“These districts are not usually protected by police—rather victimized and tyrannized over by them. No one who does not know can realize what tyranny a low-grade white policeman can exercise in a colored neighborhood.”
W.E.B. Du BoisFootnote 1
Scholars widely agree that law enforcers came to serve white supremacy in the post–Civil War United States. More elusive is the precise role taken by Du Bois's “low-grade” officers in the “tyranny” they availed, whether they performed as interchangeable cogs or as petty dictators with wide prerogative over their local fiefdoms. Gunnar Myrdal observed that “the policeman is delegated to carry out” the punishment of “even minor transgressions of caste etiquette,” suggesting a mechanical rather than activist function. At the same time the “extra-legal backing by the courts” inflated the “prestige” of these caste enforcers, who were “weak men” with “strong powers.”Footnote 2
Whether as pawns or tyrants, individual law enforcers appear small in the grand chronicle of racial oppression, a story dominated by formal and informal power structures. Legal historians have long studied these structures in transformation: how discursively manufactured hierarchies became codified, how racial distinctions banished from the law books persisted through systemic enforcement disparities. Social and legal formations propel the big story: at the nation's founding, law constructed racial categories.Footnote 3 Military occupation and the conflict between terror and democracy forged the periodization of Reconstruction and Redemption. Jim Crow statutes formalized racial caste. The technically illegal scourge of lynching meanwhile reinforced official repression, both in spontaneous coordination and as a murderous foil to the polite alternative of segregation. The rising formalistic state coexisted with lynching and then eventually subsumed it. Before, during, and after segregation, across constitutional watersheds and regional differences, purportedly colorblind laws ensnared blacks and whites unequally. As the modern state monopolized law and order and recognized civil rights, diffuse racial oppression persisted in police brutality, tortured confessions, show trials, a swelling of prisons, and a rise of executions.Footnote 4
Police officers and sheriffs often stood at the intersection of these oppressions, and were central to major transitions between their forms. The literature recognizes their importance but tends to cast it as over-determined, even formulaic. Economists have pinned the frequency of lynching to factors of political economy.Footnote 5 Critical criminology has reinforced a structural emphasis. Nirej S. Sekhon has indeed found criminal procedure reformers overly fixated on “officer discretion,” a “narrowly individualistic conception” that has skewed both “law” and “scholarship.”Footnote 6 Prison abolitionist scholars such as Dorothy E. Roberts stress the irredeemable racism of institutions.Footnote 7 For both theoretical and disciplinary reasons, social scientists, activists, and historians have generally downplayed office holders and law enforcers’ agency.Footnote 8 In a 2021 criminology article surveying four centuries of Black subjugation, historians Elizabeth Hinton and DeAnza Cook foreground the importance of “policymakers and officials at all levels of government,” but the literature they cite generally accentuates large institutional and historical patterns and not the decisions of individuals up and down the power structure.Footnote 9
But more granular attention to law enforcers’ agency can enrich scholarly understanding of how “caste” became manifested in the particular.Footnote 10 There are some methodological parallels that can be drawn from the literature on power relations during slavery. Robert M. Cover's Justice Accused has raised profound questions about abolitionist judges affirming slavery in antebellum courtrooms.Footnote 11 Enforcers’ individual stories might indeed reaffirm structural explanations much as Sally E. Hadden's Slave Patrols relates the individual patrollers to their institutional mission and Chandra Manning's What this Cruel War Was Over uses soldiers’ thoughts to corroborate slavery's centrality in the Civil War.Footnote 12
The break between slavery and emancipation was incomplete but undeniably significant, one of numerous important transformations in the structure of oppression whose ambiguities flowed in part from the legal indeterminacy of the American state as it moved toward its modern form. Hendrick Hartog has accented “the implicit pluralism of legal authority,” which “may emerge from… governmental and quasi-governmental institutions and practices,” including “prosecutorial discretion.”Footnote 13 Prosecutors and politicians have always shaped the contours of racial oppression, but scholars have paid less attention to how law enforcers defined legal reality for many who found themselves subject to their jurisdiction. In the century after slavery they instrumentally constructed the contours of white supremacy in legal action. Their countless decisions both reinforced and undercut the explicit rules of domination, which illuminated if not propelling important ruptures in the coherence between formal and informal power dynamics.
A fuller understanding of the function of policing in the Jim Crow era will necessarily rely on a flawed source base. Official documents like police and sheriff reports, precinct orders, and court records, along with heavily slanted correspondence, personal journals, and periodicals can replicate the very “biases and oppression” researchers may wish to question.Footnote 14 Scholars have also identified dangers in traditionally over-represented sources, particularly newspapers, to research lynching and racial oppression. These have proven constraining sources ever since Ida B. Wells first relied on them, as Aleen J. Ratzlaff reminds us.Footnote 15
On the other hand, a re-examination of familiar and underutilized sources could clarify the problematic role of enforcement in the rising modern liberal state, a development that routinized and standardized oppression and yet expanded each officer's prerogative. Looking at the choices of police officers and sheriffs might help explain related ironies, such as how police departments came to resemble each other nationwide at the very peak of regional distinctions in segregation law. Both the post-emancipation lynching era and the postwar era of police abuse are marked by subtle interactions between policing and officially illegal brutality. If Jim Crow America began and ended with periods of exaggerated officer discretion, then legal historians should attend to overt and covert ways that law enforcers have defined law in action.
That question, the part played by enforcers in constructing legal oppression, drives this article, a critical synthesis of literature on the century after emancipation, with the aim of suggesting a future research agenda. This article's following sections explore the shifting demographics of enforcement during Reconstruction; policing inequalities alongside lynching in the late nineteenth century; the interplay between policing and segregation statutes, colorblind criminal law, and mob violence in the Jim Crow South; the concurrent modernization of racialized policing across the continent; and the displacement of informal mob law and formal racial caste by a national regime of extralegal police violence, unequal patterns of incarceration and execution, and federal protections of civil liberties and civil rights. In each phase of racial control, law enforcers acted—whether as tyrants or pawns, recalcitrant participants or even contingent rebels—to shape the transformation of the structures around them.
