,
slavery, and westward expansion. This discord led to disorder that simply could not be contained by
civilian watches or a few constables.8 It was this need to combat disorder that led to the modernization
of policing.
New York City established the first modern department. In the 1830s and 1840s, the city ex-
perienced mass immigration that led to progressively more intense labor and ethnic antagonism,
which was aggravated by the economic depression that followed the Panic of 1837. These decades
also witnessed the rise of the abolitionist movement and the anti-Black racism it engendered, which
resulted in regular rioting that often had to be quelled by militia. This complex and strife-ridden
state compelled an 1845 reform of existing police manpower structures, responsibilities, and prac-
tices, with London’s Metropolitan Police Act serving as a model for the reorganization. London’s
new department featured a military chain of command, and its constables (nicknamed “bobbies”
after Robert Peel, the British home secretary responsible for the act) were uniformed and paid
regular salaries. Bobbies assumed the traditional functions of the day and night watches, “lighting
streetlamps, calling time, [and] watching for fires,” but their main purpose was crime prevention,
which they would accomplish by regularly patrolling the city. Over time, the Metropolitan Police
Department (MPD) became increasingly effective at controlling crime and disorder.9
New York replaced all police positions—except that of constable—with a “Day and Night
Police” of no more than 800 men. Each ward constituted a patrol district with one captain, two
assistant captains, and as many other officers as the city common council deemed necessary. A chief
of police would ostensibly provide overall supervision of the districts, but could not hire, fire, or
assign officers, as these were prerogatives of the common council. The chief’s duties would consist
mostly of inspecting hacks, cabs, stages, omnibuses, and carts. Despite these relatively limited
powers, the chief would be the first modern law enforcement executive. New York would also be
the first city to make the transition from private to public police. The city’s officers would eventually
be uniformed and also the first in the country to wear badges. The New York City Police
Department would not be nearly as proficient at crime prevention and control as London’s MPD,
and corruption would characterize it for decades; nevertheless, it became the template that other big
cities would follow. In addition to curbing and stopping criminal activity, these departments were

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also responsible for everything from enforcing building and health codes to licensing taverns and
animal control. They would also be all-White.10
In their early years, the southern colonies, too, relied on constables, night watches, and militias
for policing. But, as in the North, they proved ineffective at controlling crime and maintaining
order. For example, Charleston (the largest and busiest port south of Philadelphia) established its
constable watch in 1685, 15 years after South Carolina’s founding. It was largely a failure: watchmen
fell asleep, did not respond to crime or other disturbances, or simply failed to show up. To address
these problems, in 1696 the city set up a paid watch of one captain and five men; it was no better
than its predecessor so the civilian watch was reinstituted after two years. Poor oversight, unqualified
candidates, and—according to the historian Douglas Greenberg—a “general disregard of South
Carolinians for the authority of the law” doomed the constable and watch systems.11
The South’s demographics and distinct culture also stood as barriers to effective law enforcement.
There was a disproportionate ratio of men to women, high death rates, and ferocious competition
for land. These factors produced levels of violent crime higher than those of the northern colonies.
This violence would be exacerbated over the centuries by a regional honor culture and general
disrespect for legal authority. Ethnic or racial homogeneity also played a significant role in the
efficacy of policing. The more diverse a society is the greater the conflict within it, and hence the
difficulty of controlling its crime. Community-based policing of the kind practiced in the Old
World worked best with a shared group identity and at the least the perception of shared interests;
more homogeneous regions like New England had fewer problems than the more diverse Middle
Colonies and the South. Moreover, because of slavery, “the Southern experience with race” was “a
much more intense, deep, and embedded phenomenon,” creating a hostile racial division unlike any
other in the country. Finally, communities in the South were geographically isolated, and as slave
populations grew so, too, did fears of slave rebellion. This fear and the need to exercise tighter
control over the enslaved caused Whites to deviate profoundly from traditional policing norms and
practices.12
The first change the South made was ideological. The mutual pledge system for policing that the
colonists had brought with them from England depended on a sense of community; the people of a
town or village voluntarily came together to protect one another. As the English jurist and
commentator William Blackstone explained in defining crime, “public wrongs, or crimes and
misdemeanors, are a breach and violation of the public rights and duties, due to the whole community,
considered as a community, [italics mine] in its social aggregate capacity.”13 For a criminal justice system
to be considered legitimate, all had to be bound by its rules and all had to be protected by them.
Thomas Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia that, “We lay it down as fundamental, that
laws, to be just, must give reciprocation of right: that without this, they are merely arbitrary rules of
conduct, founded in force, and without conscience.”14 Slavery demanded that Blacks be in, but not
of, communities governed by shared rights and obligations, permanent internal outsiders. They
represented the principal threat from which Whites had to be protected, so they would be ruled and
policed by force, not through their voluntary cooperation.
Southerners regularly defended the use of force in maintaining slavery; indeed, they viewed force
as essential to all governance. The South Carolina slaveholder and politician James Henry
Hammond, said that, “[critics of slavery] complain that our slaves are kept in bondage by the ‘law of
force.’ In what country or condition of mankind do you see human affairs regulated merely by the
law of love? Unless I am greatly mistaken, you will, if you look over the world, find nearly all certain
and permanent rights, civil, social, and I may even add religious, resting on and ultimately secured by
the ‘law of force.”’15 According to George Fitzhugh, another southern social theorist and pro-
slavery ideologue, since “physical force, not moral suasion, governs the world,” the enslaved readily
accept this reality of power and become habituated to its necessary violent coercion; indeed, doing
so becomes second nature: “The negro sees the driver’s lash, becomes accustomed to obedient

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 Transformation of Southern Policing

cheerful industry, and is not aware that the lash is the force that impels him.”16 Moreover, it would
be the height of foolishness for slaveowners to seek the consent of slaves in matters of their gov-
ernance. “Masters dare not take the vote of slaves as to their government. If they did, constant
holiday, dissipation, and extravagance would be the result.”17
Townspeople came together as a community to select their sheriffs and constables and to serve on
night watches and in militias and to respond to the hue and cry; in the colonial and antebellum
South, White communities united to police enslaved and free Blacks, internal enemies with no voice
or role in the criminal justice process. The abolitionist William Goodell described the tyrannical
relationship about which Jefferson warned: “He [the slave] is the only being in the universe to
whom is denied all self-direction and free agency, but who is, nevertheless, held responsible for his
conduct, and amenable to law … . He is under the control of the law, though unprotected by law, and
can only know law as an enemy, and not as a friend.” [Italics in original].18 In Goodell’s view, this
antagonistic relationship was also a product of the slave’s relationship to the society and its legislative
process: “It must be remembered that the primary object of the enactment of penal laws is the
protection and security of those who make them. THE SLAVE HAS NO AGENCY IN MAKING
THEM. He is indeed one cause of the apprehended evils to the other class, which those laws are
expected to remedy. That he should be held amenable for the violation of those rules established for
the security of the other, is the natural result of the state in which he is placed.” [Italics and capitalization
in original].19 The entire character of southern policing was shaped by this adversarial relationship
between Blacks and Whites.
The slave states retained the system of sheriffs, constables, and night watches to police Whites,
but augmented them with patrols to control free and enslaved Blacks. It would be slave patrols that
gave southern law enforcement its distinctive character. There were no patrols in the seventeenth
century because slave populations were still too small to necessitate them. Even though Virginia had
been involved in slavery for decades longer, South Carolina set up the first patrol system because of
its proportionally larger enslaved population. As with much else about slavery in South Carolina, its
patrolling practices were based on Barbadian slave law and the experience of the island’s slave-
holders. Patrols were initially made up of detached members of the regular militia; the two groups
were formally combined into a single unit with shared responsibilities after 1721.20
In response to the Stono Rebellion in 1739, South Carolina revised its slave code and patrol law
in 1740. The act’s preamble vividly describes White fear of Black violence: “Forasmuch as many late
horrible and barbarous massacres have been actually committed, and many more designed, on white
inhabitants of this Province, by negro slaves, who are generally prone to such cruel practices, which
makes it highly necessary that constant patrols should be established and kept in the several militia
districts of this Province, for the better preventing any future insurrections or cabals of said slaves.”21
Georgia had a similar rationale for establishing its slave patrol in 1765: “It is absolutely necessary for
the security of his majesty’s subjects of this province, and for preventing the many dangers and
inconveniences that may arise from the disorderly and unlawful meetings of negroes and other slaves
within the same, that patrols be established.”22 This existential fear of Black violence gripped the
Slave South and would inform criminal justice legislation and law enforcement strategies and tactics
for the remainder of slavery’s existence.
Patrols varied in size, but generally numbered between 3 and 10 members. The South Carolina
slave code of 1740 set patrol membership at seven men and women (women who owned fewer than
ten slaves were exempted). In addition to a captain, in Alabama patrols would consist of “not less
than three, nor more than five men.” In Georgia, they were limited to 10 members. Antebellum
Arkansas county courts had the authority to appoint men to serve on patrols, “not exceeding ten.”
Not “more than seven, nor less than four persons, including the leader” patrolled in antebellum
Mississippi. In Kentucky, no more than “three men … discreet and sober” could assume patrolling
responsibilities.23

