POLICE ATTACKS ON PROTESTERS ARE ROOTED IN A VIOLENT IDEOLOGY OF REACTIONARY GRIEVANCE

NYPD officers block the exit of the Manhattan Bridge as hundreds protesting police brutality and systemic racism attempt to cross into the borough of Manhattan from Brooklyn hours after a citywide curfew went into effect in New York City on June 02, 2020. Photo: Scott Heins/Getty Images

Ryan Devereaux June 6 2020 THE INTERCEPT


THE SUN WAS HIGH as the protesters filled Grand Army Plaza. In normal times, it’s easy to forget that the gateway to Brooklyn’s largest park was once a battleground in the fight for American independence, or that its iconic “Soldiers and Sailors Arch” is a monument to those lost in the war to end slavery. But with a global pandemic having taken more than 100,000 American lives in a matter of months, more than 40 million others out of work, and protests against police violence sweeping the U.S., recent days have been far from normal, and as demonstrators took their places on Sunday, the plaza’s place in history felt unusually present.

Kenyatta Reid, a Brooklyn native, was among those gathered at the foot of the arch. Reid and her husband had come to the protest with their three young children, ages 11, 8, and 2. It was the family’s second day in the streets, joining the nationwide wave of demonstrations following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin. The previous night, near the Brooklyn Bridge, Reid and her family had watched as New York City police officers in riot gear beat and pepper-sprayed protesters. “That got really scary for the kids,” Reid told me. Still, her children woke up the next morning asking to go out again — they had even made their own signs. “Am I next?” her son’s read.

As an African American mother raising three kids in the United States in 2020, Reid said the conditions that sparked the protests are the subject of daily parental education, a process of “letting them know that they’re worthy, and the problem is other people, not them.” When asked if they would keep coming out, Reid did not hesitate. “This is their lives,” she said. “You have to.”

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Hundreds of miles away, in Cincinnati, reaction to the protests was taking a different shape. While demonstrators were gathering in Brooklyn, a group of Hamilton County sheriff’s deputies dressed in tactical gear and body armor, many of them carrying rifles, hoisted a pro-police flag outside of their office. Ubiquitous in some parts of the country, the flag replaces the red of a traditional American flag with black. The banner incorporates a blue band to symbolize the “thin blue line” that some police officers believe they represent: society’s well-armed firewall, protecting an otherwise defenseless public from the forces of evil.

Sheriff Jim Neil later said that the flag replacement was only temporary, after an image of his deputies’ informal ceremony went viral. The office’s American flag had been lost to vandals, the sheriff tweeted, and the current one was meant to honor an officer whose helmet was struck with a bullet the previous night. “The flag has been removed and we will replace it with the American Flag in the morning,” Neil wrote.

Though minor in comparison to the acts of physical violence and outpourings of grief seen across the country, the episode in Cincinnati was significant. The “thin blue line” flag is the known symbol of a social, cultural, and political movement that is inextricably linked to the country’s current unrest. The flag is the centerpiece in a world of merchandise and policing philosophy, all built around the idea that the police are an embattled tribe of warriors, maligned and reviled by a nation that fails to appreciate their unique importance. The blue line is a reminder that much of the policing community sees itself as separate from the rest of society — and as the nation has witnessed in recent days, in video after shocking video, this well-armed population, imbued with the power to deprive citizens of life and liberty, does not take kindly to those who challenge its authority.

The country is now witnessing what years of militarized conditioning, training, and culture have wrought: a nationwide protest movement running up against a nationwide police riot.


“What we’re talking about here is a worldview that says that police are the only force capable of holding society together,” Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and author of “The End of Policing,” told me. The view turns on the notion that “without the constant threat of violent coercive intervention, society will unravel into a war of all against all,” he explained. Seen through this lens, “authoritarian solutions are not just necessary, they’re almost preferable.”

In the wake of Floyd’s killing, with protests in every state in the union and U.S. security forces at every level called to respond, the country is now witnessing what years of militarized conditioning, training, and culture have wrought: a nationwide protest movement running up against a nationwide police riot.

In New York City, where at least 2,500 people have been arrested in the past week, local officials have imposed an 8 p.m. curfew, which the New York Police Department has used as a pretext to arrest individuals whom it would otherwise have no justification to take into custody. In an emerging pattern that civil rights attorneys have documented in multiple boroughs throughout the city, a number of those individuals have been taken to local station houses where NYPD intelligence officers and FBI agents have interrogated them about their political beliefs, including their views on fascism. Word of the interrogations came just days after Attorney General William Barr released a statement describing the leaderless anti-fascist movement known as antifa as a domestic terrorist organization and announced that the federal government’s 56 Joint Terrorism Task Forces had been activated in a nationwide manhunt for “criminal organizers and instigators.”


In Washington, D.C., heavily armed tactical units took up positions in the nation’s capital, wearing no official insignia. Self-styled groups of mostly white men carrying military-grade weapons were also in the streets, and local police were spotted posing for photos with bat-wielding vigilantes. Far-right, white power groups seized on the unrest to accelerate the country toward a long-desired race war: In Las Vegas, three right-wing extremists with military experience, adherents to the so-called boogaloo movement, were arrested on terrorism charges for allegedly plotting attacks in Nevada.

Michael German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and former FBI agent specializing in domestic terrorism investigations, said the government’s actions in the past week reflect entrenched, longstanding problems in American policing. From a legal and logistical standpoint, Barr’s statement regarding antifa was “toothless,” German said: “It’s a way of signaling to Trump supporters, both in law enforcement and out, that this is the enemy.”

Time and again, American law enforcement’s response to dissent has followed a pattern, German explained, with police cracking down on movements for racial, social, and environmental justice, while giving violent white nationalists who beat people in the street a free pass. “We already see that there is this dynamic where the police officers view people who protest police violence as enemies they can use further violence against,” he said. “Particularly in protests, it’s not just that the police want to arrest somebody who’s a problem,” German said. “They want to mete out punishment.”
Blue Lines Take Aim at Black Lives

Although the idea of the “thin blue line” has been around for decades, its branding and merchandising evolution began as effort to raise money for the families of slain police officers. The flag itself was created six years ago, when the U.S. was gripped with police brutality protests that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. As those demands for justice picked up momentum, a countermovement, Blue Lives Matter, rose up under the newly created banner. In an article for Harper’s magazine, author Jeff Sharlet details how a white 19-year-old college student named Andrew Jacob came up with the idea for the flag. “The black above represents citizens,” Jacob, founder of the company Thin Blue Line USA, explained. “The black below represents criminals.”

The flag’s creation coincided with the December 2014 killing of two NYPD officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, in Brooklyn. The officers’ deaths sparked a rebellion among New York City cops against Mayor Bill de Blasio. It was a turning point for the recently elected mayor, who had capitalized on demands for police accountability in his run for office. While de Blasio has become a symbol of abject failure in the eyes of nearly all NYPD accountability advocates, the department’s powerful union has continued to publicly batter and berate the mayor on a daily basis in the years since the killings, and recently doxxed his daughter following her arrest while protesting in Manhattan.

A flag with the thin blue line, which is used to honor the fallen and the courage of police officers, lies on the boardwalk near the feet of police keeping demonstrators and counter demonstrators apart during an ‘America First’ demonstration on August 20, 2017 in Laguna Beach, California.
Photo: David McNew/Getty Images
The flag’s emergence in 2014 was but one element in a larger ecosystem of police propaganda. Like the weapons, vehicles, and training that flow from the military to police departments across the country, the Blue Lives Matter movement embraces imagery and ideology drawn from U.S. wars abroad.

The same month that the officers in Brooklyn were gunned down, Clint Eastwood’s film “American Sniper” hit theaters. The film, which swiftly became the highest-grossing war movie of all time, told the story of Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL who, in addition to becoming a hero to many, once boasted about conducting dozens of extrajudicial killings on the streets of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Though Kyle was already well known following the publication of his bestselling autobiography, the Hollywood blockbuster rocketed the sniper to conservative superstardom.

On the battlefields of Iraq, the calling card of Kyle’s platoon was an image of a skull worn by the comic book character known as the Punisher. In the Marvel series, Frank Castle, aka the Punisher, is a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War who murders people in a self-declared war on crime. In his book, Kyle, who was shot and killed by a fellow veteran in 2013, described his unit’s love for the character and his symbolic skull. “We spray-painted it on our Hummers and body armor, and our helmets and all our guns,” he wrote. “We spray-painted it on every building or wall we could. We wanted people to know, We’re here and we want to fuck with you. It was our version of psyops. You see us? We’re the people kicking your ass. Fear us. Because we will kill you, motherfucker. You are bad. We are badder. We are bad-ass.”

The Blue Lives Matter movement embraces imagery and ideology drawn from U.S. wars abroad.

Police officers across the country have developed a similar infatuation for the Punisher’s skull, plastering the vigilante killer’s symbol on T-shirts, squad cars, and other gear. In Milwaukee, a gang of officers adopted “the Punishers” as their namesake and tattooed the character’s logo on their skin. The artists and writers behind the Punisher comics have pushed back on law enforcement’s embrace, describing it as a total misreading of the character. Co-creator Gerry Conway has likened law enforcement’s use of the logo to placing a Confederate flag on a government building. “He is a criminal,” Conway has said. “If an officer of the law, representing the justice system, puts a criminal’s symbol on his police car, or shares challenge coins honoring a criminal, he or she is making a very ill-advised statement about their understanding of the law.”

The violent and militaristic view of policing reflected in the Punisher’s popularity is also present in the training officers receive. In “American Sniper,” the film’s star, Bradley Cooper, delivers a speech to his sons at the kitchen table, explaining that there are three types of people in the world: sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. The wolves seek to prey on the sheep, and it’s up to the sheepdogs — a smaller yet critical population — to protect them. The lesson is drawn directly from the teachings of Lt. Dave Grossman, a former West Point psychology professor and self-proclaimed expert on killing who teaches courses for police departments and federal law enforcement agencies across the country. Grossman’s first book, “On Killing,” was at one point required reading for FBI cadets.