Policing Black Americans after Emancipation
In 1871 the Nashville Tennessean published an explanation for “the Kuklux”: “Law” was now “decided by negro jurors, administered by negro justices and enforced by negro police.” Such officials offered “little security to person and property.”Footnote 16 If the race of personnel ever mattered to outcomes, it was during Reconstruction, when Black law enforcers had new power to exercise discretion. Long reliant on slavery's discipline, the Civil War–era South “had no machinery, no adequate jails or reformatories,” according to Du Bois. Its “police system” regulated “blacks alone, and tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a member of that police.”Footnote 17 After emancipation came a scramble over the machinery directed to enforce the Black Codes during early Reconstruction, then opened to Black officers during Radical Reconstruction. Scholars have understood the importance of these post-emancipation enforcers but they deserve more focus. In Vengeance and Justice, a sweeping history of nineteenth-century Southern criminal justice, Edward L. Ayers discusses local law enforcement but places greater emphasis on correctional systems.Footnote 18 In police and sheriff positions, and up and down state systems, Black inclusion carried high stakes, as revealed in studies of the 1860s and 1870s. Blacks “served as sheriffs, chiefs of police, and policemen,” as Leon Litwack notes.Footnote 19 Eric Foner's history of Black office holders shows African Americans briefly dominating Beaufort, South Carolina's police force and at least forty-one Black sheriffs serving throughout the South.Footnote 20
Dennis C. Rousey's work on New Orleans suggests an interplay between social forces and individual choices. As the most pronounced example of the period's Black policing, New Orleans is unrepresentative of general Southern trends, but it spotlights the power of police decision making. On the one hand, the city had a distinctive legacy of Black police from about 1804 to 1828, a product of a relatively large free Black population and military experience in the War of 1812, and so Rousey finds it “appropriate” that the city “witnessed the debut of black policemen in the postwar South.” Within the “decentralization in the American criminal justice system,” these structural peculiarities manifested in Black policing.Footnote 21 But individual choices, from top to bottom, often drive the story. General Sheridan chose to include former Union soldiers and the Black community chose to pressure the mayor to integrate the police force. Black officers chose vigilance in fortifying against white resentment and demonstrated unsurpassed productivity despite their hardships. They opted to arrest whites and blacks “without any pattern of racial discrimination” despite massive social pressure.Footnote 22
New Orleans was atypical because Black law enforcers did not enjoy the same power in most other places. But generally the high stakes of their inclusion spurred the Redeemers to challenge it in the 1870s. The backlash happened piecemeal through new legal restrictions and violence.Footnote 23 In 1871, a British newspaper described a Groesbeck, Texas riot that resulted from a Black officer killing a white man while attempting to arrest him for illegally carrying a firearm. The local Democratic Party's militia took to arms. The Black police deployed by Governor Edmund Davis had to choose when to fight and when to retreat—“seeing they were likely to be summarily butchered”—when to “barricade…themselves” and when to march in force to the city.Footnote 24 Throughout the South, violence purged Black sheriffs and Reconstruction unraveled. A mob forced Peter Crosby to resign from Warren County, Mississippi, in 1874, although federal troops helped reinstate him in January 1875. In Coahoma County, Mississippi, a bloody election campaign displaced John M. Brown. Redeemers continued to defeat Black sheriffs in Louisiana and elsewhere into the late 1870s.Footnote 25
Just as Black law enforcers shaped policing patterns, so too would white enforcers. Litwack gives a structural explanation for why the “experiment” of Black law enforcement “proved short-lived”: “their very presence … undermined the foundations of white supremacy.” Whites then undertook to “extinguish the memories of black juries, judges, police, and legislators.”Footnote 26 When facing a white aggressor and Black victim, the white police were “more apt to arrest the victim than the aggressor,” as W.E.B. Du Bois averred in Black Reconstruction.Footnote 27 Scholars have regarded this report of racism reliable despite purportedly equal criminal codes. As the “enforcers of white supremacy,” writes Litwack, “the police assumed a pivotal role.”Footnote 28 But the question remains: how much of enforcement's role was typecasting and how much improvisation?
Litwack hints at the importance of ideas. Law enforcers employed brutality with the “ideological conviction” tracing back to slavery “that blacks understood only force.”Footnote 29 Examining the transmission of racial ideology between society and elected sheriffs or professional police could clarify their specific function. Generalizing from Georgia outward, Ayers stresses social cohesion: “Savannah's pattern of white police supported by white citizens had become the rule in the urban South.” White men dominated the “machinery of the police and courts” and consequently Black people “found themselves singled out for arrest, indictment, conviction, hanging, and long sentences” while whites received punishments “as lenient as ever.” Whites dominated grand juries and newspapers emphasized the cruelties afflicting white convicts.Footnote 30
As Reconstruction's reverberations subsided within law enforcement, discretion once again brought structural changes. By the dawn of the twentieth century only a handful of Black officers worked Southern cities. George Doyle served in New Orleans until 1906, expelled by disciplinary hearings after a Black man accompanying his beat fatally shot a white bartender said to be illegally serving alcohol on Sunday. The police inspector whose decision allowed removal conceded he would not “not strain … to save” a Black officer “as he might … a white officer.” The inspector had also instructed Doyle to limit Sunday Law investigations to African American violators.Footnote 31 Discretion over internal procedures succumbed to public sentiment, finalizing the racial transformation of a department whose racial makeup had proven vital.
The Nadir of Legal Clarity
“The most conspicuous failure of American civilization is the American policeman,” wrote William Ralston Balch in 1882. “Were he merely a failure as an element of our social structure it would not be so bad, but he is everywhere the supreme disgrace of the day.”Footnote 32 The story of Southern policing becomes disjointed after Reconstruction in the period often called the “nadir” of American race relations.Footnote 33 Scholars have long addressed the story through the New South's cultural proxies. Balch's quotation appears in historian Laylon Wayne Jordan's 1980 study of Charleston's police department, in which “the politics of police was a local politics” where the Populists determined personnel as had the Redeemers, Republican Radicals, and spoils-system Jacksonians before them. The Populist purge was “anti-Irish” and “anti-Catholic,” and they dumped “all five blacks on the force” as well. As a consequence, “equal protection of life and property … was not always extended” to African Americans, according to one contemporary.Footnote 34
Despite Jordan's emphasis on partisan politics, the Balch quote suggests an outsized toxicity of the lone “policeman,” not merely representative of social corruption but its leading paragon. Late-nineteenth century lawmen appear as both pawns of inequity, inhabiting ad hoc and primitive institutions, as well as its apotheosis. The secondary literature has tended to regard the Gilded Age South's weak policing infrastructure as more significant than its enforcers, who were presumably too scarce to establish institutional legacies.
