Tabor on Taylor, 'Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City'

H-Nationalism Tabor on Taylor, 'Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City'

Review published on Monday, March 18, 2019

Clarence Taylor. Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City. New York: New York University Press, 2018. v + 309 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4798-6245-0.

Reviewed by Alex Tabor (University of Cincinnati)Published on H-Nationalism (March, 2019) Commissioned by Evan C. Rothera (Sam Houston State University)

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=53711

In Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City, Clarence Taylor, professor emeritus of history at Baruch College, adds to several works on the unique experiences of African Americans in New York City and their resistance to “racial terror by the arm of the state,” emphasizing diverse methods employed by the black press, the American Communist Party (ACP), the Nation of Islam (NOI), and civil rights organizations (p. 6). Taylor contributes to an expanding volume of literature addressing misconceptions that the African American civil rights movement in the United States was a mid-century and predominantly localized, grassroots phenomenon and was primarily a feature in the South.[1] Fight the Power makes unambiguous the longue durée of contests for equality by black Americans, highlighting efforts by diverse individuals and groups to challenge abuses of police power.

Although “police brutality has been a problem since the founding of professional police departments in the mid-nineteenth century,” Taylor’s analysis begins in the 1940s—placing “a massive wave of black migration from the South” to New York City within the context of Harlem’s 1935 and 1943 riots—and continues to the current mayoralty of Bill de Blasio (p. 3). He traces several themes throughout, including perspectives on the problem of police brutality and means of curbing police power, enduring battles over the creation and delegation of punitive power to a Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) independent of the New York Police Department (NYPD) (and that department’s relationship to oversight measures at all levels), and the role of local leadership—specifically of mayors and police commissioners—in acknowledging and responding to the grievances of the city’s African American (and Latinx) communities. Though generally chronological in presentation, Taylor’s book begins by emphasizing the contributions of groups frequently overlooked or misrepresented before shifting focus to decades-long contests between local elected officials, representatives of the NYPD, and citizens seeking reform.

In chapter 1, Taylor distinguishes The People’s Voice from among other black newspapers as “the most critical of police brutality” for its role in advocating for victims of police brutality and serving as a watchdog for black citizens’ rights (p. 11). Created in 1942 by Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr., senior pastor of the city’s largest and most prestigious Abyssinian Baptist Church and later New York’s first black congressman (1944), the first edition “envisioned a ‘world made safe for democracy and also an America made safe.’” Pushing beyond other black weeklies, the Voice linked racism and

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Tabor on Taylor, 'Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City'. H-Nationalism. 04-16-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/3911/reviews/3892177/tabor-taylor-fight-power-african-americans-and-long-history-police Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Nationalism class exploitation and called for economic justice, fair wages, and an end to employment discrimination, and “promised to crusade for improved housing, health facilities, better elementary schools, more black faculty members, and support for black businesses” (p. 13). Bolder in tone than contemporaneous black presses like theNew York Amsterdam News, the Voice exposed police brutality by countering the racist imagery of black New Yorkers ubiquitous in white presses that many blacks held equally responsible for the prevalence of police brutality with “carefully constructed and distributed images of upright, hardworking, law-abiding citizens, innocent of any criminal offense” and by “providing a counter-narrative” to that of the police replete with “detailed accounts of incidents, using eyewitnesses” (pp. 15, 14, 13-14). The Voice “became the people’s record of violent encounters between law enforcement and Harlemites” (p. 33). Though the Voice proposed numerous solutions to the police brutality crisis, few were acknowledged by government and police that did not recognize police brutality as a reality.

Taylor asserts that “the American Communist Party was perhaps the most active political organization in the fight against police brutality” in chapter 2 (p. 35). The CommunistDaily Worker characterized police brutality as “northern lynching” perpetrated by those in power and argued that police in the North assumed the role of the lynch mob in the South (p. 36). Like theVoice , the ACP also connected race and class in their understanding of police brutality, noting the police’s role in maintaining “the capitalist economic structure” and “fragmenting the working class, thus stopping any attempt at creating a unified opposition” to capitalism; the ACP asserted that “police specifically targeted African Americans in order to destroy ... black and white unity among workers” (pp. 36, 37). Not only did Communists lead anti-lynching campaigns and launch an international campaign for the freedom of the Scottsboro Nine, the party also participated in the National Negro Congress whose objective was “to fight for the civil and economic rights of black Americans” (p. 39). Building on earlier analogies of police brutality as lynching, the National Negro Congress of which the ACP was a part conceptualized police brutality as genocidal “state-sanctioned violence,” laying a broader foundation for campaigns against the use of force with impunity by police on black New Yorkers across the following half-century.

