Policing After Slavery: Race, Crime, and Resistance in Atlanta

Open PDF in Browser: Jonathon J. Booth,* Policing After Slavery: Race, Crime, and Resistance in Atlanta

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This Article places the birth and growth of the Atlanta police in context by exploring the full scope of Atlanta’s criminal legal system during the four decades after the end of slavery. To do so, it analyzes the connections Atlantans made between race and crime, the adjudication and punishment of minor offenses, and the variety of Black protests against the criminal legal system. This Article is based, in part, on a variety of archival sources, including decades of arrest and prosecution data that, for the first time, allow for a quantitative assessment of the impact of the new system of policing on Atlanta’s residents.

This Article breaks new ground in four ways. First, it demonstrates that rather than simply maintaining the social relations of slavery, Atlanta’s police force responded to the challenges of freedom: it was designed to maintain White supremacy in an urban space in which residents, theoretically, had equal rights. Second, it shows that White citizens’ beliefs about the causes of crime and the connections between race and crime, which I call “lay criminology,” influenced policing strategies. Third, it adds a new layer to our understanding of the history of order-maintenance policing by showing that mass criminalization for minor offenses such as disorderly conduct began soon after emancipation. This type of policing caused a variety of harms to the city’s Black residents, forcing thousands each year to pay fines or labor for weeks on the chain gang. Fourth, it shows that the complaints of biased and brutal policing that animate contemporary police reform activism have been present for a century and a half. In the decades after emancipation, Atlanta’s Black residents, across class lines, protested the racist criminal legal system and police abuses, while envisioning a more equitable city where improved social conditions would reduce crime.

Introduction

Atlanta, Georgia, is currently embroiled in a years-long struggle over the construction of a massive police training facility.^[1] The facility is being built on forested land that once housed the Atlanta Prison Farm, where for several decades prisoners were forced to grow food and raise animals for the profit of the prison system.^[2] Opponents of the project, who call the facility “Cop City,” argue that it will further entrench the pattern of racist and brutal policing that has characterized law enforcement in Atlanta for decades. An occupation of the forest and widespread protests against the facility have led to domestic terrorism charges against dozens of protestors, the arrest of bail-fund organizers on felony fraud charges, and the death of one activist, who was shot fifty-seven times by the police.^[3]

In August 2023, Georgia’s Attorney General charged sixty-one anti-Cop City activists^[4] under the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute.^[5] The one‑hundred-page indictment alleges that the indicted activists conspired to prevent the police training center from being built—but fails to identify a specific illegal enterprise.^[6] The indictment characterizes the protestors as motivated by anarchist ideology and states that they seek to promote ideas such as “collectivism, mutualism‌/mutual aid, and social solidarity.”^[7] Among the alleged overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracy are camping in the forest,^[8] a transfer of $61.21 for “forest kitchen materials,”^[9] and one defendant signing his name as “ACAB.”^[10] Many of the indicted activists are not accused of participating in any illegal activity other than their involvement in the broader alleged conspiracy. As part of its lengthy analysis of the protestors’ ideology, the indictment states, “[o]ne of the most common false narratives promoted by Defend the Atlanta Forest is that of police aggression.”^[11]

This Article shows that after the destruction wrought by the Civil War, Atlanta’s White powerbrokers hoped to transform their city into a regional leader. They believed that economic growth required a modern police force to control the crime and disorder they associated with the city’s burgeoning Black population. The racism and brutality at the heart of contemporary protestors’ critiques of the Atlanta Police Department, I argue, have been features of policing in the city since the department’s creation 150 years ago in 1874.^[12] Once the department was created, Atlanta’s police used their discretion to arrest Black Atlantans disproportionately for vague, petty offenses. Obtaining convictions for those petty offenses was easy because the city’s Recorder’s Court, where minor offenders were tried, lacked due process protections.^[13] The high case load and lack of procedural protections made it extremely difficult for the accused to prove their innocence against the word of an officer.^[14] Those convicted were assessed onerous fines. If they could not pay, they were forced to work off the fines on the chain gang, building Atlanta’s streets while wearing striped prison uniforms.^[15] Whether it acquired revenue or free labor, the city benefitted tangibly from these minor convictions and its leaders had no interest in reforming its criminal legal system. Consequently, Black Atlantans have protested the city’s criminal legal system^[16] since the first years after the Civil War, and that legacy of protest continues to this day.^[17]

