George Floyd was not the first unarmed African-American killed ineptly by a police officer, and he was not the first unarmed African-American recorded being killed by a police officer. Yet, there was something about the May 25, 2020 choking death of the 46-year-old father that struck a chord with Americans. Despite centuries of black people decrying a noticeably disproportionate level of excessive force, brutality, racial profiling and killings of black people at the hands of law enforcement officials, many Americans responded to the George Floyd incident as if it were the first time they’d ever heard of systemic racism. Suddenly non-black people seemed interested in dismantling it and learning more about black people’s relationship with it. Many wanted to listen, and ask questions. But the answers to their questions have been around, in plain sight, staring them in the face, since the country’s founding. Today’s endless string of viral video clips showing police killing black people is just another chapter in the long story of African-Americans’ fight against injustice and racism. To understand how the United States got to this point, people simply have to revisit the forgotten first chapters of the story.
Here is a hint: When in the history of America have police ever been FOR black people? One of the very first forms of policing in the American South was the slave patrol. Slave patrollers were people who monitored slaves as they worked, recovered slaves when they escaped, disciplined them when they fell out of line and terrorized them to deter revolts. Once slavery was abolished slave patrol duties evolved into policing the activities of freed people, becoming the forerunners of the first police departments in the South. Meanwhile in the North, colonies were often protected by night watchmen, but as the Industrial Revolution enticed droves of immigrants, free black people and runaway slaves into Northern states, Northern cities developed the first centralized police departments, mostly in order to keep these “underclass” communities under control and out of the hairs of the elite. This of course came with corruption and abuses, with police officers becoming more and more violent by the decade. During the Reconstruction era (the period immediately following the emancipation of slaves), Southern states established black codes, laws banning black people from certain jobs, levels of income, and voting. When black codes were banned by the constitution, Southern states created Jim Crow laws, legalizing segregation and social oppression. If a black person was caught at the wrong end of the trolley car, or venturing into so-called sundown towns after hours (when the very presence of black people was banned) police often showed up to confront them. When black people attempted to fight these laws during the civil rights movement, local governments responded with aggressive police tactics including the use of attack dogs and heavy-powered fire hoses. When black Southerners tried to escape the horrors of the Jim Crow South by migrating to the North, Northerners responded with race riots, often orchestrated with the help or condoning of local police. By the 1970s the war of drugs criminalized drug abuse in such a way that while black people did not use or sell drugs more than white people, they were disproportionately policed and incarcerated for drug crimes, which led to a mass incarceration. By the 1990s a “tough on crime” trend in politics meant more policing, crackdowns and incarceration for black communities. Alarming reports of racial profiling, especially in traffic stops, became leading headlines during this period. In fact, with the advent of community policing in the 1990s, Millennials and Generation Z may be the first generations to grow up in an era in which police were seen as trusted community figures and not primarily as agents of terror for black people.
When in the history of America have police ever been FOR black people?
That is to say, policing in America has almost always been about protecting the white elite and their property from the underclass, namely the black underclass. Whether this meant securing slavery against rebellion, securing white hegemony in the face a newly emancipated black population, securing white communities against integration, or securing white votes by targeting and criminalizing poor black communities, for the bulk of American history, police have largely been used to systematically sacrifice the freedoms of black people in order to fortify white society.
To demonstrate this point I took a look at nearly 200 years of high-profiled instances of police brutality in America. Out of the countless cases, I curated dozens to highlight in a visual timeline. Very few, if any, of these events were isolated incidents. Almost all of the following cases are directly tied to policies and driven by institutionalized antiblack ideology. As one scrolls through the timeline a pattern emerges that shows that not only has systemic police brutality been an issue for black people since the days of slavery, but black people and their allies have been fighting this system from the very beginning. Suddenly, the case of George Floyd and the subsequent protests, marches and rioting do not seem any “different” than what has been occurring in America for the past 170+ years. The very phrases “I can’t breathe” and “don’t shoot” (with hands raised) were the last words of black people killed by police officers decades before it was even possible for them to become social media hashtags. The issue is generational.
About this project: The goal of this project is to provide a historical context for today’s glaringly fractured relationship between American law enforcement and the African-American community. The goal is not to present a politicized or anti-police argument, or to advocate for any political cause. I also acknowledge that black communities are not the only communities that have been affected by systemic police violence over the years. First Nations, Latinx, Asian, immigrant, LGBT, and Muslim communities have also experienced unique patterns of racial profiling and police brutality throughout American history.
