Darktown: Newspaper Coverage of Atlanta’s First Black Police, 1930–1960

Abstract

When the city of Atlanta hired its first Black police officers in 1948, the milestone was covered by the city’s Black newspaper, the Atlanta Daily World, and by the city’s mainstream newspapers, the morning Atlanta Constitution and the afternoon Atlanta Journal, but in starkly different ways.¹ This study explores what each newspaper omitted and included, and what each emphasized or otherwise deemed important, an examination that also seeks to draw attention to the many roles of the Black press beyond reporting the news. Special attention is given to the strategies and tactics used to argue for and against the Black patrols. Finally, these first Black hires and the newspaper coverage of the integration of Atlanta police are placed into historical context, one that juxtaposes shame and pride, degradation and achievement, fealty to Jim Crow and progress with respect to civil rights.

The author would like to thank research assistant Sascha Stryker, copyeditor Diane Land, readers Hisayo Carroll and Sarah O’Carroll, and the anonymous manuscript reviewers for American Journalism.

Notes

1 Patrick S. Washburn, The African American Newspaper (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 174.

2 The Atlanta Race Riot of 1906 did much to push Black businesses out of downtown to Auburn Avenue, “the hotbed of Negro activity,” according to L. D. Milton, who worked in one of the 121 businesses on Auburn in 1930, a bank catering to Black patrons. C. C. Hart, a plumber, told historians Clifford M. Kuhn, Harlon E. Joye, and E. Bernard West, “You could get anything you wanted on Auburn Avenue. . . . we owned Auburn Avenue.” C.C. Hart quoted in Clifford Kuhn, Living Atlanta: An Oral History of the City, 1914-1948 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 95.

3 Unlike many other cities in the South, Atlanta did not put Blacks in policing roles during Reconstruction, making the 1948 patrols truly the city’s first. W. Marvin Dulaney, Black Police in America (Bloomington, IND: Indiana University Press, 1996), 38.

4 Thomas Mullen, “Black in Blue: Atlanta’s First African American Police Officers Were Vanguards of the Civil Rights Movement,” Atlanta Magazine, September 2016, http://atlantamagazine.com/great-reads/black-blue-atlantas-first-african-american-police-officers-vanguards-civil-rights-movement/.

5 Sam Heys, “Atlanta’s Finest Cross the Color Line. First Black Cops Faced Uphill Battle,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 21, 1985. The afternoon Atlanta Journal and the morning Atlanta Constitution began sharing the same staff in 1982. Both had been owned since 1950 by Cox Enterprises, which merged them into a single newspaper in November 2001.

6 Washburn, The African American Newspaper, 174. The World first published on August 5, 1928, a four-page edition.

7 Stephen G. N. Tuck, Beyond Atlanta: The Struggle for Racial Equality in Georgia, 1940-1980 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 86. Tuck’s history does not include the campaign to integrate Atlanta police.

8 For more on Scott’s assassination and the subsequent failed police investigation, see Thomas Aiello, The Grapevine of the Black South: The Scott Newspaper Syndicate in the Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2018). Aiello devotes a chapter to the unsolved murder, which the Atlanta Negro Chamber of Commerce cited in arguing for the city’s need for Black police in Black neighborhoods (67).

9 Herman Hancock, “Eight Negroes Elected to Posts in City Police Department,” Atlanta Constitution, February 2, 1948.

10 Maria E. Odum-Hinmon, “How the Atlanta Daily World Covered the Struggle for African American Rights from 1945 to 1985,” PhD diss. (University of Maryland, 2005), 123. Lyons remembered decades later having “grown up at the World.”

11 Heys, “Atlanta’s Finest Cross the Color Line.” Jenkins told historian Ronald H. Bayor that White police “didn’t want to spend a lot of time” in Black neighborhoods, and that when they did, “they had no enthusiasm for what they were doing.” Ronald H. Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 2000), 174.

12 Black leaders began asking the city to appoint Black police as early as 1867. This study focuses on the most intense phase of that campaign’s long life in the thirties and forties.

13 Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 19.

14 Key told King that the city was unprepared for such a “radical step," according to the Constitution’s coverage. Frederick Allen, “The Police Department Legacy,” Atlanta Constitution, November 17, 1979.