In his classes, Grossman sometimes tells attendees that police officers have told him that their first killing led to the best sex of their lives, and says that with the proper training, taking a human life is “just not that big of a deal.” In 2014, Jeronimo Yanez, a Minnesota police officer, attended one of Grossman’s “Bulletproof Warrior” classes, administered by Grossman’s business partner. Two years later, Yanez pulled over Philando Castile, a black 32-year-old father, in a traffic stop. Castile informed the officer that he was in possession of a licensed firearm. Yanez grew increasingly agitated and shot him five times. Castile died in the driver’s seat, with his girlfriend and 4-year-old daughter in the vehicle. Yanez was acquitted of all charges in the trial that followed.

In the aftermath of the killing, which prompted waves of protests, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey banned the warrior policing courses. Lt. Bob Kroll, president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, bristled at the decision, calling Grossman’s trainings “excellent.”




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Minneapolis Police Union President: “I’ve Been Involved in Three Shootings Myself, and Not a One of Them Has Bothered Me”


In an interview earlier this year, just months before the killing of Floyd in his own city, Kroll said he had personally been involved in three shootings and that “not one of them has bothered me.” A 2015 profile by the Minneapolis Star Tribune noted Kroll’s membership in a police biker gang that included white supremacists (the former SWAT officer has denied the characterization), his role as a defendant in a racial discrimination lawsuit brought by five black officers, his targeting in nearly 20 internal affairs complaints (“all but three of which were closed without discipline”), and his suspension following an excessive force complaint.

In the past year alone, multiple investigations by many news organizations have uncovered police and other law enforcement officials sharing wildly racist and violent content in private social media groups. Amid the racism that swirls in these spaces are profound notes of aggrievement expressing the feeling that, in fact, it is the police who are under attack. Those sentiments can be traced, in part, to a theory promulgated in the final years of the Obama administration known as the Ferguson effect, which argued that in the wake of protests against police brutality, law enforcement was pulling back in its war on crime, thus damaging public safety.

The highest-profile proponent of the debunked theory was Barack Obama’s FBI director, James Comey. Addressing a group of law students in 2015, Comey described a “chill wind that has blown through law enforcement,” claiming that developments in the documentation of police violence were causing officers to change the way they worked, leading to a spike in murders. The claim was widely criticized, in part because it lacked evidence and in part because it was the extension of a long and racist history of “crime-fighting on a hunch.”

Ironically, considering the space Comey would come to occupy in the minds of many liberal Americans just a few years later, the former FBI director’s war-on-cops rhetoric complemented the worldview of the man who, at the time, was beginning a successful march to the White House.

The Trumpist Terror
A month after coming to office, Donald Trump signed three largely symbolic executive orders related to domestic law enforcement. While the policy impact the White House could make on the affairs of local police departments was minimal, the culture war messaging was not. Whether it was cops on the beat or immigration agents on the border, the president’s message was the same: Politically correct liberals have held you back for too long, but no more.

“From the get-go, Trump signaled his allegiance to the most reactionary parts of that movement,” Vitale, the Brooklyn College professor, explained. At the 2016 Republican National Convention, Trump received the full-throated endorsement of David Clarke, the former sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin. “Blue lives matter in America!” Clark shouted from the podium. Clarke has called Black Lives Matter a terrorist organization and compared the group to the Ku Klux Klan. His tenure as sheriff was riddled with controversy, particularly surrounding the deaths of people in his jail and the shackling of pregnant women. Once in the White House, Trump swiftly applied his powers as president to pardon Arizona Sheriff Joe Arapaio for his conviction for criminal contempt of court. Arapaio, who the Department of Justice concluded ran the largest racial-profiling scheme in U.S. history, used to refer to his notorious outdoor jails as a “concentration camp.”

President Donald Trump shakes hands with Minneapolis Police Union head Lt. Bob Kroll on stage during a campaign rally at the Target Center on Oct. 10, 2019 in Minneapolis.
Photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images


“That’s the kind of people that Trump embraces because he has decided that the solution to all social problems is criminalization, and that how you make America great again is through authoritarianism,” Vitale said. It wasn’t long before Trump-Punisher gear began popping up online, with the president’s familiar hair plopped on the menacing Punisher skull. Trump’s support from the hard-right, politicized edge of American law enforcement was again on display in October, when the president was welcomed to a Minneapolis rally by Kroll, the police union chief, in defiance of a statement from the mayor’s office that president was not welcome. Kroll wore a red shirt emblazoned with the words “Cops for Trump” (available for $20 on the union’s website). Addressing the “patriots” in the crowd, Kroll said the shirts were a message against hypocrisy.

“The Obama administration and the handcuffing and oppression of police was despicable,” Kroll said. “The first thing President Trump did when he took office was turn that around, got rid of the Holder-Loretta Lynch regime and decided to start letting the cops do their job — put the handcuffs on the criminals instead of us.”

There is no daylight between Punisher-style policing and Trump’s vision of how American law enforcement should operate, Vitale argued. “They are one and the same,” he said. “This is a kind of proto-fascism. Maybe in the next week we’ll find out if it’s a full-throated fascism.” The contradictions in American society, drawn out by the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic followed by the protests, have brought the country to a tipping point. “Historically, when this happens, there is a rupture and it’s not pretty,” Vitale said. “Usually it involves a war. That’s how this fundamental contradiction gets resolved.” The days of police reform, the buzzword of the Obama era are through, Vitale argued. “That’s all done,” he said. “This is a war over the future of the country, and right now it is literally taking place with people fighting cops in the streets. And I think that the question is what does victory for our side start to look like?”

Whether it was cops on the beat or immigration agents on the border, the president’s message was the same: Politically correct liberals have held you back for too long, but no more.


“This is not just about policing anymore,” he said. “This is about the grievances of a whole generation, about the direction of the country, the failure of both political parties, the economic crisis, the environmental crisis.” In the streets of Brooklyn, the familiar chants of “no justice, no peace” have been joined by an increasingly popular demand: defund the police. Starving the policing beast is precisely the solution Vitale has spent the past three years advocating for. “This did not come out of nowhere — we’ve been working,” Vitale said. “It’s not a revolutionary agenda, I know that, but you’ve got to build a movement that has victories and that in the process is dialing back the repressive capacity of the state.”

For now, the protests continue, despite attempts to stop them with curfews and escalating attacks by the police on a citizenry exercising its constitutional rights to free speech and assembly. Quin Johnson was among the thousands of demonstrators who returned to the streets of Brooklyn on Monday. She carried a small cardboard sign listing more than a dozen names: black men and boys beaten or killed by police or racist mobs, stretching back to 1931. “It’s very emotional,” she said, as the crowd marched west. “Today was the first day that I cried.”

Demonstrators burned Thin Blue Line flags outside Sacramento Police Department on March 2, 2019. To the right, a woman wears a t-shirt featuring the logo of the Marvel Comics character, The Punisher.
Photo: Mason Trinca/Getty Images

Johnson described the traumatic cycle that pervades American life, particularly African American life, of people killed by police and the absence of consequence. “I’m just angry,” she said. “You remember every time, and it builds up and builds up.” The scale of the protests was no surprise, she added, “every community has been affected by this,” nor was the fact that they continue. “They persist because you go back home and you watch the news, and you see what the police are doing to the people,” she explained. “It is the exact reason why people are protesting.”

The present moment is a boiling point, Johnson said — where things go next is uncertain. “It has the potential to be different,” she said. “I hope it’s different.” But if that change does not come, “I will be very happy to watch it all fucking b

NATIONAL REVIEW IS TRYING TO REWRITE ITS OWN RACIST HISTORY
Ryan Grim July 5 2020,

STUART STEVENS, who has gone from running Mitt Romney’s campaign for president in 2012 to a perch as a leading Never Trumper, is out with a new book: his mea culpa of sorts, “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.”

Some of Stevens’s former colleagues don’t like it, and one of them, Matthew Scully, savaged it in National Review. “Perhaps the most devastating book review you’ll ever read,” National Review editor Rich Lowry promised.

The review is, to be sure, unfriendly, countering that Stevens is, in so many words, a clown, a hack, a liar, a grifter — and wrong. I’m not here to referee the bulk of their dispute, but one particular claim by Scully in his review merits a closer look.

In his book, Stevens apologizes for his role in propping up a Republican Party he now considers to be little more than a “white grievance party” cynically exploiting racism in the pursuit of power. Scully objects to much of what Stevens has to say in the book, and he zeroes in on Stevens’s claim that, in hindsight, he should have seen all along that Republicans were getting ahead by exploiting racism. Stevens cites the rise of the New Right with Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964 straight through to President Donald Trump.

Scully is appalled at such libel upon the GOP, and comes to the spirited defense of Goldwater and one of his chief advocates, William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley was a founder of the National Review and, in many respects, the modern conservative movement, who, Stevens wrote, was simply “a more articulate version of the same deep ugliness and bigotry that is the hallmark of Trumpism.”

William F. Buckley, Stevens wrote, was simply “a more articulate version of the same deep ugliness and bigotry that is the hallmark of Trumpism.”


“As a rule of thumb,” Scully responds in the reportedly devastating review, “anyone so glib and presumptuous as to brush off as ‘ugliness and bigotry’ the enduring political and moral legacy of William F. Buckley Jr. has, for that reason alone, no business involving himself in Republican affairs.”

Scully might want to take a dive through the archives of his own magazine before offering such a definitive judgment. A review of that record shows there is no doubt which side of history Buckley placed himself on. Now, he stands athwart it with Trump, like it or not. Stevens, if anything, was being too polite.

IN 1957, as Congress was debating the first Civil Rights Act since Reconstruction, Buckley penned an op-ed that scrubbed away the euphemisms to get straight to the heart of the matter.

“Let us speak frankly,” Buckley wrote in the editorial, titled “Why The South Must Prevail.”

“The South does not want to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving him of the vote,” he goes on. “In some parts of the South, the White community merely intends to prevail — that is all. It means to prevail on any issue on which there is corporate disagreement between Negro and White. The White community will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way.”

