“Their Very Presence Is an Insult”:
Rejecting the Police and Defending the Community in a Pre-Black Power Era
*
Simon Balto
University of Wisconsin-Madison
*
Their very presence is an insult, and it would be, even if they spent their entire day feeding
gumdrops to children. They represent the force of the white world, and that world’s real
intentions are, simply, for that world’s criminal profit and ease, to keep the black man
corralled up here, in his place. The badge, the gun in the holster, and the swinging club
make vivid what will happen should his rebellion become overt. Rare, indeed, is the
Harlem citizen, from the most circumspect church member to the most shiftless adolescent,
who does not have a long tale to tell of police incompetence, injustice, or brutality.
-James Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown”1
*
On a late-summer's evening in 1959, Milwaukee Mayor Frank Zeidler sat in the
passenger seat of a Milwaukee Police Department cruiser as it rolled through the
congested streets of one of Milwaukee's predominantly black neighborhoods on the city's
near north side. Zeidler's participation on this ride-along, and the location of it, were not
random. Throughout Zeidler’s term in office—spanning from 1948 through the dawn of
the 1960s—Milwaukee had recurrently been rocked by large-scale street confrontations
between city police officers and members of Milwaukee’s rapidly growing black
community. In incidents that the police would regularly use the idiom of riots to
describe, dozens—sometimes hundreds—of black citizens in the impoverished northside
section of the city known as the “inner core” collectively used force of numbers, their
bodies, rocks, bottles, and whatever else was at their disposal in efforts to prevent officers
from making arrests of black citizens. The frequency, causes, and deeper meanings of
such incidents were an object of concern and study for members of the city
administration and private citizens alike throughout these years. With the first significant
public notice of such confrontations coming in the late 1940s, they had approached or
exceeded a level of frequency by the mid-1950s of roughly one every three months. The
late-1959 moment in which Mayor Zeidler chose to hit the streets came at a time of
particularly acute tensions between the police and members of the black community.
Indeed, one of these types of disturbances had already been reported earlier the same day
of the mayor’s ride-along. As tensions mounted, Zeidler decided to observe for himself
the sorts of exchanges between officers and citizens that bred such hostility.2
Zeidler found plenty of grist for his intellectual mill. Responding to reports of a
disturbance at a playground in the heart of black Milwaukee, police—with the mayor in
tow—arrived to find two fourteen-year-old girls fighting in the park. When officers
intervened, a crowd of roughly two hundred residents descended upon the scene to resist
the arrest of the teenagers, reportedly incited by a few black men in their early twenties.
According to official and newspaper accounts, protestors hurled insults and rocks at the
arresting officers, and tried multiple times to pry the girls free from the policemen.
Officers were forced to call for reinforcements, and only a formidable display of police
power was able to quell the uprising. For the moment, the streets returned to normal,
though the resentment motivating such actions remained.3
What were the motivations for such actions? Do—and if so, how do—these
events and moments and strategies like them help us reconceptualize the trajectory of
twentieth-century African American resistance politics? More specifically, and more
germane to our present purposes this weekend, how do we situate these and other acts
like them within a Black Power framework? How do they help to enrich, expand, or
challenge our understandings of what Black Power was (and is) and how it developed?
I think it important at the outset here to be clear about some of my intellectual
frameworks for thinking about these issues. First is that these acts of resistance strike me
as indisputably acts of community defense, and I’ll explain why shortly. To be clear,
what matters here is not whether or not we agree with the actions of the crowd—and
some of us, as with participants’ contemporaries, surely do not. Nor does it seem
particularly for relevant whether or not such strategies “worked.” (They generally did not
in, if we understand their motivation to be to stop police from making arrests.) What
matters is why they participated, and some context that I'll provide momentarily should
help clarify that question. Second, although the optic I'm using here is focused heavily
on eruptions of crowd resistance to the police in Milwaukee particularly, it's important to
understand that this type of active, forceful rejection of police authority—by threat or
actualization of violence—is hardly exceptional. Although early research of issues of
race and policing in Chicago has turned up only brief mention of similar events, it’s
important that such community confrontation of the police does nonetheless mark the
historical record there, as well. This is true both in brief archival mentions of such
events, as well as in reading between the lines of police correspondence and discovering
how concerned the Chicago police were about mob resistance.4 Moreover, if we draw
our lens further out chronologically and conceptually, the portrait becomes all the richer.
