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Abstract
Police shootings and the Black Lives Matter campaign have shone a spotlight on how different the everyday experiences are of white Americans and Americans of color. While much attention has been paid to these seemingly daily occurrences, the historical forces that led to our current situation have been less discussed: Is the de facto segregation that exists in many Northern cities a result of the lack of forced integration of the type that took place in the South? And is the mass incarceration of and police brutality inflicted on black Americans a result of these same forces?
Speakers
Melissa Nobles is the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science at MIT. She is also a collaborator and advisory board member of Northeastern Law School’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice clinic. Her current research is focused on constructing a database of racial murders in the American South between 1930 and 1954. She is the author of two books: Shades of Citizenship: Race and Census in Modern Politics (2000) and The Politics of Official Apologies (2008), and related book chapters and articles.
Tracey Meares is the Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law at Yale Law School and the Director of the Justice Collaboratory. Before coming to Yale, she was the Max Pam Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice at the University of Chicago; she was the first African-American woman granted tenure at both institutions’ law schools. She’s worked extensively with the federal government, and and in December 2014 she was named to be a member of President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
Moderator: Seth Mnookin is the director of the Communications Forum and the associate director of the Graduate Program of Science Writing at MIT. His most recent book is The Panic Virus: The True Story of the Vaccine-Autism Controversy.
Summary
By Conor Gearin. Originally posted at web.mit.edu/comm-forum/forums/jim-crow.html
Communications Forum director Seth Mnookin began by asking SHASS Dean Melissa Nobles to describe her work on the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Clinic with Northeastern Law School.
Nobles said that the project began in 2007 with the goal of examining cold cases of racial violence from the Civil Rights Era of the 1950s and ’60s. However, after a conference, the group realized that there is a big gap in knowledge about the period just before the Civil Rights Era in the South, also known as the Jim Crow era. She explained that while the Jim Crow period is well studied in certain ways, the “coercive forces” that made that period so violent for black Americans is not well understood. A book by Stewart Tolnay, A Festival of Violence, on lynchings during Jim Crow, made the claim that violence against blacks declined after the 1930s due to the Great Migration of blacks out of the South to Northern cities. “But that’s an assertion, not an argument, because they don’t have the evidence to show that violence decreased,” said Nobles.
The Northeastern clinic’s findings challenge the easy narrative the nation has accepted about race in the U.S., in which the successes of the Civil Rights Movement and the election of Barack Obama resolved any lingering problems, Nobles said. “What we are finding is just a range of violence that none of us had anticipated,” she said. Oftentimes that violence is “connected to violation of Jim Crow norms,” which prescribed how blacks should interact with whites. Therefore, Nobles said, if “you didn’t take your hat off, you didn’t say sir” to a white person, a black person could face terrible violence. She told the story of Timothy Hood, a black World War II veteran who entered a bus in Birmingham, Alabama wearing his uniform. At the time, bus drivers were oftentimes armed. After moving the “Blacks Only” sign forward in the bus so that more blacks could have seats, he was shot to death by the driver following a brief altercation.
What concerns Nobles is that the legacy of Jim Crow shapes current interactions between blacks and whites. She brought up the killing of Trayvon Martin, a black teenager, by George Zimmerman, who she said “self-deputized himself” in the style of the Jim Crow bus drivers. What comes up in such interactions are issues of “threat perception, behaviors, control of space, discipline, what are you doing here, you don’t belong in this neighborhood,” she said. “Seemingly simple interactions which ought not result in death sentences are ending up that way. Those perceptions are deeply rooted in Jim Crow.”
Mnookin then asked Yale Law School’s Tracey Meares about how Northern perceptions of black criminality were becoming established as early as the late 19th century.
Meares said that her work is focused on how interpretations of constitutional law changed throughout different periods of race relations—during the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, then during the Civil Rights era, which she argued was “a second Reconstruction.” She wondered if we might now be on the verge of a third Reconstruction.
Meares said that her work is focused on how interpretations of constitutional law changed throughout different periods of race relations—during the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, then during the Civil Rights era, which she argued was “a second Reconstruction.” She wondered if we might now be on the verge of a third Reconstruction.
