A Look at Chicago Policing through the Lens of Historymakers
As we begin Black History Month, I spent time in the archive researching the history of the black community and the Chicago police force. Most of my non-archival research has been through the study of the book Occupied Territory by scholar and historian Simon Balto. However, I think that the story of policing in Black Chicago is best told by those who experienced it first hand. If you would like to hear some of the stores first hand, please enjoy this MyClipsPlaylist.
The Great Migration inspired thousands of Black Americans to move to Chicago from the South, especially Mississippi. Balto argues that this demographic shift heightened racial tensions in the city, and shaped the way the city’s police force interacted with its black citizenry. Balto uses the 1919 race riot and the violence of the Red summer of the same year to illustrate his point. HistoryMaker Irma Josephine Barber remembered the violence first hand saying, “they killed one of the old men. And then right across the street from where we lived, there was a man--it was a two flat building. And he was reading his Bible and they shot him. And he just fell over like this…And we all ran--oh, we all ran quickly into the house. 'Cause we were--had been sitting outside. And of course it, it was terrible.”
The circumstances and outcomes of this year solidified the roles of the historically tumultuous relationship. Through these events, Black Chicagoans learned that the police force would rarely act on their behalf. Instead, the police force could be expected to either aid in or actively participate in anti-black terrorism. This offensive stance would only be compounded by the intense over policing of black Chicago communities like the Southside. In response to these indignities, black Chicagoans would develop their own black political spaces. However, the representation did not beget the change they wished to see. According to Balto, “the rise of the new black political class did not radically alter the fact that black Chicago ranked low on an overwhelming majority of Chicago politicians’ priority lists, including of those who actually had power to influence public policy. This translated—directly—into a comparative inability among black people to influence police policy.” (51) This trend would continue into the Great Depression era.
The Depression Era would usher in a new era of harshness to black Chicagoans. Not only were they experiencing abject poverty at higher rates than their white counterparts, but they were also the targets of further political domination. This Depression Era saw a massive push for the Democratic Party within the black communities of Chicago. One of the results of this push was the further politicization of the Chicago police force. With this change, Chicago politicians would be enabled to block police reform and further bureaucratize policing. Balto says, “This politicization of the department served to undercut the functionality of the cpd and eviscerate its legitimacy in the eyes of many Chicagoans; it also made it harder for police officers who honestly wished and worked to do their jobs in an ethical way.” (66)
Although the politicization of Chicago policing achieved the temporary goals and interests of the democratic party, it had the adverse effect of pushing black Chicagoans to radical political ideologies. This was especially troublesome as it was the dawn of the First Red Scare, an anti communist propaganda movement that swept the US. This would set the stage for the Chicago Red Squad, one of the police intelligence units used to surveil political and social organizations during this period. As expected, the Chicago unit of the Red Squad was especially brutal towards black communist and leftist groups. This would set the stage for the intense monitoring and visceral treatment of black leftists in the city, a trend that would be maintained throughout the Second World War, the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement.
Shortly following the Second World War, Black Chicagoans experienced yet another uptick in police harassment and violence. Throughout the US, Black veterans returned to their homes unable to access the freedoms they fought for overseas. This contrast prompted even more Black Americans to move to the north and west to escape the harshness of Jim Crow. Furthermore, the Black Americans who benefited from the economic boom that the war created began to move into wealthier white neighborhood. Conversely, white veterans returned to their neighborhoods to find them nearly unrecognizable due to the demographic shift that occurred because of the Great Migration. As such, racial tensions only heightened as housing became more scarce. This often resulted in communal violence between the two groups, peaking in the year of 1957. More often than not, Black migrants faced a lukewarm or outright cold reception by the CPD in instances of hate crimes. This is partially exemplified by the 1957 case of a hate crime against a family of Black picnickers in the predominantly white neighborhood of Calumet Park. Balto writes, “observers of the post–Calumet Park trials of white assailants reported that the officer who had arrested the accused white rioters… stated he did not want to get anyone in trouble, that he had lived in that neighborhood and had gone to school with a number of the ‘boys.’ He hadn’t even wanted to testify but had felt pressured into doing so by a superior officer.”(101) However, Black Chicagoans responded to this violence with solidarity, beginning a news and legal campaign. Black lawyers began to circulate leaflets asking for information on missing and brutalized black citizens. The visceral imagery and frequency of leaflets incited rage among black Chicagoans. This tactic would only be proven more affective in the wake of the Emmet Till case, which captured the US’s attention like no other case had before. Till, a Chicago native, represented violence against black Americans as a whole, and as a result, CPD was under more pressure than ever to address their own issues.
In the years following Till’s murder, the Chicago Police would undergo a major reformation period. This was due in part to Orlando Winfield Wilson, who acted as superintendent of the CPD. CivicMaker and the first black Chicago superintendent, Fred Rice spoke to the archive about O.W. Wilson’s impact saying, “He brought the Chicago Police Department out of the 19th century into the 20th century, in fact the 21st century. He was very visionary…He reduced the police department from thirty-eight stations to twenty-one stations and, and more or less, they more or less squared off as opposed to falling in any political boundaries…He extended the education of people at the training school…He started giving tests every two years for each rank and took the, took the cream off the tests and, and as a result he, he slowly and grudgingly won over some of his detractors.”
However, these reforms did not bring about widespread change regarding the brutality and hyper surveillance experienced by Black Chicagoans. The politicization of police also came back into focus with the election of Mayor Daley. Daley not only increased police presence dramatically in Black neighborhoods like the West Side, but implemented stop and frisk techniques that furthered racial profiling. Daley’s power was further cemented by HistoryMaker Renault Robinson, who said, “[Mayor Daley] was all powerful. I mean he ran this city. He ran the county and he ran the state. And all of the federal jobs in this area went through him. That's a powerful man.”
The 1960s and 70s also brought a return of the Red Squad, as social tensions began to influence black political thinking. This is perhaps best exemplified by the murder of Black Panther revolutionary Fred Hampton. At the time of his death, the 21 year old was ambushed and murdered in bed next to his pregnant girlfriend after being heavily surveilled by the CPD and the Red Squad. Balto writes, “while it’s rare for historians to successfully draw straight lines between different time periods, it isn’t especially difficult to see how the Red Squad’s escalating power and boldness in the 1930s and 1940s prefigured its relentless and illegal responses in the 1960s and 1970s to civil rights and leftist protests…”(79)
The infamy of Chicago’s police department is well earned. The brutality has been revitalized in nearly every decade following 1919, and indicates more of an expectation rather than a pattern. Today, Black Chicagoans regularly enter discourse and conflicts with a force that has historically worked in the interests of the white citizenry.
