Clarence Taylor - Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City

Clarence Taylor

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

2019 by New York University

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Taylor, Clarence, author.

Title: Fight the power : African Americans and the long history of police brutality in New York City / Clarence Taylor.

Description: New York : New York University, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN | ISBN 9781479862450 (cl : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Police brutalityNew York (State)New YorkHistory. | African AmericansViolence againstNew York (State)New York.

Classification: LCC HV8148.N5 T39 2018 | DDC 363.2/3dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017060992

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On August 19, 2010, I served as the moderator of a panel examining the 1968 New York City teachers strike. The event took place at the Museum of the City of New York and was held in conjunction with its exhibition on mayor John Lindsay. Two weeks later, to my surprise, the museum invited me back to take part in a symposium on Mayor Lindsay and policing. I understood why I was asked to host the August 19 event; I had written a book on the teachers strike and had given several public talks on the fight for community control, a central focus of the strike, but I had never written on policing and John Lindsay. Nevertheless, I agreed to take part.

The symposiums moderator was Sam Roberts from the New York Times, and a number of people who had served in the Lindsay administration took part in the discussion. I had thought I would add little to the conversation, but that was not the case. When one symposium participant blamed Lindsay for the bad relationship between his administration and the police, I felt I had to refute him. I spoke about police brutality in black communities, how it had led to civil unrest and mistrust between blacks and the NYPD. I also pointed out that there is a long history of African Americans efforts to expose the brutality and bring it to an end. The ensuing questions from the audience and symposium participants alike made it clear that they were largely unaware of how the interactions of police and race had been polarizing the city for decades and continued to do so. I decided that evening to write this book.

Police brutality is the use of excessive force by police on citizens when such force is unnecessary. Unjust shootings, severe beatings, intimidation, verbal abuse, and psychological as well as physical coercion are some of its most common forms.

Policing and race have been a major focus of public discourse, with renewed emphasis beginning, perhaps, with the killing of Michael

But despite the recent focus on police brutality, there has been little examination by the media of the long history of the abusive imbalance of power between the police and black communities or the early campaigns by black people to expose and eliminate police brutality. Contemporary media coverage that does look at the past does not look very far back. In July 2014 the Huffington Post published an article by Matthew Mathias and Carly Schwartz titled The NYPD Has a Long History of Killing Unarmed Black Men. With the exception of James Powell, who was killed in 1965, all the victims profiled in the article were killed after 1990. In the preface to the ACLUs 1997 publication Fighting Police Abuse: A Community Action Manual, Ira Glazer, then the organizations executive director, writes of the 1991 police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, but with that exception, all the other incidents of police brutality listed in the manual happened no earlier than 1995.

Missing from all the above examples is any acknowledgment that police brutality against people of color long predates the 1960s, as have the vigorous campaigns mounted to address that abuse. And those few

Although police brutality has been a problem since the founding of professional police departments in the mid-nineteenth century, the starting point of this book is the 1940s, when New York experienced a massive wave of black migration from the South and of immigration from the Caribbean. The citys black population increased dramatically from 152,467 in 1920 to 327,706 in 1930. By 1940 it had jumped to 458,888, and by 1950 it reached 747,608. Harlems black population numbered 341,000 in 1950. As the black population grew, so did related institutions such as religious bodies, political parties, civic groups, civil rights organizations, and the black press. These institutions worked to improve the social and economic conditions of black people in the North and targeted racial oppression, one manifestation of which was police brutality.

As black communities and their institutions grew, the push for equal justice also increased. In the 1920s the Reverend Thomas Harten of Brooklyns Holy Trinity Baptist Church led protests against police assaults on black citizens. In 1925, for example, he held a rally of two thousand people at his church protesting police brutality. But such events were sporadic, and few black New York ministers in the early twentieth century turned to street demonstrations, rallies, or other forms of social protest to confront police practices. Protracted campaigns protesting police brutality against black people in New York were launched in response to the Harlem riots of 1935 and 1943, which were set off by police assaults on people of color. Both riots helped to spotlight police brutality. The black press, civil rights leaders, and others called loudly for an end to the police officers practice of brutalizing the citizens of Harlem.

This book examines the activist groups that carried out long campaigns, first sparked by the 1935 and 1943 riots, to end racially targeted police brutality. Those involved represented a wide spectrum of individuals and groups, ranging from the politically secular and religious left in the 1940s, black nationalists and civil rights leaders of the 1950s and 1960s, elected officials starting in the 1960s, and civil liberty groups on behalf of black and brown people who were subjected to the abuses of the policy of stop, question, and frisk beginning in the 1990s.

Activists in the 1940s realized that police brutality was one expression of a form of domination and extreme power police held over citizens, and they rejected the then-popular theory that rogue cops, just a few bad apples, were to blame. They and their successors understood that brutality was not only pervasive but sanctioned by the highest echelons of the NYPD. Until John Lindsay became New York Citys mayor in 1966, those in political power did nothing to curtail the police. One major reason, which persists today, was a matter of popular perception: the role of the police was to protect the lives and rights of white citizens, not the lives or rights of black criminals; they were control agents and crime fighters placed in the community to stop crime and criminals, not to act as social workers. The positive popular image of law enforcement and the general publics support of police officers is due in large measure to the fact that they put their lives on the line to protect citizens and maintain the peace by confronting the criminals in society. Their public image as a safeguarding force is reinforced by a narrative disseminated by the media, political leaders, popular culture outlets, and law enforcement agencies themselves. Since the 1940s radio programs and films, and later television, have portrayed heroic police saving the public from dangerous criminals. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, Hollywood especially portrayed law enforcement as comprising men who enforced the law for moral and ethical reasons.