In the final chapter dedicated to a specific entity or group, Taylor complicates the body of literature that focuses predominantly on the NOI’s violent confrontations with police and calls for armament and self-defense with an investigation of the NOI’s nonviolent strategies, which prioritized negotiations with police and government representatives; legal redress; and, like theVoice or the ACP’s Daily Worker, political pressure applied through media to empower and mobilize black people “against state dominance” (p. 57). Spiritual and religious organizations ubiquitously provided a means of fostering community for many African Americans across all periods of US history, but Taylor explains that some assumed nationalist tones in the wake of northward migration to urban spaces and the Great Depression, providing followers with “explanations for their social circumstances that framed black people as the people of God” and that “challenged white supremacy by blaming whites for black misery” (p. 59). Beyond its “psychological approach toward eliminating low black self-esteem,” the NOI mirrored earlier black organizations’ emphases on racial uplift and reliance on charismatic leaders—like Elijah Robert Poole (later Elijah Muhammad) and Malcolm X—to convey prophetic visions of black liberation from “white ‘devils’” (p. 60). The NOI’s perception that police brutality was “purely an expression of white people’s evil nature,” and not symptomatic of structural inequities of power, and the sometimes contradicting and vacillating positions on the use of violence in self-defense served as two rifts of contention between the NOI and other national groups

Chapters 4 through 11 broaden in scope, illustrating a dynamic and enduring contest between numerous local civil rights organizations and coalitions and their pursuit of myriad reforms intended to curb police power, establish external oversight of police training and operation, and democratize decision-making processes related to community justice. Chapters 4-7 focus on the 1950s-60s and 8-11 advance from the mid-1980s to the present. Contextualizing campaigns against police brutality, Taylor notes that “New York City political activists were depicting police brutality as a civil rights issue long before the rise of the civil rights movement in the South” (p. 84). Despite Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s formation of a commission in the 1940s that recommended the police commissioner appoint a five to seven member, interracial “Citizen’s Public Safety Committee” of Harlemites to receive citizen complaints, no such body formed in response to either of Harlem’s major riots; LaGuardia served as New York City’s mayor from 1934 to 1945 (p. 86). To community activists, an oversight body independent of the NYPD with investigative and punitive power was fundamental to ensuring fair and full protection, but wartime interests in maintaining national unity against Axis powers contributed to stifling any possibility. Mayors and police commissioners throughout the 1940s and early 1950s failed to respond to repeated commission recommendations for a civilian complaint review board and instead argued that “the primary problem ... was poor public relations.” William O’Brian, serving as commissioner in 1949, published a four-factor list “for determining good police- community relations” that, though including police attitudes toward the community and the inverse, lumped racial and religious attitudes in a failure to recognize canyons of distinction (p. 89). Not until Edward Jacko of the NAACP’s legal redress team uncovered a secret deal between the FBI and NYPD that “shielded the NYPD from a federal investigation into police brutality” was the department forced to create a formal CCRB, whose original composition in 1953 included only three deputy police commissioners (p. 91).

In chapter 5, Taylor analyzes how several civil rights groups, including the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the National Urban League, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the NAACP, among smaller local organizations, responded differently to the Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant riots based on ideological differences and unique perspectives on the importance of public image and to targeted Cold War red-baiting, volatile political conditions surrounding the Johnson-Goldwater election, and ongoing civil rights campaigns in the Midwest and South. Taylor highlights the potential for progress under Mayor John Lindsay’s mayoralty from 1966 to 1973 in chapter 6. Despite a nearly identical proposal in 1964, Lindsay created a four-civilian, three-police commissioner CCRB with investigative powers able to recommend but not mandate punishments for police violations five months into his first term. While black leadership felt the proposal fell short in several ways, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA) launched a multipronged and brashly racist campaign against the mere potential for civilian oversight. Taylor investigates both responses in chapter 7. Ultimately, the successful PBA campaign culminated in a referendum on November 8 when “New Yorkers voted 3-1 to abolish the Civilian Complaint Review Board,” a defeat that Lindsay blamed on “‘emotion, misunderstanding and fear” and that the New York Times conveyed as “a sign

