Bluecoated Terror: Jim Crow New Orleans and the Roots of Modern Police BrutalityA searing chronicle of how racist violence became an ingrained facet of law enforcement in the United States. Too often, scholars and pundits argue either that police violence against African Americans has remained unchanged since the era of slavery or that it is a recent phenomenon and disconnected from the past. Neither view is accurate. In Bluecoated Terror, Jeffrey S. Adler draws on rich archival accounts to show, in narrative detail, how racialized police brutality is part of a larger system of state oppression with roots in the early twentieth-century South, particularly New Orleans. Wide racial differentials in the use of lethal force and beatings during arrest and interrogation emerged in the 1930s and 1940s. Adler explains how race control and crime control blended and blurred during this era, when police officers and criminal justice officials began to justify systemic violence against Black people as a crucial—and legal—tool for maintaining law and order. Bluecoated Terror explores both the rise of these law-enforcement trends and their chilling resilience, providing critical context for recent horrific police abuses as the ghost of Jim Crow law enforcement continues to haunt the nation. |
Contents
At No Time in the History of Our State | 36 |
Had Already Half Killed Me | 58 |
Buttercup Burns Bulldog Johnny Grosch and the Killer Twins | 84 |
Negroes Are Willing to Die Rather Than Submit | 111 |
Notes | 147 |
| 181 | |
| 191 | |
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Advancement of Colored African American residents African American suspects aggressive American New Orleanians arrest assault attacked Baton Rouge beat became Birmingham Branch Files Chicago Defender city officials city’s Class Pressures committed deadly force December early twentieth-century extract confessions Grosch homicide rate Homicide Reports interracial interrogation methods interwar John Grosch Johnson journalist June killed killers law and order law enforcement Louisiana League Louisiana Weekly lynching March March 15 March 28 Melancon Memphis Commercial Appeal Memphis Police Department murder NAACP Orleans cops Orleans Item Orleans police Orleans Times-Picayune patrolmen percent Picayune Pittsburgh Courier police brutality police homicide police officers police violence policemen predators prisoners prosecutors protect Race and Class racial control racial disparities racial order racialized policing Raper Report of Homicide Reyer sociologist Southern cities Third Degree Transcripts of Statements unarmed urban South victims vigilantism violent cops white New Orleanians white residents white supremacy white women white-on-Black homicides Willie Grosch