Fight the Power

African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City

Clarence Taylor

• Editorial: NYU Press
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479822355
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: African American History

A story of resistance, power and politics as revealed through New York City’s complex history of police brutality The 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri was the catalyst for a national conversation about race, policing, and injustice. The subsequent killings of other black (often unarmed) citizens led to a surge of media coverage which in turn led to protests and clashes between the police and local residents that were reminiscent of the unrest of the 1960s. Fight the Power examines the explosive history of police brutality in New York City and the black community’s long struggle to resist it. Taylor brings this story to life by exploring the institutions and the people that waged campaigns to end the mistreatment of people of color at the hands of the police, including the black church, the black press, black communists and civil rights activists. Ranging from the 1940s to the mayoralty of Bill de Blasio, Taylor describes the significant strides made in curbing police power in New York City, describing the grassroots street campaigns as well as the accomplishments achieved in the political arena and in the city’s courtrooms. Taylor challenges the belief that police reform is born out of improved relations between communities and the authorities arguing that the only real solution is radically reducing the police domination of New York’s black citizens.

1

The People’s Voice and Police Brutality

Since the 1990s, scholars have been investigating the civil rights struggles outside the South and challenging an earlier historiography that depicted the movement as an exclusively southern affair. They have also questioned the 1954 benchmark set as the start of the civil rights movement, citing northern civil rights campaigns inaugurated well before the U.S. Supreme Court found legal segregation unconstitutional in its Brown v. Board of Education decision. They argued that civil rights activists outside the South sought more than integration, an end to discrimination in public accommodations, and the protection of voting rights. The campaigns in the North and West, as well as in the South, also sought economic empowerment, fairer distribution of governmental services and resources, and an end to discriminatory practices in both the private and public sectors.

For activists in the North, ending police brutality was a major objective. Historian Martha Biondi argues, for example, that starting in the 1940s, activists in New York City fought for “protection from unreasonable search and seizure, a halt to coerced confessions, the creation of an independent civilian complaint-review board, a law to end police immunity from criminal prosecution, greater accountability and disciplinary procedures within the department, more Black police officers, an end to the media stereotyping of Black men as criminals, a halt to the criminalization of poor, minority neighborhoods, and better, fairer policing of Black neighborhoods.”1

In New York City, police brutality was a major concern of the civil rights community, and the People’s Voice newspaper carved out a key political role in one of urban America’s most important civil rights battles. The Voice framed itself as a champion of black people, particularly in the case of police brutality. It pitted its version of the events in police brutality cases against the official police version and the perspective of the white press, and claimed that it was exposing the latter’s deliberate effort to denigrate Harlem and other black communities.

In December 1942, the Saturday Review published an essay by Warren H. Brown, former director of Negro relations for the Council of Democracy and once executive secretary of the March on Washington Movement, in which he accused the black press of rushing to judgment when it came to police brutality: “When a Negro runs seriously afoul of the law, the Negro press seldom stops to ask the facts. It goes to town in flaming headlines to turn the matter to race-rousing account.” Brown pointed to a case in New York City in which a police officer shot a “demented Negro” who tried to escape arrest. One black weekly, he noted, “did not wait for an official investigation. It chose to ignore that, under the Police Commissioner and the courts of New York, a fair trial can be assured. Instead this paper broke out its blackest type for a ‘police brutality’ story.”2 The weekly in question was the People’s Voice.

While one may question Brown’s assertion that the black press rushed to judgment in such instances, in the 1940s, when there was dramatic growth of New York City’s black population, many African American periodicals did indeed highlight cases of police violence against African Americans and often called for justice for the victims. Social scientist Maxwell R. Brooks contended that even though the white press ignored racial discrimination, “such reports of discriminatory treatment of members of the race are of primary concern to Negro people everywhere.” Referring to the black press, he noted that such “news furnishes the raw material for the editorials and personal columns.”3 In his book The Negro Revolt, African American reporter and author Louis E. Lomax writes that the “problem is aggravated in areas like Harlem where police brutality is an accepted fact of life. Without such cases to report, Negro newspapers would have considerable blank space.”4

Although Lomax exaggerated the potential for empty space, he was correct in claiming that black publications spent considerable ink reporting cases of police officers physically abusing and/or killing people of African origins. For example, the New York Amsterdam News, the longest-running and largest New York City black weekly, founded in 1909, reported police attacks on black New Yorkers practically every week in the 1940s and 1950s. Al Nall, a writer for the Amsterdam News, noted in 1957 that there was not a week in which the paper was not informed of a police brutality case. He claimed that there were so many police brutality lawsuits and financial settlements that police abuse had become quite expensive for the city.5 In 1953 the NAACP magazine Crisis declared that police brutality was an “old story” carried out by police and “conniving supervisors” whose victims were usually blacks and other minorities who had little recourse under federal law.6 The black press became one of the most important vehicles for informing their readership of police assaults on black citizens.

