Black Rage in New Orleans: Police Brutality and African American Activism from World War II to Hurricane Katrina

INTRODUCTION: Police Violence, New Orleans, and the Postwar Urban Landscape

1 Introduction Police Violence, New Orleans, and the Postwar Urban Landscape Police brutality has been a source of frustration, anger, and rage for African Americans throughout the postwar period. In the postwar migration of African Americans out of the rural South into the nation’s urban areas in search of better social and economic opportunities, they came in contact with the most visible arm of the state: the police. African Americans throughout the country confronted repressive police departments that were threatened by black demands for equality after World War II and intimidated by an expanded black populace as whites fled to the suburbs. Law enforcement agencies across the country responded to the increased black presence with an iron fist. In many ways white police officers institutionalized an informal culture of police brutality toward African Americans and they emerged as the protectors of white privilege and the opponents of black progress. As Gail O’Brien notes in her study of police violence in Tennessee, “the police operated as the frontline guardians of an arbitrary criminal justice system and a social order that controlled black Americans in their relations with whites but that offered blacks little protection from whites or from one another .” As the number of African Americans grew in the nation’s cities, it did not take long for white officers to develop an “us versus them” mentality as they encountered African Americans on a daily basis. Consequently, they were often ready to let African Americans know who was in charge by utilizing any and all methods of police repression. Consequently, the term police brutality was all encompassing to African Americans during the postwar period. It included police homicides; unlawful arrests; assaults; threatening and abusive language; the use of racial slurs; sexual exploitation of black 2 Black Rage in New Orleans women; the beating of prisoners in police custody; racial profiling; police complicity in drug-dealing, prostitution, burglaries, protection schemes, and gun-smuggling; and the lack of justice available to black defendants in the courts. Although the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) did not keep records of police brutality complaints and the mainstream media rarely covered incidents of police brutality against African Americans, the black press always highlighted cases of police mistreatment, and generally on the front page. Even a cursory examination of black newspapers in the postwar period reveals articles, at times on a weekly basis, detailing cases of police brutality. Likewise, the archives of local and national civil rights organizations are filled with thousands of affidavits and letters relaying first-person experiences of police brutality.1 In the urban South police departments adhered to a strict policy of segregation and its ideological pattern of white supremacy. The typical police officer in the urban South viewed African Americans as docile, fearful , cowardly, and deathly afraid of the police. But at the same time, they also viewed black men as criminals and black women as sexual aggressors. Consequently, while black men were often brutalized by the police, black women were often sexually violated by the police. While unfair encounters with law enforcement have been a fact of life for the African American community , these encounters become more intense in the postwar period for several reasons. First, as African Americans began to assert demands for freedom and democracy, white police officers viewed themselves as agents that existed for the protection of whites only. Although police departments were subsidized by all taxpayers, African Americans found themselves paying for fair and equitable police services that they seldom received. Thus, black residents needed the protection of the police while at the same time needing protection from the police. Second, as a consequence of white rural migration to nearby urban areas, white mob activity was replaced by police violence as a means of restricting black social mobility. While white supremacist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens’ Council were quite visible in the postwar South, they did not engage in lynchings and other forms of racial violence that were typical of the plantation South because of the urban setting. Instead, the local police department, with the support of politicians, segregationists, district attorneys, and judges, carried out extralegal violence against African Americans, realizing that black southerners had no visible means of redress. Third, as the black populace expanded and whites fled to the suburbs, local law enforcement agencies introduction 3 viewed black mobility as a threat. In some ways, the police...