Scroll through the timeline to see a list of events. Most entries typically have three clickable photos that, once selected, enlarge and tell a fuller story. Though the stories only cover the very basics. Readers should ultimately research these cases on their own to get the full details. Some are so striking or eerily similar to recent events that readers will probably want to look them up to learn more.Though each story in this timeline has been verified by multiple credible sources. Supplemental content highlighting interesting facts, background context and the various ways artists have attempted to draw attention to police brutality in black communities are also sprinkled throughout the timeline.
Notwithstanding slave patrols (organized groups that policed and monitored slaves), thousands of American slaves tried to escape to freedom. Slaves were expensive and profitable so slave owners went to great lengths to capture runaways and bring them back. The U.S. Constitution contained a fugitive slave clause that required runaway slaves to be returned to the people who claimed them as property. Policemen, federal marshals and militia were often recruited to capture these runaways. When Northerners ignored the constitutional provision, frustrated Southerners pushed Congress to pass the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which made violating the slave clause a punishable crime. When Northerners still flouted the law, helping slaves escape and acquitting captured ones during state jury trials, Southerners pushed for a stricter law. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 introduced tougher penalties for people who helped slaves escape or refused to help return them to slavery. With warrants law enforcement officials could raid and ransack houses in search of escaped slaves.The law was very controversial in the North and sparked protest from freed people and abolitionists. Attempts to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act are some of the earliest examples of high-profiled clashes between black communities and law enforcement in America.
Following the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the Reconstruction period was supposed to regulate the transition of the South into the Union and ease the integration of newly emancipated slaves into free life. In many cases, black people were able to vote and run for office during this time. In some cities Republican politicians, who supported several black causes, gained control over local governments. White Southerners, of course, resented black people’s newfound privilege. Newly freed black people found themselves competing with European immigrants for jobs and status, which sometimes resulted in violent clashes. Meanwhile, Southern white Democrats resorted to violent tactics to disenfranchise black people.
Many states established "black codes," laws that restricted where and when black people could work and how much they could earn. Under black codes, white employers (usually landowners) sought to create a system as close to slavery as possible, enforcing exploitive contracts and deficient pay. Black codes also prevented black people from voting in elections.Violating these codes could result in arrest. In cases where black men were able to obtain office, race riots often drove them out. White Southerners weaponized policing to carry out these tactics. In many cases local law enforcement, often composed of former Confederate soldiers, Irish immigrants, and/or members of vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan, sympathized with white Southerners and sometimes allowed antiblack violence, or even participated in it themselves.
The 14th and 15th amendments pretty much abolished black codes, but this didn’t stop white Southerners from attempting to disenfranchise black people and undermine their freedom. Starting from the end of the Reconstruction era and lasting for almost 100 years, white Southerners used Jim Crow laws, discrimination and terrorism to protect their social dominance. As black people began moving to larger Southern cities to escape exploitation in the rural areas more white Southerners began resenting free black communities, especially ones rising to prominence. They began pushing for more legislation to separate black people from white people. Jim Crow laws legalized segregation, isolating black Southerners from fair housing, education, voting rights, employment and even transportation. Violating these laws could result in arrest and prosecution, which made police complicit.
Meanwhile, during this period terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the White League regularly engaged in lynchings, riots and immolation. One accusation against a black person could end with that person being arrested and then brutally murdered before hundreds, sometimes thousands, of spectators. Thriving black communities were chased out of town, their neighborhoods pillaged and burned. Even in the North, white street gangs, especially from poor and immigrant communities, engaged in bullying and ignited race riots against growing black communities. Law enforcement often played crucial roles in enabling the terror. Some police officials deputized vigilantes, handed targets over to lynch mobs, lackadaisically protected communities from riots, refused to arrest mob members, and humored false or weak accusations that led to mob violence.
Many black leaders fought against Jim Crow laws and racism throughout the late 19th Century and early 20th Century, but it wasn’t until a series of civil rights legislation in the 1940s and 1950s that black activists were able to organize in a way that ushered in a new movement of political and social change. Executive orders in 1941 and 1948 ended discrimination in government jobs and the military. Then the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education deemed school segregation unconstitutional, implying that most segregation was also unconstitutional. This propelled the formation of several grassroots organizations that staged a series of protests, demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience to challenge and dismantle Jim Crow in the South. But many white Southerners were committed to maintaining Jim Crow and responded to the civil rights movement with aggressive resistance. At the forefront of this resistance were police.
