Law & Order in America

Hello, my name is Angela Dillard. I'm the Richard a Meisler collegiate professor in the department's of Afro-American and African Studies, history and the residential college here at the University of Michigan. Play video starting at ::13 and follow transcript0:13 As a scholar, my work focuses primarily on American and African-American intellectual history. Especially the ways that ideology gets used in the context of social movements on both the left and the right side of the political spectrum. Play video starting at ::28 and follow transcript0:28 Today I'll be addressing a really important topic, which is the ways that police brutality and police violence impacted social movements across the 20th century. I'll be using three primary examples. The first is from 1937, the second is from 1963, and the third is from 1968. These map on to the labor movement, the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. But first let me say that these are not the only three examples that could be used, this is a topic that is pervasive, especially across the 20th century. As black and brown communities try to organize and fight instances of police brutality. And it has impacted multiple movements across the 20th century that have had to confront police violence in the face of their own movements and protests for social justice. So let's get to our first example. 1937, a young Walter Reuther and an equally young United Auto Workers Union are organizing the industrial union movement. And they want to be able to organize workers within the massive Ford Motor Company plants here in Michigan. Play video starting at :1:44 and follow transcript1:44 This example from 1937 is typically referred to as a battle of the overpass. And it occurred as unionists attempted to do a leafleting campaign at large plant in Michigan. And the Ford Motor Company sent its service department which was kind of a private police force often augmented by city police and often involving off duty officers themselves. So the Ford Motor Company sent them out to literally stop the unionists from approaching the plant and being able to engage with workers. It was a violent moment, a lot of people were injured. The Ford Service Department was particularly brutal, and a number of images were captured from this battle. And it becomes a kind of iconic moment the labor movement and they're actually able to use this moment captured on film to advance the cause of unionism in Michigan and then nationally. This actually turns out to be a bit of a pattern that these moments of police violence are captured, on on film and on videotape and then use to advance the cause of the movement. Play video starting at :3:10 and follow transcript3:10 And in this instance, people started to use this these photographs for the battle of the overpass under the banner of unionism, not fordism. Play video starting at :3:22 and follow transcript3:22 So fast forward to Birmingham, Alabama in the spring of 1963, the civil rights movement had already moved into its direct action phase. It actually borrows and adapts tactics from the older labor movement, especially the sit in technique to advance its own cause. The movement is also at this time, starting to commit to some acts of civil disobedience in which you knowingly break what you consider to be an unjust law. So the SCLC, which is a Southern Christian Leadership Council, was in Alabama, in 1963 to organize what was a really large scale, very strategic, very well campaign against the city of Birmingham. To convince city officials to negotiate with Play video starting at :4:16 and follow transcript4:16 representatives from the movement around public accommodations and other civil rights demands of the era. So the protesters, some of them were quite young, some of them children, high school students. All of whom I committed to packing the jails, as part of this protest campaign, were met with extraordinary violence at the hands of Sheriff Eugene Bull Connor and his police force. They use direct physical violence, they use clubs they use fire hoses, and they use dogs who are trained to attack people on command. Here again, we get a series of iconic images horrifying to look at because of the level of violence. But today when we focus on the courage, and the determination of the protesters, sometimes we forget that we're also looking at violent acts by the police against protesters. The vast majority of whom are peaceful protesters in this era. Fast forward again to Chicago 1968, thousands of anti-war protesters have converged on the city for the Democratic National Convention being held that year. There was a lot of activity around Grant Park, and we can debate what we call this and historians have debated how to describe what happened as a police entered Grant Park and start to confront the protesters. Personally, I think it's best described as a police riot. I think that's clearly what happened as police start attacking protesters in the park and then later along Michigan Avenue. They're on horseback, they're clubbing protesters left and right. People get pushed through glass plate windows, there's blood in the streets, a number of people are seriously injured as they're being dragged away, as they're being arrested. And then the protesters start to chant the whole world is watching, which was a recognition of camera crews who were there, the news media, all of this was being captured. Once again, producing a series of iconic images of protesters being confronted by the police and then suffering enormous amounts of violence against them. I think what's interesting about Chicago in 1968 is also that on the one hand, a generation of young people are going to become disillusioned with American institutions and American government. Play video starting at :7:16 and follow transcript7:16 Because of these instances of police brutality and the kind of violence that they are confronted with as protesters. But nonetheless, these this moment also produces a very ideologically dense call for law and order and by ideologically does I just mean that there's a lot there to unpack, that it's a really a very complex thing. The Richard Nixon is going to use a call for law and order as part of his successful presidential campaign that year. But for protesters, they come to understand that law and order or law and disorder is precisely part of the problem that they're experiencing at the hands of the police, often under the direction of city officials. So I invite you to think about today's Black Lives Matters protest, against police brutality and against white supremacy in light of these historical examples. We want to be very mindful of historical specificity. There are real historical differences across the 1937, 1963 and 1968, but there are also real similarities that we can learn from. One is certainly the use of state sanctioned violence against protesters who were primarily non violent protesters in these instances. I think we can also learn a lot about this tendency to blame protesters themselves from the violence that's being inflicted upon them. This happens in all of these cases and we could certainly look at Play video starting at :9:2 and follow transcript9:02 Martin Luther King's wonderful 1963 letter from Birmingham jail, which he writes as he's being jailed along with just hundreds of protesters in the city. And he writes it to defend the tactics that they're using. And he writes it because he realizes that protesters themselves are being blamed for the violence that and they're being blamed for the violence that was again inflicted upon them. And so he wants to be able to defend this form of activism and he wants to be able to defend the movement in the face of these kinds of charges. So it's a wonderful text to go back to in this moment as we're thinking through some of what we've been seeing in cities and towns across America. And then I think we want to be really careful about normalizing the violence against protesters. Which I think can happen, especially if we get seduced by these ideological calls for law and order. Play video starting at :10:8 and follow transcript10:08 In the face of some of what protesters have been encountering from the police forces across the country, and again, there is a wealth of documentary evidence. Now it's not just the newspaper person with a camera, as was the case in the 30s or film crews in the 1960s, but often people using their own cameras to be able to film what's been going on, as they've been out protesting. And what they've suffered at the hands of the police and we ought to be very concerned about some of those images and some of what we've been seeing. And again, resist the urge to normalize the violence and resist being seduced by a call for law and order in the face of what's been going on especially because we know that that is so often been used against movements for social justice in America. Thank you so much.