Of all the black-owned publications in New York City, the People’s Voice was the most critical of police brutality. Created in 1942 by the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who served as editor in chief, and Charles P. Buchanan, the paper’s publisher, it joined a long list of the city’s black-owned weekly newspapers, monthly magazines, and journals; among the most prominent were the Amsterdam News, New York Age, the NAACP’s Crisis, and the Urban League’s Opportunity Journal. Despite the crowded field, Powell decided that the city needed another black newspaper in order to address the pressing needs of Harlem. One of the city’s preeminent black leaders, in 1936 he was named senior pastor of New York’s largest and most prestigious black church, Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church. In 1941 he was elected to the New York City Council, becoming the first African American to represent Harlem. Powell’s prestige ensured that New York’s black press covered his activities. The Amsterdam News even invited him to write a column, but he was more interested in a publication that he felt would better promote his image as an effective leader and make the city’s black community aware of his activities and accomplishments. While New York’s black newspapers of course reported on the political and cultural life of black New Yorkers, Powell accused them of containing too much sensationalism and not enough reporting on vital issues that had an impact on the community. He wanted to create a quality paper that would report on international and national as well as local social and political events.

Powell also wanted his paper to reflect his own political leanings, so he was not afraid to recruit writers on the left. He hired a group of dedicated journalists, including Marvel Cooke, who had written for the NAACP Crisis and the Amsterdam News and was critical of the latter’s sensational headlines. Cooke had joined the Communist Party during a 1935 strike against the Amsterdam News by the Writers Guild. Powell also hired the attorney Benjamin Davis, who was a prominent official in the American Communist Party,7 as well as Doxey Wilkerson, who would officially join the party in 1945 and was well-known for his leftist views. Wilkerson would later become educational director of the Maryland Communist Party, a columnist for the Daily Worker, and a member of the party’s National Committee.8 Powell also convinced the managing editor of the Amsterdam News and nationally renowned political cartoonist Ollie Harrington to come on board as art director. Harrington may not have joined the Communist Party, but he did support the 1935 Writers Guild strike against the Amsterdam News, during which he became friends with Ben Davis and Marvel Cooke and developed ties to the party.9

One of the Voice’s most important writers on police brutality was journalist and photographer Llewellyn Ransom. Although not a member of any left-leaning organizations, more than any other Voice writer he shaped the paper’s arguments on the issue of police brutality—in particular with regard to young people. Powell’s decision to hire leftist journalists assured that the Voice would not dwell on the sensational but would seriously interrogate the problems of Harlem and of people of African origins throughout the nation and the world. Hiring politically dedicated journalists also guaranteed that the Voice would present an interpretation of events from the left, one that differed from the more middle-class-oriented Amsterdam News and New York Age. Furthermore, a left-leaning staff made it certain that the paper would take a position in support of Harlem and the city’s other black working-class neighborhoods.

The People’s Voice wasted little time in revealing its political task. The first edition came out on February 14, 1942, at what it called “modern history’s most chaotic hour,” with war being waged on “every continent.” The Voice proclaimed that it was time for those who were elected, selected, or volunteered to assume some portion of leadership: “It matters not how insignificant the role of past leaders may have been, this day and this hour demand the highest, the greatest and the best that all of us can give.” Reading like a manifesto, the first edition declared that its mission was to solve “the people’s problem,” and went on to claim that it was the “people’s hour to make democracy real.”10 It also embraced what would later be called the Double V campaign, first called for in a January 31, 1942, letter to the Pittsburgh Courier by James G. Thompson, who was a reader of that paper. The twenty-six-year-old Thompson identified himself as an “American of dark complexion” and suggested that “while we keep defense and victory in the forefront that we don’t lose sight of our fight for true democracy at home.”11 Thompson’s call for victory over racism at home as well as abroad was adopted by the People’s Voice, which in its inaugural edition envisioned a “world made safe for democracy and also an America made safe.” The objective should be a “real democracy, triumphant not only on the scene of battle but triumphant on the scene of civil liberties, racial equality and human justices.”12

