The Color of the Law: Race, Violence, and Justice in the Post-World War II South

5. The Politics of Policing

THE POLITICS OF POLICINe Ironically, while the migration of African Americans to the nation's cities discouraged attacks by white civilians, it increased the possibility ofnegative encounters between police officers and black residents. This occurred because after World War II, police in the urban South were more likely to abuse blacks than were those in small towns and the countryside. l Police abuse was also rising in certain urban locales in the postwar era.2 While both developments were undoubtedly related to the growing number ofAfrican Americans in cities, the very anonymity of urban blacks often led police to typecast all with whom they came in contact as "bad niggers" and to confront them aggressively. When officers were exceptionally abusive , African Americans frequently responded in kind, so that killings by police and killings of police tended to be high in the same locales.3 Although the specific personnel of the police force, especially the chief, helped explain the different death rates from one city to another, police behavior ultimately rested on a more fundamental bedrock-namely, politics and the distribution of power. Nothing demonstrated better the differences that political arrangements could make in the safety and security of African Americans than the contrasting treatment blacks received at the hands of the Columbia police and the Maury County sheriff. Although Justice attorney Eleanor Bontecou described both Police Chief Griffin and Sheriff Underwood as "two very gentle spirits," subtle but important differences distinguished the two.4 While the Columbia police did not behave as viciously as some law officers, they, like their counterparts in towns and cities across the South, answered to white officials, and indirectly to an overwhelmingly white elec- torate, that expected perpetuation of the status quo. Relations bctween black Columbians and the local police had changed since the late nineteenth century, but the changes werc more ones of style than substance. Mcanwhile, a very different political matrix-one that looked backward to the First Reconstruction and forward to the Second-had developed between Underwood and black voters. This section sorts out and explains these distinctions; the following one compares the Highway Patrol and the State Guard. Together thev dcmonstrate how political machinations both protected and offended black rights. They also challenge the truisms that state law officers are inhcrently more impartial than their counterparts at the grassroots level and that the intermingling oflaw enforcement and politics is innately bad. THE LOCAL SCENE As upholders of a legal and social order that had sustained first slavery and then segregation, the vast majority of southern law officers were not held in high esteem by most Mrican Americans. \ Some improvement had occurred in the rare locales that had hired black policemen, but as a Gcorgia resident summed the prevailing sentiment: "We have no Negro police and most of the white policemen are nasty."6 Although the Columbia police in 1946 did not engage in the savagery that some did, their behavior was at best mixed. W. E. "Clyde" Frazier, the radio operator at the Columbia policc station, struck Gladys Stephenson sevcral times as she attempted to protect hcr son on the morning ofthe 25th, and local fire chief J. P. White may have hit her as welF Constable T. I. "Harry" Shaw of Spring Hill and TVA guard W. E. "Smitty" Smith also pummeled Alexander Bullock with their fists and blackjacks when he arrivcd at City Hall the morning of the 26th in search of his car. In addition to the physical abuse accorded Stephenson and Bullock, Police Chief Griffin clearly discriminated against the Stephensons in the matter of arrests. As James Stephenson explained, when the police appeared , "the other two [white] guys [who had been in the fight] walked upon the sidewalk."8 No one questioned them, and obviously Griffin never thought of taking them into custody. The chief did not consider arresting any of the whites involved in the Stephenson-Fleming fight, nor did he question the propriety of white civilians and officers abusing black Maury Countians, because the social function of the police in the South, as in much of the nation, was to control Mrican Americans, not protect them.9 In this mission, all whites were preJ .42 Racial Justice sumably united. For these reasons, the law officers involved in the Columbia fray focused on the men gathered in the Bottom, not on the armed whites roaming around the town square. Even Sheriff Underwood made no...