Enforcer discretion is evident in the period's common thread, an unequal application of colorblind law. In 1876, Mississippi's facially race-neutral “Pig Law” notoriously empowered law enforcement to target Black people for petty theft. Historians have long pinpointed the law for swelling prisons, a trope subject to some revisionism.Footnote 35 The consequences of these types of measures were profound for policing and the carceral state. Scholars stress that convict leasing stunted police modernization while patrimonial debt criminalization incentivized egregious sheriff practices. William Stuntz argues that the South had less policing than the North partly because “the heavy use of convict labor” provided a “fiscal benefit” whereas police “represented fiscal cost.”Footnote 36 Douglas Blackmon's popular account observes that sheriffs and justices of the peace were compensated for fining Black Americans. One justice of the peace ordered all defendant property relinquished in almost every one of 225 debt claims that “he heard between 1878 and 1880.”Footnote 37 The sorts of sources that Blackmon uses might reveal how much this system relied on sheriffs’ complicity.
Lynching remains the most studied and yet indefinite link between late-nineteenth century law enforcement and customary racism. Lynching is the paradigmatic example of legally ambiguous collective action expressed through the most personalized violence. Lynchings were, in Michael J. Pfeifer's words, “everyday enactments” of white supremacy with particular meaning within the whole.Footnote 38 In Lynching and Spectacle, Amy Louise Wood has described lynching as the “primary representation of racial injustice and oppression.”Footnote 39 The universal significance of these atrocities has inspired scholarly attempts to study lynching beyond its most familiar settings.Footnote 40 Attempts to synthesize a century's work by activists, social scientists, and historians have pressed for widening the vantage across time, space, and historical actors.Footnote 41 Others have underlined connections between past and present. Wood and Susan V. Donaldson identify the contemporary significance of lynching to “racial disparities in the death penalty[,] to police brutality, to hate crimes, to the torture of prisoners.”Footnote 42
While contending with lynching as a component of the social structure of the Jim Crow era South, recent lynching scholarship has stressed “race, gender, sexuality, and social class,” highlighting the importance of individuals in three important ways. First, studies of brutality and defiance have personalized victims.Footnote 43 Second, law enforcers’ use of discretion has emerged in narratives that emphasize race and gender.Footnote 44 Third, cultural history has underscored the performative dimension that marks each lynching a discrete spectacle whose enablers helped construct social reality. Officers could encourage or discourage the spectacle by protecting audiences or blocking their view, which Wood observes could provoke “disorderly resistance.”Footnote 45 Both similarities and variations across performative contours indeed reveal structure's explanatory limits. Lee Ann Fujii's study of Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota, asks how absent “Southern norms, these northerners still managed to pull off ‘Southern-style’ lynchings.”Footnote 46 Wood finds “no consistency even in individual localities,” where one sheriff might “have preferred private hangings, whereas his successor allowed public ones.”Footnote 47 Public legitimacy could hinge on law enforcement's posture toward the spectacle, at least until mobs reached critical mass.
Was lynching legal or extralegal? Were their perpetrators legal agents? As the grisliest expression of white supremacy, lynching escalated in indeterminate relation to positive law, which complicates assessments of the enforcers’ legal agency. Faced with many moving parts, scholars have sought legal meaning that transcends historical particularity. But attempts to define lynching stumble over legal status, soliciting fraught fusions of theory and history. Social scientists examining change often seek a fixed, however paradoxical definition that stresses formal illegality alongside social approval. Economist Lisa D. Cook's call for a comprehensive national database assumes that victims died “illegally” and “under the pretext of protecting justice or tradition.”Footnote 48 Michael Weaver's study of public legitimacy defines “Lynching [as] the extralegal use of lethal force to punish some alleged crime or violation of custom or tradition.”Footnote 49 Lynching often involved the “vestiges of legal proceedings,” note Amy Kate Bailey and Stewart E. Tolnay, who suggest this useful paradoxical framing still poses problems. The venerated National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) definition that assumes “the pretext of service to justice or tradition” nevertheless “excludes fatal encounters with the police [and] sheriffs.”Footnote 50 In any event, the perpetrators’ legal self-conceptualization mattered. “Mobs often bent over backward to establish the guilt” even of those “already lynched,” explains Wood, indicating legal pretense outlasted the killing.Footnote 51
For historians, trying to pin down any definition relying on positivist legality is aiming at a moving target. Ashraf H.A. Rushdy defends using both “a capacious definition” and more “specific definitions” to serve both “longue durée” narrations and granular studies. Rushdy's broader definition is similar to the social scientists’: “an act of extralegal collective violence by a group alleging pursuit of summary justice.”Footnote 52 Working definitions yet yield a circular problem: defining lynching through legal status while narrating its impact on legal development. The legal meaning of lynching varied up and down the polycentric political order and across time. Christopher Waldrep has looked to community standards and language in determining the “legitimacy or illegitimacy or mob law.”Footnote 53 Perhaps enforcement decisions collectively determined whether social sanction constituted de jure legal status. To relate structural changes and individual actions historians might follow Waldrep's concession that “the word ‘lynching’ cannot be defined,”Footnote 54 and instead focus on brutalities sharing a family resemblance.