Buckley goes on to weigh whether such a position is kosher from a sophisticated, conservative perspective. “The central question that emerges,” he writes, “is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?” His answer is clear:


The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism, and elsewhere; the South, where the conflict is by no means dramatic, as in Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes’, and intends to assert its own. NATIONAL REVIEW believes that the South’s premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.

Having justified denying the vote to Black people in the South as “enlightened,” Buckley then grapples with the proper level of violence needed to sustain the “civilized standards” he is intent on upholding.


Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way, and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.

By 1957, when Buckley was writing the column and Congress was considering its civil rights legislation, lynchings were continuing in the South, a mechanism of discipline to enforce Jim Crow, a regime that rendered the post-Civil War constitutional guarantees of the franchise and the right to equal protection of the laws mere words on paper. Buckley concluded the editorial by suggesting that with enough guidance and charity from white people in the South, Black people may one day be worthy of an equal standing.


Universal suffrage is not the beginning of wisdom or the beginning of freedom. Reasonable limitations upon the vote are not exclusively the recommendation of tyrants or oligarchists (was Jefferson either?). The problem in the South is not how to get the vote for the Negro, but how to equip the Negro—and a great many Whites—to cast an enlightened and responsible vote. The South confronts one grave moral challenge. It must not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness to preserve the Negro as a servile class. It is tempting and convenient to block the progress of a minority whose services, as menials, are economically useful. Let the South never permit itself to do this. So long as it is merely asserting the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races, and so long as it does so by humane and charitable means, the South is in step with civilization, as is the Congress that permits it to function.

Disenfranchisement and a reasonable amount of violence were justified, Buckley wrote, to maintain society.


Buckley’s argument, “undemocratic” as it may be, is an articulate defense of white supremacy — with a capital W, as was the house style at the magazine then — as the proper means toward the goal of a good society. Maintaining that good society through disenfranchisement and a reasonable amount of violence was justified. The column appears not just in the magazine’s archives but also the 2008 book, “From The New Deal to The New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism,” published by Yale University Press and authored by Joseph E. Lowndes. The thesis of Lowndes’s book, that the fusion of Southern white supremacists and the business class was forged with the intellectual guidance of National Review, was buttressed by research a decade later: a paper from Cambridge University Press called, “‘Will the Jungle Take Over?’ National Review and the Defense of Western Civilization in the Era of Civil Rights and African Decolonization.”

Buckley made his argument in the context of an internal debate over the direction of the Republican Party as the New Deal realignment was reshaping politics. One wing of the party, dominated by the Rockefellers and other Northeastern politicians, argued for a multiracial, moderate, pro-business party that continued to compete across the country. The other wing — with Goldwater, Buckley, and the National Review as its lead champions — argued for an alliance between Southern segregationists gradually leaving the Democratic Party and pro-business forces around the country.

SCULLY PREFERS a vastly different history of this realignment. Goldwater, who served as an Arizona senator, ran for president in 1964: a failed campaign but one that is credited with birthing the modern Republican Party. In June of that year, he famously cast his vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, citing constitutional objections. Goldwater, Scully argues, was not involved in a “carefully crafted platform of coded racism,” but was simply a principled, small-government conservative:


To see what Goldwater’s “carefully crafted platform of coded racism” actually looked like, you have to go fetch it yourself. Republicans in 1964 pledged “full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and all other civil rights statutes; . . . such additional administrative or legislative actions as may be required to end the denial, for whatever unlawful reason, of the right to vote; . . . continued opposition to discrimination based on race, creed, national origin or sex. We recognize that the elimination of any such discrimination is a matter of heart, conscience, and education, as well as of equal rights under law.”

Across the South, we’re to believe, ears went up at the dog whistle in this language, so subtle that even now no one else can pick it up. Even if Stevens’s point is that 1964 marked a sharp decline in African-American votes for Republicans, that proves only that the sum of Goldwater’s platform and convictions held less appeal to black citizens than did Lyndon Johnson’s activist government and Great Society agenda. As NR’s Kevin Williamson has skillfully explained, African-American support for Democrats began to rise long before the 1960s with the programs of the New Deal. Everything isn’t about race; presumably black voters acted in the belief that these economic policies best served their own and their country’s interests. And this despite the fact that many prominent Democrats themselves in that era, including LBJ, had disgraceful records on civil rights.

On that score it would have been relevant for Stevens to mention that Barry Goldwater — the most upright of men, whose reputation was good enough for the proud one-time “Goldwater Girl” nominated for president in 2016 — was a champion of and fundraiser for efforts to end segregation in Phoenix schools, in 1946 led the desegregation of the Arizona National Guard, and was a founding member of the Arizona NAACP. Easy to fault the senator now for overthinking constitutional objections to elements of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, despite his consistent votes for civil-rights bills before that, and to note adverse electoral consequences for his party. But to accuse Republicans of stirring up racial hatred with that man and that platform is a gross misstatement of fact.

Ku Klux Klan members supporting Barry Goldwater’s campaign for the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, as an African American man pushes signs back, on July 12, 1964. Photo: Warren K Leffler/Universal History Archive/Getty Images


Most students of American political history are probably scratching their heads at how Scully could attempt to deny that Republicans exploited racial grievance to build its base of white voters in the South. Here, again, the real history of the National Review is instructive. Linking the business wing of the GOP with the racist wing of Democratic Party was not the easy task it seems in hindsight, but required decades of effort to help these disparate camps find their shared interests and fuse together.

Scully is right that Black Americans’ drift away from the GOP began long before the Civil Rights Act. A majority of Black voters went for virulent racist Woodrow Wilson in 1912, attracted by his progressive economic platform, the first time since winning the right to vote that Black voters had cast it for a Democrat for president. That trend continued over the next several decades. In 1948, Harry Truman insisted on including a strong civil rights plank in the party’s platform. Southerners walked out of the Democratic National Convention in protest and ran Strom Thurmond as their “Dixiecrat” nominee.

Voters, even white ones in the South, reacted to Thurmond with a yawn. He won 2.4 percent of the vote, just over a million, which was roughly what the Populist Party’s candidate had won in the 1890s. Truman won Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, and the rest of the South and border states other than the four most hardcore: South Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. The Dixiecrat revolt was crushed.
or Northern Republicans to get behind segregation and the preservation of the white Southern way of life.

Getting each to accept the other was not inevitable, nor was it easy. That’s where th
It was clear that the South couldn’t win the fight alone, and for that, needed conservative allies in the North. The problem was that the rest of the country, Northern Republican conservatives included, wanted nothing to do with the explicit, raw racism on display in the South, preferring the more subtle kind that is more familiar today.

But those Republicans did want something else: an end to the New Deal. In order to forge the alliance between the racist Democrats in the South, then, and the business wing of the Republicans in the North, they had to fuse two, unlinked political movements — the drive for segregation and the rollback of the New Deal. That required the South to go along with attacking programs that were extremely popular with the people of the South, and fe National Review comes in.

The move was made by linking the New Deal to a big, overreaching government that, yes, had electrified the country, built Social Security, dug the country out of the Depression, and so on, but also wanted to forcibly integrate society and ensure the franchise for Black voters. Buckley was primarily against all the former insults upon the Constitution, and Southern segregationists were primarily against the latter. Buckley argued to Southerners that their defense of Jim Crow through the rhetoric of states’ rights was too often “opportunistic” rather than principled — inarguably true — and that if they didn’t embrace a broader ideology of limited government, they wouldn’t find the allies they needed to succeed.

With Southerners willing to break from the New Deal, the Northern Republican elites were open to some level of compromise on segregation that would allow white supremacy to continue without party leaders needing to endorse white supremacy. They satisfied their own consciences by pretending that their new allies weren’t racist; rather, they simply deeply believed in the principle of local democracy and states rights. That game of pretend is still going on in the National Review today.

THE MAGAZINE was founded in 1955 as a project to undermine the New Deal, with the famous motto, “It stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” It invested extraordinary amounts of time and resources into building an intellectual edifice for segregation that could be bandied about in polite society.
One 1956 editorial, titled “The South Girds Its Loins,” shows how it was typically done.

Those who oppose the South’s resistance tend to rest their case, simply, on the fact that they disapprove of racial discrimination of any kind. It has been surprisingly difficult to fix their attention on the fact that, as far as the South and its sympathies are concerned, something else is at stake. Indeed, support for the Southern position rests not at all on the question of whether Negro and White children should, in fact, study geography side by side; but on whether a central or local authority should make that decision.

National Review invested extraordinary amounts of time and resources into building an intellectual edifice for segregation that could be bandied about in polite society.


What makes the earlier passage from Buckley, explicitly justifying violence to perpetuate white dominance, so startling is not that the ideas in it are unusual or surprising, but that they are so nakedly on display. It was obvious to Buckley’s colleague and co-founder, L. Brent Bozell Jr., how damaging that messaging could be to the nascent efforts at an alliance between moderate, pro-business northern Republicans and segregationist Democrats. In the next issue, he pushed back.

“This magazine,” Bozell wrote, “has expressed views on the racial question that I consider dead wrong, and capable of doing grave hurt to the conservative movement.” Bozell argued that Buckley was making a mockery of the rule of law, undermining conservative values. Buckley responded with a “clarification” that the constitutional amendments that gave Black people the right to vote and the right to equal protection of the laws “are regarded by much of the South as inorganic accretions to the original document, grafted up int by a victor-at-war by force.” But he conceded to Bozell that conservatives should be more careful in how they frame their attacks on the right to vote by “enacting [voter suppression] laws that apply equally to blacks and whites.” Buckley was anticipating the color-blind logic Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts would use to gut the Voting Rights Act in 2013.

Bozell’s framing is what allows Scully to now claim that Goldwater was “the most upright of men,” without a racist bone in his body, and therefore the project itself could never have exploited racial grievance. We don’t need to see straight into the heart of Goldwater, though, to understand how the Republican Party really evolved.

James J. Kilpatrick, left, an editor of the Richmond, Va., News-Leader, appears with Martin Luther King Jr. before their debate on “Are Sit-In Strikes Justifiable?” which was televised Nov. 26, 1960, from NBC’s New York studios.
Photo: John Lent/AP
In 1962, regular National Review writer James Kilpatrick published a book called “The Southern Case for Segregation.” His case: “the Negro race, as a race, plainly is not equal to the white race, as a race; nor, for that matter, in the wider world beyond, by the accepted judgment of ten thousand years, has the Negro race, as a race, ever been the cultural or intellectual equal of the white race, as a race.”