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Kentucky established “special patrol companies” to prevent runaways. These units were larger
and had more expansive powers than the regular patrols. “Counties bounded by the Ohio River, if
they think proper, may, at any time, appoint for their respective counties a strong and active patrol,
to consist of sober, discrete citizens, not to exceed thirty in any county, whose duty it shall be to
guard and watch the places for crossing the river, and such other points and places as may be
designated by the court.” These special companies would “have power to arrest, without warrant,
any person found lurking about, with the intention to afford assistance, by advice or otherwise, to
any slave to escape from his master, or who may be lurking about for any harmful purpose to the
community.”24
The small size of slave patrols obscures their true nature and that of southern policing. While
most men were expected to serve in the militia or to be called upon if a hue and cry were issued,
all Whites were expected to play some role in policing all Blacks (including the sheriffs, con-
stables, and night watches). For example, citizens had the authority to enforce the pass laws. Any
White person could stop, punish, or return to their plantations any of the enslaved caught
without passes or permission tickets. In South Carolina, “If any slave who shall be out of the
house or plantation where such slave shall live, or shall be usually employed, or without some
white person in company with such slave, shall refuse to submit or undergo the examination of
any white person, it shall be lawful for any such white person to pursue, apprehend, and mod-
erately correct such slave; and if any such slave shall assault and strike such white person, such
slave may be lawfully killed.” (Georgia based its 1755 slave code on the South Carolina slave code
of 1740 and used this exact language to grant Whites the power to surveille, police, and punish
the slave population.) In Alabama, it was lawful for “any person to apprehend” slaves who
violated the pass law, and to carry them before a justice of the peace to be “punished with
stripes.” Mississippi used this same language verbatim to authorize free White persons to police
slaves. Likewise, “any citizen” of the state could “apprehend and take … before any justice of the
peace” slaves offering up goods for sale.25
In addition to expecting the White populace to aid them in restricting the unauthorized
movements of slaves in their districts, patrols could also rely on them for additional manpower in the
performance of their other duties. After 1839, South Carolina patrollers were “empowered and
required to call unto their assistance such force and assistance from the neighborhood, as he or they
may judge necessary.” The same was true in Florida, where patrols were “authorized to call unto
their assistance, from the neighborhood, such force as he or they may judge necessary.”26 There
were also no laws that prohibited Whites from offering patrols their aid, as did Thomas Bagby in his
fatal encounter with Jacob at a Georgia campground in 1858.
Furthermore, local law enforcement and patrols were expected to work in concert. In Georgia,
the night watch—under the direction of a constable—was empowered to “Seize & apprehend every
negroe [sic] and other Slave that shall be found in the said town [Savannah] not having a tickett [sic]
or token” from their owners or a “white person in Company with him or them” or a “satisfactory
account” of the business they were conducting on their owner’s behalf. In antebellum Alabama,
justices of the peace were required “to furnish the constable of that beat to which they belong, a
copy of the list of patrol detachments, setting forth the leader of each detachment, and the name of
each patrol-man belonging to his detachment, and the time at which each leader shall commence his
tour of duty” for the purpose of coordinating their policing activities. In Mississippi, it was “the duty
of all sheriffs, coroners, and constables” to “seize from, and take” all articles being unlawfully sold by
slaves—“for their own use.”27
Southern men also formed private slave patrols and other criminal justice organizations that
reinforced those the state authorized. For example, in Branchville and St. Matthews Parishes in
South Carolina White men formed unofficial policing associations. These private patrollers received
indemnification against any lawsuits that might be brought for causing injury to a slave. Members of

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 Transformation of Southern Policing

a similar group, the Edisto Island Auxiliary Association, sought official recognition from the state
legislature in 1823. In one South Carolina district, just before the Civil War, men sought to establish
the “Military Vigilance Poliece [sic],” whose purpose was to set up juries to immediately try any
slave they suspected of sedition.28
The shared White commitment to controlling the slave and free-Black populations meant that
they did not need much of the formal apparatus of policing. As James Henry Hammond explained
(while understating the nature and extent of volunteer policing), “With thus every citizen
concerned in the maintenance of order … our mutual vigilance renders standing armies, whether
of soldiers or policemen, entirely unnecessary. Small guards in our cities, and occasional patrols in
the country, ensure us a reposing security known nowhere else.” As a result of this constant
White surveillance and minimal police forces the South was safer and freer: “You cannot be
ignorant that, accepting the United States, there is no country in the world whose existing
Government would not be overturned in a month, but for its standing armies, maintained at an
enormous and destructive cost to those whom they are destined to overawe—so rampant and
combative is the spirit of discontent wherever nominal Free labor prevails, with its ostensive
privileges and its dismal servitude.”29
Slave patrols had two major responsibilities. First, they were to search slave quarters for evidence
of revolts, weapons, books, paper and other indicators of education, and for Blacks who did not
belong there—especially runaway slaves. Second, they were to disperse unlawful gatherings of
enslaved Blacks or those who aided them. In 1839, South Carolina defined as unlawful “all
assemblies and congregations of slaves, free negroes, mulattoes, and mustizoes, [sic]” and any “white
persons, assembled or met together for the purpose of mental instruction, in a confined or secret
place of meeting, barred, bolted, or locked, so as to prevent the free ingress and egress to and from
the same.” In Florida, “all assemblies and congregations of slaves, free negroes and mulattoes,
consisting of four or more, met together in a confined or secret place,” was “declared to be an
unlawful meeting.” Patrols were empowered to “enter into any such places, and for that purpose, to
break open doors, windows or gates if resisted, and disperse such slaves, free negroes or mulattos as
may be then and there found unlawfully together.”30
In Alabama, it was “the duty of each patrol detachment, to visit all Negro quarters, all places
suspected of entertaining unlawful assemblies of slaves or other disorderly persons unlawfully
assembled, and upon finding such disorderly person or persons, to take him, her, or them, if free,
before the nearest justice of the peace.” If any of these assembled persons were slaves the patrol could
administer “any number of lashes, not exceeding fifteen.” Arkansas patrols were mandated to “visit
all Negro quarters and other places suspected of unlawful assemblages of slaves … . Any slave found
at such assembly, or who shall be found strolling about from one house or plantation to another,
without a pass from his master, employer or overseer, shall receive any number of lashes at the
discretion of the patrol, not exceeding twenty.” Patrol laws in all of the slave states had responsi-
bilities similar to those of South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, and Arkansas.31
To effectively carry out their mission of policing Blacks, patrols also had the power to search the
persons and homes of Whites, and to arrest them if necessary. In South Carolina, patrols could enter
the homes of servants—both Black and White—apprehend them and seize contraband. According
to the state’s 1740 slave code, patrols were required to ask permission before searching any house
owned by Whites suspected of harboring fugitive slaves. If the “owner or other white person so
entreated shall refuse to deliver up such fugitive slave or slaves, or to suffer search to be made for
them, (the said patrol or any of them having seen such slaves enter) shall forfeit the sum of five
pounds current money for every such offense.” At the end of the antebellum period, elite South
Carolinians even proposed granting patrols the authority to arrest White poachers, trespassers, and
vagabonds. In Arkansas, “if any white person shall be caught in company with negroes, in the night
time, in suspicious places, by the patrol, they shall take him before some … justice of the peace who

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shall on conviction of the person so caught, commit him to jail for trial; … and if he shall be found
guilty by a jury, he shall be punished with the like number of lashes as would have been inflicted on
a slave, not exceeding twenty.” Given Americans’ deep commitment to protecting individual lib-
erties, southerners’ willingness to empower slave patrols to enter onto or into private property
without warrants was a clear deviation from the nation’s republican values. Grant of this amount of
power was predicated on the belief that Blacks were a violent population that simply had to be
subordinated. This racist view of African Americans became woven into the fabric of southern law
enforcement.32
While slave patrols had arrest and search and seizure powers that generally extended beyond those
of northern police, they had one other that made them truly unique in colonial and antebellum law
enforcement: the power to mete out summary punishment. As seen in the examples above,
patrollers could detect violations of the criminal law, apprehend the offenders, and sanction them on
the spot. In Georgia, slaves caught “without the fences or cleared ground of their owner’s plan-
tation” without a pass or responsible white person could be whipped, not to exceed twenty lashes.”
“All slaves who may be found without the limits of their owner’s plantation” in Florida could expect
patrollers to administer “moderate whipping with a switch or cowhide, not exceeding twenty
lashes.” In South Carolina, “officers and persons” dispersing an “unlawful assemblage of persons,
shall, if they think proper, impose such corporal punishment, not exceeding twenty lashes, … as
they may judge necessary.” Enslaved persons in Kentucky “strolling from one plantation to another,
or found in a town or city without a pass for the time from his master or overseer” or attempting to
“sell, any commodity, or have the same in his possession for sale” without their master’s permission
could anticipate—“at the discretion of the captain of the patrol”—“any number of stripes not
exceeding ten.” In Mississippi, any slave who violated the slave code and was apprehended by patrols
would receive “any number of lashes not exceeding fifteen.”33 In policing African-American slaves,
patrollers acted as judges, juries, and executioners of the law.
Patrols that were adequate to control African Americans in rural areas were insufficient for doing
so in the South’s largest cities—even with the aid of other law enforcement agencies and the White
citizenry. Black populations were too large and transient; there were too many places where they
could not be effectively surveilled, and too many opportunities to plot in secret. An urban Black
insurrection would be too big and complex for a patrol to quell. Much larger, armed police forces
were necessary. Southern cities and towns began to replace slave patrols with paramilitary city guards
soon after the American Revolution, beginning with Charleston in 1781. Savannah established its
city guard in 1796; its officers were uniformed and carried swords. (Later, the guardsmen were
mounted and armed with pistols.) In Charleston, Raleigh, Richmond, and New Orleans, these
forces were allocated the largest part of city budgets. These urban guards and watches adopted
military postures and practices because, according to the historian Dennis Rousey, “policemen who
looked like soldiers probably helped ameliorate the deep anxieties many whites harbored about the
dangers of slave crime and revolt.” These urban police forces only grew larger over time: during the
antebellum years, Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans had higher ratios of policemen
to citizens than New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.34
The New Orleans gendarmerie provides an excellent example of an early militarized police force.
Founded in 1805, the gendarmes were salaried, uniformed, and armed—not with the clubs or staffs
carried by night watchmen in the North—but with flintlock pistols and swords. Half the force was
mounted, and they patrolled mostly at night, although a portion of their number was held in reserve
“during the day for any public official to call upon when needed.” The command structure was
military, from a captain down to the rank-and-file gendarmes. And, as in the army, the gendarmes
were housed in barracks. This highly militarized police force lasted only a few years because of the
great expense required to maintain it and was replaced by a city guard that was unmounted and
armed with pikes and sabers rather than pistols (although guardsmen were authorized to use muskets