15 “White Church Women Ask for Negro Police: Church Women Ask Race Police for Negro Areas Say They are Concerned Over Homicide Rate,” Atlanta Daily World, October 22, 1943. Joining nine denominations, the Atlanta Council of Church Women recommended “the employment of Negro policemen for the Negro sections of Atlanta.”

16 “Savannah Gets 12 Negro Police Officers: Mayor John Kennedy Fulfils His Pledge,” Atlanta Daily World, May 3, 1947. Twelve police and six municipal workers were sworn in at an official ceremony at City Hall.

17 “2 Southern States Fail to Hire Negro Policemen,” Atlanta Daily World, May 26, 1948; George Hatcher, “Employment of Negro Police Is Spreading in Region,” New York Times, July 13, 1947. The term “integration” admittedly is problematic. For the sake of simplicity, in this article it refers to a city or police department hiring its first Black patrol officers.

18 “54 Towns in South Hire 279 Negro Officers: Rise Of 43 In 8 Cities in Year Indicates Success,” Atlanta Daily World, Nov. 18, 1948. Charlotte, N.C., and Raleigh, N.C., had two Black female officers each, while Lexington, KY, reported one.

19 George Hatcher, “Employment of Negro Police Is Spreading in Region,” New York Times, July 13, 1947.

20 C. A. McMahan, The People of Atlanta: A Demographic Study of Georgia’s Capital City (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1950), 4.

21 Via ProQuest, all issues for the period studied were available for the World and the Constitution. The Journal, however, was only available for the years 1950-1960.

22 Odum-Hinmon, “How the Atlanta Daily World Covered the Struggle,” 5.

23 Washburn, The African American Newspaper, 174.

24 Aiello, The Grapevine of the Black South, 35, 191.

25 Washburn, The African American Newspaper, 200.

26 Odum-Hinmon, “How the Atlanta Daily World Covered the Struggle.”

27 Two studies of municipal police departments’ integration should also be mentioned: Margaret Keeton Williams, “Segregating the Police: Negotiating Equality in Postwar Memphis, Tennessee,” PhD diss. (University of North Carolina Greensboro, 2016); Benjamin Israel, “Putting Black in Blue: The Struggle to Put Uniformed African American Officers on the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department,” M. A. thesis, (University of Missouri, 1988). Neither looks at newspaper coverage per se, but both rely on newspaper accounts as primary sources.

28 Alton Hornsby, Jr., “Georgia,” in The Black Press in the South, 1865-1979, ed. Henry Lewis Suggs (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983).

29 During the century from Reconstruction to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., only Mississippi lynched more Blacks than did Georgia, 581 to 552. Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent, 34.

30 Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta, 174-182. Several scholars have contributed to the growing body of scholarship on race relations and activism in Atlanta and in Georgia. In addition to Bayor, Brown-Nagin, Odum-Hinnon, Tuck, and Washburn already referenced, these historians and researchers include David Harmon, Beneath the Image of the Civil Rights Movement and Race Relations (New York: Routledge, 1996); Herman “Skip” Mason, Jr., Politics, Civil Rights, and Law in Black Atlanta, 1870-1970 (Arcadia Publishing, 2000); Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Penguin/Random House, 2007). This history builds on their important research. Also important is Harold H. Martin’s biography of Hartsfield, William Berry Hartsfield: Mayor of Atlanta (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2010).

31 Dulaney cites, among others, Robert Wintersmith, Police and the Black Community (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Co., 1974); Homer Hawkins and Richard Thomas, “White Policing of Black Populations: A History of Race and Social Control in America,” in Ellis Cashmore and Eugene McLaughlin, eds., Out of Order? Policing Black People (New York: Routledge, 1991); H. M. Henry, The Police Control of the Slave in South Carolina (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968); Marie Fry, Night Riders in Black Folk History (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1975); Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 80-82, 98-106.

32 James I. Alexander, Blue Coats, Black Skins: The Black Experience in the New York City Police Department Since 1891 (Hicksville, N.Y.: Exposition Press, 1978); Homer F. Broome, LAPD’s Black History, 1886-1976 (Los Angeles, 1976); James S. Griffin, “Blacks in the St. Paul Police Department: An Eighty-Year Survey,” Minnesota History 45, no.3 (Fall 1975): 255-265: James N. Reaves, Black Cops (Philadelphia: Quantum Leap Publishers, 1991); Dennis C. Rousey, “Black Policemen in New Orleans During Reconstruction,” The Historian 49, no.2 (February 1987): 233-243; Rousey, “Yellow Fever and Black Policemen in Memphis: A Post-Reconstruction Anomaly,” Journal of Southern History 51, no.3 (August 1985): 357-374. May Walker, The History of Black Police Officers in the Houston Police Department (Dallas: Taylor Publishing Co., 1988); Eugene J. Watts, “Black and Blue: Afro-American Police Officers in Twentieth Century St. Louis,” Journal of Urban History 7, no.2 (February 1981): 131-168.