Although I certainly don't wish to flatten the very real historical dissimilarities between
the contexts, it's worth noting that there are abundant examples animated by similar
rejections of police authority from even earlier periods of urban history, too. In Dallas,
Texas, in 1921, for example, after the public whipping of an African American man
named Alexander Johnson went uninvestigated and unpunished, rumors circulated that a
group of African Americans in the city were organizing a black parallel organization to
the Ku Klux Klan. As an early target and a powerful message, the group threatened to
publicly whip the Sheriff of Dallas County for so brazenly neglecting the needs of the
black community.5 In Atlanta, Georgia two years ealier, an anonymous group of black
Atlantans put a pair of detectives with the city the police department on notice that they
should stay out of the black community after repeated accusations that they were
harassing local residents in their search for a band of unidentified criminals.6 And these
are just a couple earlier historical moments that could be explored within the frame I’m
outlining today.
In returning to a narrower focus on postwar Milwaukee, though, I’d like to offer
some context that helps explain the sorts of events to which Frank Zeidler bore witness .
What brought people to view the police, in Mayor Zeidler’s words, as their “enemies”
rather than “protectors?”7 On the one hand, we have the official line from the city, which
was more or less that participants in these street confrontations with police were simply
parts of drunken, unruly mobs looking for a fight. But on the other, we have black
Milwaukeeans’ expressions of dissent and grievance vis-à-vis the police presence in their
community, as well as the broader context of police-community relations that generated
such grievances. Primarily because of the remarkable and terrible burden that the modern
carceral state has hoisted upon African America since the 1970s and 80s, many of our
most thorough explorations of issues of and related to hyper-intensive policing remain
situated in a post-1960s context.8 But as a means of suggesting why this frame is
incomplete, it is surely worth considering that, in 1952, for example, the Milwaukee
police made one arrest of a black citizen for every three African American residents of
the city.9 Similarly, throughout the postwar years, the African American inmate
population at the Milwaukee County House of Corrections was roughly four times the
black representation in the overall population by the early 1960s.10 Even more striking
are admittance rates at the State Prison. Although those figures waxed and waned,
statistics such as those, again, from the year 1952, when African Americans represented
nineteen percent of offenders sent to the prison despite constituting less than one percent
of the total state population, are particularly startling. 11
These figures—particularly the arrest rates and the House of Corrections
numbers—were heavily driven by police crackdowns on misdemeanor violations of
social codes. Evidence of this is found in the outsized arrest records of black
Milwaukeeans on charges such as vagrancy, public drinking and drunkenness, and so
forth. When interviewed in a 1960 survey of that “inner core” area, black residents there
reported that “individual police officers manifest racial prejudice,” and they complained
of officers “addressing colored residents as ‘boy’ or by first name.”12 Informants further
argued that the police were more lenient toward whites, that in dealing with African
Americans officers undertook “unnecessarily severe questioning for minor offenses or
behavior,” and that they treated all black people, without distinction, as if they were
criminals.13 Ultimately, interviewees were “virtually unanimous in reporting a
widespread belief that law enforcement is more strict in the inner-core area than
elsewhere in the city,” particularly in regard to alcohol-related offenses and “minor
infractions, such as jay-walking or loitering.”14
Citizens were also justifiably aggrieved over police violence. The history of
police brutality is probably well-known enough to the audience here that I’ll not dwell
extensively on it, but suffice to say that accusations and evidence of beatings, abuse, and
death at the hands of the police coursed throughout black Milwaukee. Ubiquitously
relentless (and often seemingly remorseless) incidents of police violence and misconduct
were justifiably interpreted by many African Americans as the embodiment of systemic
patterns of racially driven abuse, and as the most serious of a large constellation of law
enforcement injustices facing black Milwaukee. Consider the words of Pastor B.S.