20
 Transformation of Southern Policing

in times of emergency). New Orleans finally moved towards a northern-style civilian police
department in the 1830s.35
In Charleston, by contrast, the patrol became more military as the nineteenth century progressed,
donning uniforms and carrying swords and muskets. Until 1821, they patrolled the city in 20- to-
30-man platoons. In response to the Denmark Vesey slave conspiracy in 1822, the South Carolina
legislature passed an act to create a “Municipal Guard.” The guard would be made up of no more
than 150 men and was responsible “for the Protection of the City of Charleston and Its Vicinity.” It
would patrol “at all times of day and night, as necessity may require” and would furnish “any
number of men which the police of Charleston … may require, for the preservation of peace and
the public safety.” It would enforce all laws relating to “the government of Negroes of free persons
of color” but would “have no military power over the white inhabitants of the State.” The
Municipal Guard could be “enlisted for any term not exceeding five years, and shall be governed by
the rules and articles of the United States army.” These paramilitary police would be paid for by “a
tax of ten dollars” levied on all houses “inhabited by Negroes or persons of color, as tenants or
owners” or “all free male Negroes or persons of color, who exercise any mechanic trade within city
limits.” In 1837, with its approximately 100 members, the Charleston city guard was the largest
police organization in the country.36
Foreigners remarked on America’s stark regional dissimilarities in city policing. A British traveler
in 1830, James Stuart, wrote of the differences between the paramilitary police forces of the South
and the civilian ones of the North and the reason for them: The “armed police, [of] Charleston and
New Orleans do not resemble the free cities of America; but the greater number of the black
population, and the way in which they are treated by the whites, render this precaution, I have no
doubt, indispensably necessary.” Bernard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar Eisenach, a visitor to Charleston,
described the municipal guardsmen as “police soldiers” posted throughout the city, and who owed
their support “to fear of the negroes.”37 Policemen in these cities were uniformed, armed, con-
ducted themselves as military units, and patrolled the streets in large numbers—all out of fear of
Black crime and violence. After the Civil War, many modern police departments, North and South,
evolved to share many of these characteristics, sadly, for the same reason.
When the British colonists set up their social, political, and economic institutions, they did so by
modeling them on those they had known. Accordingly, policing practices mirrored those in
England. A few townsmen would be legally empowered to call upon volunteer others to address
crime and disorder as the need arose; there would be no permanent, standing police. The people of a
community were thus both protectors and protected. Even those who broke the law were con-
sidered members of the community—though wayward ones. Old World institutions and behaviors
gave way to fast-changing conditions in North America. North and South diverged as each region
became ever more deeply committed to their respective economic systems, slavery in the South and
free labor in the North. This divergence had profound implications for law enforcement. Rapid
industrialization led to increasing immigration and urbanization and the crime and discord that
accompanied them. In response, northern police forces became larger, paid, and professional, with
civilians playing a declining role. The opposite happened in the South. As slavery expanded, the
region’s African-American population grew, reaching four million by 1860. These Black millions
created public safety concerns—fears—that necessitated a much more expansive and intrusive form
of policing than had previously existed. Southerners accomplished this not by expanding their public
police significantly, but by calling upon all Whites to play some role in policing all Blacks. Slave
patrols, city guards, and White-citizen surveillance resulted in largely private, rather than public,
law enforcement.
Focus on Robert Peel’s 1829 Metropolitan Police Act and northern police departments have
caused scholars to underappreciate the role of the South in the evolution of American policing. The
failure of the night watches led southern cities to establish the forerunners of urban police forces far

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sooner than those in the Northeast, in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Southern
city guards were large, often uniformed, armed, and patrolled their cities—all characteristics we
associate with modern police departments. According to the historian Martin Alan Greenberg, those
forces represent “the first era of modern policing.”38 Patrolling is perhaps the most important police
function. The first police departments in New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia did not initially
consider it an essential part of crime prevention and detection, but White southerners knew they
could not control slave crime without patrols and constant surveillance. A former New York police
commissioner, Patrick Murphy, has gone so far as to say that “slave patrols of the South were
America’s first modern-style police forces.”39 It is inconceivable to think of modern policing
without officers on foot or car patrol, but the first Americans to do so were on horseback riding the
roads and fields of the South to keep Whites safe from the enslaved Blacks in their midst.
American law enforcement officers and the general public have been unwilling to associate the
nation’s police with slavery and White supremacy. As the historians Robert Wadman and William
Allison observe, beginning consideration of American policing with Robert Peel’s “Principles of
Law Enforcement … is substantially more comfortable and acceptable to those in policing than the
reality that some current police functions evolved from slave patrols and enforcement of slave
codes.”40 Like much else about race relations in America, policing was shaped by centuries of chattel
slavery. Failure to acknowledge this history makes it difficult to truly comprehend one of the most
pressing issues of our day: the deeply troubling relationship between Blacks and the police.

Notes
1 State v. Jacob, Bibb County Superior Court, November 15, 1858, drawer 183, microfilm box 15, vol. 9,
p. 136, Georgia Department of Archives and History, Morrow, GA.
2 Martin Alan Greenberg, Citizens Defending America: From Colonial Times to the Age of Terrorism (Pittsburgh,
PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 12.
3 Ibid., 1; Robert C. Wadman and William Thomas Allison, To Protect and Serve: A History of Police in America
(Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2004), 2; Elizabeth Dale, Criminal Justice in the United States,
1789–1939 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 36; and George L. Keeling, William
Francis Walsh, and Jean-Paul Brodeur, “The Development of Professional Policing in England,” in Encyclopedia
Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/police/The-development-of-professional-policing-in-England.
4 Greenberg, Citizens Defending America, 1, 4, 23–24; and Wadman and Allison, To Protect and Serve, 9.
5 Wadman and Allison, To Protect and Serve, 8–9.
6 Ibid., 9; Greenberg, Citizens Defending America, 22.
7 Greenberg, Citizens Defending America, 37; and Wadman and Allison, To Protect and Serve, 9–10. Like modern
police departments, fire departments were an outgrowth of the functions of night watches. See Stephen F.
Ginsberg, “The Police and Fire Protection in New York City:1800–1850,” in Policing and Crime Control, Part
1, ed., Eric Monkkonen, Crime & Justice in American History (Munich: K.G. Saur, 1992), 227–33.
8 Wadman and Allison, To Protect and Serve, 14–16.
9 James F. Richardson, “The Struggle to Establish a London-Style Police Force for New York City,” in
Police, Prison, and Punishment: Major Historical Interpretations, ed. Kermit L. Hall (New York: Garland
Publishing, Inc., 1987), 568, 72; Greenberg, Citizens Defending America, 2–3; and Keeling, Walsh, and
Brodeur, “Development of Professional Policing.”
10 Richardson, “Struggle to Establish London-Style Police Force,” 582, 587–90; Wadman and Allison, To
Protect and Serve, 17–25; and Greenberg, Citizens Defending America, 3.
11 Greenberg, Citizens Defending America, 251; and Wadman and Allison, To Protect and Serve, 11.
12 Douglas Greenberg, “Crime, Law Enforcement, and Social Control in Colonial America,” in Crime &
Justice in American History, ed. Eric Monkkonen, vol. 1. The Colonies and Early Republic (Westport, CT:
Meckler, 1991), 240; Wadman and Allison, To Protect and Serve, 28–29. For perhaps the most important
monograph on the role of honor in southern culture, see, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and
Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Greenberg, Citizens Defending
America, 257; and Dale, Criminal Justice in the U.S., 36.
13 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, ed., William Carey Jones (Oxford, England:
Clarendon Press, 1765–70; repr., San Francisco: Bancroft-Whitney Co., 1915).

22
 Transformation of Southern Policing

14 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1955), 142.
15 James Henry Hammond, “Slavery in the Light of Political Science,” in Cotton is King and Other Pro-Slavery
Arguments, ed. E.N. Elliott (Augusta, GA: Pritchard, Abbott & Loomis, 1860), 677.
16 George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters, ed. C. Vann Woodward (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1960), 248–49.
17 Ibid., 243.
18 William Goodell, The American Slave Code in Theory and Practice: Its Distinctive Features Shown by Its Statutes,
Judicial Decisions and Illustrative Facts (n.p.: American & Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1853; repr., New
York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 309.
19 Ibid., 310.
20 Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2001), 8–10, 24–25; and Greenberg, Citizens Defending America, 34–36.
21 Thomas Cooper, Statutes at Large of South Carolina (Columbia, SC: A.S. Johnston, 1838), 3:570.
22 Oliver H. Prince, A Digest of the Laws of the State of Georgia (Athens, GA: Oliver H. Prince, 1837), 441.
23 Cooper, South Carolina Statutes, 3:570; C.C. Clay, Digest of the Laws of the State of Alabama (Tuscaloosa, AL:
Marmaduke J. Slade, 1843), 336; Prince, Digest of Laws of Georgia, 442; William McK. Ball and Samuel C.
Roane, Revised Statutes of the State of Arkansas (Boston: Weeks, Jordan & Co., 1838), 604; T.J. Fox Alden
and J.A. Van Hoesen, Digest of the Laws of Mississippi (New York: Alexander S. Gould, 1839), 677; and
Richard H. Stanton, The Revised Statutes of Kentucky, Adopted and Approved by the General Assembly, 1851 and
1852, and in Force from July 1, 1852 (Cincinnati, OH: Robert Clarke and Company, 1867), 1:196.
24 Stanton, Kentucky Statutes, 1:196.
25 Greenberg, Citizens Defending America, 34–36; David J. McCord, Statutes at Large of South Carolina, vol. 7
(Columbia, SC: A.S. Johnston, 1840), 7:399; Allen D. Candler, Colonial Records of the State of Georgia
(Atlanta, GA: Franklin Printing and Publishing Co., 1904), 18:105–6; John G. Aikin, Digest of the Laws of the
State of Alabama (Tuscaloosa, AL: D. Woodruff, 1836), 391; and Alden and Hoesen, Digest of Laws of
Mississippi, 747.
26 McCord, South Carolina Statutes, 7:441; Leslie A. Thompson, Manual or the Digest of the Statute Law of the
State of Florida (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1847), 175–76.
27 Alden and Hoesen, Digest of Laws of Mississippi, 751; Candler, Colonial Records of Georgia, 18:292–93; and
Clay, Digest of Laws of Alabama, 394.
28 Greenberg, Citizens Defending America, 47.
29 James Henry Hammond, Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Honorable James H. Hammond of South
Carolina (New York: John F. Throw & Co., Printers, 1866), 127–28. In the South, citizen involvement
significantly affected not just policing, but the entire criminal justice process. As Hammond expounded
elsewhere: “On our estates we dispense with the whole machinery of public police and public courts of
justice. Thus we try, decide, and execute the sentences, in thousands of cases, which in other countries
would go into courts.” William Harper, James Henry Hammond, William Gilmore Simms, and Thomas
Roderick Dew, The Pro-Slavery Argument as Maintained by the Most Distinguished Writers of the Southern States
(Philadelphia: Lippincott, Gambo, 1853), 130–31. Hammond’s analysis was accurate for colonial and
antebellum Georgia, where formal and informal criminal justice processes interacted to create a legal culture
that decidedly favored mastery. See Glenn McNair, Criminal Injustice: Slaves and Free Blacks in Georgia’s
Criminal Justice System (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009).
30 Hadden, Slave Patrols, 108; McCord, South Carolina Statutes, 7:440; and Thompson, Statute Law of
Florida, 175.
31 Aikin, Digest of Laws of Alabama 336–37; Ball and Roane, Arkansas Revised Statutes, 604; Clay, Digest of Laws
of Alabama, 392; Stanton, Kentucky Statutes, 196; Alden and Hoesen, Digest of Laws of Mississippi, 675; John
Haywood and Robert L. Cobbs, Statute Laws of the State of Tennessee (Knoxville, TN: F.S. Heiskell, 1831),
324; Samuel Shepherd, Statutues at Large of Virginia (Richmond, VA: Samuel Shepherd, 1836), 3:17; and
Prince, Digest of Laws of Georgia, 774–75.
32 Dale, Criminal Justice in the U.S., 36; Cooper, South Carolina Statutes, 3:572; Ball and Roane, Arkansas
Revised Statutes, 604; and Wadman and Allison, To Protect and Serve, 35.
33 Prince, Digest of Laws of Georgia, 443–44; Thompson, Statute Law of Florida, 174; McCord, South Carolina
Statutes, 7:441; Stanton, Kentucky Statutes, 1:196; and Alden and Hoesen, Digest of Laws of Mississippi, 675.
34 James M. Campbell, Crime and Punishment in African American History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2013), 29; Dennis Charles Rousey, Policing the Southern City: New Orleans, 1805–1889 (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 21, 24, 39; and Wadman and Allison, To Protect and Serve, 34.
35 Rousey, Policing the Southern City, 16–18.