Although police decision making is not its typical focus, the literature starkly illustrates enforcers’ capacity in instantiating oppression that both transgressed and moved the boundaries of law. On the whole, law enforcement enabled something akin to a lynching regime.Footnote 55 They almost never arrested perpetrators but beyond that their posture was more variable. In Litwack's words, law enforcement “often stood by helplessly,” “on occasion actively participated,” and even appeared in press photos alongside lynch mobs and the accused.Footnote 56 Although W. Fitzhugh Brundage describes sheriffs’ attempts to curb lynching, he concludes that “local authorities typically showed little inclination to prosecute mob members.”Footnote 57 Scholars could more exhaustively study police and sheriff decisions on whether to step in. Sheriffs could “make or break a lynching,” as Toby Moore says.Footnote 58 To explain the decline in lynching, Bailey and Tolnay implicate enforcers’ technological improvements but also note enforcers’ “determined efforts” to stop many lynchings.Footnote 59 The choices to intervene could have helped transform its racial importance, an under-studied question. In 1888, one Birmingham sheriff violently resisted the mob that sought to kill a white prisoner arrested for murdering his family. The percentage of white victims declined after the 1880s. Blacks became far more likely victims, which might have correlated with decisions to intercede.Footnote 60
Within the context of lynchings, law enforcers made consequential calculations weighing social costs, their own safety, and the urgency of short-term order over long-term justice. In November 1890 the sheriffs of Shelby County, Alabama, went to some lengths to protect a Black prisoner accused of assaulting a white woman. They disguised him in women's clothes and navigated him through the mob.Footnote 61 In 1904, one Mississippi sheriff, working alone with a pistol, saved a Black man accused of child rape from a lynching, even crossing through New Orleans.Footnote 62 Sheriffs faced social constraints and risks in taking such measures. In 1895, in Live Oak, Florida, the sheriff protected a Black prisoner on two occasions, and lost re-election.Footnote 63 Another officer had “every intention of fulfilling my oath” to protect a jailed suspect, but succumbed to the “half a dozen… leading citizens—businessmen, leaders of their churches and community.” Sheriff W.M. Waltrip sought to protect two accused arsonists in Franklin County, Alabama, in 1891. He was “heartily opposed to mob law” but a “larger portion of the people, black and white,” supported the lynching and fearing for his life he relented.Footnote 64
In the twilight of the century, conspicuous social contradictions revealed potential tension between the lynching regime and law enforcement. As segregation policies drove regional differentiation in written law, Northerners lost their stomach for lynching often without gaining sympathy for its victims. As Ayers writes, most whites in the North and South attributed the surge in lynching, taking 700 lives from 1889 to 1893, to “an epidemic of the ‘New Negro crime.’”Footnote 65
The tension between social attitudes and legal status appeared in the often-cited “first” definition of lynching. An 1896 Ohio law turned on the perpetrators’ legal intentions and self-conceptualization. Lynching was “any violence” visited upon persons targeted by a “mob,” itself defined as a group “assembled for any unlawful purpose” intending to inflict harm “or pretending to exercise correctional power.”Footnote 66 Meanwhile, lynching was defended as a positive and legal good in the South. Looking at the 1902 novel The Virginian, Rushdy quotes a judge saying that “far from being a defiance of the law,” lynching is “an assertion of it.”Footnote 67 In 1905 James Elbert Cutler defined lynching as “an illegal and summary execution” whose perpetrators had to “some degree the public opinion of the community.”Footnote 68
On this score, further research could distinguish the decision of law enforcers to thwart individual lynchings from their de facto failure to vigilantly police lynching as a social institution. Police and sheriffs’ navigation of this legal landscape intensified as legal oppression followed trends of urban modernity.
The Interlocking Oppressions of the Jim Crow South
In 1923 Du Bois described “the black man” as “a person who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia.”Footnote 69 Du Bois's positivist definition of the Black race, bound by regional law, was salient. Dawning with the Progressive Era, a modern system of racial oppression—formalized in segregation and disenfranchisement—spread and hardened in the South.Footnote 70 Yet a national story accompanied this regional one. Southern Jim Crow unfolded in a transformative period for a nation that, in Richard Hofstadter's words, “was born in the country and has moved to the city.”Footnote 71 Nationwide, progressive reformers were mixed on racial questions.Footnote 72 David Taft Terry's study of Baltimore—that middle ground of North meeting South—observes that the “ideological foundation of Jim Crow segregation” in the cities was “Progressivism.” While “night riders and vigilante mobs” kept blacks from “challenging” rural whites, “‘professional’ and ‘modern’ police forces under the guise of law and order but guided by white supremacy enjoyed broad permission” to reinforce white dominance in the city.Footnote 73 Even as technological and policy development made urban police forces resemble one another nationwide, multiple means of control overlapped and interacted in the South to oppress Black Americans in ways even more systematic than during the post-Reconstruction “nadir” of race relations.Footnote 74 Police administered these overlapping oppressions and clarified their tensions. In implementing segregation, unequally enforcing an expanding criminal law, and acting ambivalently toward lynching and racial terror, Southern law enforcers helped define the meaning of Jim Crow law in all its unstable reliance on formal and informal authority.
The impact of segregation statutes is such a foundation of modern historiography that statutory structure and language have long overshadowed an interest in police decision making in implementing these statutes. C. Vann Woodward's groundbreaking revision of Jim Crow periodization depicted the contingent rise of 1900s segregation statutes as “the most elaborate and formal expression” to reinforce customary domination.Footnote 75 In Barbara Welke's words, “Jim Crow reaffirmed the connection between status and race.”Footnote 76 Did lawmen have a special place in this codification of custom? On the one hand enforcement was diffuse: “the Jim Crow laws,” Woodward explains, “put the authority of the state or city in the voice of the street-car conductor, the railway brakeman, the bus driver, the theater usher, and also into the voice of the hoodlum of the public parks and playgrounds.”Footnote 77 Ayers describes streetcar conductors as enforcers, imposing order in the “‘twilight zone’ of race relations.”Footnote 78 In her examination of gender, race, and the railroads, Welke has revealed private guardians of property exercising “regulatory power” that already “embedded the most ‘natural’ of social divisions.” And yet official police reinforced the whole system, including the dispersed maintenance of codified law that itself affirmed customary caste. They arrested blacks and whites found “in violation of the state segregation law,” as Welke notes.Footnote 79 Although historians devote more time discussing the courts, Litwack writes that the police “played a critical role as the enforcers of Jim Crow.”Footnote 80
Closer study of how police choices converted official decrees into legal outcomes could highlight divergences between theory and practice. When Montgomery segregated street cars in August 1900, its ordinance invested enforcement in the “police power of a police officer” and fined company agents who refused to comply. But it allowed exceptions for “negro nurses having in charge white children or sick or infirmed white persons,” suggesting some place for police discretion.Footnote 81 Abundant are the fruits of such methodological reorientation toward workaday state actors in Peggy Pascoe's What Comes Naturally, which explores how the administrative state implemented anti-miscegenation policy. Pascoe focuses not on police but on the bureaucratic task of delineating ambiguous race categories, sometimes left to county clerks deciding which marriages to affirm.Footnote 82 Yet marital segregation initially relied on “criminal arrest and imprisonment” along with judicial nullification of interracial marriages. Extrapolating from Alabama, where 343 men and women faced criminal charges between 1883 and 1938, Southern police arrested thousands for interracial marriage, leaving behind arrest records and perhaps documentation of their thoughts.Footnote 83
Pascoe was chiefly concerned with the systemic, yet her attention to discretion could inspire historians to extend such scrutiny to the earlier police enforcement of anti-miscegenation and segregation law. Discriminatory residential law could also use this treatment. As Black Americans moved into white neighborhoods in the early twentieth century, white majorities passed segregation codes. Roger L. Rice traces such laws from Baltimore in 1910 and Richmond in 1911 to other municipalities in Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia. Soon enough Louisville, St. Louis, Oklahoma City, and New Orleans followed suit. Rice hints at criminal enforcement. The Louisiana ordinance faced challenges in “both civil and criminal cases” and a criminal judge upheld it. A Baltimore ordinance was presented before the “Committee on Police and Jail of the City Council.”Footnote 84 On the margins, police determined who could live where.