The problem, he argued, was that Black leaders refuse to admit their own inferiority. “A really massive, significant change in race relations will not come until the Negro people develop leaders who will ask themselves the familiar question, ‘Why are we treated as second-class citizens?’ and return a candid answer to it: Because all too often that is what we are. … The Negro says he’s the white man’s equal; show me,” he wrote.

Kilpatrick and Buckley were close. Buckley assigned Kilpatrick to cover major segregation cases for the magazine, and once called him “the primary editorialist on our side of the fence. … In fact, I sometimes jocularly refer to him as ‘Number one,’” according to “The Fire is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate Over Race in America.”

In 1958, Kilpatrick connected Buckley with Bill Simmons, a leader of Citizens Council, an abjectly white supremacist organization, suggesting a partnership with National Review had potential. Simmons sent Buckley the organization’s mailing list, along with other offers of support. Buckley wrote back to thank him, in an anecdote relayed in “The Fire is Upon Us”: “I feel that our position on states’ rights is the same as your own and that we are therefore, as far as political decentralization is concerned, pursuing the same ends.” This was Buckley quite actively seeking an alliance with active and explicit white supremacists in order to fuse together his movement with theirs. Whatever he felt about them personally, his goal was to empower them.

Kilpatrick’s objectively white supremacist book was reviewed fondly in the pages of National Review by Bozell.

Bozell, who married Buckley’s sister (producing, among 10 children, conservative provocateur L. Brent Bozell III), would go on to ghostwrite Barry Goldwater’s defining 1960 book, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” and to serve as a top adviser to his 1964 presidential campaign — a campaign National Review helped make possible — refining the conservative language on race so that its meaning was easy to grasp but its words were slippery. “Bozell would help ensure that his would be the political course modern American conservatism would steer,” concluded Lowndes.

“I don’t like segregation,” Goldwater said in 1962. “But I don’t like the Constitution kicked around either.”

The language Bozell helped make famous was around local control. He used the concept of “interposition,” similar to “nullification,” which essentially said that a state, or group of states, was free to reject a federal law it found unconstitutional. Civil rights laws, considered unconstitutional in the South among white leaders, could therefore be ignored, and the states themselves could set the policy. Here, Goldwater would say that he personally felt that the Southern states ought to embrace civil rights, but that it was up to them. The result was the same as if he stridently opposed civil rights — and white Southern voters knew it, and flocked to Goldwater. “I don’t like segregation,” Goldwater said in 1962. “But I don’t like the Constitution kicked around either.”

The next year, National Review writer William Rusher, in an article called “Crossroads for the GOP,” argued that “Goldwater, and Goldwater alone, can carry enough Southern and Border States to offset the inevitable Kennedy conquests in the big industrial states of the North.” This could be done, Rusher suggested, without resorting to exploitation of racial grievance. But the same magazine issue, Lowndes found, included two cartoons, one of a bearded Confederate general holding aloft a GOP flag, and another of Confederate soldiers firing cannons, with the cannonballs labeled “Republican.” The cartoons are not reprinted in his book, though perhaps Scully or Lowry could dig them out of the archives. (Check the February 12, 1963 issue.)

After the ’64 convention — in which the civil rights plank, Scully neglects to mention, was watered down by removing the word “enforcement” — none other than Strom Thurmond rallied to Goldwater’s banner. He made a television announcement early in the fall that he was leaving the Democratic Party (again). “The Democratic Party,” he said, “has forsaken the people to become the party of minority groups, power-hungry union leaders, political bosses and big businessmen looking for government contracts and favors.” His indictment continued: The party “has rammed through Congress unconstitutional, unworkable and oppressive legislation which invades inalienable personal and property rights of the individual.”

He said that he’d be joining the “Goldwater Republican Party,” joining him in the fight “to make the Republican Party a party which supports freedom, justice and constitutional government.”

He was already a reader of the National Review, having been gifted a subscription by Buckley’s father who assured him that his son “is for segregation and backs it in every issue.”

Buckley, in a column in July 1963, warned that if Democrats tried to paint Goldwater’s movement as racist, it might “resignedly” just become that.

If the Democrats, in their anxiety to discredit Goldwater and the conservative wing of the Republican Party, hammer away at the themes that such sentiments as Goldwater’s add up to an anti-Negro policy, then those who side with Goldwater may begin reconstructing their habits of thought and argument; and eventual their policies. Thereafter, they might proceed, resignedly, on the assumption that what is anti-Negro and what is traditionally American are apparently the same thing. And that therefore one must now choose between staying free and trucking to the Negro vote.

That same year, conservative reporter Robert Novak attended an annual RNC meeting in Denver, concluding that “a good many, perhaps a majority of the party’s leaders, envisioned substantial political gold to be mined in the racial crisis by becoming in fact, though not in name, the White Man’s Party.”

William F. Buckley Jr. left, talks with former California Gov. Ronald Reagan at the South Carolina Governor’s Mansion in Columbia, S.C., on Jan. 13, 1978.

Photo: Lou Krasky/AP


Six years earlier, Buckley had made the forceful argument in the pages of National Review that “the White community is so entitled [to block Blacks from voting] because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.” Now Goldwater, with the enthusiastic support of Thurmond, was running on a platform that would legally allow such white supremacy to continue in the South. He lost badly to Lyndon B. Johnson, but Richard Nixon implemented the strategy in 1968, and the parties were realigned.

The GOP was now the White Man’s Party — courtesy of Goldwater, Buckley, and National Review.
The tragedy of Buckley is that he did personally evolve on questions of Jim Crow. The civil rights movement and the white violence that met it did help Buckley genuinely evolve. He came around to support federal enforcement of civil rights laws, the rights of Black people to vote, and even affirmative action to right years of injustice. He attacked the John Birch Society and warred with anti-Semites. When Kilpatrick eventually gave up defending segregation, Buckley cheered him.

But like so many too-clever operatives before him and since, the forces he empowered became too powerful for him and his magazine. Buckley may have thought he was exploiting the Citizens Council for his own movement’s gain, but it worked the other way around.

Today, it’s unfolding as farce. In January 2016, National Review dedicated an entire issue to taking down Trump, making a full-throated conservative case against him.

One of the columns is drafted by Bozell’s son, L. Brent Bozell III. “Trump might be the greatest charlatan of them all,” Bozell III suggested, comparing him unfavorably to Ronald Reagan, who, Bozell III noted, was a devoted reader of National Review and “supported Barry Goldwater when the GOP mainstream turned its back on him.”

National Review has since been brought around, and is four-square behind Trump. He has the right instincts and enemies, the magazine argues, even if his language could use some greater sophistication. But now that Buckley’s ghost has bent the knee to the Citizens’ Council, nobody in Trump’s world cares what National Review thinks. The magazine’s faux-intellectual discourse is no longer needed by the forces that Buckley — resignedly or not — built up. All that’s left to do for the magazine is hug closer to Trump, and celebrate each new lifetime judicial confirmation. After all, there may be some differences, but, in the words of Buckley, both partners are “pursuing the same ends.” What could go wrong?
TOP PHOTO Magazine editor William F. Buckley Jr., editor of the National Review, holds a copy of the magazine as he makes a statement on the steps of the U.S. Courthouse on May 13, 1958. Bettmann Archive

CONFEDERACY INC.: DONALD TRUMP, RACIST POLICE, AND THE WHITEWASHING OF HISTORY

LONG READ

Intercepted
July 1 2020, 4:01 a.m.

DONALD TRUMP IS bringing his white power revue to Mount Rushmore. This week on Intercepted: As cases of Covid-19 skyrocket across the U.S. — particularly in states that basked in the glory of the Trump administration’s ignorance and anti-science policies — Trump is passionately focused on defending the legacy of the Confederacy and white supremacist monuments. Native American historian Nick Estes explains the crimes against Indigenous people committed by the four presidents whose faces are carved into Mount Rushmore and describes the story of the Native tribes displaced from the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Black Lives Matter demonstrations against police brutality systemic racism continue across the U.S. as calls to defund the police intensify. University of Iowa historian Simon Balto, author of the new book “Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power,” lays out the origins of the Chicago Police Department as a moralistic enforcement agency in the late 1800s and its transformation into a militarized terror force deployed to systemically and violently control Black people in Chicago, while simultaneously crushing movements for workers’ rights, tenant rights, and basic human rights.

[Musical interlude]

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

[Musical interlude]

JS: I’m Jeremy Scahill, coming to you from my basement in New York City. And this is episode 136 of Intercepted.

Donald Trump: So we have more cases because we do the greatest testing. If we didn’t do testing, we’d have no cases. Other countries, they don’t test millions. It’s up to almost 30 million tests. So when you do 30 million and have a kid with the sniffles and they’ll say it’s coronavirus, whatever you want to call it. I said the other night, there are so many names to this, I could name 19 names, like corona 19.

JS: In the United States right now, we are witnessing the blowback caused by stupidity, ignorance and anti-science policymaking from the highest office in the land. Coronavirus infections are skyrocketing across the country, notably in states whose governors joined Donald Trump in minimizing the grave danger posed by not taking Covid-19 seriously. Both Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have overwhelmingly refused to take the most basic steps to project a message of responsibility or to encourage people to just wear masks. They have celebrated and spoken in front of mass gatherings of people who have equated wearing protective masks with the loss of their liberty. And now the virus is spreading like wildfire through the states of some of Trump’s most loyal followers and supporters.

[Siren]

NBC News: This morning the coronavirus surge continues in Texas. Infections statewide now topping 150,000, with just over 2,400 deaths.

Sam Brock: Twenty-six states are already seeing a rise in cases, with 11 looking at a sharp jump of 100 percent or more over the last 14 days. That includes Florida, rocked by a five-fold increase in daily cases in two weeks.