This Article places the birth and growth of the Atlanta police in context by exploring the full scope of Atlanta’s criminal legal system in the decades between the end of the Civil War and the first decade of the twentieth century.^[18] In so doing, this Article analyzes the connections Atlantans made between race and crime, the adjudication and punishment of minor offenses, and the variety of Black protests against the criminal legal system. This Article is based in part on a variety of archival sources, including decades of arrest and prosecution data that, for the first time, allow for a quantitative assessment of the impact of the system of policing inaugurated in 1874 on Atlanta’s residents.^[19] These statistics not only reveal the extraordinary growth in the number of arrests in the decades after the formation of the police force—leading Atlanta to have the highest arrest rate in the country by the turn of the twentieth century—but also demonstrate that Atlanta was an early adopter of mass order-maintenance criminalization.^[20] In 1902, for example, 83 percent of all arrests were for the petty order-maintenance offenses of disorderly conduct, drunkenness, or idleness.^[21]

The historical literature on policing has developed largely independently of related legal scholarship. This Article bridges the gap between the two by investigating the central research questions of the legal scholarship through the lens of the historical literature and using historical sources. It breaks new ground in four ways.

First, this Article demonstrates that the Atlanta Police Department was a new institution that developed in response to post-slavery conditions: It was designed to proactively make mass arrests for minor offenses and to maintain White supremacy in a rapidly growing city in which residents, theoretically, had equal rights.^[22] This Article disrupts simplistic, monocausal narratives of police development by explaining why Atlanta’s police history does not fit neatly into established categories. Atlanta’s force was not directly copied from England or Northern cities; unlike those police forces, it was not designed primarily to prevent riots and crime.^[23] Nor was it a corrupt organization staffed by lazy and incompetent officers more concerned with collecting a paycheck than making arrests.^[24] Nor was Atlanta’s police force a direct descendant of the pre-war slave patrol system, where many scholars have located the origins of Southern police forces.^[25]

A key reason why the history of Atlanta’s police does not fit well into existing categories is that most policing scholarship focuses on Northern cities in the second half of the twentieth century.^[26] This vital work has clearly demonstrated the centrality of resource extraction and racialized social control to policing in recent decades, but it does not explore the origins of these characteristics. In addition, there are a handful of works that focus on policing in the antebellum South. These works demonstrate that antebellum Southern police forces served to control diverse urban populations including free people of color and immigrants, along with enslaved people.^[27] Little research, however, examines the numerous Southern cities that created police forces only after emancipation.^[28] This Article begins to fill that gap and demonstrates that Atlanta’s new police force had the same goal as police forces in other cities, Southern and Northern: enforcing racialized social control on a free, urban population.

Second, this Article shows that White citizens’ beliefs about the causes of crime and the connections between race and crime, which I call “lay criminology,”^[29] influenced policing strategies. Scholars have long recognized that popular perceptions about the causes of crime and the relationship between race and crime are spread and shaped by the media^[30] and that these perceptions have an important effect on police policy and tactics.^[31] No scholarship, however, has addressed the relationship between popular criminological ideas and police practices in the post-emancipation South. This Article demonstrates that Atlanta’s newspapers promoted lay criminological ideas that connected crime to Black leisure and family life. More directly, newspapers also demanded that the police force take action against Black leisure by raiding saloons and dancehalls.^[32] The police responded by making an enormous number of arrests in such raids.