Gregg, one of the spokespersons for a community organization known as the Citizens’
Anti-Police Brutality Committee, as he testified on the state of police-community
relations before the Milwaukee Police and Fire Commission:
Make no mistake about it: we have some law officers in this city who consistently insult,
harass, and brutalize Milwaukee Negroes. We have law officers who act on the
assumption that every Negro is a second class citizen, a person to be treated with
contempt, a person without rights before the law. Incidents which exemplify these
attitudes range in seriousness from what one censures as poor human relations to what
one condemns as inhumanity. Furthermore, such incidents are widely experienced,
witnessed, and discussed in the Northside community where, we repeat, tensions are
rising to the point of explosion.15
Gregg’s comments spoke directly to the systemic challenges that the police posed
to the city’s black citizenry. Beyond the seemingly omnipresent danger of bodily harm,
black Milwaukeeans’ resentment toward the police was born of the totality of their
experiences with them: the regular indignities, humiliations, and harassments; the
pervasive dread of being stopped or arrested; the everyday witnessing of neighbors and
friends manhandled, cited, and hauled away on minor and often vague charges. For the
thousands of poor and working-class black Milwaukeeans living in the congested near
north side, everyday life was perpetually being molded by the constant threat of arrest by
officers charged with maintaining law and order and upholding the dominant society’s
governing social codes. Importantly, too, was the fact that the vast majority of black
Milwaukeeans were denied an opportunity to have their grievances against the police
heard in any formal channel. An arcane ordinance known as the “freeholder clause”
restricted the ability to bring grievances to the Police and Fire Commission (PFC) to
Milwaukee’s homeowners only, tethering property rights directly to the scope of one’s
rights vis-à-vis the police. The aforementioned Ad Hoc Committee on Police
Administration 1960s convincingly argued that the measure served to deny nonhomeowners equal protection of the law. 16
In this context so riddled with repression and violence, and with no release for the
simmering anger against the police that coursed through sections of black Milwaukee,
official caricatures of the previously described street confrontations as entirely incoherent
or drunken endeavors seem untenable if not mendacious. Such eruptions were, in reality,
awash in political meaning, despite their seeming spontaneity. Consider the case of Irene
Haynes, 28, and Essie White, 22, two black women whom police tried to arrest in
January 1955 for allegedly fighting at a busy sixth ward thoroughfare. As the officers
tried to take the women into custody, they were quickly surrounded by a crowd of two
hundred when they tried to arrest the women. The police accused Haynes and White,
along with two other women, of trying to incite a riot; and in court, officers testified that
they had been injured in the melee that ensued as White tried to free Haynes—who,
remember, had supposedly been fighting each other just moments before—from the grasp
of an officer. The women found the officers’ stories so implausible and disconnected
from their own experiences that they were admonished from the bench for laughing in
court during the testimony.17
Let’s similarly consider another incident, this from November 1956. That night,
officers with the Milwaukee police reported that they initially approached a crowd of
fifty to sixty black youths outside a youth center in search of suspects in an earlier gang
attack on another black resident. Upon finding none, officers reported, they tried to
disperse the crowd. The mass of people quickly grew to three to four hundred people,
who by MPD reports began rocking police cars, throwing stones, and jeering at the
officers. As one of the officers testified to the newspaper, “We started to disperse the
crowd the best we could and when they refused to move, we tried to take a few into
custody. The prisoners started to fight with the officers and screamed for help. At this,
the rest of the mob tried to come to their aid, throwing stones and bottles.” [Emphasis
mine.] The police called for reinforcements, dispersed the crowd, made arrests, and
moved on, only to find another group of roughly one hundred youths at a different
intersection who similarly hurled rocks and other objects at the officers. By the end of
the evening, hundreds of black Milwaukeeans had been involved, forty officers had been
called on to help prevent a full-scale riot, two officers were hospitalized, and six people
were arrested.18
Taking these particular incidents as illustrative of the larger body of disturbances
and properly contextualizing them allows us to understand them as distinctly political
acts of resistance. I use the word ‘political’ here in an expansive sense. The case of
participants in these incidents is one of citizens who had been absolutely stripped of
particular rights using alternative channels to try to regain them or protect themselves.
Doing so meant navigating inherently unequal terrains of power—and risking bodily
harm—in order to try to better their own circumstances and those of the people around
them. An ethos of not just self-preservation, but of community defense, courses through
the history of each individual incident here. The challenges to police power that we see
over and over again here weren’t simply arbitrary and unreasoned, even if they weren’t
attached to any particular programmatic agenda—they constituted a form of early
midcentury political resistance that historians have yet to really think at length about.
So what does this mean for thinking about Black Power? In both public
consciousness and the historical narrative, an important aspect of the Black Power turn
was the forceful challenges to and rejections of the authority of American law
enforcement. Whether in the Panthers’ famed promises to “police the police” or in their
more verbose condemnations of “the pigs,” the relationships between local, state, and
federal law enforcement agencies and Black Power activists during what we typically
identify as “the movement” proper—and more specifically the latter’s rejection of the
former—stand as one of the iconic components of Black Power ideologies. But our
understandings for where such ideas originated from remain amorphous. On one hand, as
Donna Murch has shown in the case of the Panthers, much of the intellectual and
theoretical development of Black Power activists stemmed directly from their immediate
contexts and experiences—with migration, juvenile justice, education, and so forth.19 At
the same time, it’s important that we reach for better appreciations of how the urban
context—and everything that attended it—over a much longer historical term shaped the
development of Black Power thought and ideology. I think it’s clear by this point how
frustration with the attenuation of civil rights in the urban North and West, the onset of
the urban crises, the urban rebellions of the sixties, and Black Power were all linked
together. But the primacy that we as historians give to the interrelations between these
“long-1960s” historical phenomena may actually hinder our ability to appreciate how
Black Power’s intellectual challenges to, or rejections of, police authority actually
developed. As this brief snapshot of community assertions of self-defense and challenges
to the police suggests, the soil from which Black Power framings of the limits and
legitimacies of law enforcement grew was rich. What did people who joined or
embraced aspects of “the movement” receive from their forebears, and how did they
receive it? How did they adopt and adapt such attitudes, and how did they come to bear
on how they expressed themselves politically? Even as we focus our attention on what
legacies Black Power activists left and how they influenced the people, communities, and
cultures around them, there are important questions to be asked as well about what they
learned from the folk around and before them. In other words, to continue on issues
related to law enforcement, we all know about the Panthers telling “the people” to hate
“the pigs.” But what historically beyond their own direct experiences and intellectual and
theoretical explorations led them to such a position?