23
 Glenn McNair

36 David J. McCord, Statutes at Large of South Carolina, vol. 6 (Columbia, SC: A.S. Johnston, 1839), 6:177–78;
and Wadman and Allison, To Protect and Serve, 35–36.
37 James Stuart, Three Years in North America (Edinburgh, Scotland: Robert Cadell, 1833), 2:139; and Duke of
Saxe Weimar-Eisenach Bernard, Travels Through America during the Years 1825 and 1826 (Philadelphia:
Carey, Lea & Carey, 1828), 2:7.
38 Greenberg, Citizens Defending America, xii.
39 Wadman and Allison, To Protect and Serve, 27.
40 Ibid.

24
 2
POLICING IN GILDED AGE
URBAN HUBS
Malcolm D. Holmes

The economic, political, and social structure of America underwent massive transformations during the
nineteenth century, social changes that converged to shape big-city policing. The agrarian commu-
nities and small towns of the colonial era were socially homogeneous and close relations existed among
citizens.1 These patterns persisted into the early nineteenth century, but increasingly social relationships
became more impersonal with the growth of cities. Industrialization began expanding in the North,
fueling urbanization and the rise of big business. New patterns of immigration and the emergence of
labor unions created tensions among various ethnic groups and social classes. Political machines
emerged in the rapidly growing cities of the North. These changes escalated dramatically after the Civil
War, during the historical period that came to be known as the “Gilded Age.”2
Formal systems of policing emerged in large northern cities late in the antebellum period. After
the war, the new system of social control rapidly diffused to large cities throughout the nation.3 But
it was the social milieu and struggles of the rapidly industrializing and urbanizing Northeastern and
Midwestern cities that shaped both the formal structure and informal culture of law enforcement.
Although policing has undergone major changes since the turn of the twentieth century, in many
ways the factors that shaped early police departments and practices still influence policing today.4
Indeed, the pressing concerns about policing in contemporary America, especially tensions between
police and ethnic minority communities and police brutality that disproportionately targets those
communities, are deeply rooted in the Gilded Age.5
Social class and ethnic group interests shaped early policing and continue to do so today.6 When
significant social inequalities characterize a society, policing implicitly involves protecting social
arrangements that advantage more privileged groups. Critical theories assert that coercive crime
control is an instrument that expressly aims to protect the interests of powerful groups by controlling
the “dangerous classes” of immigrants, racial/minorities, and the poor by whatever means neces-
sary.7 In the northern cities of the nineteenth century, European immigrants and the working poor
were seen as particularly threatening to the social order and the interests of more affluent classes.8
Groups perceived as threats to the status quo have borne the brunt of police coercive control,
including violence, throughout American history.9 The core of the police role rests on the state-
sanctioned authority to use force, including deadly force, to protect citizens and officers from the
dangerous people in their midst.10 At the same time, democratic societies circumscribe that mandate.
The use of force may be deemed proper or excessive, depending on whether it is necessary and justified
to realize a legitimate police duty.11 From the perspective of law, excessive physical force most clearly
constitutes what is popularly termed police brutality.12 However, early policing in America was more

DOI: 10.4324/9781003109969-4 25
 Malcolm D. Holmes

aligned with subcultural norms of the occupation than with legal norms.13 The indiscriminate use of
force in disadvantaged neighborhoods became a hallmark of policing in the nineteenth century, a
practice that many citizens of color, as well as critical scholars, believe persists today.14
In this essay, I explore the development of big-city policing and the forces that shaped it during
the nineteenth century. While the institution has been transformed in many ways over the course of
the twentieth century, the organization of policing departments reflects that heritage and policing
still represents the interests of the powerful, including those of officers themselves, over those of
more disadvantaged populations.15 Nowhere is that more troubling than in the deployment of
violence by police.

The Gilded Age

Rapid industrialization, urbanization, and technological innovations were a major part of the
changes that reshaped American life during the late nineteenth century. Another important element
involved major shifts in the sociodemographic structure of the nation, as immigrant streams from
Europe and sharp increases in economic inequality restructured northern cities.
The North was the center of early industrialization in America, with factories spreading across
New England and the Middle Atlantic states during the antebellum period, whereas the South and
Midwest remained largely agrarian. The end of the Civil War ushered in the greatest industrial
growth in the history of the country.16 Industrialization increased dramatically in the North and
Midwest, as well as to a lesser degree in the South. A major change during the Gilded Age was the
development of the modern corporation in certain industrial sectors, such as oil, railroads, and steel
production. These massive, hierarchically organized corporate bureaucracies were at the vanguard of
rapid economic growth. The growth of railroads provided a central part of the transportation
infrastructure essential to the distribution of goods. Technological changes were also key.17
Advances in communications, notably the telephone, supplemented the telegraph and facilitated
rapid coordination of production and transportation of goods. Other technological developments,
especially the transmission of electricity and techniques of mass production in factories, facilitated
the manufacture of an array of new consumer goods.
Industrialization and urbanization are generally interrelated phenomena. The rapid growth of
large-scale manufacturing in America went hand-in-hand with a major shift in the distribution of
the population from rural to urban.18 Regional variation was evident in urbanization, reflecting the
unequal pattern of industrialization across the nation. In 1860, the urban population comprised
35.7% in the Northeast, which jumped to 66.1% in 1900. In contrast, the South remained primarily
rural, with 18% of the population residing in urban areas in 1900. The North Central (Midwest) and
West regions fell between these two extremes.
As cities expanded and new forms of transportation appeared, spatial changes reshaped urban life.
In the compact cities of early America, people typically walked to their destinations and little
differentiation existed in patterns of land use.19 There was considerable intermingling of different
ethnic groups and social classes. The development of mass transit, such as street railway systems, and
the physical expansion of cities altered this pattern, with cities becoming more segregated by
ethnicity and class. The more affluent moved to developing suburban areas along mass-transit lines,
while immigrant and poorer populations were increasingly concentrated in densely populated
neighborhoods comprising the urban core.
The arrival of new immigrants further fueled urbanization. Before the Civil War, immigrants to
the United States originated almost exclusively from northwestern Europe.20 Although the bulk of
immigrants arriving during the Gilded Age still originated from that region, immigration from
southeastern Europe became more prevalent late in the nineteenth century. Immigrants from
Europe were motivated primarily by economic considerations, with employment opportunities

26
 Policing in Gilded Age Urban Hubs

being increasingly located in the urban, industrial sector of the economy. These jobs were dis-
proportionately located in northern cities that were the heart of the changing economic structure of
the country. Consequently, those cities saw substantially greater increases in immigrant populations.
The Catholic Irish comprised the first “new” immigrant stream that challenged the hegemony of
America’s largely Protestant population of western European origin. Driven by poverty and famine,
they began settling in northeastern cities in the 1830s. Popularly viewed as racially inferior to native-
born Whites, the Irish were relegated to low-paying jobs, lived in dilapidated neighborhoods, and
experienced harsh social ills including crime.21 They were stereotyped as a belligerent and drunken
problem population. Yet, despite increasing nativist sentiment that aimed to halt immigration and
keep the Irish, along with other Catholic immigrants, from acquiring political power, the Irish came
to dominate urban politics in many northern cities during the Gilded Age.
Catholics from other countries also comprised significant immigrant streams during the nineteenth
century.22 Germans were most numerous, with Italian and Eastern European Catholics comprising
major immigrant streams later in the century. Nativist sentiment had become a prominent political
issue by the beginning of the Gilded Age, with hostility intensifying as ever-larger Catholic immigrant
streams arrived. Although holding rather different philosophies regarding nativist hostility and moral
benevolence, the Know Nothing Party and the anti-drinking American Temperance Movement were
allied with respect to curtailing the assault on the American way of life purportedly mounted by
Catholic immigrants.23 These immigrants were hardly the only targets of the nativist movement. But
the large number of Catholic immigrants, their settlement in the Northeastern and Midwestern cities
where industrialization flourished, and their lack of skills and capital made them especially threatening
to “old-stock” Americans.
Many immigrants arriving during the Gilded Age were consigned to unskilled jobs in an
economy increasingly based on wage labor.24 The new industrial order of America fostered overall
prosperity but also greater economic inequality. While business elites benefited immensely from the
new industrial order, many immigrant workers lived in abject poverty even as living standards
improved among more advantaged populations. The working class suffered the harsh deprivations of
work—long hours, low wages, and dangerous conditions—that characterized the industrializing
economy. Class conflict became a hallmark of the Gilded Age. For example, there were nearly
10,000 strikes and lockouts during the 1880s, primarily in industrializing cities of the North. The
emergence of the labor movement further exacerbated tensions between capitalists and workers.
Powerful business and political interests called upon state militias, federal troops, and local police to
crush strikes and repress the labor movement.