Chapter 8 begins with Mayor Ed Koch’s creation of a comparable CCRB in 1986, twenty years after Lindsay’s attempt and after opposing community efforts for most of his tenure, a turnabout Taylor attributes to visceral details of police tortures of teenagers reaching the press and personal interest in preventing an all-civilian CCRB. David Dinkins, the city’s first black mayor (1990 to 1993), pledged an all-civilian CCRB along with increased diversity among officers and an expansion of the force, only to see the CCRB’s funding stifled by budget cuts under the subsequent mayoralty of Rudy Giuliani. Detailed accounts of major cases, like those of Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo, and the racist application of programs like CompStat are the focus of chapters 9-10, where Giuliani’s advocacy for “zero tolerance” policing, subsequent Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s quality-of-life “broken windows” policy and support for “stop, question, and frisk,” and the disproportionate targeting of blacks and Latinos inherent to both are central to discussions of Floyd v. City of New York (2013) and Ligon v. City of New York (2014).

The limited reforms under de Blasio’s current mayoralty comprise the final chapter of analysis. City Council mandated the Department of Investigation (DOI), an “independent city agency created in the 1870s,” to perform functions community activists long proposed be delegated to a CCRB in 2014, and two years later de Blasio and Police Commissioner William Bratton reformed policing of low quantities of marijuana possession (p. 227). Though de Blasio also piloted a body-cam program to dissuade officers from using force, investigations by the DOI under the Office of the Inspector General determined there was no clear definition of “force” in existing patrol guides nor sufficient de- escalation training (p. 228). Efforts by some council members to pressure the state assembly to pass “Right to Know” laws requiring officers to provide rank, badge, and precinct information and receive consent for unwarranted searches were gutted by de Blasio’s vacillation and by an agreement on a “verbal deal” under PBA and Police Commissioner Bratton’s pressure—a deal that reduced or removed most requirements for police disclosure (pp. 238, 239).

The break between the focus of the first three chapters and flow of the final eight might imply the absence of the former from the contests in the latter, but greater attention to theVoice , ACP, and NOI is purposeful and enlightening. However, Taylor might have found ways to integrate theVoice , ACP, and NOI into the subsequent chapters’ complex narratives. Regardless, an array of newspapers, organization papers, and government reports synthesized within a foundation of secondary literature renders this text an astute contribution to existing scholarship. If the study of history informs understanding of the present, few topics might be considered timelier, as the advent of social media and technological innovations bring instances of police brutality to eyes across the nation and world on a seemingly daily basis. Aside from providing valuable context to present realities, Taylor’s accessible text demands further inquiry into the myriad ways class, ideology, political affiliation, and religion influenced means of protest, especially within the rapidly evolving postwar period, and consideration as to what directions modern protest must evolve in response to changing conditions today. In posing such questions, Fight the Power undoubtedly belongs in any curriculum intent on illustrating connectivity between past and present, emphasizing the unique experiences of people of color in the United States or aspiring to empower students with relevant and actionable knowledge.

Note

[1]. Bayard Rustin first described the decade between the monumental Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 as the “classical phase,” but the perception found life in works like Gary May’sBending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 2013). However, broad swaths of interdisciplinary literature resist such interpretations that reduce the movement to a generational and regional phenomenon. A handful that focus on earlier organizing—highlighting antecedents to the “classical phase” at the turn of the century—or contemporary resistance to ongoing struggles for civil rights include Aldon Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: The Free Press, 1984); Deborah Gay White,Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” The Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233-63; Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Anchor Books, 2009); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012); Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, 2012); and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).

Citation: Alex Tabor. Review of Taylor, Clarence, Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City. H-Nationalism, H-Net Reviews. March, 2019.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53711

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.