In order to escape the terror of living in the Jim Crow South, despite the civil rights movement, millions of black people migrated from the South to the North between 1910 and 1970. They were lured by job opportunities and dreams of better lives. Instead, the huge wave of black residents, along with a surge in immigrant populations made many Northern white people leery. Afraid that black people would infiltrate their cities, many white city dwellers reacted to the influx of black residents with racism and violence. Throughout the Great Migration period Northern white residents restricted black mobility, property ownership and employment. They protested when black families attempted to move into white apartment buildings, and pushed back when city officials announced new developments that could bring black residents nearby. They staged rallies in public parks and even formed gangs to mark territory and intimidate black residents. Redlining and “sundown towns” prevented black people from moving into nicer communities and kept white residents away from black ones. Many white people abandoned cities altogether with the help of federal home loans and discriminatory housing policies that steered them to suburban properties, but locked black families out. Cities limited job opportunities for black people as well. These tactics physically and socially isolated black communities, creating what is now colloquially referred to as “ghettos,” trapping black people inside squalid, neglected, impoverished districts. Meanwhile, policing intensified in these areas.
Stifled and frustrated, by the 1960s many black residents who lived in inner city ghettos began to rebel, rejecting the peaceful protesting of the generation before and turning to rioting and looting, typically in their “own” neighborhoods, which they did not see as truly theirs. When they could not destroy or dismantle the systems that confined them and restrained their mobility they destroyed the physical representations of them. The Summer of 1967 became known as the ‘Long Hot Summer of 1967’ because more than 100 race riots, known as “ghetto riots,” erupted across the North. The popular Kerner Report, commissioned by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the causes of these riots, famously found that all of these riots had a few things in common. It was not the suspected “outside agitators” or black militias at the root of the unrest, but specifically “white prejudice,” in the form of segregation, institutionalized racism and police brutality that essentially turned inner cities into powder kegs.
Despite the Kerner report’s conclusion that racism and police brutality were at the root of the 1960s inner city uprisings, President Lyndon B. Johnson and much of white America chose to ignore the findings. Instead, the inner city was painted as a hotbed for criminality. The next presidential administration, the Nixon Administration, piggybacked on this idea, carefully appealing to its racial undertones. As rising crime became a major voting issue, the Nixon re-election campaign took a “tough on crime,” “law and order” stance to appeal to white Southern voters. This was known as the Southern Strategy. Nixon then declared a “war on drugs,” a federal-backed effort to increase funding and support for the crackdown on drug use and selling. At the time, people's perception of drug users was that they were hippies and black people. This put the focus of the "war on drugs" on inner cities. Though, it wasn’t until the Ronald Reagan Administration that the war on drugs really caused an explosion in the United States prison population. Even though black communities did not use or sell drugs more than white ones, black offenders received tougher sentences and longer jail time. Possession of crack, popular in inner cities, came with much harsher penalties than powder cocaine, for instance. The “tough on crime” approach to drug abuse got stricter and stricter through the 1980s and 1990s, leading to mass incarceration at disproportionate levels. By the early 1990s, Democrats wanted to show that they, like Republicans, could also be “tough on crime.” The Crime Bill of 1994 therefore provided funding to build more federal and state prisons, and add more police officers on streets to fill those prisons.
This crackdown on drug crime and the subsequent mass incarceration of African-Americans not only influenced the way the general public saw inner city black people, but how police saw them. Racial profiling, especially in the context of traffic stops and “driving while black,” became a topic of great concern among the black community and the media in the 1980s and 1990s. Though, also around this time the concept of community policing began to take shape, emphasizing building a positive relationship with urban communities versus an antagonizing one. Crime began to go down in the 1990s. But just because crime had gone down doesn't mean police brutality was no longer an issue.
Black communities, many still struggling to reverse the effects of segregation and ghettoization from the mid-20th-century, have long-complained of racial profiling and excessive force by police. The dissemination of their stories has traditionally depended on mainstream media outlets. Recently, however, digital technology has allowed the black community to distribute their stories themselves and rally an immediate response to them. Whereas civil rights leaders in the 1950s and 1960s depended on the news media to show the world what they were up against, digital technology has equipped marginalized communities with the means to invite outsiders to be first-person witnesses to their experiences, often in real time. Instead of fighting to be “included” and invited to the conversation black people have created their own virtual spaces where they can host discourse and spark action without permission or social barriers. Black Twitter, for instance, is an intimate subsection of a public-facing digital forum. In Black Twitter, members of the black community use codified language and “signifiers” (memes) to talk about social and political topics in ways that only other members can easily decode.
This phenomenon has enabled black people to translate virtual discussions into unified, offline action. Black Lives Matter, is perhaps, one of the most popular examples of this. Stricken by the a slew of high-profiled killings of unarmed African-Americans, black people were able to use the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter to start a movement that eventually turned into offline protest. This unique era of digital activism has empowered black people to share, broadcast, expose, critique, dismantle, “cancel” and resist daily acts of racism and injustices in ways that were unimaginable in the 20th Century. Because of this, police brutality has become a standout issue in black social media spaces.