JS: Instead of realizing the deadly mistakes of his administration’s response to this pandemic, Trump has spent weeks railing against Black Lives Matter protests, attempting to criminalize dissent and dreaming up scenarios where he can order police and military forces to operate with even greater brutality. Trump appears to spend more time developing edicts to lock away people who deface or destroy Confederate monuments than he does actually trying to save the lives of Americans fighting a lethal virus.

DJT: We’re fighting, really, a movement. And it’s not a movement, even, that votes. We have the votes, we have everything. But what’s gone on and what I watch and I see all the time and I’ve been watching for the last three weeks is a disgrace. I see them pulling down monuments. They don’t even know which monument it is.

JS: Donald Trump has used the virus of his re-election campaign to give racist speeches in Tulsa, Oklahoma around the Juneteenth holiday that celebrates emancipation of enslaved people. And he chose a city that was home to a horrifying racial massacre of Black people. He’s tweeting videos of his supporters yelling “white power.”

[Shouting]

Unidentified person 1: White power! White power!

Unidentified person 2: There you go, “white power,” did you hear that?

JS: And as he does this and as people continue to become infected with Covid-19 at alarming rates, Trump is obsessively demanding that people who attack Confederate monuments be locked in prison for a decade.

DJT: No, we’ll stop it. Don’t worry. Just don’t worry about it. Ten years is a long time to spend in prison.

JS: The truth is that Donald Trump has expended infinitely more energy trying to protect white supremacist monuments to slaveholders and war criminals who killed and died to protect their ability to enslave Black people than he has at protecting the people of this country from a deadly infectious disease. It says everything we need to know about who he is and what his administration represents.

And now, for his next performance, he is going to go to South Dakota on July 3 for a fireworks show to celebrate his white supremacist agenda and re-election campaign. Now, none of the four presidents on Mount Rushmore were Confederate generals or commanders. But if you really examine the history of these presidents, and in particular their actions against Indigenous people, Native Americans, including those whose lands were taken so that that monument could be built, then you see that it’s actually a perfect location for Trump to take his tour of hate right now.

The current actions targeting Confederate monuments have been a long time coming and it is not lost on the activists agitating for their removal that many of these statues and memorials were built not in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, but decades later. And the reason they were erected was to reap terror on Black people in this country by celebrating the commanders of a war white southerners fought in an effort to keep their status as slave owners.

At the same time, there are monuments and statues and schools named for people whose crimes predate the Civil War. I am talking about the military figures, the U.S. presidents, and others who are glorified because of, or in spite of, their role in the sustained campaigns of genocide and displacement against Indigenous people in this country.
Historian Nick Estes on the History of Mount Rushmore, and the Systematic Extermination and Displacement of Native Americans

JS: Joining me now is the Native American historian and professor, Nick Estes. He is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and an assistant professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico. He’s also the host of the excellent Red Nation podcast. His latest book is “Our History is The Future.” Nick Estes, thanks so much for joining us again here on Intercepted.

Nick Estes: Thanks for having me, Jeremy.

JS: So on Friday, Donald Trump issued an executive order on“Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence.” And of course, this comes as we’ve seen Confederate monuments coming down. Sometimes activists are pulling them down, sometimes institutions through public pressure have decided to take them down. There’s a lot to unpack in that executive order, but I just wanted to share some of how it begins: “Key targets in the violent, extremist campaign against our country, our public monuments, memorials and statues.” It goes on, “their selection of targets reveals a deep ignorance of our history and is indicative of a desire to indiscriminately destroy anything that honors our past.” Just your big picture response to this executive order.

NE: Trump, he’s invoking this kind of idea of lawlessness that has been unleashed by Black-led resistance all over the country, and now internationally, to make this argument that the very core, the very idea of America “as we know it,” right, is under attack.

DJT: First of all, we have arrested, I think almost — but it could be over the number — hundreds of people. We have arrested a lot of people for what they’ve done. They’ve created bedlam. They’ve destroyed very important things. I mean you’re also talking about statues of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln…

NE: And if there’s any lesson that we can learn from colonialism, it involves three things: God, gold, and glory. Right? The soft underbelly of this entire project has always been glory. The idea that this nation is built on an exceptional, kind of unique history, right? The city on the hill kind of thesis that came out of the pilgrim mythology. And so in this moment, Trump is trying to essentially rewrite history and to say that there are winners and there are losers, right? It’s a very kind of facile reading of history and I don’t think that the advocates that are calling for the tearing down of these monuments or the, you know, even the replacement in some instances, are saying that we should reduce the history of racism, of imperialism to just the Civil War, but that it’s a very complicated history, especially when you factor in something like settler colonialism. And so, in this instance, he’s saying, you know, “our history,” “deep ignorance of our history,” and whose history is that?

DJT: We have to cherish our past. We have to cherish good or bad. We have to understand our past. We have to understand our history. Because if we don’t know our history, it could all happen again. We have to know our history.

NE: When somebody like Trump says, you know, “We’re here to protect our national monuments,” he’s been invoking the language of heritage, which is kind of like a dog whistle for the “it’s heritage, not hate” kind of speak around the Confederate monuments as well as the Confederate battle flag. He’s not including Indigenous people in this particular rhetoric because our monuments, our history as Indigenous people, is under constant erasure. And to reduce the kind of struggles over monuments, over how we know and how we write history in this particular moment, to just the idea of Confederate monuments or, you know, Union monuments, completely ignores the larger kind of context of U.S. history. And it attempts to sanitize it, between: Oh, we have good colonizers and we have bad colonizers.

JS: Trump has a rally planned on July 3 and the location for that rally is what they call Mount Rushmore. Talk about the significance of this location, Mount Rushmore, located in South Dakota’s Black Hills, and what that location means to the Lakota people and how that monument is viewed among Indigenous activists.

NE: Mount Rushmore is within a cultural landscape that we know as He Sapa, or the Black Hills. And it’s kind of a mistranslation in some ways because, when we say He Sapa, you know, when we talked about our 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty that we signed with the United States, it didn’t just include the cultural landscape of the Black Hills as we know it today, with the Black Hills National Forest, et cetera, and the federal park lands that exist there and the state park lands that exist there. But it actually meant — He Sapa actually means “the black ridge.” Which, “the black ridge” for us is the Teton Mountains. And so that’s the extent of Lakota territory as we understand it and the extent of this kind of cultural, sacred landscape. And the Black Hills were also a place of origin and a place of cultural and spiritual significance for over 50 Indigenous nations. So it’s not just our kind of proprietary claim to this particular location. We were kind of the final, I guess, caretakers after a lot of these Indigenous nations were kind of removed through U.S. policy, and of course, inter-Indigenous warfare itself as well. And so, Mount Rushmore is named after a gold prospector who had illegally entered into Lakota treaty territory to begin prospecting. And so it’s taken on this name from this squatter who came into our land. But then, later on, the son of Danish immigrant, Gutzon Borglum, saw this as a place to build his kind of shrine to democracy, as it became known. Or his shrine to American exceptionalism, because he really wanted to capture and to portray and celebrate the uniqueness and the greatness of the United States. And so he picked this location for those very specific reasons, to put the four presidents on there.

Gutzon Borglum: And the characters that we have chosen — Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt — are the most outstanding men in the last 150 years in the building of, not only the government itself but in establishing and developing its territorial dimension.

NE: This is one of the darkest periods of the reservation period because our language was banned, our dancing was banned, all of our religions and ceremonies were actually banned on the reservation and we were only allowed to perform them for, you know, national celebrations, such as 4th of July or for, you know, national holidays like Presidents Day or Flag Day, for example. But Dennis Banks, as well as Russell Means, called this the shrine of hypocrisy.

Russell Means: Anything Indian was condemned and punishable. Then they developed a program of forcing us off the reservation. There’s many ways of doing this of course — economic deprivation — therefore we were forced into the cities to look for jobs for existence. Then they introduced the relocation program, where they relocated Indian people from reservations to seven different designated cities in the United States. After the first five years of my life, first six or seven, I then began growing up in the urban environment and have yet to meet an Indian in the urban environment that does not plan on eventually going home.

NE: Washington was known as “town destroyer.” He was given that name by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy because he led a scorched-earth campaign against the Haudenosaunee prior to the Revolutionary War, but also during the Revolutionary War to push them further westward, to make room, you know, to create Lebensraum or living space for the new kind of white-Anglo nation that was under construction. Every sitting president to date of the United States has the name “town destroyer” from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

JS: Let’s just break down each of them. You just talked a bit about George Washington. What about Thomas Jefferson and his relationship with Indigenous people in this country.

NE: Yeah, Thomas Jefferson was really the architect of Indian removal as we now know it, as like the Trail of Tears or the removal of the southeastern tribes from what is now the South, what we know as the South, and places like Georgia and North Carolina. But he was the one who really envisioned that, and that’s why he facilitated something like the Louisiana Purchase because he imagined moving, basically creating a large Indian reserve west of the Mississippi River. And of course, that, later on, became Oklahoma Territory. He also envisioned that the entire western hemisphere would be dominated by the Anglo-Saxon race and this was really the foundation of what we know as Manifest Destiny, which was a term that was coined in the late 19th century. But earlier on there was the Monroe Doctrine, right? Which really was drawing inspiration from somebody like Thomas Jefferson and understanding the kind of unique place of the United States in dominating the entire western hemisphere and understanding the western hemisphere as the “backyard” of the United States.

JS: So let’s move, I guess, chronologically then. And of course, next, we have Abraham Lincoln. As Indigenous activists have been protesting Mount Rushmore itself, you also have Abraham Lincoln’s story, which we hear nothing about his relationship with Indigenous people in this country.

NE: Right, and even within that executive order issued by Trump, he mentions the vandalization of the Lincoln Memorial and kind of raises the question, why Lincoln?

DJT: But they’re after Abraham Lincoln, and tonight, I guess they’re looking at Abraham Lincoln. And that was the Emancipation Proclamation. So you have that and you’re signing Emancipation Proclamation, and you have somebody, I think that wasn’t freed, and he’s getting up. It’s the position of he’s getting up. He’s being freed by Abraham Lincoln. And I can see controversy, but I can also see beauty in it. And it was paid for by slaves. I don’t know if you know that. It was paid for because they were so grateful to the president. It was paid for that reason. And they want to take it down.