While the Voice embraced the tradition of the black press by becoming an advocate of social reforms, it also reflected the left-leaning politics of its staff and distinguished itself from other black weeklies by linking the issues of race and class, asserting that people of African origins faced not only racism but also class exploitation. It declared itself a “working class paper” and African Americans “a working class race.”13 As such, it pledged its full support to the trade union movement and embraced a civil rights agenda that called not only for political democracy but also for economic justice, which included the right to fair wages and an end to discrimination in employment and in the union hall. The Voice recognized that the white working class suffered from the plague of racism, and it declared a challenge by announcing that it would see to it that blacks were admitted to all unions. Focusing on issues that crossed lines of race and class, the Voice promised to crusade for improved housing, health facilities, better elementary schools, more black faculty members, and support for black businesses.14 Writer Richard Robbins noted in 1949 that a major difference between the Amsterdam News and the People’s Voice was that the latter was “more militant, more outspoken in castigating white practices, more impatient with the slow rate of amelioration. It is, in the non-invidious meaning of the term, essentially radical.”15

The Voice’s weekly circulation ranged from sixteen thousand to fifty thousand copies. This represented a significant percentage of New York black population, but it was small compared to the more politically moderate Amsterdam News, whose weekly circulation was over 105,000. But the Voice’s importance was in its more militant tone,16 and the issue on which it exceeded all other black publications in militancy was police brutality.

The Voice mounted its campaign on police brutality by trying to empower black New Yorkers in the battle against abuse. It published detailed accounts of incidents, using eyewitnesses, in order to counter the police versions that were usually reported in the white press. By providing a counter-narrative, the Voice hoped to verify to a larger audience that the police physically assaulted black people without justification. Its mission was to expose police brutality so that an aware public could demand action to end it. To that end, the paper went beyond the details of brutal police assaults on blacks to also provide proposals for altering the power dynamics between police and citizens.

Investigating Brutality Cases on the Behalf of the Victim

The People’s Voice differentiated itself from the Amsterdam News and the New York Age, the city’s largest black weeklies, by not just reporting police brutality cases but by also serving as an advocate for the victims. It undertook “investigations” to uncover the truth about the incidents and prove to the public the victims’ innocence and the culpability of the police. As a victims’ advocate, the paper never accepted police versions of what happened, which, it made clear, were at best suspect and at worst a cover-up. In challenging the police versions of events, the Voice provided elaborate details on how the police attacked black men, women, and children with impunity. In practically all cases of police assaults on black citizens, the paper took the position that police officers abused their power by targeting black citizens solely because they were black, but it also went further and asserted that police brutality did not just involve the police. In many of its reports and editorials, the Voice pointed the finger at the mainstream press for creating a distorted image of blacks as criminals. The Voice used a variety of approaches in its challenge to police brutality, including vivid imagery, eyewitness accounts, undermining the police version of events, highlighting attacks on black youth, and challenging what the paper labeled the crime smear. According to the Voice, the crime smear was a campaign by the white press to portray Harlem and other black communities as areas plagued by crime and therefore an unsafe place for citizens to reside.

The Voice’s reports on police brutality were well researched and always claimed to uncover events concealed by the police. In its efforts to challenge the abuse of power by the powerful, the paper embraced the spirit of investigative journalism by acting as a watchdog and attempting to get the citizenry and government to take remedial action.

In order to win support for its campaign to end police brutality, the People’s Voice carefully constructed and distributed images of upright, h...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The People’s Voice and Police Brutality
• 2. The Communist Party and Police Brutality
• 3. The Nation of Islam and Police Brutality
• 4. Civil Rights, Community Activists, and Police Brutality
• 5. Police Brutality, the Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant Riots, and the National Civil Rights Movement
• 6. John Lindsay, Racial Politics, and the Civilian Complaint Review Board
• 7. The Triumph of a False Narrative
• 8. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Brutality
• 9. Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo, and the Resistance to Giuliani
• 10. The Campaign to End Stop, Question, and Frisk
• 11. The Limits of Mayor de Blasio’s Police Reform Agenda
• Conclusion: Where Do We Go from Here?
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author