33 “Pa. Leads States in Number of Negro Cops,” Atlanta Daily World, September 19, 1932, citing numbers compiled by the Bureau of the Census.

34 Dulaney, Black Police in America, 30.

35 Dulaney, Black Police in America, 41. Dulaney’s account of the integration of Atlanta police, found on pages 41-44, provides a good summary of the key events described and discussed in this study.

36 “Miami Adds Race Policeman to Forces,” Atlanta Daily World, Jan. 13, 1937.

37 “Crime Survey Shows Need of Colored Police: Would Cut the Homicide Rate Is Belief,” Atlanta Daily World, March 15, 1937.

38 “Crime Survey Shows Need of Colored Police.”

39 “Crime Survey Shows Need of Colored Police.”

40 “Crime Survey Shows Need of Colored Police.”

41 “Pleas for Negro Police Heard Here Wednesday: Committee, Hears Testimony For, Against Police Hearings Punctuated by Frequent Boos as Speakers Testify,” Atlanta Daily World, November 27, 1947. Scott cited the alarming high homicide rate among Atlanta’s Black population and argued that Black police would be more familiar to Black problems.

42 Alan Sverdlik, “Atlanta Daily World,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, July 16, 2020, https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/atlanta-daily-world.

43 United States Congressional Set, 1947, US Government Printing Office, https://www.google.com/books/edition/United_States_Congressional_Serial_Set/EwQ7AQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0.

44 For more on the Scott Newspaper Syndicate, see Aiello, The Grapevine of the Black South. At its heyday, more than 240 papers were associated with the Syndicate, making it one of the biggest organs of the Black press during the period leading up to the civil rights era.

45 Scott’s close partnership with King, Sr., is even more noteworthy considering the “consistent critics” that Scott and the World would prove to be of his son, Martin Luther King, Jr., in the sixties. Roberts and Klibanoff, The Race Beat, 318.

46 “Colored Policemen Cited by Leaders as Sure Means of Reducing Crime,” Atlanta Daily World, August 1, 1937.

47 “Interracialists Ponder Racial Problems, Needs: Education, Health Police Questions Up for Study,” Atlanta Daily World, October 27, 1945.

48 “Interracial Group Discusses Negro Police for City,” Atlanta Daily World, November 3, 1943. This argument was repeated. “The Chances Are 19 To 1 That You’ll Be Killed,” Atlanta Daily World, November 7, 1943.

49 “Scott Advocates Execution in Unwarranted Slayings: Says Colored Police Would Reduce Homicides,” Atlanta Daily World, July 12, 1941.

50 “Scott Advocates Execution in Unwarranted Slayings: Says Colored Police Would Reduce Homicides,” Atlanta Daily World, July 12, 1941.

51 Chivers’s biographical facts come from Charles V. Willie, “Walter R. Chivers – An Advocate of Situation Sociology,” Phylon 43, no. 3 (1982): 242-248.

52 “Walter Chivers Says: Atlanta Needs Negro Police,” Atlanta Daily World, September 7, 1941.

53 “Atlanta Needs Negro Police,” Atlanta Daily World.

54 “Walter Chivers Says: Atlanta Needs Negro Police,” Atlanta Daily World, September 14, 1941. Chivers seemingly was echoing Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, who, in his seminal study of race in America, An American Dilemma (New York: Harper Brothers, 1944), wrote that the police officer is a symbol of social order to the society’s dominant groups and as such are also symbols of the inequities of that social order from the point of view of racial minorities. The police officer, therefore, could be seen to stand for white supremacy and the “whole set of social customs associated with this concept” (535).

55 “Walter Chivers Says: Atlanta Needs Negro Police,” Atlanta Daily World, September 14, 1941.

