In July 1919, an explosive race riot forever changed Chicago. For
years, black southerners had been leaving the South as part of the
Great Migration. Their arrival in Chicago drew the ire and scorn of
many local whites, including members of the city's political
leadership and police department, who generally sympathized with
white Chicagoans and viewed black migrants as a problem population.
During Chicago's Red Summer riot, patterns of extraordinary
brutality, negligence, and discriminatory policing emerged to
shocking effect. Those patterns shifted in subsequent decades, but
the overall realities of a racially discriminatory police system
persisted.
In this history of Chicago from 1919 to the rise and fall of Black
Power in the 1960s and 1970s, Simon Balto narrates the evolution of
racially repressive policing in black neighborhoods as well as how
black citizen-activists challenged that repression. Balto
demonstrates that punitive practices by and inadequate protection
from the police were central to black Chicagoans' lives long before
the late-century "wars" on crime and drugs. By exploring the deeper
origins of this toxic system, Balto reveals how modern mass
incarceration, built upon racialized police practices, emerged as a
fully formed machine of profoundly antiblack subjugation.