As segregation swept the South, enforcement of basic laws ensnared the races unequally. As Litwack explains, the “entire machinery of justice… functioned as a formidable instrument of social control,” securing the “absolute power” of whites to “control blacks” despite “criminal and civil codes” that “implied that the legal system was colorblind.”Footnote 85 An enforcer could routinely destroy a Black person's life over nothing. After one Georgia police officer asked the names of a group of Black youth, and had trouble spelling “Ulysses,” he felt so humiliated when Ulysses offered to write it himself that he punched the young man to the ground. Ulysses was arrested, fined more than he could pay, and damned to a chain gang. While both formal and informal oppression inhabit this story, the officer chose to take offense, to beat and arrest the young man to salve his bruised ego. Presumably he chose not to intervene in court to save Ulysses from forced servitude to the state.Footnote 86
White police chose how to treat Black victims as well as suspects. Ayers and others repeat an officer's frank admission of the double standard: “If a n*gger kills a white man, that's murder. If a white man kills a n*gger, that's justifiable homicide. If a n*gger kills another n*gger, that's one less n*gger.”Footnote 87 This quote reappears in historiography covering a broad time frame—Ayers is bringing texture to a late-nineteenth century discussion—but the original statement occurred in the late Progressive Era, a reminder that informal enforcement standards persisted. Moore discusses “[t]he curious southern practice of ‘white patronage,’ by which whites cemented black dependence by protecting blacks from punishment of black-on-black crime” an exploitative practice that relied on “the cooperation of official law enforcement.”Footnote 88 Valk and Brown highlight police inaction against “white-on-black rape and sexual assault.” Police, “like many other white southerners, considered black people so sexually immoral” that they assumed consent.Footnote 89
If police attitudes mattered so too did their choices, and instances of welcome conduct only underscore that abuse was sometimes elective. So overwhelming is the record of unfair treatment that Brandon T. Jett argues that historians have overlooked cooperation and “nonviolent interactions between police and African Americans.” Jett stresses the agency of Black people who assisted police, served as witnesses, provided evidence, apprehended suspects, for their own ends: community protection and to shape narratives of their social position.Footnote 90 Also under-studied are police decisions either to destroy Black lives or serve as public servants, however problematically.
Well-intentioned police agency might seem trivial alongside the early twentieth century's rise of white supremacist mob violence, but even here choices mattered. Law enforcement decisions to escalate tensions could erupt into racist crowd behavior, demonstrating both the limits and expanse of an officer's choices. An enforcer's power to propel a mob was immense, but it soon took on a life of its own. The scholarly recognition of this dynamic is about as old as the phenomenon. Ida B. Wells exposed race riots and lynching as vengeance against African Americans who resisted police.Footnote 91 In 1904, Mary Church Terrell described a familiar sort of incident from two years before: a “well to do and law-abiding” Atlanta Black man named Richardson had “been so imprudent to a white man” that “the sheriff led out a posse, consisting of the city police, to arrest Richardson.” The confrontation resulted in four white police being killed, Richardson being burned to death, and a riot.Footnote 92 Kevern Verney and Litwack are among the modern historians who have documented police confrontations triggering mob violence.Footnote 93
Police calculations carried high stakes when multiple sides took up arms. In the September 1906 Atlanta “race riot,” the police became “prudently scarce, interceding mostly to disarm blacks” while white gun purchases rose, Litwack writes.Footnote 94 Black people in turn “mobilized” in armed defense against “arresting officers, abusive railroad and streetcar conductors, exploitative employers, lynch mobs, and police violence.”Footnote 95 When Black Americans rose up, police influenced white retaliation. Even the press at the time reveals the police killing two African Americans, arresting 257, searching their premises for weapons, and holding seventy-five in custody.Footnote 96
Police crucially held Black people to different standards of self-defense, mixing private and public enforcement of Black subordination. As Chris Bray explains, criminalizing self-defense brought legal force to racial terror. Blacks resisting subjugation “caused consternation within the Jim Crow regime” where “violence was supposed to flow in only one direction.” Even when “white authorities … embraced armed black resistance and self-defense” they sometimes did so to reaffirm Jim Crow. Bray writes of the “bitter irony” of one Black woman who successfully used segregationist logic for the legal right to public space.Footnote 97 More often police simply disregarded such rights. (Up North in the 1918 Philadelphia riots, Khalil Gibran Muhammad finds “the criminalization of black resistance to white violence” a major factor in the “disproportionate arrests of blacks.” Police regarded Black self-defense “as a criminal offense regardless of the circumstances” and disarmed them through warrantless searches. Muhammad points to “moments when white policemen intervened to protect blacks who reportedly did not fight back,” to show that Black resistance was sometimes more feared than Black skin.)Footnote 98
Apace with segregation and unequal policing, Southern lynching persisted with an unstable relationship to law enforcement. The ambiguity arises partly within the broader confusion of the legal status of lynching alongside governmental modernization. Michael J. Pfeifer argues that the emergence of the death penalty in the modern state was “the eventual compromise” between an early era of “rough justice” racial violence and a subsequent era of due process-based formalism aimed in part at curbing lynching. The debate over Pfeifer's due process thesis often turns on whether these coexisting oppressions were complementary or rivalrous forces resolving in a formalist synthesis.Footnote 99 Some scholars have criticized Pfeifer for flattening distinctions.Footnote 100 Bailey and Tolnay argue that Pfeifer has overstated the rivalry between lynching and the modern state.Footnote 101 In general, some scholars have pushed for sharper distinctions between the democratic state and the mob; others have found in lynching reasons to identify democratic liberty as historically contestable.Footnote 102 Although lynching supposedly “demarcated a border between civilization and savagery,” Jesse Carr rejects the association with “‘lawlessness’” and characterizes lynching as “a technique of law enforcement.”Footnote 103
For victims of policing and lynching, the distinctions occupied a continuum. Within cities, as Terry notes, “lynching” long served as metaphor for “state-sanctioned violence” that “underpinned Jim Crow across the South”, both the “routine, institutionalized forms” of humiliation and the unbridled countryside terror.Footnote 104 Indeed, as Kidada E. Williams explains, the decline of rural massacres did not mark the end of “racialized killings,” which African Americans may have continued to call “lynchings.”Footnote 105 Pascoe notes that South Carolina Governor Cole Blease “defended lynching” to manage ‘black brutes’” as a complement to the administrative state's anti-miscegenation policy.Footnote 106 More attention to enforcers could reconcile the larger story of lynching and the liberal state. Contrasting sheriffs with police could draw out differences between rural and urban settings, elected and appointed authority, and could indicate whether lynching was an instrumental phase in the development of a due process-oriented state, a vestigial practice incompatible with modernity, or both. At the turn of the century, police had an interest “to deny legitimacy of the mob as an agent of social control,” as E.M. Beck puts it.Footnote 107 The early twentieth-century South saw some polarization between law enforcement and the mobs, an impasse that sustained the lynching regime through years of uncertainty. Radicalized societal forces mobilized against the procedural state. Sometimes officially deputized bands of citizens performed killings.Footnote 108 Sometimes politicians lent their full support.Footnote 109 Perhaps it was no coincidence that spectacle lynching escalated alongside procedural formalization of police forces. Ostentatious lynching drew mobs that could overpower police and thus police forces had to closely weigh the costs of intervention.Footnote 110 Sometimes, of course, official police forces also participated in lynchings. The infamous Waco, Texas lynching of 1916 was witnessed by a reported 20,000-person mob. Although the Chicago Defender indicated that “Police, Ministers and Professional Men” were complicit, the reporting did not clarify their role.Footnote 111 Police sometimes sparked and lost control of lynchings just as they did with riots. The “committee of twelve” who summarily convicted Tom Clark sentenced him to hanging but the mob burned him alive, at which point the enforcers’ choices could not be undone.Footnote 112
