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.