56 “Walter Chivers Says: Atlanta Needs Negro Police,” Atlanta Daily World, September 21, 1941. For examples of other voices using listings of southern cities already seeing the benefits of Black police, see “The Question Of Negro Police,” Atlanta Daily World, October 30, 1945, in which Dr. Guy Johnson, director of the Southern Regional Council, pointed to thirty Southern cities; and “Negro Police For Atlanta Discussed,” Atlanta Daily World, July 17, 1947, reporting on a meeting with the mayor by President B. E. Mays of Morehouse College, Scott, and King, to make the argument. Mays cited forty-four Southern cities.

57 “The Reasons Why,” Atlanta Daily World, March 2, 1943.

58 There is conflicting evidence as to whether, in fact, Black patrols affected homicide rates, as Scott claimed they would, and as Scott later claimed they did. In 1950, for example, Scott praised Auburn Avenue’s Black officers for “capturing blacks who murder other blacks,” something the White police never made an effort to do, he said. Dulaney, Black Police in America, 141, citing the Jan. 6, 1950 issue of the Atlanta Daily World. According to the Atlanta Police Department’s own records, the rate for Black-on-Black homicide remained unchanged for the period 1948-1953, or the five years after the first Black patrols. Atlanta Police Department, Annual Reports, 1946-1953.

59 See, for example, “54 Towns in South Hire 279 Negro Officers: Rise of 43 in 8 Cities in Year Indicates Success,” Atlanta Daily World, November 18, 1948. Louisville, Knoxville, and Tampa each had Black police beginning in the thirties.

60 See, for example, “Negro Police Officers Sought for Columbia: Citizens Committee Asks Race Officers for Negro Areas,” Atlanta Daily World, July 8, 1943; and “Lighthouse Poll Shows That Leaders Favor Colored Officers,” Atlanta Daily World, July 8, 1943.

61 “Nashville Mayor, Police Commissioner Proud of Negro Police on Force,” Atlanta Daily World, July 27, 1948. “During the past four weeks, the Memphis World has carried on a campaign for police officers in Memphis. This campaign has been intensified in the wake of police brutality,” the Atlanta Daily World reported. See also “Memphis Gets Negro Police,” Atlanta Daily World, October 28, 1948.

62 “‘Blackout’ Assault Leads to Conclusion That Negro Police Are Needed Here,” Atlanta Daily World, December 14, 1943.

63 See “Mayor of Darktown Returns in Spirit; Ghost is Ill Omen,” Atlanta Constitution, April 25, 1948. In an article meant to to be funny published in the same month that Atlanta’s first Black policemen began their jobs, this article recalls some of the lore of Lower Butler Street, presenting it as part of a letter from the paper's police reporter. A Darktown resident referred to as Beaverslide is quoted at length in an affected vernacular or dialect. Another of these “humor” pieces: Keeler McCartney, “Solemnity Clothes ‘Darktown Mayor’s’ Shaky Lean-To Shop,” Atlanta Constitution, January 11, 1948.

64 “Darktown Craze for ‘Auto Poker’ Lands 4 In Jail,” Atlanta Constitution, April 25, 1916.

65 William Fowlkes Jr., “Boykin, Hornsby Quiet on Negro Police Suggestion: Both Eager to See Rising Crime Wave Stopped,” Atlanta Daily World, November 20, 1942.

66 See Brian Carroll, When to Stop the Cheering? The Black Press, the Black Community, and the Integration of Professional Baseball (New York: Routledge, 2007), 133-4.

67 “Boykin, Hornsby Quiet on Negro Police Suggestion.”

68 “Boykin, Hornsby Quiet on Negro Police Suggestion.”

69 Herman Hancock, “Herbert Jenkins Elected Chief of Atlanta Police,” Atlanta Constitution, 4 February 1947. Hornsby died suddenly. Jenkins’s hire was approved by the City Council twelve votes to five.

70 “Hearings On Police Suit Wednesday,” Atlanta Daily World, January 6, 1948.

71 “Sue to Block Race Police in Atlanta,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 20, 1947; “Hearings On Police Suit Wednesday,” Atlanta Daily World; C. Lamar Weaver, “Barriers Against Negro Firemen Removed: Case Against Hiring Negro Police Voided Judge Almand Says ‘None of Our Business,’” Atlanta Daily World, January 28, 1948.

72 “Negro Police Issue Moves Into Courts; Hearing Is Scheduled,” Atlanta Constitution, December 11, 1947.