Meares said that a book by Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness, described how the collection of the race of people who committed crimes created a way for the government to track the criminality of each race. “What he shows, really interestingly, are the ways we have used statistics over time to construct a picture of black people as criminals,” said Meares. She explained that while initially criminal statistics were kept on different European immigrant ethnicities, during the Progressive Era of the early 20th century, crime statistics became only about blacks and whites. During this period, social support for European immigrants increased and they became integrated into society, “while African-Americans were left to work out their own salvation.” Continuing to collect racial crime statistics without the social support to go along with it, Northern cities then used the statistics about black crime to justify over-policing in black neighborhoods.
“This kind of policing becomes a warrant for itself,” said Meares.
Understanding the Violence of Jim Crow
Mnookin said that he had always thought of the Jim Crow South as a pretty well understood period. He asked Nobles if putting together a database on violence against blacks during that period has changed her understanding of it.
Nobles said that the historical narrative we are comfortable with sees lynching as mob violence but not as part of governance in the South, which in fact it was. “(Jim Crow) was certainly understood by the government to be important.” She named Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Texas and Florida as the main loci of violence against blacks. Even when whites would object to lynching in the South, “part of the argument against lynching wasn’t about human rights or the value of black people but that, ‘we are lawless,’” and objecting to that, Nobles said. None of these things are well understood in the U.S. generally, she said.
Every time the Restorative Justice clinic has sent its researchers out to study one particular cold case, “invariably we find another case,” Nobles said. Often families bury the stories of violence for years because “they don’t want the kids to have that burden. When we come, all of that stuff comes rushing out,” she said.” The project has taken on a certain urgency because the survivors of Jim Crow are dying of old age.
“Right now it’s a living history,” Nobles said. “In ten years, it’s going to be a history.”
Meares said that while part of how Nobles views Jim Crow resonates with her, from the legal perspective, things looked a bit different. During Jim Crow in the 1920s and ’30s, the U.S. Supreme Court began reviewing criminal cases from the South, such as the trial of the Scottsboro boys—nine black men, who were convicted by an all-white jury, of raping two white women. The court reversed the jury decision and ruled that due process required that a lawyer must be appointed to defend “poor illiterate Negroes.” While the language of the ruling was problematic, it was still a progressive ruling because it made explicit mention of race, and of a failure of due process for black defendants due to their race, Meares explained. The court also threw out a law in Alabama that excluded blacks from juries. Later Supreme Court due process rulings in the 1950s and ’60s, such as the exclusionary rule (which throws out evidence obtained by violating a defendant’s constitutional rights) did not make any mention of race.
“What’s happening is the court is defining the meaning of due process as against the lawlessness of the South, while mostly leaving the North alone,” Meares said of the Jim Crow era Supreme Court. Cases that later looked at violence in the North had their legal basis on decisions about what was happening in the South, she said.
Reckoning with the Legacy of Violence
Mnookin asked Nobles to describe the exoneration work involved in the Restorative Justice clinic.
Nobles said that in many cases of murders of blacks, there can be no criminal prosecution. For some families, it’s enough to have their story told and known. In certain cases, the clinic corrects a death certificate. For example, the certificate may say that the person died of gunshots, but it might not state the circumstances, such as that the gunshots came from a lynch mob. Nobles’ collaborator in the clinic worked to exonerate a black boy executed at age 14 in South Carolina who had to be set up on books to fit in the electric chair. Nobles said that some people are afraid to discuss past crimes because they retain the fear of racial violence. Many blacks did not leave the counties where their friends and family members were murdered.
“The perpetrator’s descendants and the victims descendants live in the same town,” Nobles said.
Mnookin observed that Northern cities are much more segregated than Southern cities. He asked the panelists why this is, wondering if it had to do with the reckoning with its past that the South went through during the Civil Rights era—something that the North might not have done yet.
Meares said that she was not sure that either the North or the South has truly had a reckoning. She recommended Jacob Lawrence’s Migration series—an exhibit most recently on display in New York’s Museum of Modern Art—to better understand the Jim Crow period and segregation. She said that in the South, Jim Crow’s exacting laws structured interactions in spaces where blacks and whites mingled. However, in the North, cities used redlining to segregate cities and to limit contact between blacks and whites. Meares said that the Black Lives Matter movement is, in a sense, the North reckoning with its past. Because blacks were forced into segregated neighborhoods in the North, that created the opportunity for aggressive policing of those neighborhoods. This explains why the Black Lives Matter movement is largely a Northern and urban phenomenon, Meares said.