The Establishment of Big-City Police Departments

Given the rapid social change and tumult that America experienced during the nineteenth century,
it is unsurprising that a new form of social control emerged by mid-century and then proliferated
during the Gilded Age. Early colonial communities depended on personal and familial relationships
to create informal systems of social control.25 Unwritten customs and religious prescripts provided
the normative framework governing behavior, and ordinary citizens shared the responsibility of
monitoring and protecting others. Following English traditions, they performed law enforcement
duties as constables and night watchmen, usually on a part-time basis.26 These informal means of
social control began to weaken as personal ties gave way to more impersonal relationships with the
growth of cities.
The constabulary charged with carrying out law enforcement functions typically spent little
time controlling crime and social disorder.27 Civil duties took priority because constables were
often paid on fee schedules that provided more certain remuneration for inspecting taverns and
serving papers. Night-watch systems dealt primarily with problems of nighttime disorder, such as

27
 Malcolm D. Holmes

fires and drunkenness. Male citizens generally had a civil obligation to serve on the night watch, but
poor pay and responsibilities to families and jobs motivated many to actively dodge this service.
Despite the increasing prevalence of crime and disorder, and the widely shared belief that the
constabulary and night-watch were ineffective at solving those problems, these loosely structured
systems of informal social control endured well into the nineteenth century.
The acceleration of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration in the early part of the
century fundamentally changed the nature of life in American cities.28 Cities became more densely
populated and diverse as they grew. Large influxes of immigrants resulted in increased racial and
ethnic tensions as culturally and religiously diverse groups competed for scarce resources in densely
populated neighborhoods. Historic animosities were transported to the United States and often
erupted in urban violence. Large-scale urban disorder and riots were commonplace before the Civil
War and persisted throughout the nineteenth century. The riots were motivated not only by ethnic
conflicts, but also to protest matters such as elections, taxes, and economic conditions.29
The constabulary and night-watch were ill-equipped for responding to the perceived problems of
urban disorder and crime.30 The night-watch of most towns was poorly organized and inadequately
staffed. Constables had neither the training nor the resources to handle mob violence. The military,
although better equipped to handle riots, responded slowly and risked inflaming ethnic and class
tensions. Business elites and the middle-class increasingly feared for the stability of society. They
especially feared the “dangerous classes” of the poor, ethnic immigrants, and Blacks. Frequent
reference was made to the threat posed by this allegedly “unmanageable, volatile, and convulsively
criminal class at the base of society.”31 Elites’ fear of the dangerous classes, and their concern about
the social instability created by riots and civil disorder, led them to advocate for a mechanism to
control those seen as threats to the stability of society.
They came to believe that a formal public institution backed by the coercive power of the state
provided the best option for controlling disorder and crime.32 Urban elites, middle-class citizens,
and business owners stood to benefit from the creation of a bureaucratic police system in a number
of ways. It could protect property and control the urban underclasses while sheltering these
privileged citizens from participation in informal mechanisms of social control such as the night-
watch. Moreover, the new institution would benefit the dominant classes by redirecting the
animosity of the dangerous classes to the police who ostensibly served larger societal interests.
Reflecting the concerns of more affluent citizens, American police departments were first created in
cities that experienced substantial immigration and social disorder. Shortly after becoming incorporated,
Boston reorganized the night-watch into a police department in 1838. New York City followed in
1844, and police departments soon began appearing in other northern cities, including Cincinnati
(1848), Chicago (1851), Philadelphia (1854), Baltimore (1857), and Washington, D.C. (1861).33
Virtually all early city police departments were located in northern cities. In contrast to the urbanizing
North, the agrarian South relied primarily on slave patrols to control the large Black population of the
region throughout the antebellum period.34 After the Civil War, police departments rapidly
proliferated throughout the nation.35
Like the constabulary and night-watch, in many respects, the first police departments in the
United States followed the English model. The Metropolitan Police of London was founded in 1829
by Robert Peel, relying on a quasi-military bureaucratic model that aimed to position the new
police between the state and citizens. Although intending “to create a ’softer’ means of social control
than the military, [Peel] had established the institution that would be at the center of social conflict
for the next 150 years.”36 The Metropolitan Police provided the model for early American police
departments, but there were important differences between the two systems.
The Metropolitan Police relied on a highly centralized organizational framework, whereas
American departments were geographically and administratively decentralized. A related difference
was their mode of legitimization, with the former seeing themselves constitutionally bound by the

28
 Policing in Gilded Age Urban Hubs

rule of law, the latter calling upon populist democratic principles to justify officers individually
administering justice on the street.37 Often the organizational structure of early American police
departments deeply involved the police in local neighborhood affairs, where they could readily serve
the politicians to whom they were beholden. Police chiefs were appointed to manage departments,
but in reality local politicians controlled precinct appointments, which left chiefs with little practical
power over officers on the beat.38
Despite being “created by and for elites,”39 the police were never monopolized by a single powerful
faction; rather, they were a valuable instrument that competing interest groups fought over. Local
political machines, often formed from immigrant neighborhoods, ensnared big-city police by the mid-
1800s. Police officers were political appointees beholden to politicians for their positions, which were
awarded through a system of patronage.40 They were generally recruited from the neighborhoods in
which they would work. Given the early arrival and size of the Irish population, they came to
dominate urban political machines and, consequently, the ranks of northern police departments in
cities such as New York and Chicago.41 In many cities power often shifted hands from one political
faction to another, resulting in high turnover in police departments as newly elected politicians
rewarded supporters from their neighborhoods with appointments as police officers.42
Indeed, policing was largely viewed as a temporary job rather than a career in the nineteenth
century.43 Entry requirements for prospective police officers were generally minimal. New officers
often had little formal education, as one only needed the right political connections or willingness to
pay a fee to obtain a position. The new police officer was provided a club and badge, but little or no
training. Lacking training and supervision, the police officer of the nineteenth century had considerable
freedom in carrying out his duties. Early police officers spent a good deal of time avoiding their job
responsibilities altogether. Nonetheless, police agencies provided numerous services directly out of
precinct houses, and officers were expected to maintain at least a semblance of order on their beats.
Insofar as police were neighborhood based and heavily influenced by dominant political powers,
the kind of policing citizens received depended largely on the neighborhood in which they resided.
The police “maintained a paternal surveillance” in ethnic neighborhoods, whereas in more affluent
locales “police spared no effort or force to locate culprits of crime.”44 Given that Black populations
were small in northern cities and had little political influence, their neighborhoods were largely
ignored. Police were not drawn from those neighborhoods, and they paid little heed to the needs of
the Black community.45 In short, police activity reflected the racial and ethnic composition of
neighborhoods. Conflicts between police and citizens frequently had an ethnic or racial character,
with the police sometimes representing one ethnic group over another.46
Controversy often surrounded nineteenth century policing. Rampant corruption plagued big-
city police agencies.47 The red-light or vice districts of cities were often seen as choice assignments,
as they provided a steady source of pay-off money for the police. They accepted bribes from
operators of illegal establishments to overlook the illegal activities of patrons who did not seriously
disturb the public peace. Police served as poll watchers during elections and were expected to ignore
common fraudulent activities, such as ballot-box stuffing, that benefited their political patrons.
Police brutality was a particularly prominent concern of citizens and early reformers. Lack of
training, minimal supervision, public hostility, and ethnic tensions compelled the police to rely
heavily on personal authority to obtain compliance and respect. Indeed, the use of violence under
certain circumstances became an accepted norm among police. Police officers often individually
meted out justice on the street rather than relying on the courts.48 Arrest was not always feasible, as
officers could not easily summon other officers to assist them or transport prisoners to jail. Rather,
they freely applied the “hickory” (a moniker based on the hardwood from which nightclubs were
crafted) to roughly administer justice, primarily targeting immigrants and the working-class. Citizens
often complained about police “clubbing” people with nightsticks or blackjacks.

29
 Malcolm D. Holmes

For their part, citizens frequently challenged police authority, and officers resorted to brutality to
establish control.49 Not only did the use of violence serve the instrumental ends of maintaining
social order; its use also preserved the personal dignity of officers in the face of citizens’ affronts. A
police clubbing often resulted from challenges to officers, with “insults, snide remarks, rowdy or
drunken behavior, or a failure to obey orders [being] common provocations.”50 These behaviors
generally did not involve criminal violations, but they were (and still are) seen as violations of police
subcultural norms that demanded rough justice be dispensed on the street.
Police became notorious for clubbing citizens during the Gilded Age. The brutality of policing
was widely criticized by the working class, who saw them as handmaidens of capitalists, and by
middle-class reformers, who saw them as lower-class brutes. Indeed, the term police brutality, first
used in newspaper accounts of the 1860s, “implied that that police were inhumane beasts who
cruelly and savagely abused citizens.”51
The police did not just employ brutality on the streets. Despite the assurances of the Fifth
Amendment of the Constitution, police relied heavily on the “third degree” to coerce confessions
and the identity of accomplices.52 Suspects were detained and tortured, both physically and
psychologically, for days on end. These practices were seen as a necessary expedient and became an
accepted part of police investigations. They were not as highly publicized as clubbing on the streets
because victims of the practice feared retribution from their criminal accomplices and the police.
Moreover, the public was less concerned with the treatment of purported criminals than the
gratuitous beatings triggered by minor violations of citizens within their neighborhoods.
Working-class concern about brutality stemmed not only from police action in ethnic neigh-
borhoods, but also from the role police played in controlling riots and breaking strikes. Riots were
commonplace throughout the nineteenth century. Strikes became commonplace with the rapid
industrialization of the Gilded Age, visibly symbolizing the class conflicts between capitalists and
workers that accompanied the increasing social inequality of the period.53 Wealthy capitalists
became politically powerful, and by the 1880s they were able to garner the support of governors and
federal officials to exert control over workers who sought to improve their wages and the conditions
under which they labored. The last two decades of the nineteenth century saw rapid growth of labor
unions and thousands of massive clashes between workers and their employers. Pitched battles
between strikers and were often brutally suppressed by the military and police, though occasionally
local police sided with strikers.
Not all efforts to control poorer populations were punitive, however. Notably, the police also
engaged in efforts to alleviate the suffering of the homeless poor during hard times by providing
overnight lodging, and often food, in police stations.54 Although far from luxurious or welcoming, these
accommodations kept many paupers alive when there were no other resources to turn to. Ironically,
despite the problems of widespread corruption and brutality during the Gilded Age, the police were
more oriented to non-criminal services than they would become in the decades that followed.