NE: Lincoln himself is a very controversial figure for our people because he, he signed the death sentence for 38 Dakota patriots who took up arms against the United States after a break down in treaty obligations happened during the Civil War. The Dakota people in the territory of Minnesota had signed away, you know, pretty much all of their territory through this really coerced treaty that basically gave the Dakota people like a 22-mile strip of reservation land. And we now know that today, like, a lot of that land actually became part of, you know, the Moral Act, which is the act that kind of facilitated the creation of land grant institutions. But then also, at the same time, in 1862, you had the passage of the Homestead Act, which was an attempt to alleviate some of the mounting pressures happening on the eastern seaboard, between North and South, to kind of open up “free Indigenous land,” or nearly free Indigenous land in the West so that white immigrants could go out there and establish themselves and, you know, create this kind of yeoman farming empire that was envisioned by Jefferson.

And so these, this was the lead up prior to the Dakota Uprising, as it’s known, in 1862. And what happened is, because the United States failed to live up to its treaty obligations to the Dakota people and they had, you know, given over these large tracts of land, they took up arms. And many of the people who took up arms were — they took up arms reluctantly. They had, themselves kind of adopted the white mode of living. They cut their hair. They went to church. They began speaking English. They sent their children off to be educated in Christian boarding schools. But none of this prevented them from starving to death, right? So they took up arms against mainly Scandinavian and German immigrants who were flooding the area because of the Homestead Act and because of the railroad colonization that was happening at the time. And they expelled a lot of them within a very short period of time. But as the state of Minnesota reorganized itself for retaliation, they began organizing these irregular settler militias that were composed of these recent European immigrants to basically create what we now know as the National Guard to crush the Indigenous uprising, but at the same time issued scalp bounties for upwards of $250 for an Indigenous or a Dakota scalp. And so what happened from 1862 to 1863 was known as kind of the punitive years of Dakota punishment.

And to kind of kick it off, just weeks before he signed the Emancipation Proclamation in January, Abraham Lincoln executed 38 Dakota people for their role — whether it was real or imagined — in the Dakota uprising in what became known as the largest mass execution in U.S. history. And this happened in Makato, of what we know as Blue Earth and today it’s known as Mankato. But in 1863, Lincoln ordered Sibley and Sully, two generals, to basically crush the remaining, kind of, Dakota resistance and they chased us all the way into what is now North Dakota as well as South Dakota.

And this campaign, which is known as the campaign, or the Columns of Vengeance, ended with the Whitestone Hill massacre in 1863. It’s a massacre that’s largely forgotten within U.S. history. And so at Whitestone Hill, in 1863, they converged on a buffalo hunt camp. Many of these people had nothing to do with the Dakota uprising but nonetheless were seen as hostile. Many of them were women and children. Most of the men had left for a hunting party and they returned to see around 400 of their relatives massacred at Whitestone Hill and the survivors of this particular massacre went on to join their Hunkpapa relatives in what is now known as the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. So those survivors of the Whitestone Hill massacre later became, you know, the descendants of them, became the people who facilitated the uprising against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

[Protesters against Dakota Access Pipeline chant: We’re not leaving. We’re not leaving. We’re not leaving. We’re not leaving.]

NE: Abraham Lincoln himself also oversaw the Navajo Long Walk, where somebody like Kit Carson was sent to round up all the Navajo people as well as Apache people and incarcerate them or imprison them in an open-air concentration camp known as Bosque Redondo. You know there were around 4,000 Navajo people who died on the Navajo Long Walk. Of course, there was the Sand Creek massacre that happened in 1864 as well. So Lincoln, himself, oversaw many of these kind of pivotal moments in not just in Indian policy, but also Indian wars of extermination. And when we understand the modern kind of like Indian massacre, when that image comes up of the kind of industrial warfare that was waged against, not just “enemy combatants,” but also non-combatants and civilians, it was this particularly era that was the defining moment that carried on into what we now know as Reconstruction, but also the “Plains Wars” that happened from, you know post-war, post Civil War to the 1890s.

JS: Talk about Teddy Roosevelt and the history of extermination, war, and slaughter of Indigenous people.

NE: Yeah, so Teddy Roosevelt, he wasn’t necessarily an Indian killer in the same way as these other presidents, in the sense that he didn’t really wage a kind of military campaign. His was more so a campaign of “preservation,” right? He’s seen as, you know, the Sierra Club figure of like the guy who created these national parks. But for settlers to appreciate nature, Indigenous people had to be “removed” from nature, right, itself.

And so that’s what Teddy Roosevelt did and there was a complete denial — especially in places like the Black Hills — a complete denial that Lakota, Dakota people had legitimate treaty claim to this land. And later on, as we know, even the Supreme Court understood that, because of the Black Hills Act of 1877, the Black Hills themselves were actually illegally taken from the Lakota nation. They were illegally taken out of trust. They were illegally taken out of treaty status — and this happened under the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant — and then became open for white settlement, but also open for the nationalization of large tracts into what we now know as federal forest lands.

JS: The recent events that were sparked, or given new life — the rebellion, the uprising against police murder of Black people in this country, the confrontation of the legacy of white supremacy and genocide upon which this country was built — has sent a lot of people back to history to read about those who came before them. And there’s been a lot of renewed interest in the work of abolitionists and the work of the Black Panther Party, and you also have this history in modern times of Indigenous movements — namely the American Indian Movement — and the way it was attacked in the same ways that the Black Panther Party or other militant groups were attacked by the U.S. government using Cointelpro infiltration, false flag operations. Talk a bit about the American Indian Movement, its political origins, and what you think would be helpful for people to understand about AIM in the current moment that we’re in right now.

NE: So the American Indian Movement was formed in 1968 in the Twin Cities, in Saint Paul and Minneapolis, and they formed for three reasons. And this is incredibly important for this day and age as well. They were formed to end child removal, which was the taking or the adoption out of Indian children into white families. So in 1969, a Congressional report came out that showed that one out of three American Indian children had been adopted out to a white family. The second one was to address poverty and the third one was to address police brutality or police violence. And this is incredibly important. So, many of the founders of the American Indian Movement began thinking about creating an organization while they were in prison. The Bellecourt brothers, Vernon and Clyde, as well as Dennis Banks began to develop a kind of class consciousness, for lack of a better term, around the situation of Indigenous people living off the reservation.

Dennis Banks: Well, there are three things. Basically, one of them is to have the United States government began a process of honoring the treaties that have been signed with the Native Americans. Second would be to have the Bureau of Indian Affairs removed from the Department of Interior because of the tremendous amount of conflict of interest. And thirdly to amend what is known as the Indian Reorganization Act. This is the act that establishes the puppet councils, puppet governments on the reservations and we want to amend it so that Indian people on the reservation will have direct control of the reservation life instead of having all of the policies originating out of Washington, D.C.

NE: They begin offering job opportunities in cities, whether it was in Cleveland, whether it was in the Bay Area, to get people off the reservation to essentially begin the process of liquidating tribal collective ownership of land. And so many of these people, you know, were going into places like Minneapolis, Denver. And in Minneapolis, of course, you can remove an Indian from the reservation but just because they’re not on the reservation doesn’t mean that they’re going to stop being an Indian. And so they found each other and just like any oppressed group of people, they formed their own kind of community, their own kind of culture. They first created a group called Concerned Indian Americans, whose acronym is CIA, which they thought was not a good fit.

JS: There was a mistake at the printer!

NE: But it was really just like… It wasn’t academics, you know. It wasn’t, like, thought leaders of the era. It was really just like homegrown, working-class Indigenous people. And many of them were women. Pat Bellinger was, you know, one of the founders of the American Indian Movement. And they decided at their first meeting that they were going to go out and fight the police.

Russell Means: And originally AIM, of course, was organized to combat police brutality in Minneapolis, Minnesota. But it grew, because the ideas of self-determination, the idea of being able to stand on your own two feet, eye-to-eye with the white man and say, “Wait a minute. Stop.”

NE: And so they created what were called “AIM patrols,” and they decided — they landed on American Indian Movement, right, they wanted to be more than just an organization. They wanted to be a movement. So they created AIM patrols to basically police the police. To prevent them from, you know, violating people’s civil rights. And then of course as the movement grew, they adopted a kind of more militant stance. But it was really the influence of the Black Panther Party in Oakland and their own cop patrols, as well as the free breakfast program, that influenced these kinds of Indigenous communities. But at the same time there were kind of unique Indigenous political contributions to the movement, such as survival school. Some of them kind of still exist today in alternative education for Indigenous people, but they also help with housing.

This is something that was really fascinating to me in the coverage of a place like Minneapolis. Leading up to the uprising and the killing of George Floyd, the conversation that I was hearing on the ground there, not just from Indigenous people but all people in that community, in the activist sphere in Minneapolis was the question of housing because housing was skyrocketing, housing prices were skyrocketing. So the intensification of police violence always correlates with, you know, profound inequality and we can trace that inequality in a place like Minneapolis back to its colonial origins when they expelled my ancestors, right? When they created scalp bounties for indigenous people, where not just the kind of policing institutions of the state, whether they’re sheriff’s deputies or the National Guard, but everyday settlers were encouraged to enact vigilante violence against indigenous people. Those are the origins of the George Floyd protests.

NE: And it’s not lost on us that they’re called an uprising, just like our revolt was called the Dakota Uprising. We see it as a continuation, and continuing of the tradition of the anti-police violence work of the American Indian Movement.

[Archival music from members of an American Indian Movement meeting.]

JS: Nick Estes, I want to thank you very much for all of your really, really important work. You’re a phenomenal young historian and I really do hope that people follow your work and also pick up your latest book, “Our History is The Future.” Nick Estes, thanks so much for being with us again.

NE: Thanks again, Jeremy.

JS: Nick Estes is an assistant professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico. He is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and the host of the Red Nation podcast. His latest book is “Our History is The Future.” Nick Estes is on Twitter @nick_W_Estes.

[Music interlude]
Historian Simon Balto on the Founding of the Chicago Police Department, from Moralistic Enforcement Agency to a Militarized Terror Force

Protester call and response:

What do we want?