The Roots of the Black Lives Matter Movement
Mnookin asked why the reckoning period has come now—whether it is because of social media and the proliferation of cameras on phones, or some other factor.
Nobles said that these things have been happening for a while, now people “are prepared to believe” because there is evidence. When someone kills someone else, one person is dead and that story is forever unknown. And when the perpetrator is the police, “they get the benefit of the doubt,” she said. However, while Nobles agreed that cell phone videos are an important part of the story, what the events in Ferguson, Mo., showed was that the killing of Michael Brown spoke to the constant negative interactions between blacks and the police. The revenue-generating nature of the Ferguson Police Department’s treatment of black residents revealed in the Department of Justice investigation further developed the picture.
“That is a complete negation of living in a free society,” Nobles said.
Therefore, the Black Lives Matter movement is a way of asking what the status of black citizenship is in the age of a black president, Nobles said.
Meares said that while social media is an important factor, there are a constellation of things that led to the current movement. One factor is the presidency of Barack Obama. Another is the way in which our expectations of what police can do for us. Before 2000, researchers claimed there was no evidence that putting more police on the streets can decrease crime. But around 2000, the book Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt argued that increased policing led to major drops in crime, she said. What this meant is that police executives could argue that invasive policing strategies like “stop and frisk” are actually helping black people. Crime control became self-justifying, Meares argued.
Meares said that on the President’s Task Force for 21st Century Policing, their emphasis was on “promoting public trust while also promoting public safety,” and on policing with procedural justice and legitimacy. She observed that research has shown that when people trust the law they are more law-abiding.
How to Make Policing More Just
Mnookin said that when two New York City police officers were killed, one thing that struck him was that the slogans “Black Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” were set up in opposition to each other, which he found “alarming though not surprising.” He asked Meares if there was a way that large urban police forces could become part of the solution and not think of themselves as being in an adversarial relationship with the communities they serve.
“If you are willing to work with people in the communities which you are providing public safety to enhance trust, that will be a strategy that works for you,” Meares said. Past police training has been all about how the public is a threat to the officer, leading them to define their safety narrowly. Law enforcement officers have told her they just want to get home to their family. Meares asks them, how about getting home to your family in an emotionally healthy way? She noted the high suicide rate among police officers relative to other professions. Trust-building strategies not only encourage the public to comply voluntarily, they also decrease the risk of harm to police officers and make the job less stressful, she argued.
Noting that the current conversation about race feels different than those he can remember, Mnookin asked the panelists if what’s happening today makes them more or less optimistic about race relations.
Nobles said that she is optimistic in a certain sense. She valued how the Black Lives Matter movement, led by outspoken women, has thrown out the Civil Rights era idea of black respectability—that “you had to prove that you were worthy of being citizens.” In the current movement, leaders say, “We are who we are, deal with me,” she said. Nobles finds the irreverence and bravery of the women in the Black Lives Matter movement encouraging.
Meares said that while she agrees with everything Nobles described, she is concerned as a lawyer that the Black Lives Matter movement lacks legal targets.
“If you look at the success of the Civil Rights Movement, or the latest successes of immigration rights and the like, almost every one of those had a legal target,” Meares said. “The fact that you might need a legal target in order to be successful is worrisome to me.” She said that in France, the court assumes a defendant to be guilty but treats convicted criminals with mercy. In the U.S., defendants are innocent until proven guilty, but those who are found convicted are not treated fairly at all. Meares said that the fundamental redistribution of wealth required to correct racial inequity has no simple legal target, which poses a problem to the movement.
Q & A
Mnookin opened up the floor to the audience. MIT associate dean of Student Support Services, Ayida Mthembu, told the panel that she believed the decision of the Civil Rights Movement to pick certain objectives was a lot more complicated than the story we’ve been told. She said that archives of correspondence between leaders showed disagreement over whether the movement should aim for plurality or for integration with whites. She wondered what would have happened if they had aimed for plurality, and if this would have allowed blacks to make sure society does not interfere with their identities.
Nobles agreed that the debate within black communities about strategizing has always been complicated, and that the panel’s discussion had “kind of collapsed” the complexity for the sake of time. She said that while we may look back and criticize the NAACP’s decisions about how to present black citizenship and say that your enemies shouldn’t set your terms, we have to recognize that you have to “deal with the hand you’re dealt.” We now live with a different political language, “and I’m embracing that,” Nobles said.