Policing in the Modern Era

By the turn of the twentieth century, the foundation of big-city policing as we know it today was in
place. Yet, urban policing retained its corrupt and politicized quality during the early part of the
century.55 In many ways the social context surrounding the institution remained little changed as
the Gilded Age came to an end. The corporate greed and political corruption that were hallmarks of
the late nineteenth century persisted into the 1920s. Political machines retained considerable power
and corporations were able to fend off efforts to reign in their excesses. Massive streams of
immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe continued until World War I. Two major social
changes were on the horizon by the turn of the century, however, changes that would significantly
alter policing in the modern era.

30
 Policing in Gilded Age Urban Hubs

A particularly important transformation involved racial and ethnic relations. Beliefs about
purported racial inferiority commonly become part of public discourse regarding the social
disadvantages confronted by various groups. Some such beliefs dissipate relatively quickly, but others
endure tenaciously. As immigration streams from Europe tapered off, these populations eventually
came to be seen as less threatening as they assimilated into the dominant society. For example,
stereotypes and ideologies about the “racial” inferiority of Catholic immigrants served as useful
justifications for the rampant discrimination they experienced during the nineteenth century.56 Yet,
by the 1950s the various Catholic immigrant groups, once often consigned to conditions of abject
poverty, were largely assimilated into the mainstream of American society.57 Although vestiges of
their ethnic identities and stereotypes undoubtedly still exist, beliefs about their racial inferiority and
innate criminality have largely faded away.
In contrast to the rapidly growing population of European immigrants, Blacks comprised a small
part of the population in northern cities during the nineteenth century, but antipathy toward them
was as intense in the North as in the South.58 The beginning of Jim Crow in the South was marked
by the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which infamously established the “separate but
equal” standard for permissible segregation.59 This ruling provided southern states with the
opportunity to develop new means of exerting social control over the Black population. Public
institutions and facilities were strictly segregated, and lynching emerged as a powerful tool for
suppressing the threat allegedly posed by Blacks.60
The Great Migration of the twentieth century ensued as many Blacks from the largely rural
southern population migrated to northern cities to escape the tribulations of the Jim Crow era. In
1900, the population of the United States was 11.6% Black, which was very unevenly distributed
across regions.61 Blacks comprised less than 2% of the population in the Northeast and Midwest,
whereas they made up almost one-third of the population in the South. By 1990, less than 20% of
the South’s population was Black, and the Black population of the Northeast (11%) and Midwest
(9.6) had nearly reached the national figure of 12.1%. Much of the population of the northern and
midwestern states resided in highly segregated, impoverished urban neighborhoods.62
This demographic shift profoundly affected race relations in northern and midwestern cities,
including between the police and Black citizens. Tensions emerged between Whites and the
southern Backs who flooded into old ethnic neighborhoods in the early twentieth century.63
Resentment arose among the old immigrants who perceived Blacks as competitors for jobs and
housing. Riots occurred as Irish residents in particular sought to drive Blacks from their neigh-
borhoods. Given the prevalence of the Irish in big-city police departments, it is not surprising that
the police sided with their countrymen. Blacks were frequently beaten and arrested by police,
whereas the White instigators of the riots often went unpunished. Black citizens lacked powerful
allies because of the lack of Black police officers and political officials. Blacks increasingly became the
target of coercive crime control throughout the large cities of the northern tier of states. Unlike
European immigrants, Blacks have never had the opportunity to fully assimilate into American
society. They remain highly segregated today, many in very disadvantaged neighborhoods where
they experience tensions with police and a high incidence of police brutality.64
The other major change of the early twentieth century was the advent of the Progressive Era.
Calls for reform began during the late nineteenth century, when progressives sought to curtail
the corrupt business and political practices of the Gilded Age, as well as restricting the entry of
“undesirable” immigrants into the nation. Various forms of police brutality and corruption did not
escape their attention. The police were still little oriented to legal norms; rather, they remained
beholden to political interests and the demands of their informal subculture.65
Middle-class, native-born Whites became increasingly riled by corruption scandals and accounts
of brutality, motivating a political movement to reform the police.66 Progressives were not the only
ones interested in changing policing. Police chiefs held accountable for the failures of their agencies,

31
 Malcolm D. Holmes

even though they had little control over their precinct commanders and street-level officers, wanted
a means to achieve greater control. The movement to reform city police departments evolved into a
coalition of progressive outsiders and police insiders that sought, in part, to diminish the power of
immigrant political machines by wresting away their control of policing.
In 1931, The National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (The Wickersham
Commission) harshly condemned the use of police brutality in a widely publicized report on
Lawlessness in Law Enforcement.67 That report helped foster the movement to improve policing.
Reforming police departments centered on narrowing organizational focus, increasing centralization
and control, and improving personnel.68 The police began to focus more on enforcing laws and
controlling crime, and less on maintaining order and providing service. Provision of services pre-
viously provided by police increasingly came under the purview of emerging social service agencies.
The decentralized structure of early police departments gave way to more centralized organization,
giving greater control to the police chief while wresting away the power of local neighborhood
commanders and their political sponsors. Changes in the recruitment, selection, and training aimed
to remake the police officer as a professional. Civil service reforms, such as hiring/promotion
examinations and enhanced entry requirements, ended patronage appointments and weeded out
unqualified applicants. New training programs instilled police recruits with a legalistic orientation
and prepared them to perform their jobs. Greater supervision and accountability procedures sought
to ensure that officers carried out their duties properly while avoiding the enticements of corruption.
In addition to these reforms, technological innovations (e.g., patrol cars, two-way radios) sig-
nificantly altered street-level policing, and police departments adopted new business practices to
ensure organizational efficiency.69 The professional police of the modern era had fully emerged by
the late 1950s, with a new emphasis on crime fighting.
Despite the profound changes in policing that came about by the movement toward profession-
alism, events of the 1960s again triggered public concern and scrutiny of the police.70 Widespread civil
unrest, including civil rights protests and urban riots, brought the police into direct conflict with Black
citizens. Newspaper accounts and television news reported police officers beating civil rights marchers
and setting dogs on them. In an exhaustive investigation of the urban unrest that swept through
American cities during the late 1960s, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, better
known as the Kerner Commission, identified numerous contributing factors to these immensely
destructive riots.71 The Commission concluded that longstanding socioeconomic disadvantages and
general perceptions of unequal justice among Blacks, combined with precipitating acts of police
violence, provided the catalysts for the outbreak of urban race riots. The reforms of previous decades
clearly had not eradicated the enduring and destructive problems of “racialized” urban policing.
After the riots of the 1960s, scholars became increasingly interested in whether a different
standard existed for police use of violence in Black communities, given that police killings of citizens
often precipitated the civil unrest.72 Several early studies demonstrated that Black citizens were
disproportionately killed by police, but their higher death rates were correlated with higher rates of
violence and resistance among Blacks.73 That research generally concluded that the disparity was
attributable to the objective threats posed by Blacks rather than to racial bias among the
predominantly White police officers of that era. That conclusion seems at odds with the well-
documented existence of police racism and permissive standards regarding the use of deadly force in
place at the time. Indeed, these studies could not explain the substantial differences in rates of police
killings across cities by variations in levels of community violence.74
A new reform movement aiming to ameliorate police–minority tensions took hold after the
1960s. This round of reforms originated from the recommendations of the Kerner Commission and
focused on breaking down the insularity of the police and making them more accountable to the
communities they serve.75 Popular proposals included increasing racial/ethnic diversity in police
agencies, developing community policing programs, and establishing civilian review procedures for

32
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21. Each to give me | gifts was fain,
Gifts to give, | and goodly speech,
Comfort so | for my sorrows great
To bring they tried, | but I trusted them not.

22. A draught did Grimhild | give me to drink,

Bitter and cold; | I forgot my cares; [458]
For mingled therein | was magic earth,
Ice-cold sea, | and the blood of swine.

23. In the cup were runes | of every kind,

Written and reddened, | I could not read them;
A heather-fish | from the Haddings’ land,
An ear uncut, | and the entrails of beasts.

24. Much evil was brewed | within the beer,

Blossoms of trees, | and acorns burned,
Dew of the hearth, | and holy entrails,
The liver of swine,— | all grief to allay.

25. Then I forgot, | when the draught they gave

me,
There in the hall, | my husband’s slaying;
On their knees the kings | all three did kneel,
Ere she herself | to speak began:

[459]
26. “Guthrun, gold | to thee I give,
The wealth that once | thy father’s was,
Rings to have, | and Hlothver’s halls,
And the hangings all | that the monarch had.

27. “Hunnish women, | skilled in weaving,

Who gold make fair | to give thee joy,
And the wealth of Buthli | thine shall be,
Gold-decked one, | as Atli’s wife.”

Guthrun spake:

28. “A husband now | I will not have,

Nor wife of Brynhild’s | brother be;
It beseems me not | with Buthli’s son
Happy to be, | and heirs to bear.”