73 “Courthouse Digest,” Atlanta Constitution, January 28, 1948; “Chief’s Orders Not ‘Limited,’” Atlanta Constitution, April 15, 1948.

74 “Barriers Against Negro Firemen Removed,” Atlanta Daily World, January 28, 1948; “None of Their Business,” Atlanta Daily World, January 29, 1948; “High Court Rules Only On Police Chief's Discretion,” Atlanta Daily World, April 16, 1948. The Court ruled that the chief’s lawful performance of his duties was not a matter for judicial review.

75 “Grand Jury Endorses Atlanta Police Plan,” Cleveland Call and Post, January 10, 1948.

76 Marion E. Jackson, “Sentiment Mounts for Negro Police,” Atlanta Daily World, July 23, 1947.

77 Marion E. Jackson, “Need for Negro Police Seen in Police Court Offenders,” Atlanta Daily World, July 24, 1947.

78 “No More Surveys Needed,” Atlanta Daily World, May 14, 1947; Ozeil F. Woolcock, “American Veterans Group Back Negro Police Drive,” Atlanta Daily World, July 11, 1947; William G. Anderson, “American Legion Post Seeks Negro Policemen,” Atlanta Daily World, August 21, 1947; “Atlanta Bar Group Favors Race Police,” Atlanta Daily World, October 7, 1947.

79 “Hearing on Negro Police Slated Tonight: Citizens and Organizations To Testify,” Atlanta Daily World, November 26, 1947. The report stated that “Atlanta’s daily newspapers have voiced themselves as 100 per cent in favor of the move, and have given editorial and columnar support of the idea.”

80 C. Lamar Weaver, “Council, Hartsfield Give Okay to Negro Police: Huie Fights for Plan To Approve Negro Policemen,” Atlanta Daily World, December 2, 1947.

81 Weaver, “Council, Hartsfield Give Okay to Negro Police.

82 “The Long Awaited Dream Comes True,” Atlanta Daily World, December 3, 1947. 

83 Carroll, When to Stop the Cheering?, 159-60.

84 “The Long Awaited Dream Comes True.” 

85 “Toward New Horizons,” Atlanta Daily World, February 27, 1948.

86 “Toward New Horizons,” Atlanta Daily World, February 27, 1948.

87 “Get Going,” Atlanta Daily World, April 4, 1948. 

88 C. Lamar Weaver, “Throngs Thrilled by New Atlanta Officers,” Atlanta Daily World, April 4, 1948.

89 W. M. Jones, “Letters to the Editor,” Atlanta Daily World, April 9, 1948.

90 “Negro Police Start Patrol Duty In Negro Areas of City Saturday,” Atlanta Constitution, April 1, 1948.

91 “Let’s Prove Our Good Will,” Atlanta Constitution, April 5, 1948. 

92 “Negro Policemen Will Be Honored,” Atlanta Constitution, April 30, 1948.

93 “First Negro Police to be Honored Tonight at Mt. Calvary Church,” Atlanta Daily World, April 30, 1948; C. Lamar Weaver, “New Police Welcomed to Active Duty: Throng Greets New Officers at Mt. Calvary,” Atlanta Daily World, May 2, 1948.

94 "New Police Welcomed to Active Duty: Throng Greets New Officers at Mt. Calvary," Atlanta Daily World, May 2, 1948.

95 “A Significant Occasion,” Atlanta Daily World, May 2, 1948. The editorial noted the “over-flow crowd of several thousand citizens,” declaring it “a great milestone in the progress of our race and city.”

96 C. L. Weaver, “Police No Longer Novelty; Bear Down on Disorders,” Atlanta Daily World, April 11, 1948.

97 “Welcome Baseball!!!,” Atlanta Daily World, May 2, 1948.

98 “Welcome Baseball!!!”

99 “The Interracial Commission,” Atlanta Daily World, April 22, 1945; “The Mounting Homicides,” Atlanta Daily World, September 26, 1945.

100 For a discussion of status congruency and incongruency, see Thomas E. Lasswell, Class and Stratum (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1965), 92-95.

101 “That Unruly Prisoner,” Atlanta Daily World, September 4, 1948.

102 “It was all American; Excerpts from Ralph McGill’s 1963 column,” Atlanta Constitution, May 10, 2018, https://www.ajc.com/lifestyles/holiday/was-all-american-excerpts-from-ralph-mcgill-1963-column/Djg1mEPbnfprYEBBL3CAdP/.

