Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power

Description

In July 1919, an explosive race riot forever changed Chicago. For years, black southerners had been leaving the South as part of the Great Migration. Their arrival in Chicago drew the ire and scorn of many local whites, including members of the city's political leadership and police department, who generally sympathized with white Chicagoans and viewed black migrants as a problem population. During Chicago's Red Summer riot, patterns of extraordinary brutality, negligence, and discriminatory policing emerged to shocking effect. Those patterns shifted in subsequent decades, but the overall realities of a racially discriminatory police system persisted. In this history of Chicago from 1919 to the rise and fall of Black Power in the 1960s and 1970s, Simon Balto narrates the evolution of racially repressive policing in black neighborhoods as well as how black citizen-activists challenged that repression. Balto demonstrates that punitive practices by and inadequate protection from the police were central to black Chicagoans' lives long before the late-century "wars" on crime and drugs. By exploring the deeper origins of this toxic system, Balto reveals how modern mass incarceration, built upon racialized police practices, emerged as a fully formed machine of profoundly antiblack subjugation. Cover Half Title Title Copyright Dedication Contents Abbreviations Introduction: Overpoliced and Underprotected in America Prologue: The Promised Land and the Devil’s Sanctum: The Risings of the Chicago Police Department and Black Chicago 1. Negro Distrust of the Police Increased: Migration, Prohibition, and Regime-Building in the 1920s 2. You Can’t Shoot All of Us: Radical Politics, Machine Politics, and Law and Order in the Great Depression 3. Whose Police?: Race, Privilege, and Policing in Postwar Chicago 4. The Law Has a Bad Opinion of Me: Chicago’s Punitive Turn 5. Occupied Territory: Reform and Racialization 6. Shoot to Kill: Rebellion and Retrenchment in Post–Civil Rights Chicago 7. Do You Consider Revolution to Be a Crime?: Fighting for Police Reform Epilogue: Attending to the Living Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Y