Justice!

When do we want it?

Now!

JS: Protests, marches, and demonstrations against police brutality and murder and against systemic racism are continuing across the United States and the calls to defund the police and to abolish the prison system as it currently exists in this country are intensifying. The movement for Black Lives has provided crucial leadership that has brought these issues to an international stage and the resilience of these activists is a sight to behold, to emulate, and to be grateful for.

Over the past several weeks on this show, we have been focusing on these issues with Black scholars and organizers who have done the work of writing the history and telling the stories systematically suppressed, ignored, and left out of history classes and media discourse in this country — people like Robin D.G. Kelley and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

Robin D.G. Kelley: “Stop killing us” is a slogan that we’ve been carrying for centuries. It’s aimed at ending state-sanctioned racist violence, but also ending the violence of poverty; the violence of a health care system that has continued to reproduce inequality.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore: As people have lost the ability to keep their households and their communities together with adequate income, clean water, reasonable air, reliable shelter, as those things have gone away, what’s risen up has been policing and prison.

JS: What we want to do today is to back up and look at the very broad questions of why we have police in this country, why they are organized in the way that they are, and to examine their political power and the ways it has been used as a force to defend the interests of the elite, to crush organized labor and to reap terror on Black and brown and poor communities. We are going to do that today by taking an in-depth look at the origins and history of one of the most notorious and racist police forces in this country, the Chicago Police Department.

There is an astonishingly brilliant new book that chronicles this history from the mid-1800s to the 1970s, a book that uses scholarship and primary source documents and testimonials to give lie to some of the most pernicious and ill-informed characterizations of Black people and Black communities to this day. At the same time, the book lays out the origins of the Chicago Police as a moralistic enforcement agency established by white land and business owners and politicians with the primary aim of policing the behavior of European immigrants and it soon became a militarized terror force that was used to systemically and violently force Black people in Chicago to live in poverty, have their communities used as drug-infested business centers for white organized crime gangs while simultaneously crushing movements for workers rights, tenant rights, and basic human rights. The book also tells the often deleted history of Black political organizing and rebellion in Chicago and it offers lessons on how this history speaks to the demands and struggles of the present moment.

The book is called “Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power” and its author is Simon Balto, an assistant professor of history and African American studies at the University of Iowa. Simon Balto joins me now. Simon, thanks so much for being with us here on Intercepted.

SB: Thanks for having me, Jeremy.

JS: I want to begin by going pretty far back in U.S. history. In a general sense, talk about how police came to be in the United States. What are the early origins of the idea of city police forces in the U.S.?

SB: If we’re looking at the origins of the police, they primarily were implemented to do one or both of two things, and that is to preserve economic hierarchy or to preserve racial hierarchy.

So, you know, in a number of southern cities, early police forces either grow directly out of or overlap significantly with early slave patrols, you know, surveil and contain and control Black people who are trying to commit the crime of freeing themselves. In other places, though, it looks a little different.

So, in a city like Chicago, for example, the early police department is developed primarily by elite business owners in the city with the primary purpose of controlling immigrant behavior that they deem to be unruly and undesirable. They were especially concerned with the drinking habits of German and Irish immigrants.

But their other primary purpose was to suppress labor militancy. So, you know, one of the early purposes of the CPD [Chicago Police Department] is to make sure that, you know, workers who are trying to strike for an 8-hour workday or, you know, to better their working conditions, the police force is deployed to suppress them.

I think it’s important for people to understand that, when people first founded these police departments, they were not designed to promote some sort of public safety. They were designed with very specific, kind of political repressions in mind. And actually what’s funny to me is that, back when police departments were first being implemented, in a lot of places they were seen as kind of literally anti-American. In the 1840s, New Yorkers actively resisted the implementation of a New York police department and the reason that they did so was that the kind of generational memory of having the city be occupied by British forces during the Revolutionary War, the police department reminded people of those occupying forces. And so people sort of decried the implementation of a police department as antithetical to the American vision of independence and liberty.

JS: Let’s talk for a moment of the role of the Chicago police in breaking up strikes, attacking organized labor, ultimately then red squads that were aimed at taking down the perceived radicals. I think it’s important to begin with the Haymarket Square uprising. Just briefly explain when it happened and what it was about and what happened there.

SB: You know it’s 1886. You know there’s been increasing labor militancy and demands for an 8-hour workday and better working conditions, not just in Chicago but in the larger Chicago metro area, and also just across the country. And so, with Haymarket, you have a moment in time in which people are gathered in a labor protest and the Chicago police arrive there, and it’s coming in the wake of increased hostility between workers and police officers in Chicago. And you know what exactly happened that precipitated the events at Haymarket remains a little bit of a mystery, but what we do know is that police ended up opening fire on this crowd of workers and ended up killing a number of people, including a number of police officers through friendly fire. You know, it’s essentially a moment in time that’s really important, I think, for crystallizing wider public support for the police in Chicago, especially among corporate interests.

JS: As you write, the Chicago Tribune organized fundraisers for the police, and the first pension program for police was organized, that was the first time that a pension program was organized for the police.

SB: It’s through events like this where you have a moment of people who are perceived to be radical agitators or outsiders who the police are called upon to repress — people who are organizing to try to better the conditions for people who are underpaid, overworked, who work in hazardous conditions. I mean, it’s again like, what our perceptions of what public goods are is, I think, an important metric for thinking about what police do.

JS: Talk also about the kind of rise of the South Side of Chicago as was described historically as a kind of Black mecca with Black businesses thriving, cultural institutions, people taking over housing that had been occupied by immigrants, often taking the lowest quality houses and trying to build from that something that was viable and vibrant.

SB: When Black people move into Chicago during the first Great Migration, it’s a city that is structurally designed to disadvantage Black people. And so, what that means is that Black folks generally speaking are, I mean, in some cases their own interest of living near relatives or friends or other people that they know, people move to the south side partly because of those reasons, but they also move to the south side because people in other parts of the city don’t want them. And so that takes the form, in some cases, of physical violence. You know, so, for example, in the late 1910s and into the early 1920s, I mean, dozens of Black homes and businesses are bombed as people try to move into areas that are deemed for white people only. And then that also takes the form of more systematized legal violence. For example, restrictive covenants that are written into housing mortgages, you know, that prevent the sale or renting of huge swaths of the city to people who are not “of the caucasian race.” And so, you know, within that context of limited options, Black Chicagoans build. It’s a place of extraordinary Black political achievement, Black cultural achievement. It’s the duality of Black history kind of in a nutshell of racial repression and then, you know, incredible achievement.

JS: One of the narratives or stories that you tell in this book that I found so striking and important for people to understand is the way in which, beginning in the early 1900s, the Chicago authorities, the police, the government, local officials — at the time it was in the hands of the Republicans, but then the Democrats would take over and they govern in perpetuity to this day — but in the early 1900s Chicago basically abandoned the “Black belt” of the South Side of Chicago. They basically create this levee, where this is the area of the city where all of this seedy stuff is going to be allowed to take place, where people will need to go to this community to take part in it and the police are basically going to stay away from it and let the cards fall where they fall.

SB: The logic that policy-makers and police officials operate under in that moment is that look we’re not going to be able to prevent sex work. We’re not going to ever be able to abolish drinking and so on and so forth. So, what are we going to do about it? And what they decide to do about it is that they’ll push it into places where people, because of the color of their skin, lack much political weight to do otherwise. So, the police are pretty explicit about, essentially pushing the sex trade into Black neighborhoods. During Prohibition as well, you have, you know, white mobsters who, you know, who set up operations in Black communities because they know that the police just really won’t care.

You know, when we talk about the cultivation of vice and other forms of matters deemed criminal, whether they should be or not, it’s very much put into place along racialized lines operating under the racist logic that, we can’t get rid of these things but we can put them in places that we don’t really care about and that other people, you know, kind of the dominant population won’t really care about. So we see that in places, you point out, I mean, in the late 1800s and onward into the 1900s.

JS: Just to give people a statistic that you unearthed and cite in this book, from 1917 to 1921, 58 Black homes or residences were bombed because the residents or owners of those properties were Black people who had moved to overwhelmingly white neighborhoods. And the police did almost nothing in response to this spate over four years of bombings of Black homes where people had dared to move a bit outside of the “Black belt.”

SB: Black folks organized around these bombings to essentially begin trying to do the work that the police should technically be doing. I mean that, you know, you have local organizers that essentially try to launch investigations into who’s behind these bombings. In other words, doing what we think the police should be doing. You also have other Black people who talk about arming themselves to protect, you know, their own homes and businesses. You know, the same thing happens in the 1940s and ‘50s when Black people are again moving into and within the city and moving into previously white neighborhoods where white people are engaged in straight-up terrorism against these people when they’re moving into white neighborhoods. I mean, you know, that includes arson, it includes overturning cars, it includes beating. I mean it’s all sorts of different terrorist methods to prevent integration of city neighborhoods. You know, when civil rights leaders in Chicago in 1955, for example, are holding memorial rallies for Emmett Till after he’s lynched in Mississippi.

Journalist: The body was shipped home, back north to Chicago where Mamie Till Bradley insisted on an open casket funeral. “So all the world can see,” she said, “what they did to my boy.”

SB: They tied directly the lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi to the ongoing terrorism that white mobs are visiting upon Black people in Chicago and the failure of the police department in Chicago to actually protect them from those terrorist mobs. There’s an interesting linkage that Black organizers are making between terrorism in Mississippi and terrorism in Chicago and the fact that Mayor Richard Daley, who’s newly elected in that moment, you know, that he issues a condemnation of the lynching of Emmett Till but refuses to actually respond to Black demands in Chicago for the police department to actually keep Black people safe.

JS: At the time of the 1919 race riot, as you document in the book, this started when a group of young Black men — kids — were in a part of Lake Michigan that was unofficially the Black section, and they had gone out on a raft and the tide starts to kind of sweep them southward toward the white area of the beach and a white man starts pelting their boat with rocks and stones. They lose control of the raft. One of the young men goes under and dies. No one responds to go and get him. His friends come ashore and they approach a Black Chicago police officer and try to identify this man as being the culprit who was pummeling them with these rocks and stones and then a white officer intervenes and then that man is let go. But that sparked what would become known as the race riots of 1919. So, Simon, pick it up from there.