[460]

Grimhild spake:

29. “Seek not on men | to avenge thy sorrows,

Though the blame at first | with us hath been;
Happy shalt be | as if both still lived,
Sigurth and Sigmund, | if sons thou bearest.”

Guthrun spake:

30. “Grimhild, I may not | gladness find,

Nor hold forth hopes | to heroes now,
Since once the raven | and ravening wolf
Sigurth’s heart’s-blood | hungrily lapped.”

Grimhild spake:

31. “Noblest of birth | is the ruler now

I have found for thee, | and foremost of all;
Him shalt thou have | while life thou hast,
Or husbandless be | if him thou wilt choose not.”

Guthrun spake:

32. “Seek not so eagerly | me to send

To be a bride | of yon baneful race;
On Gunnar first | his wrath shall fall,
And the heart will he tear | from Hogni’s breast.”

[461]

33. Weeping Grimhild | heard the words

That fate full sore | for her sons foretold,
(And mighty woe | for them should work;)
“Lands I give thee, | with all that live there,
(Vinbjorg is thine, | and Valbjorg too,)
Have them forever, | but hear me, daughter.”

34. So must I do | as the kings besought,

And against my will | for my kinsmen wed;
Ne’er with my husband | joy I had,
And my sons by my brothers’ | fate were saved
not.

35. . . . . . . . . | . . . . . . . .
I could not rest | till of life I had robbed
The warrior bold, | the maker of battles.

36. Soon on horseback | each hero was, [462]

And the foreign women | in wagons faring;
A week through lands | so cold we went,
And a second week | the waves we smote,
(And a third through lands | that water lacked).

37. The warders now | on the lofty walls

Opened the gates, | and in we rode.

* * * * * *

38. Atli woke me, | for ever I seemed

Of bitterness full | for my brothers’ death.

Atli spake:

39. “Now from sleep | the Norns have waked me

With visions of terror,— | to thee will I tell them;
Methought thou, Guthrun, | Gjuki’s daughter,
With poisoned blade | didst pierce my body.”
[463]

Guthrun spake:

40. “Fire a dream | of steel shall follow

And willful pride | one of woman’s wrath;
A baneful sore | I shall burn from thee,
And tend and heal thee, | though hated thou art.”

Atli spake:

41. “Of plants I dreamed, | in the garden drooping,

That fain would I have | full high to grow;
Plucked by the roots, | and red with blood,
They brought them hither, | and bade me eat.

42. “I dreamed my hawks | from my hand had

flown,
Eager for food, | to an evil house;
I dreamed their hearts | with honey I ate,
Soaked in blood, | and heavy my sorrow.

43. “Hounds I dreamed | from my hand I loosed,

Loud in hunger | and pain they howled;
Their flesh methought | was eagles’ food,
And their bodies now | I needs must eat.”

Guthrun spake:
44. “Men shall soon | of sacrifice speak, [464]
And off the heads | of beasts shall hew;
Die they shall | ere day has dawned,
A few nights hence, | and the folk shall have
them.”

Atli spake:

45. “On my bed I sank, | nor slumber sought,

Weary with woe,— | full well I remember.”
. . . . . . . . | . . . . . . . .

[450]

[Contents]

NOTES
[451]

Prose. Thjothrek: the famous Theoderich, king of the Ostrogoths,

who became renowned in German story as Dietrich von Bern. The
German tradition early accepted the anachronism of bringing
together Attila (Etzel, Atli), who died in 453, and Theoderich, who
was born about 455, and adding thereto Ermanarich (Jormunrek),
king of the Goths, who died about 376. Ermanarich, in German
tradition, replaced Theoderich’s actual enemy, Odovakar, and it was
in battle with Jormunrek (i.e., Odovakar) that Thjothrek is here said
to have lost most of his men. The annotator found the material for
this note in Guthrunarkvitha III, in which Guthrun is accused of
having Thjothrek as her lover. At the time when Guthrunarkvitha II
[452]was composed (early tenth century) it is probable that the story
of Theoderich had not reached the North at all, and the annotator is
consequently wrong in giving the poem its setting.

2. Cf. Guthrunarkvitha I, 17.

4. Regarding the varying accounts of the manner of Sigurth’s death

cf. Brot, concluding prose and note. Grani: cf. Brot, 7.

6. No gap indicated in the manuscript. Some editions combine these

two lines with either stanza 5 or stanza 7. [453]

7. Gotthorm: from this it appears that in both versions of the death of

Sigurth the mortally wounded hero killed his murderer, the younger
brother of Gunnar and Hogni. The story of how Gotthorm was slain
after killing Sigurth in his bed is told in Sigurtharkvitha en skamma,
22–23, and in the Volsungasaga.

11. On lines 3–4 cf. Guthrunarkvitha I, 1. Line 5 is probably spurious.

[454]

12. Many editions make one stanza of stanzas 12 and 13,

reconstructing line 3; the manuscript shows no gap. Bugge fills out
the stanza thus: “The wolves were howling | on all the ways, / The
eagles cried | as their food they craved.”

13. Cf. note on preceding stanza. Grundtvig suggests as a first line:

“Long did I bide, | my brothers awaiting.” Many editors reject line
4.

14. The manuscript marks line 3 as beginning a stanza, and many

editions combine lines 3–4 with lines 1–2 of stanza 15. Hoalf (or
Half): Gering thinks this Danish king may be identical with Alf, son of
King Hjalprek, and second husband of Hjordis, Sigurth’s mother (cf.
Fra Dautha Sinfjotla and note), but the name was a common one.
Thora and Hokon have not been identified (cf. Guthrunarkvitha I,
concluding prose, which is clearly based on this stanza). A Thora
appears in Hyndluljoth, 18, as the wife of Dag, one of the sons of
Halfdan the Old, the most famous of Denmark’s mythical kings, and
one of her sons is Alf (Hoalf?). [455]

15. The manuscript marks line 3 as the beginning of a stanza. Some

editors combine lines 5–6 with lines 1–2 of stanza 16, while others
mark them as interpolated.

16. Some editions combine lines 3–4 with stanza 17. Sigmund:
Sigurth’s father, who here appears as a sea-rover in Guthrun’s
tapestry. Sigar: named in Fornaldar sögur II, 10, as the father of
Siggeir, the latter being the husband of Sigmund’s twin sister, Signy
(cf. Fra Dautha Sinfjotla). Fjon: this name, referring to the Danish
island of Fünen, is taken from the Volsungasaga paraphrase as
better fitting the Danish setting of the stanza than the name in
Regius, which is “Fife” (Scotland).

17. No gap is indicated in the manuscript, and most editions combine

these two lines either with lines 3–4 of stanza 16, with lines 1–2 of
stanza 18, or with the whole of stanza 18. Line 2 [456]has been filled
out in various ways. The Volsungasaga paraphrase indicates that
these two lines are the remains of a full stanza, the prose passage
running: “Now Guthrun was somewhat comforted of her sorrows.
Then Grimhild learned where Guthrun was now dwelling.” The first
two lines may be the ones missing. Gothic: the term “Goth” was used
in the North without much discrimination to apply to all south-
Germanic peoples. In Gripisspo, 35, Gunnar, Grimhild’s son,
appears as “lord of the Goths.”

18. The manuscript marks line 3 as the beginning of a stanza.

Grimhild is eager to have amends made to Guthrun for the slaying of
Sigurth and their son, Sigmund, because Atli has threatened war if
he cannot have Guthrun for his wife.
19. Lines 5–6 are almost certainly interpolations, made by a scribe
with a very vague understanding of the meaning of the stanza, which
refers simply to the journey of the Gjukungs to bring their sister
home from Denmark.

20. Lines 1–2 are probably interpolated, though the Volsungasaga

includes the names. Some one apparently attempted to [457]supply
the names of Atli’s messengers, the “long-beard men” of line 4, who
have come to ask for Guthrun’s hand. Some commentators assume,
as the Volsungasaga does, that these messengers went with the
Gjukungs to Denmark in search of Guthrun, but it seems more likely
that a transitional stanza has dropped out after stanza 19, and that
Guthrun received Atli’s emissaries in her brothers’ home. Long-
beards: the word may actually mean Langobards or Lombards, but, if
it does, it is presumably without any specific significance here.
Certainly the names in the interpolated two lines do not fit either
Lombards or Huns, for Valdar is identified as a Dane, and Jarizleif
and Jarizskar are apparently Slavic. The manuscript indicates line 5
as beginning a new stanza.

21. Each: the reference is presumably to Gunnar and Hogni, and

perhaps also Grimhild. I suspect that this stanza belongs before
stanza 20.

22. Stanzas 22–25 describe the draught of forgetfulness which

Grimhild gives Guthrun, just as she gave one to Sigurth (in one
version of the story) to make him forget Brynhild. The draught does
not seem to work despite Guthrun’s statement in stanza 25 (cf.
stanza 30), for which reason Vigfusson, not unwisely, places stanzas
22–25 after stanza 34. Blood of swine: cf. Hyndluljoth, 39 and note.
[458]

23. The Volsungasaga quotes stanzas 23–24. Heather-fish: a snake.

Haddings’ land: the world of the dead, so called because, according
to Saxo Grammaticus, the Danish king Hadingus once visited it. It is
possible that the comma should follow “heather-fish,” making the
“ear uncut” (of grain) come from the world of the dead.

24. Dew of the hearth: soot.

25. In the manuscript, and in some editions, the first line is in the
third person plural: “Then they forgot, | when the draught they had
drunk.” The second line in the original is manifestly in bad shape,
and has been variously emended. I forgot: this emendation is
doubtful, in view of stanza 30, but cf. note to stanza 22. The kings all
three: probably Atli’s emissaries, though the interpolated lines of
stanza 20 name four of them. I suspect that line 4 is wrong, and
should read: “Ere he himself (Atli) | to speak began.” Certainly
stanzas 26–27 [459]fit Atli much better than they do Grimhild, and
there is nothing unreasonable in Atli’s having come in person, along
with his tributary kings, to seek Guthrun’s hand. However, the “three
kings” may not be Atli’s followers at all, but Gunnar, Hogni, and the
unnamed third brother possibly referred to in Sigurtharkvitha en
skamma, 18.