In the end, this may be something of a piece with the calls we’ve seen for a “long
Black Power movement.” But it should also serve as a reminder that we need to pay
attention to local histories and local voices as we reach for that more expansive history.
Tim Tyson did us all a service more than a decade ago in showing us how the African
American radical intellectual Robert F. Williams served as an intellectual forefather to
many members of the movement.20 But what about the people who served as actual
mothers and fathers to people in the Black Power movement? What did people like Essie
White and Irene Haynes—convicted in the 1950s for being at the center of one such
street confrontation with the police—teach their children about the role and legitimacy of
law enforcement in American society generally and in African America particularly?
How did the kids of participants in the incidents I’ve talked about today absorb such
displays of community defense and rejections of state authority? Surely these local
legacies have a place in understanding the rise, development, and appeal of “the
movement.” Better exploring earlier contexts of urban conflict and resistance should
serve to dramatically enrich our appreciations for Black Power, as well as the larger
trajectory of twentieth century African American freedom politics.
1
James Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem,” Esquire, July 1960.
Milwaukee Commission on Human Rights, Annual Report, 1956, Milwaukee Human Rights
Commission Records, Milwaukee Public Library, Milwaukee, WI, 22-23; Bernard Toliver and Joseph
Himden, “Research in Police-Community Relations in Inner-Core Area, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 19591960,” Masters Thesis: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1960-61. Milwaukee Public Library,
Milwaukee, WI.
3
Milwaukee Sentinel, August 27, 1959, 1.
4
Virgil W. Peterson, “Crime Conditions in the Fifth Police District: Survey Made in 1945 to
Determine Reasons for High Crime Rate,” Criminal Justice, 1946, 20, Chicago Crime Commission
Records, Box 1, Folder 9. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois-Chicago Archives.
5
Chicago Whip, April 16, 1921.
6
Chicago Whip, November 22, 1919.
7
Milwaukee Journal, November 3, 1956,
8
Among others, see Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of
Colorblindness (New York: The Free Press, 2010); Loïc Wacquant, Prisons of Poverty (Minneapolis, MN,
2010) and Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, NC, 2009);
David Garland, ed., Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences (London: Sage Press, 2001);
Michael Tonry, Malign Neglect: Race, Crime, and Punishment in America (Oxford, 1995); After the War
on Crime: Race, Democracy, and a New Reconstruction (New York: New York University Press, 2008);
and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing
California (Berkeley, CA, 2007).
9
MPD Annual Report: 1952, Milwaukee Public Library, Milwaukee, WI. Police records show 9,352
arrests of African Americans, from a population of roughly 30,000.
10
Milwaukee County House of Corrections Records: 1948 to 1960, Milwaukee Public Library,
Milwaukee, WI (records for 1945, 1946, and 1947 are unavailable).
11
State of Wisconsin Department of Public Welfare, Division of Corrections, “Criminal Offenders
Placed Under the Supervision and Control of the Wisconsin Department of Public Welfare, Division of
Corrections, during 1952,” Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, WI.
12
Bernard Toliver and Joseph Himden, “Research in Police-Community Relations in Inner-Core Area,
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1959-1960,” masters thesis, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1961, 15-17.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid.
15
Pastor B.S. Gregg, “Statement of the Citizens’ Anti-Police Brutality Committee Before the
Milwaukee Police and Fire Commission, January 21, 1965,” box 21, folder 9, Citizens’ Anti-Police
Brutality Committee Records, in Lloyd Barbee Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, WI
(hereafter, CAPBC Records).
16
Ad Hoc Committee on Police Administration in Milwaukee, “The Problem of Police-Community
Relations in Milwaukee,” ca. 1968, AHCPAM Records. The freeholder clause was finally struck down in
1967.
17
Milwaukee Journal, January 4, 1955.
18
Milwaukee Journal, October 30, 1955.
19
Donna Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in
Oakland, California (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010).
2
20
Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams & the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1999).