Arthur Berger, a research affiliate in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, asked what successes the Black Lives Matter movement can lead to, given that it does not have a legal target, and what strategies the panelists would recommend for its success.
Meares argued that getting better training for police, and for citizens in how to interact with police, can help prevent minor incidents in the future from escalating. “It can’t be that some cop stops you for some BS traffic stop and you’re dead,” she said.
Meares said that she used four factors to evaluate police interactions with black citizens: 1) Whether the citizen is treated with dignity and respect; 2) whether the decision that the police officer is making is based in fact and is fair; 3) whether the police officer gives the citizen a chance to tell her or his side of the story; and 4) is the police officer acting in a way that creates the expectation that he or she will treat the citizen benevolently in the future. She argued that you can train police on these four factors, even though it cannot be legislated. “You have to train your officers to be sensitive to implicit bias,” she said.
Mnookin asked if improving interactions could be as simple as buying body cameras for police. Meares said that when cops are wearing body cameras, there are many fewer complaints but that the research is very new. She wondered what will happen when body cameras become the new normal for policing. She said that on the President’s Task Force for 21st Century Policing, they had a lot to say about body cameras. Their usefulness is less about evidence of police wrongdoing and more about allowing law enforcement to see how the interactions go and then do training to improve, she said.
Comparative Media Studies/Writing associate professor Sasha Costanza-Chock asked the panelists what they thought of Campaign Zero, a set of policy proposals from activists associated with the movement which, he said, did involve reachable legal targets. He also asked how we escape the loop of “algorithmic policing,” the logic that only more police in black neighborhoods will reduce crime.
Meares said that Campaign Zero is new, and that the Black Lives Matter platform had been “interestingly devoid of legal targets.” Speaking as a lawyer, she said, some of their targets misunderstood how government works—such as demanding that the Attorney General’s office investigate every time a citizen is killed by police. Meares said that Campaign Zero was spearheaded by Brittany Packnett, another member of the President’s Task Force. Much of what the campaign addresses came from the Task Force, Meares said. As for the future of policing and using crime data to make decisions about where to put officers, she recommended reading an article by David Alan Sklansky, “The Persistent Pull of Police Professionalism.” She argued that while there will always be the next new thing in policing, the developments will not impact most of the 18,000 policing agencies in the country since only half have more than 50 officers and are not ready to adopt new technology. However, predictive policing developments matter in large cities like New York and Chicago, and it’s in such places that the Task Force’s recommendations can make policing smarter.
Jon Ivestor asked if Nobles could comment on her project’s reconciliation work for cold cases of Jim Crow violence.
Nobles said that for the vast majority of cases, reconciliation is a private matter—usually, finding out what happened to their loved ones. The part of reconciliation that is not well developed is what happens for the perpetrators’ families. She referenced a town in Texas that held a public discussion about what happened to a murdered black person during Jim Crow. The white and black members of the town came together, and the mayor apologized on behalf of the town, she said. These kinds of public discussions can go a long way.
Meares said that the second recommendation of the Task Force was that the police acknowledge past and present violations of civil rights. She told the story of the former police chief of Montgomery, Alabama, who failed to stop a white mob from firebombing a black church during the Civil Rights Movement. The chief met with Rep. John Lewis, a Civil Rights leader who was in Montgomery during the firebombing, and told him that the police had failed to protect Lewis. The chief gave Lewis his badge, saying that it is reserved for people who stand for rights like Lewis. Meares said that this action was “really moving”—it was unplanned and addressed a serious wrong from the past.
Kemi Oyewole, a PhD student in economics, questioned Meares’ dismissal of the Freakonomics finding about “broken windows” policing, referencing the large dataset that the economists had used.
Meares said that instead of just analyzing the data in hand, we have to ask questions about why we are collecting the data in the first place and what kinds of data we really need. She argued that we need to actually attempt to assess police legitimacy in the eyes of communities—yet this does not happen, because large surveys cost money. She said that “we need to start agitating to get this data.”
To end the forum, Mnookin thanked the audience for coming and directed them to the website of Nobles’ Civil Rights and Restorative Justice clinic, which has many resources.