Southern law enforcers seemingly became more willing to intervene to stop lynchings when they were able to meet or exceed the physical force arrayed against them. Some scholars have downplayed the importance of impeded lynchings.Footnote 113 But Beck has documented many “threatened, foiled, averted, and failed lynchings,” and finds that by the early twentieth century, more were thwarted than completed. Most often, officials moved the targets to a different jail or protected them “with additional guards, the militia, or state troops.” In one dramatic instance in 1921, Sheriff John Logan of Polk County, Florida, deputized a whole crowd to escort a prisoner. Beck gives a “crude and approximate estimate that without such efforts, “an additional 2,000 southerners,” mostly Black men, would have perished.Footnote 114
Local and state interference with lynching followed discernible trends through the interwar period. Militia protection of prisoners against lynching rose for the last quarter of the nineteenth century, then declined until World War I, and then increased again. Individual enforcers often spurred these institutional responses. Police sometimes chose to resist a mob long enough for state militia to subdue it. In July 1920 in Alamance County, North Carolina, a sheriff and his deputies held a mob at bay long enough to call for backup from the governor. In 1932 in Rockingham County, Virginia, police rigged a water hose as a deterrent, buying time to bring the National Guard.Footnote 115 A closer look at the officers and their decision making would illuminate the transformation of lynching's legal meaning alongside the formalized oppression of the progressive police state.
Policing a Jim Crow Nation
In 1934, San Francisco Police Captain Arthur Christiansen ordered his company “to arrest on sight every negress prostitute.” Any of his subordinates who tolerated this “very vicious criminal element” would “be severely disciplined.”Footnote 116 Far removed from the South, Christiansen's order nevertheless seems to exemplify the Jim Crow era. His directive to enforce colorblind vice law selectively presented subordinates with a choice: carry out this racist directive or face potential discipline.
In the early twentieth century, rigid racial codes distinguished the South, and yet nationwide, racialized policing was the coin of the realm. While scholars like Risa L. Goluboff and Richard Rothstein have examined discrimination outside the South, the line between state-enforced and state-tolerated alienation is even muddier with policing.Footnote 117 Ayers finds surprising comparisons across the Mason–Dixon line beginning in the late nineteenth century: at the moment when the regions diverged on segregation. Despite a “striking resemblance,” Southern cities had smaller forces, were more preoccupied with public intoxication and fighting, and indeed arrested “considerably fewer [people] than Northeastern police.”Footnote 118 While whites dominated Southern forces, Samuel Walker writes that “New York City did not appoint its first black policeman until 1905.”Footnote 119 Because uneven policing and protection shaped the lived reality of Jim Crow, categorizing the oppression as legal or extralegal is not straightforward. If, in addition to riding separately in Georgia, a Black man had to fear police everywhere, Du Bois's construction of race, delineated by Southern segregation statute, was perhaps too regional and positivist. Jim Crow made the South unique, but police made America a Jim Crow nation. Familiar elements across regions included unstable relationships to mob violence, a weaponized language of Black criminality, and a ubiquitous practice of unequal enforcement. Police officers’ decision making mediated these structural factors.
The white-dominated Northern police had an uncertain disposition toward anti-Black terror. The scholarly emphasis, once again, has been structural, an examination of indirect ties between police and violence. But sometimes police stopped the mobs, sometimes they joined, and sometimes vigilantism both strengthened and frustrated formal governance. In the August 1900 New York riot sparked by a Black man killing a white police officer, Walker describes city police helping the mob of “white lawlessness” brutalize African Americans, arresting no whites and encouraging “open season on blacks.”Footnote 120 Although “it took one hundred … officers” to pacify white rioters, Waldrep cites an anonymous New York Times letter suggesting that the incident proved that Black criminality went beyond the South.Footnote 121 The same year in Chicago, according to the Atlanta Constitution, a crowd besieged a Black man after he hit a “white man who had been tormenting him.” This time the police confronted the white mob, dispatching “their clubs freely to disperse their crowd.”Footnote 122 Sometimes lawmen faced pressure in both directions, as confrontation took courage but politics penalized inaction. The Illinois governor refused a sheriff's reinstatement in 1909 for having failed to “use the utmost human endeavor to protect the life of his prisoner.”Footnote 123
Muhammad observes that some police decided to “rescue blacks from mobs rather than simply arrest them after they were beaten.”Footnote 124 In many if not all instances, such decisions could have mattered, sometimes enormously. Muhammad quotes a letter from B.G. Collier and Richard R. Wright, Jr., that pinned the 1918 Philadelphia riot on police agency: “But for the sympathy of the police, their hobnobbing with the mob, what has now become the disgrace of Philadelphia would have been nothing more than a petty row.”Footnote 125 Similar police behavior characterized racial riots in 1917 East St. Louis and 1919 Chicago.Footnote 126 Simon Balto suggests the importance of local policing in driving a continuity of racial oppression well after the Civil Rights Act. He frames the story largely in terms of policy changes, and yet gestures toward police decisions to arrest victims and tolerate mobs in Chicago's Red Summer of 1919—a riot “critical to the historical relationship between black Chicago and the police department.”Footnote 127
The racist, ideological underpinnings of unequal policing also unified the nation's police forces. As Hinton and Cook have noted, “ideas about innate black criminality sanctioned the terror of mob violence.”Footnote 128 These factors have driven a fruitful focus on the criminological dialogue uniting police across regions, but the cultural and intellectual historiography have only said a little about the police. Kali N. Gross's Colored Amazons, showcasing Philadelphia's treatment of Black women convicts from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, reveals that intensified “muscle to policing” exacerbated crime and its attendant racial ideology.Footnote 129 Gross traces the “tactics” of tracking expected recidivists through their formalization in Pennsylvania's 1899 Act for the Identification of Habitual Criminals.Footnote 130 One wonders whether enforcers regarded these tactics as a constituent or incidental element in creating law.