SB: Chicago in some ways, already a bit of a tinderbox. People were pretty clear in the aftermath of these riots that ultimately killed 38 people, people were pretty clear that the reason why it all started was really this white police officer named Daniel Callahan. It was his refusal to allow an arrest of a white murderer that really set everything off. You know so over the coming days, the city essentially descends into what people call a race riot but was essentially white marauders going through mostly the Black parts of the Black South Side, white mobs terrorizing and killing Black people and then Black people taking up arms to respond to this terrorism.

JS: So layout sort of what happens throughout the ‘20s and into the early ‘30s regarding Chicago police and the growing Black population of the city.

SB: This is a period of time in which the Republican machine and the Democratic machine are really vying for control of the city and it’s during this moment, by the end of the 1920s, that the Democratic political machine that we, you know, has a stranglehold on Chicago, really emerges from the fray as being the political machine that’s going to control the city’s future. When that political machine coheres and asserts its dominance, it’s really disinterested and actually actively hostile to Black people because Black voters had traditionally been voting Republican. And so, at that founding moment of this powerful machine, it’s organized really with no interest in responding at all to Black grievances or Black needs or anything like that. And that manifests in the police department because the political machine really has extraordinary amounts of control over the police. Democratic politicians, you know, essentially appoint their friends and neighbors and family members to positions on the police force. You know, you get people that have essentially no qualifications for the job other than just knowing the right people. The Democratic machine totally distorts and twists the demographics of the police force and how the police actually operate to the advantage of white neighborhoods and the disadvantage of Black ones. And this is a story that continues to unfold and manifest overtime in the coming decades. And part, also, of what the Democratic machine is doing during that moment is asserting “law and order” over, again, people who are deemed to be politically radical. That manifests most strikingly in the ways that it treats and responds to Black communist organizers on the south side.

In the emergent, early years of the Great Depression, the Communist Party is extraordinarily active on Chicago’s South Side and it’s really, really active in terms of battling austerity measures that the city is putting in place. Where this takes shape most clearly is in anti-eviction organizing. It’s a moment in which the police power is asserting itself to control Black radical organizing, but it’s also a moment time in which there’s some pretty astute and important resistance to the assertion of that authority.

JS: By the mid ‘6’s, you write that, “the Chicago police department was supported politically by members of both major parties, was flush with cash and possessed extraordinary power and autonomy.” How did the Chicago police department ultimately gain and grow its political power, which endures to this day, starting in the mid-60s?

SB: There’s all of this momentum in the 1960s to really lobby for increasing police power. So the police department in most of the 1960s is overseen by a guy named Orlando Wilson. And Wilson is, you know, one of the most esteemed criminal justice minds when he’s hired as the superintendent of the CPD. What Wilson does is he modernizes and professionalizes the department, but he also makes pretty explicit the ways in which the police are going to be instruments of racial control. There’s a really striking document that I found in his papers, which are housed at Berkeley, where he makes a very explicit argument for an increased budgetary allotment for the police department so that they can hire more people based solely and explicitly upon the fact that Chicago is getting blacker. So essentially, you know, they use predictive modeling of population growth to say: Look, Chicago is going to get X percentage more young Black people coming into the city for the remainder of the 1960s and so we need an equivalent budgetary increase to hire more police officers.

By that point in time, in the 1960s, the police department, generally speaking, is an institution whose attentions are focused overwhelmingly on controlling Black people and Black spaces. And by that point in time, white people just sort of assume that that is the legitimate reason for the police to exist. And it’s during that moment in time where police repression and police attentions are focusing increasingly and overwhelmingly on Black parts of the city. And so I don’t think it’s a coincidence that that is when, you know, the budgetary allotments begin to explode because, you know, that’s seen as a legitimate police function.

JS: In the midst of this scene that you’re describing, you have the emergence of the Black Panther Party in Chicago. Talk about their efforts to curb violence in their community, but also to confront the Chicago Police Department and it ultimately culminates with the assassination of Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in December of ‘69. But talk about the rise of the Black Panthers and the response of the Chicago police and power structure during the ‘60s.

SB: What the Panthers were really concerned about was curbing structural violence, you know, through the implementation of things like a free breakfast for children program in Chicago, free community health clinic for people whose medical needs were not being met, free programs to bus family members to visit incarcerated loved ones. I mean these are all programs that the Panthers in Chicago put into effect with pretty remarkable success. And they were also really concerned with building cross-racial alliances and solidarities with other organizations. This included working with white organizations, with Puerto Rican organizations, to really try to identify common points of structural oppression and violence and try to figure out ways to mitigate them.

When the Panthers are organizing alongside comrades from other organizations, in 1969 particularly, the level of state repression that is visited upon these efforts is overwhelming. I mean the assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark is the culmination of really a years-long violent campaign that the Chicago police department, with the assistance of the FBI, waged against the Panthers. The Panthers’ headquarters are frequently raided; supplies that they have acquired to feed kids in the free breakfast for children program are burned by the police. Fred Hampton was widely identified as one of the most promising political organizers not just in Chicago but in the country.

Fred Hampton: What makes them made about it is that they have Black people and white poor people and red poor people and Puerto Rican poor people, Latin American poor people — poor people of all descents — they have been caught up in the movements based on racism when the Black Panther Party stood up and said we don’t care what anybody says, we don’t think you fight fire with fire best; we think you fight fire with water best. We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight it with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with Black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism.

SB: You know and he’s only 21 years old when he’s assassinated. The political components of the tragedy really are couched in the fact that the things that he was able to do were really seeing some significant successes in the city. And the Panthers, in a lot of ways, are gutted by the assassination of Fred Hampton. So in the wake of his assassination, there are dozens of organizations that are founded across the city, you know, inspired by his memory to really try to confront police brutality as it exists primarily in Black and brown communities.

And the Panthers continue to be part of those efforts and I think the most important initiative that came out of that was, in the early ‘70s, what’s left of the Black Panther Party in Chicago organizes a citywide coalition to fight for community control of the police. What community control of the police looked like has a whole variety of different components. Part of it was exactly what it sounds like in terms of not necessarily abolishing the police, but radically reimagining the police, decentralizing the police and essentially neighborhoods having control over what policing looked liked within their particular neighborhoods. But I think that the really important component to what community control looked like in the eyes of that coalition was what we would today identify as defunding the police. At that point in time, the Chicago police department’s budget had grown to over $300 million a year — it’s now $1.7 billion a year — so when they looked at that $300 million budget line for the Chicago police, part of what they were calling for with community control was to take a significant portion of that investment in the police and putting it into other things. Putting it into schools, putting it into job trainings, putting it into community health, and so on and so forth.

JS: From all the scholarship that you’ve done, deeply looking at the history of the Chicago police, primarily up to 1970, what are the big takeaways from your research that you can share with people to understand the way that current police forces operate and their relationship with Black people, Black property, Black communities.

SB: I think that the first one that people should be thinking about is that the fundamental premise that the police exist and the police were brought into existence to, like, “protect us” or “keep us safe” — that’s a myth. You know, the police in Chicago and elsewhere were first put into place in order to protect capital and to protect racial hierarchies. And so when we think about the ways in which police forces currently operate, if we know that as the founding story of police, I think that the way that they operate makes a whole lot more sense. Because they’re essentially continuing to do now what they were founded to do, which is to protect capital and to protect racial hierarchy.

The second big takeaway that I would say is that when we think about the problems of policing and why policing doesn’t work — at least doesn’t work how people like to think it does — when we look at how Black communities like Chicago’s experience policing, it’s a two-sided story. So on the one hand, it’s a story of being overpoliced, so of being subject to, you know, constant harassment, constant surveillance, constant violence, including torture. All of that happens, while at the same time, Black communities do not actually experience much in the way of supposed public safety, you know. So when we think about, you know, communities that are the most subject to intercommunal violence, you know, the communities that are the least safe, they’re also the communities that are also the most overpoliced. And so it raises the question of what’s the point? People like Trump and others enjoy looking at Chicago’s gun violence and saying, “Well, look at that gun violence. This is why we need police.”

DJT: Chicago’s an example. It’s, like, worse than Afghanistan. It’s worse than — I shouldn’t say it because they’re working with us — Honduras, Guatemala.

SB: But actually when we look at Chicago’s gun violence and the long history of it, the fact that the Chicago Police Department almost never is able to arrest people who commit homicides. I mean the clearance rate for homicides in Chicago is below 20 percent. Really what the story is is that policing doesn’t work. If this gun violence is so relentless and so untethered to actual police presences, it’s actually a total refutation of the idea that policing works.

You know I think it’s important to understand that we are part of a long lineage of people who have struggled with and rejected the legitimacy of police power as it exists and as it is visited upon communities of color in the United States. That people who are out on the streets right now calling for defunding and abolition, or people who are contributing, you know, financially to those causes and things like that, it’s part of a tradition of protest against police violence that, you know, has been going on for longer than any of us have been alive.

JS: Simon Balto, thank you so much for being with us here on Intercepted.

SB: Thanks so much, Jeremy. It’s been a pleasure.

JS: Simon Balto is author of the new book “Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power.” It is published by the University of North Carolina Press. He is also an assistant professor of history and African American studies at the University of Iowa. You can find him on Twitter @SimonBalto.

[Music interlude]

JS: And that does it for this week’s show. You can follow us on Twitter @intercepted and on Instagram @InterceptedPodcast. Intercepted is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our lead producer is Jack D’Isidoro. Our producer is Laura Flynn. Elise Swain is our associate producer and graphic designer. Betsy Reed is editor in chief of The Intercept.

I want to offer a very heartfelt goodbye and a deep debt of gratitude is owed to our managing editor, Charlotte Greensit who is moving on to join the New York Times. Charlotte has always been one of the biggest promoters and supporters of this program and we wish her all the best as she starts a new, exciting adventure.

Rick Kwan mixed the show. Transcription for this program is done by Lucy Kroening. Our music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky. Until next week, I’m Jeremy Scahill.


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