26. Thy father’s: So the manuscript, in which case the reference is

obviously to Gjuki. But some editions omit the “thy,” and if Atli, and
not Grimhild, is speaking (cf. note on stanza 25), the reference may
be, as in line 3 of stanza 27, to the wealth of Atli’s father, Buthli.
Hlothver: the northern form of the Frankish name Chlodowech
(Ludwig), but who this Hlothver was, beyond the fact that he was
evidently a Frankish king, is uncertain. If Atli is speaking, he is
presumably a Frankish ruler whose land Atli and his Huns have
conquered.

27. Cf. note on stanza 25 as to the probable speaker.

28. In stanzas 28–32 the dialogue, in alternate stanzas, is clearly

between Guthrun and her mother, Grimhild, though the manuscript
does not indicate the speakers. [460]

29. Sigmund: son of Sigurth and Guthrun, killed at Brynhild’s behest.

30. This stanza presents a strong argument for transposing the
description of the draught of forgetfulness (stanzas 22–24 and lines
1–2 of stanza 25) to follow stanza 33. Raven, etc.: the original is
somewhat obscure, and the line may refer simply to the “corpse-
eating raven.”

32. In the manuscript this stanza is immediately followed by the two

lines which here, following Bugge’s suggestion, appear [461]as
stanza 35. In lines 3–4 Guthrun foretells what will (and actually does)
happen if she is forced to become Atli’s wife. If stanza 35 really
belongs here, it continues the prophesy to the effect that Guthrun will
have no rest till she has avenged her brothers’ death.

33. Very likely the remains of two stanzas; the manuscript marks line
4 as beginning a new stanza. On the other hand, lines 3 and 5 may
be interpolations. Vinbjorg and Valbjorg: apparently imaginary place-
names.

34. The kings: presumably Gunnar and Hogni. My sons: regarding

Guthrun’s slaying of her two sons by Atli, Erp and Eitil, cf. Drap
Niflunga, note.

35. In the manuscript this stanza follows stanza 32. The loss of two
lines, to the effect that “Ill was that marriage for my brothers, and ill
for Atli himself,” and the transposition of the remaining two lines to
this point, are indicated in a number of editions. The warrior, etc.:
Atli, whom Guthrun kills. [462]

36. The stanza describes the journey to Atli’s home, and sundry
unsuccessful efforts have been made to follow the travellers through
Germany and down the Danube. Foreign women: slaves. Line 5,
which the manuscript marks as beginning a stanza, is probably
spurious.

37. After these two lines there appears to be a considerable gap, the
lost stanzas giving Guthrun’s story of the slaying of her brothers. It is
possible that stanzas 38–45 came originally from another poem,
dealing with Atli’s dream, and were here substituted for the original
conclusion of Guthrun’s lament. Many editions combine stanzas 37
and 38, or combine stanza 38 (the manuscript marks line 1 as
beginning a stanza) with lines 1–2 of stanza 39.

39. The manuscript indicates line 3 as the beginning of a stanza. The

manuscript and most editions do not indicate the speakers in this
and the following stanzas. [463]

40. Guthrun, somewhat obscurely, interprets Atli’s first dream (stanza

39) to mean that she will cure him of an abscess by cauterizing it.
Her interpretation is, of course, intended merely to blind him to her
purpose.

41. In stanzas 41–43 Atli’s dreams forecast the death of his two
sons, whose flesh Guthrun gives him to eat (cf. Atlakvitha, 39, and
Atlamol, 78).

44. This stanza is evidently Guthrun’s intentionally cryptic

[464]interpretation of Atli’s dreams, but the meaning of the original is
more than doubtful. The word here rendered “sacrifice” may mean
“sea-catch,” and the one rendered “beasts” may mean “whales.”
None of the attempted emendations have rendered the stanza really
intelligible, but it appears to mean that Atli will soon make a sacrifice
of beasts at night, and give their bodies to the people. Guthrun of
course has in mind the slaying of his two sons.

45. With these two lines the poem abruptly ends; some editors
assign the speech to Atli (I think rightly), others to Guthrun. Ettmüller
combines the lines with stanza 38. Whether stanzas 38–45 originally
belonged to Guthrun’s lament, or were interpolated here in place of
the lost conclusion of that poem from another one dealing with Atli’s
dreams (cf. note on stanza 37), it is clear that the end has been lost.
[465]
[Contents]
GUTHRUNARKVITHA III
 The Third Lay of Guthrun
[Contents]

Introductory Note
The short Guthrunarkvitha III, entitled in the manuscript simply
Guthrunarkvitha, but so numbered in most editions to distinguish it
from the first and second Guthrun lays, appears only in the Codex
Regius. It is neither quoted nor paraphrased in the Volsungasaga,
the compilers of which appear not to have known the story with
which it deals. The poem as we have it is evidently complete and
free from serious interpolations. It can safely be dated from the first
half of the eleventh century, for the ordeal by boiling water, with
which it is chiefly concerned, was first introduced into Norway by St.
Olaf, who died in 1030, and the poem speaks of it in stanza 7 as still
of foreign origin.

The material for the poem evidently came from North Germany, but
there is little indication that the poet was working on the basis of a
narrative legend already fully formed. The story of the wife accused
of faithlessness who proves her innocence by the test of boiling
water had long been current in Germany, as elsewhere, and had
attached itself to various women of legendary fame, but not except in
this poem, so far as we can judge, to Guthrun (Kriemhild). The
introduction of Thjothrek (Theoderich, Dietrich, Thithrek) is another
indication of relative lateness, for the legends of Theoderich do not
appear to have reached the North materially before the year 1000.
On the anachronism of bringing Thjothrek to Atli’s court cf.
Guthrunarkvitha II, introductory prose, note, in which the
development of the Theoderich tradition in its relation to that of Atli is
briefly outlined.

Guthrunarkvitha III is, then, little more than a dramatic German story
made into a narrative lay by a Norse poet, with the names of
Guthrun, Atli, Thjothrek, and Herkja incorporated for the sake of
greater effectiveness. Its story probably nowhere formed a part of
the living tradition of Sigurth and Atli, but the poem has so little
distinctively Norse coloring that it may possibly have been based on
a story or even a poem which its composer heard in Germany or
from the lips of a German narrator.

[Contents]

[466]

Herkja was the name of a serving-woman of Atli’s;

she had been his concubine. She told Atli that she
had seen Thjothrek and Guthrun both together. Atli
was greatly angered thereby. Then Guthrun said:

1. “What thy sorrow, Atli, | Buthli’s son?

Is thy heart heavy-laden? | Why laughest thou
never?
It would better befit | the warrior far
To speak with men, | and me to look on.”

Atli spake:
2. “It troubles me, Guthrun, | Gjuki’s daughter,
What Herkja here | in the hall hath told me,
That thou in the bed | with Thjothrek liest,
Beneath the linen | in lovers’ guise.”

Guthrun spake:

3. “This shall I | with oaths now swear,

Swear by the sacred | stone so white,
That nought was there | with Thjothmar’s son
That man or woman | may not know.

[467]

4. “Nor ever once | did my arms embrace

The hero brave, | the leader of hosts;
In another manner | our meeting was,
When our sorrows we | in secret told.

5. “With thirty warriors | Thjothrek came,

Nor of all his men | doth one remain;
Thou hast murdered my brothers | and mail-clad
men,
Thou hast murdered all | the men of my race.

6. “Gunnar comes not, | Hogni I greet not,

No longer I see | my brothers loved;
My sorrow would Hogni | avenge with the sword,
Now myself for my woes | I shall payment win.

7. “Summon Saxi, | the southrons’ king,

For he the boiling | kettle can hallow.” [468]
Seven hundred | there were in the hall,
Ere the queen her hand | in the kettle thrust.

8. To the bottom she reached | with hand so bright,

And forth she brought | the flashing stones:
“Behold, ye warriors, | well am I cleared
Of sin by the kettle’s | sacred boiling.”

9. Then Atli’s heart | in happiness laughed,

When Guthrun’s hand | unhurt he saw;
“Now Herkja shall come | the kettle to try,
She who grief | for Guthrun planned.”

10. Ne’er saw man sight | more sad than this,

How burned were the hands | of Herkja then;
In a bog so foul | the maid they flung,
And so was Guthrun’s | grief requited.

[465]

[Contents]
NOTES
[466]

Prose. The annotator derived all the material for this note from the
poem itself, except for the reference to Herkja as Atli’s former
concubine. Herkja: the historical Kreka and the Helche of the
Nibelungenlied, who there appears as Etzel’s (Attila’s) first wife.
Thjothrek: cf. Introductory Note.

2. The manuscript omits the names of the speakers throughout.

3. Holy stone: just what this refers to is uncertain; it may be identical

with the “ice-cold stone of Uth” mentioned in an oath in Helgakvitha
Hundingsbana II, 29. Thjothmar’s son: the manuscript has simply
“Thjothmar.” Some editions change it as [467]here, some assume that
Thjothmar is another name or an error for Thjothrek, and Finnur
Jonsson not only retains Thjothmar here but changes Thjothrek to
Thjothmar in stanza 5 to conform to it.

5. Regarding the death of Thjothrek’s men cf. Guthrunarkvitha II,

introductory prose, note. It was on these stanzas of Guthrunarkvitha
III that the annotator based his introduction to Guthrunarkvitha II.
The manuscript repeats the “thirty” in line 2, in defiance of metrical
requirements.

6. In the manuscript this stanza follows stanza 7; many editions have

made the transposition.

7. Who Saxi may be is not clear, but the stanza clearly points to the
time when the ordeal by boiling water was still regarded as a foreign
institution, and when a southern king (i.e., a Christian from some
earlier-converted region) was necessary [468]to consecrate the kettle
used in the test. The ordeal by boiling water followed closely the
introduction of Christianity, which took place around the year 1000.
Some editions make two stanzas out of stanza 7, and Müllenhoff
contends that lines 1–2 do not constitute part of Guthrun’s speech.

10. The word “requited” in line 4 is omitted in the manuscript, but it is

clear that some such word was intended. The punishment of casting
a culprit into a bog to be drowned was particularly reserved for
women, and is not infrequently mentioned in the sagas. [469]

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