Muhammad's The Condemnation of Blackness has gone furthest to show how a racialized criminology unified North and South in a racial project with a seeming clean break from the regionalized divisions of the Civil War. The hardening construction of Black criminality came alongside the decline of eugenic conceptions of ethnic white criminality. Muhammad does not emphasize the enforcers’ own attitudes. Because “the mistreatment of African Americans” does not alone show that “[r]ace mattered to city officials and reformers,” Muhammad looks for larger trends including Black reformist support for anti-crime forces.Footnote 131 Yet police decisions crucially pushed every step in the feedback loop in which racist enforcement propelled racist criminology propelled racist enforcement.
Scholars interested in the sociology of knowledge might look more to the practitioners who contributed to the rise and decline of criminological assumptions. August Vollmer, Berkeley's police chief who brought police departments across the nation and world into conversation with academia, deserves more focus. Still somewhat under-studied is his particular complicity in eugenics. He believed in hereditary criminality and belonged to the American Eugenics Society, but his influence on this front deserves more examination.Footnote 132 By the 1930s he was recommending studies denying the particular criminality of Black people. His acolytes ran police departments around the country—from Wichita to Honolulu—and had marked innovations to his approach.Footnote 133 Tracing the academic treatments on racial criminology through these departments would be a worthwhile project.
Clearly, Northern as well as Southern police, having embraced racist ideas, conducted themselves differently toward blacks and whites. One area warranting closer study is how the modernization of the criminal code, particularly vice law, facilitated racialized police enforcement on the ground. Historians writing in the shadow of the War on Drugs have recognized the historical discrimination in vice policing. The “targeted enforcement of nonviolent crimes” constituted a tool of interwar racial control, Hinton and Cook note.Footnote 134 It is fruitful to bring the methods that power fine-grained histories of Progressive Era anti-vice crusades into conversation with Michelle Alexander's thesis that biases direct modern colorblind law toward “systematic mass incarceration of people of color.”Footnote 135
But Muhammad's examination of vice policing reveals sophisticated planning beyond mere over-policing. The campaign against “white slavery” fixated on Black men along with foreign whites. In the 1910s, vice policing targeted Black communities in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and other cities. These “anticrime forces… acted with impunity” but their racial impact was more than disproportionate enforcement. Cleaning up Philadelphia neighborhoods for the white working class sometimes meant the strategic neglect of Black neighborhoods. Under a reformist tough-on-crime Philadelphia mayor, “whites looked after their own” while “black crime fighters” mostly lacked the “active support of the police” and other officials. In the 1920s police gave known criminals, who assisted them in anti-corruption efforts, a free hand to terrorize Black neighborhoods. Muhammad discusses New York's purposeful toleration of vice in some areas. In the early 1930s, New York police made up deficiencies in arrest quotas by targeting Black residents in Harlem.Footnote 136 This strategic policing relied on precise implementation.
Individual police exercised some of their most consequential discretion through the exercise of brutality and torture. In principle, professionalizing progressives like Vollmer condemned these technically illegal practices but only seldom formally or practically corrected them. Kevin Boyle describes the unwritten police code of 1920s Detroit: outwardly the police station was “a civil temple, an evocation in stone and sculpture of the Western tradition's highest ideals,” but inside this “façade… corruption was rampant, and every Negro in the city knew that justice received here would be tempered at best, lethal at worst.”Footnote 137
In a more pedestrian sense, unequal enforcement meant the harassment, neglect, and violent abuse of Northern African Americans. As Kenneth Kusmer put it, “black people [in Cleveland] could without contradiction say that they received both too little and too much” police protection.Footnote 138 The problem expanded with technology. Shannon King has shown how New York police enforcement in the 1930s and 1940s subjected Black people to “constant suspicion of being criminals, brutal treatment when in police custody, and the presence of police officers as an occupying force in black neighborhoods.” In sum, the 1930s and 1940s New York Police Department (NYPD) “both overpoliced and underprotected black New Yorkers.”Footnote 139 Speaking generally of the urban 1960s, Kevern Verney describes enforcers who were “almost always white and not residents of the ghettos that they patrolled” and whose “aggressive preventative policing tactics” produced shootings and brutality.Footnote 140 One might assume that patrol cars empowered the reach of police as pawns or as “low-grade tyrants.”
Civilizing Brutality
The 1931 trial of nine young Black defendants falsely accused of raping a white woman in Scottsboro, Alabama, was a critical juncture in multiple civil rights engagements. As eight of them wrote, their trial was marred by crowds threatening to lynch them, “toting these big shotguns.”Footnote 141 Subjected to torture, the nine teenagers endured a notorious and defining episode in the modernization of the criminological state. Law enforcement protected them from the mob, after which they were “handcuffed and beaten … with rifle butts,” in the words of one victim.Footnote 142 Three intertwined stories flow from the interwar period through the 1960s: the decline of lynching and mob terror; the routinization of discriminatory policing and correctional practices, both legal and illegal; and the nationalization of law and public opinion toward the abolition of segregation and the reform of state criminal procedure. The pre-eminence of the Scottsboro case in these national stories is well known, but less appreciated is the impact of police discretion. The police chose to prevent lynching and to extract confessions through torture. They opted for procedural oppression. These choices proved pivotal in the formalistic state's conquest and absorption of lawless racial terror, and in its eventual rejection, however incomplete, of both lynching and police torture.