103 Ralph McGill, “One Word More,” Atlanta Constitution, June 4, 1942. History shows McGill’s view to be woefully inadequate. The major histories of race relations in Atlanta are unanimous in citing police harassment and brutality toward the city’s Black residents to be exceptional and persistent. See, for example, Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent, 35; Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta, 174.

104 Harold Martin, Ralph McGill, Reporter (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1973), 55. In Martin’s view, McGill’s best writing came in the late fifties and early sixties, after the push for Black police and, significantly, after his column began syndicating nationally in 1957.

105 Roberts and Klibanoff, The Race Beat, 23.

106 Herman Talmadge emerged victor in the “three governors controversy” of 1946-1947. In the wake of governor-elect Eugene Talmadge’s death, his supporters proposed allowing the Georgia Assembly to elect Talmadge’s son Herman Talmadge. The newly elected lieutenant governor, Melvin E. Thompson, claimed the office of governor instead, but the outgoing governor, Ellis Arnall, refused to leave office. The Georgia Supreme Court settled the controversy, ruling in favor of Henry Talmadge. See Charles S. Bullock, III, Scott E. Buchanan, and Ronald Keith Gaddie, The Three Governors Controversy: Skullduggery, Machinations, and the Decline of Georgia’s Progressive Politics (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2015).

107 Ralph McGill, “Cool Facts for a Hot Summer,” Atlanta Constitution, April 9, 1946.

108 “Common-Sense Law and Order,” Atlanta Constitution, May 7, 1947.

109 Ralph McGill, “Murder and The Crime Parade,” Atlanta Constitution, August 13, 1947.

110 “Murder and The Crime Parade.”

111 “Murder and The Crime Parade.”

112 W.E.B. DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995 edition), 194.

113 “Let’s Prove Our Good Will,” Atlanta Constitution, April 5, 1948, 6. 

114 Carroll, When to Stop the Cheering?, 94-98.

115 Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent, 37.

116 Peter M. Sheingold, “In Black and White: Sam Lacy’s Campaign to Integrate Baseball,” M.A. thesis, (Hampshire College, 1992), 53.

117 For a concise account of the Black press’s criticism of military segregation and the Pittsburgh Courier’s Double V campaign, see Washburn, The African American Newspaper, 143-178.

118 Gunnar Myrdal with Richard Sterner and Arnold Rose, The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1944), 61.

119 Lee Finkle, Forum for Protest: The Black Press During World War II (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975), 53.

120 From an exhaustive study of more than 2,000 murder cases in Georgia in the 1970s, it was found that Black defendants with white victims were sentenced to death twenty-two percent of the time while white defendants with Black victims received the death penalty three percent of the time. The disparity held true even when the study factored in thirty nonracial factors such as multiple murders, long criminal records, or strong eyewitness testimony. Cited in David Cole, No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System (New York: New Press, 1999), 133.

121 Tuck, Beyond Atlanta, 120.

122 Jones’s compelling articulation of why cities were burning, “How Can We Win,” June 1, 2020, is available at https://youtube.com/watch?v=sb9_qGOa9Go.

123 For an early study of the inequities facing Black police with respect to assignments, promotions, and treatment by their employers, see Dulaney, Black Police in America. Dulaney traces the history of Blacks in policing from the appointment of the first free men of color as slave patrollers in nineteenth-century New Orleans to the advent of black police chiefs in urban centers.

124 “Chief Jenkins Moves to Cut Down Homicides,” Atlanta Constitution, September 29, 1955.

125 “9 Negro Policemen Added Here,” Atlanta Constitution, September 11, 1957. By 1959, there were forty Black police on a force of 650, or 6.1 percent. By 1968, the number had risen to 130, or 13.4 percent, at a time when the city’s Black population represented forty-eight percent. Bayor, Race and the Shaping, 179-182.

126 Black police could arrest White residents beginning in 1962, or a year before Atlanta had its first Black firemen, who were segregated to Station 16. Bayor, Race and the Shaping, 179.

127 Conor Lee, “Atlanta’s First Black Police Officers,” History Atlanta, August 22, 2013, http://historyatlanta.com.

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Notes on contributors

Brian Carroll

Brian Carroll is a professor and chair of the Department of Communication at Berry College in Mount Berry, Georgia. He is the author of several books, including an examination of the Black press and baseball.