Balto, "Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (July 2019), by Simon Balto (University of Iowa). A description from the Press:

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.

A few blurbs:

"Simon Balto’s study of twentieth-century black Chicago provides new insights into the historical roots of police abuse in black communities while challenging scholarship that posits the mid-twentieth century as a turning point for deteriorating relationships between the police and black Americans. This beautifully written history is a model of clarity and moral passion."--Beryl Satter

"The last several years have seen important histories written about the rise of mass incarceration in the United States, but what has been missing are studies that deepen our understanding of American policing. Simon Balto offers a much-needed history of policing in Chicago, clearly articulating the connection between the Chicago Police Department’s record of racism and abuse and its contemporary crisis of police brutality."--Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

More information is available here. You can learn more about the book over at New Books Network, where they recently posted an interview with Professor Balto.

-- Karen Tani

Grisinger AND Franklin on Chin & Ormonde, "The War Against Chinese Restaurants"

Catching up on our JOTWELL reading, we came upon Joanna Grisinger's recent review of "The War Against Chinese Restaurants," by Gabriel J. Chin (University of California, Davis) & John Ormond (independent scholar). The article appeared in Volume 67 of the Duke Law Journal (2018). Here's the first paragraph of the review:

In the The War Against Chinese Restaurants, Gabriel J. Chin and John Ormonde describe how state and local actors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used legal tools to try to drive Chinese restaurants out of business. Chin and Ormonde describe a wide array of legislative, regulatory, and prosecutorial activity targeting Chinese-owned restaurants—some of it successful, some not—and argue that these local (but often nationally coordinated) efforts demonstrate white Americans’ intertwined concerns about work, immigration, urbanization, gender, and ethnicity in this era. And these concerns, once moved to the national stage, motivated Congress in 1917 and 1924 to ban almost all immigration from Asia.

Read on here.

It turns out the Cary Franklin (University of Texas at Austin School of Law) is also a fan of the article. Here's a taste of her JOTWELL review (for the Constitutional Law section):

In this article, Chin and Ormonde recover the largely forgotten history of the national campaign, in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, to eradicate Chinese restaurants from the United States. Although the number of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. decreased over those years as a result of tight restrictions on Asian immigration, the number of Chinese restaurants skyrocketed. In 1870, Chinese restaurants employed 164 Chinese workers; by 1920, such restaurants employed over 11,400 Chinese workers. By that point, it had become clear that the “Chop Suey craze” was not just a fad. Americans seemed to have a limitless appetite for Chinese food. But the rapid proliferation of Chinese restaurants exacerbated powerful nativist anxieties about economic opportunity, immigration, and the racial make-up of the American polity. Unions in particular decried the diversion of jobs and money away from “the American wage-earner” and to “workers and employers from the Orient.” Union leaders feared that the low wages and low prices associated with Chinese restaurants would depress restaurant workers’ pay and deprive so-called American restaurants of much-needed revenue. Deeply intertwined with these apparently economic concerns was the widely-shared fear that Chinese immigrants constituted a threat to “traditional” American culture and that Chinese men, often portrayed as shifty opium-pushers, posed a threat to the safety of white women. Thus began a decades-long campaign, orchestrated by unions, politicians, and law enforcement officers, to eliminate Chinese restaurants from cities and towns across the country.

Read on here -- and I recommend you read to the very end, where Franklin highlights the gender dimension to the article and offers the following observation. "This piece of history helps one to see more vividly how manufactured panics about the dangers of non-white immigrant men—then and now—enable those in power to obscure where the real threats to women lie."

cummings on the Racial History of Policing in the US

andré douglas pond cummings, University of Arkansas at Little Rock School of Law, has posted Reforming Policing, which is forthcoming in the Drexel Law Review 10 (2018): 573-630:

Law enforcement killing of unarmed black men and police brutality visited upon minority citizens continues to confound the United States. Despite protests, clarion calls for reform, admitted training shortcomings and deficiencies among U.S. law enforcement officers, conferences, summits, and movements to reform policing, the solution to ending undisciplined police violence and the hostile killings of unarmed minority individuals at the hands of U.S. police seems to elude us. Why should this be? The United States is home to some of the most creative, innovative, pathmarking, and course-changing thinkers the world has ever known. This challenge — police killing of unarmed minority citizens and law enforcement brutality — could be one that this nation can solve; that is, if there is a political and moral will to do so.

This article proposes a radical restructuring of United States law enforcement policies, procedures, and applications in order to address this critical challenge. After comparing some of the nation’s most innovative police reform efforts, this article will provide policymakers, legislators, officers, leaders, judges, and lawyers the most effective reform efforts and best thinking that have been implemented to date in connection with saving the lives of residents who face danger from those trained to protect and serve them. This article may serve as a signal to a potential sea change in failed police practices that have endured for decades in the United States.

This proposal unfolds as follows: Part I describes the historical evolution of policing practices in the United States, including the influence of slave catchers in the South during the slave trade and tracing back to the nation’s founding. This historical analysis will demonstrate the deep-seated bigotry and race-hatred that influenced many early law enforcement practices throughout the nation. Part II reviews the historical racial difficulties and will reflect on how they manifest today, where policing in many departments still centers around controlling black and brown individuals. Part III then surveys some of the most influential and innovative police reform efforts that have been undertaken by cities, municipalities, and states around the country, particularly those that are revolutionizing policing in a way that recognizes the historical racism and seeks to reform policing in a meaningful and human-centered way. Finally, Part IV recommends a battery of policies and reforms that may deeply influence the way policing is conducted currently and provide a better way forward. The Article ends with concluding thoughts.

Vatlin on state-sponsored violence in the USSR

We missed this one in 2016. Agents of Terror: Ordinary Men and Extraordinary Violence in Stalin's Secret Police by Alexander Vatlin, Moscow State University has been edited and translated by Seth Bernstein and published by the University of Wisconsin Press. From the press:

In the Great Terror of 1937–38 more than a million Soviet citizens were arrested or killed for political crimes they didn't commit. What kind of people carried out this violent purge, and what motivated them? This book opens up the world of the Soviet perpetrator for the first time. Focusing on Kuntsevo, the Moscow suburb where Stalin had a dacha, Alexander Vatlin shows how Stalinism rewarded local officials for inventing enemies. 

Agents of Terror reveals stunning, detailed evidence from archives available for a limited time in the 1990s. Going beyond the central figures of the terror, Vatlin takes readers into the offices and interrogation rooms of secret police at the district level. Spurred at times by ambition, and at times by fear for their own lives, agents rushed to fulfill quotas for arresting “enemies of the people”—even when it meant fabricating the evidence. Vatlin pulls back the curtain on a Kafkaesque system, forcing readers to reassess notions of historical agency and moral responsibility in Stalin-era crimes.

Praise for the book: 

“Groundbreaking. In the first detailed description of Stalin’s mass terror, Vatlin unfolds the day-to-day working of the Soviet political police who carried out orders to select, arrest, interrogate, and often murder their fellow citizens. An absorbing, heartrending account.” -David Shearer

“Although the literature on the Great Terror has improved markedly over the past twenty-five years, only a handful of case studies consider how the purges took place at the grassroots level. Thankfully, Alexander Vatlin’s pathbreaking work has now become available to English-speaking audiences. One can only hope that Agents of Terror will inspire more research on the purge’s perpetrators and victims as well as on the broader sociology of this brutal period.” -David Brandenberger

“A sensationally significant, detailed microhistory of Stalin’s Great Terror, based on the criminal files of NKVD agents who were arrested as scapegoats at the end of the terror—what some historians have called the purge of the purgers.” -Lynne Viola

Further information is available here.