Of course, one can question the fable of national forces taming parochial brutality. Some of the literature on crime control stresses a continuity of oppression beyond the Civil Rights Act, as a modern war on crime, militarized policing, and mass incarceration reconstituted Jim Crow through other means—in the North as well as the South.Footnote 143 Others attribute this continuity not to federal policy innovations but to earlier twentieth-century grassroots political development.Footnote 144 But insofar as a discernable chapter of oppression ends in the decades after World War II, with national movements, legislation, and litigation delivering a historical rupture, individual police are still an underemphasized factor. As the lore often implies, despite the North and South having converged in many policing practices, the mid-century discourse became regionally polarized. Unequal policing became especially pronounced in the last decades of the segregated South.Footnote 145 Electoral politics and the federal judiciary reinforced this divergence of geographical attention. Criminal justice fueled civil rights litigation, which shaped national understandings of the South. This federal civilizing of Southern discipline, whatever its limitations, invites attention to law enforcers, who were ubiquitous in the confluence of misconduct allegations, lynching reform, coercive interrogations, and the struggle over segregation. Their decisions ultimately attracted scrutiny in the 1950s and 1960s that seemed to reinvigorate the faded promise of Reconstruction.Footnote 146
It is tempting to see mid-century procedural liberalism as overwhelming whatever importance law enforcers’ agency had in an earlier period of provincial enforcement. But even everyday examples of formalism smothering racial lawlessness implicated police decisions and highlighted the ongoing importance of law enforcers’ discretion. In Florida in 1928, a conspiracy reached the police chief who worked with several subordinates to conceal a detective's murder of a Black bellboy. William M. Beachey refused orders to hide the body. His disobedience and willingness to testify led to the murder indictment of a lieutenant and detective.Footnote 147 Throughout the 1930s, NAACP and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyers understood police misconduct as a problem of agency as well as of institutions. They stressed the urgency of pursuing civil and criminal penalties against abusive police, hoping that even in failure such efforts would discourage brutality.Footnote 148
The decades of declining lynching, moreover, saw changing trends at the state and local levels. In the interwar period, the white mob's desire for de facto legal approval became increasingly unrequited, including among law enforcement.Footnote 149 Sometimes police attitudes preceded public sentiment and sometimes they lagged, as social pressure on police and sheriffs to “take meaningful steps to prevent lynchings” increased in the 1920s, according to Brundage.Footnote 150 Where sociologists can convey the scope of these interactions between enforcement and society, historians can bring texture to the decisions to intervene. Police decisions mattered through the end of the Jim Crow era.
The grand narrative often ends with national institutions and movements overcoming a racist lawlessness tolerated by local enforcement. Beginning in the 1940s, as Goluboff has observed, the Civil Rights Section of the federal Department of Justice sought a holistic defense of Black Americans, targeting “police brutality,” “involuntary servitude, lynching… and voting rights cases.”Footnote 151 Historians have revealed ironies in this federal development. Even as the FBI began to take local abuses seriously, its surveillance of Black Americans became pervasive.Footnote 152 Moreover, federal authorities justified their attention by exaggerating the agency of local officials—by reframing lynching as constitutionally legible and correctable state action—even as state officials were probably less complicit than before. In his argument about the confluence of legal nationalism, the administrative state, and the FBI, Waldrep explains that the Department of Justice “fudged the line between ‘police brutality’ and ‘lynching.’”Footnote 153 The convergence of these issues accommodated a “conceptual shift” under President Harry Truman toward “affirmative federal power,” writes Goluboff, “to protect not only New Deal economic security but also African Americans’ … right to be free from bondage, lynching, and police brutality.”Footnote 154 Political scientist Daniel Kato sees federal action as the overdue end of “constitutional anarchy,” the fulfillment of the “will of a sovereign nation to enforce or not to enforce its own laws.”Footnote 155
More attention to local enforcement could illuminate the mid-century transformation of white supremacist control, alongside civil rights and civil liberties reforms. Beck situates the motivations of even local enforcers in the larger epic of “the emergence of a strong state” and “the establishment of law and order.”Footnote 156 But local law enforcers did not see all parochial racial injustices in the same light.Footnote 157 Into the 1940s, sheriffs continued their “political role” of keeping Black citizens from voting “at all,” as Moore puts it.Footnote 158 Studies of police and sheriff testimonials as they turned on lynching but maintained other caste mechanisms, might reveal their understanding of the different prongs of white supremacy.
Conclusion
In considering the colossal story of racial oppression from the 1860s to the 1960s, it might seem myopic to summon more attention to individual police. A compelling structural emphasis suggests two frameworks, somewhat in tension. One points to the inexorability of white supremacy itself, the central structure that persisted from emancipation for the next century and beyond. The other seeks out change, both formal and informal. The struggle for equality did not always find progress or declension but traversed complex twists and turns, from presidential through Radical Reconstruction, from Redemption and the New South through the Jim Crow era and on to Civil Rights and mass incarceration. Inequality mutated but endured through these importantly different eras: through the informal law of lynching, the over-policing and under-protection of African Americans, police torture and brutality, and the construction of a Black criminal archetype that transcended the Mason–Dixon line.
But even to understand the interplay between the greater structure of white supremacy and its many different and sometimes contradictory manifestations, a closer look at individual law enforcers, the discretion accorded to them, and the decisions that they undertook, promises to clarify and better our understanding of the history of lynching and racial violence in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Law enforcement discretion has conspicuously bookended the greater story of racial oppression after emancipation. Historians should extend Pascoe's sharp methodical focus on county clerks to other enforcers and bring the daunting panorama of institutional mechanisms of racial control into greater relief. Police department documents, sheriff office records, captains’ orders, officer correspondence, and other primary sources can underscore how much enforcer discretion helped shape the complex construction of interlocking oppressive structures. An examination of a Southern city's police sources over three decades could provide a new social and granular history. Including the early twentieth century could reveal if and how police selectively enforced segregation statutes. In a broader sense, law enforcement might hold the key to understanding a key political and legal puzzle: how the rising liberal state exacerbated some elements of racial oppression while displacing others through its paradoxical elevation of bureaucratic administration, empowering both individual police and the inexorable engine of punitive correction. With the modern state came the faceless leviathan as well as each enforcer's exaggerated power over life and death, to act as both tyrants and pawns within the structures they occupied and sometimes transformed.
