Kristian Williams - Our Enemies in Blue - Police and Power in America

tom .... A door opens outward on the stairway leading down into the vaults.The first thing noticed is a bloody handmark, blood-spots line the whitewalls on the side, and blood spots the steps .... It is with a sensation of sickeninghorror that you leave all the scenes and respectfully picking your waythrough cast off hats and shoes that are all over every floor of the building,find yourself in the open street, the sidewalk of which ran with blood.')With the convention in ruins, the police led bands of White vigilantesaround the city, beating any Black people they encountered and shooting at thosewho fled. The majority of the victims had no connection to the convention. Atleast thirty-eight people were killed, and many times that number wounded.Overwhelmingly, the victims were Black.lOThat afternoon, bodies were piled into baggage cars. Many of the woundedwere loaded in with the dead, and witnesses later swore to seeing police systematicallyshooting those who stirred.1I No one was prosecuted for the massacre,though a Congressional committee concluded that it had been planned by agroup of police-mostly Confederate veterans. 12 They were assisted by a Know­Nothing group called (appropriately) "the Thugs" and a vigilante regimentnamed "Hays' Brigade," acting under the leadership of police Sergeant LucienAdams and Sheriff Harry T. Hays, respectively. I.'1bese two examples, especially the Mechanics Institute massacre, illustratethe character of such attacks. As Melinda Hennessey explains,The actions of whites in many of the Reconstruction riots, however, hadless in common with mob rule than with the organized character of paramilitaryunits .... Antebellum militias and slave patrols gave southernwhites experience in local military organization, and this trend continuedin the locally based Confederate military units.'4White people adhered not only to the values of the slave system, but to its methodsas well.The central role of the police in these two disturbances was unfortunatelytypical of the period. In her comprehensive study of Reconstruction-era unrest,Hennessey finds, "In only three riots, including Mobile in 1867, Vicksburg in1875, and Charleston in 1867, did the police or sheriff try to quell the disturbance,and in a third of the riots, the police or sheriffs posse led the violence."15Examples of police-led violence include the election riots in Savannah in 1868,Baton Rouge in 1870, and Barbour County, Alabama, in 1874.'6 Perhaps thestarkest case occurred in Camilla, Georgia, where in 1868 Sheriff Munford J.Poore deputized the town's entire White male population to prevent a Blackpolitical procession;17 a military investigation found that the sheriff made noeffort to control the posse and "was a party to the wanton and unnecessarydestruction of life which subsequently ensued."'RWhere legal authorities were not themselves complicit with the terrorists,they found themselves among the terrorized; they were powerless to stop Klanactivity, prosecute offenders, protect their own constituencies, or, in some cases,defend themselves. For officers sincere in their duties, the situation was desperate.In Warren County, Georgia, Sheriff John C. Norris faced constant harassmentfor his efforts to enforce the law; eventually he was crippled in a Klanambush. The weakness of his position might be indicated by the fact that, though79