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  • The Color of the Third Degree: Racism, Police Torture, and Civil Rights in the American South, 1930–1955 by Silvan Niedermeier
  • Luther Adams
The Color of the Third Degree: Racism, Police Torture, and Civil Rights in the American South, 1930–1955. By Silvan Niedermeier. Translated by Paul Cohen. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. [x], 213. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-5297-9; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-46965296-2.)

Translated from German by Paul Cohen, Silvan Niedermeier's The Color of the Third Degree: Racism, Police Torture, and Civil Rights in the American South, 1930–1955 is a history of the NAACP's work to expose police torture in the American South. Police tortured black people "outside the public eye" and "officially denied" any wrongdoing (p. 1). Niedermeier defines torture as "violence used by state and law enforcement officials to acquire information or coerce confessions," basing his definition on the 1984 United Nations Convention against Torture (p. 5). Niedermeier uses fifty-one complaints filed with the NAACP, newspapers, court records, government reports, and records [End Page 747] of the American Civil Liberties Union and the FBI to trace African Americans' efforts to expose and delegitimize police torture. In cases like Brown v. Mississippi (1936), Chambers v. Florida (1940), and those involving the Groveland Four (1949–1955), NAACP lawyers challenged police torture but were "powerless" to stop it (p. 99). It was "difficult … to establish the truth in the courts of the South," and the NAACP had "no immediate impact" (pp. 119, 88). The NAACP failed to curb "the commonplace torture of African American citizens" (p. 88). Failure to acknowledge police torture exposed the "limits of African American testimony in southern courts" (p. 47).

White people were reluctant to put police officers, sheriffs, and deputies on trial. White police were acquitted, and allegations of torture were ignored, "in the face of overwhelming evidence against them" (p. 11). Judges, district attorneys, and juries all protected white supremacy. When white people did protest police torture, it was often out of a racist sense of paternalism. According to Niedermeier, the FBI was spurred to act by the growing political pressure applied by black voters during the Cold War and the agency's ethos of "strict rationality" and "neutrality and objectivity" in gathering evidence (p. 112).

The black press and the NAACP, through pamphlets, speaking tours, fundraisers, and the courts, positioned police torture as part of a wider pattern of police brutality and its eradication as central to the rights of first-class citizenship. Instead of placing torture in the context of police brutality itself, Niedermeier fixates on a provocative but unproved assertion: "police torture was a dark side to the gradual decline in lynching violence in the South" (p. 16).

The Color of the Third Degree could more deeply engage secondary sources on the NAACP and the Groveland Four. Genna Rae McNeil's Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Philadelphia, 1983) and Barbara Ransby's Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill, 2003) demonstrate the connection between the early work of building the NAACP into an organization of 500,000 members by the 1950s and the legal groundwork of the 1930s and 1940s. Why did the NAACP win cases on issues relating to housing, voting rights, jury selection, interstate travel, and higher education but was unable to win convictions in police torture cases? And why was that lack of convictions the NAACP's failure? Niedermeier's work neglects the limits of white truth telling, and that the failure of the justice system was the failure of American democracy.

Niedermeier does not cite Langston Hughes's "Ballad of Harry Moore" (1952), the PBS documentary Freedom Never Dies: The Legacy of Harry T. Moore (2000), or Gilbert King's Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America (New York, 2012). King's work is instructive on how police torture in the case of the Groveland Four exposed the depth of the Ku Klux Klan in Florida law enforcement.

The Color of the Third Degree is a timely and important...

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