Third, this Article analyzes how minor offenses were policed and prosecuted in Atlanta. It adds a new layer to our understanding of the history of order-maintenance policing by showing that mass criminalization of minor offenses began soon after emancipation as a response to the urbanization of Georgia’s Black population. This type of policing caused a variety of harms to the city’s Black residents, including forcing thousands each year to pay fines or labor for weeks on the chain gang.^[33] Recent scholarship has demonstrated the importance of low-level arrests in enforcing White supremacy and social control today,^[34] especially when the arrests result from a strategy of order-maintenance policing, which expanded rapidly in the “broken windows” era of the 1990s.^[35] This Article argues that social control through mass arrests for minor offenses is a constitutive element of the modern American criminal legal system and dates to the system’s earliest days.

In addition, this Article provides a historical dimension to the growing literature on misdemeanor enforcement in low-level courts. It does so by examining the unfairness of Atlanta’s Recorder’s Court, which adjudicated offenses against city ordinances. The literature on low-level courts emphasizes that such courts have few procedural protections and are characterized by discretion, informality, rapid adjudication, and social control.^[36] In the aftermath of the Department of Justice’s 2015 report on policing and misdemeanor adjudication in Ferguson, Missouri,^[37] scholars have also examined the economic and social impact of the fines and fees that result from low-level interactions with the criminal legal system.^[38] This Article demonstrates that the conclusions of this literature are part of a broader pattern that dates back to the nineteenth century, where the Recorder’s Court generated large amounts of revenue in fines and inflicted a wide variety of harm on the city’s Black residents.

Fourth, this Article shows that the complaints of biased and brutal policing that motivate contemporary police reform activists, including those protesting the construction of Cop City, have been present for a century and a half.^[39] A proper understanding of this history has never been more urgent. Over the past decade, in Atlanta and around the country, powerful movements have challenged the power of police and highlighted the ongoing toll of police discrimination and violence. This Article shows that, as far back as the 1860s, Atlanta’s Black residents, across class lines, protested the criminal legal system and police abuses while envisioning a more equitable city where improved social conditions would reduce crime.^[40]

By placing Black protest at the center of the history of policing, this Article highlights the historical foundation upon which the recent legal literature on policing and social movements builds. Until recently, much of the legal scholarship examined the questions arising out of the post-civil rights movement Constitution: how police can avoid abuse of power, achieve legitimacy, and support procedural justice.^[41] In recent years, inspired in part by the Black Lives Matter movement, some scholars have moved away from these themes to fundamentally critique policing itself.^[42] Scholarship in this vein has called to democratize, disband, disaggregate, reimagine, or abolish police.^[43] This critical scholarship has justified its call to make fundamental changes to policing by focusing on the physical and financial harm that policing does to subordinated communities.^[44] This Article demonstrates that the harm of policing reaches back at least to the mid-nineteenth century. In addition to inspiring more fundamental critiques of policing, the Black Lives Matter movement has also led legal scholars to focus on the importance of social movements to criminal law.^[45] Yet the history of Black protest is underdeveloped, especially protest of the criminal legal system between the end of Reconstruction and the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909.^[46] This Article shows that the centrality of the criminal legal system to Black protest is part of a long tradition and has shaped American criminal justice institutions since emancipation.

In sum, this Article demonstrates that the new system of policing that developed in Atlanta after the Civil War supported White supremacy and spurred strong resistance from Black residents of the city. Racially biased low-level enforcement has been a part of American policing since the end of slavery. The Article proceeds as follows: Part I describes Atlanta’s pre-police law enforcement system and shows how that system developed into the modern police force created in 1874. Part II surveys the lay criminological beliefs of Atlanta’s leaders, illuminating how most White Atlantans connected Blackness to crime and believed that Black leisure activities were an important driver of criminality. Part III examines the practices of policing and prosecuting Black Atlantans and demonstrates that the vast majority were arrested for minor violations, such as disorderly conduct, and faced trial in the Recorder’s Court with little due process. Part IV explores the variety of Black protests against the criminal legal system, including the Black middle class’s attempts to create an alternate criminology focused on improving social conditions and the Black working class’s more direct resistance to the police. Part V examines the lessons that this history holds for our contemporary understanding of policing.

 I. The Death of Slavery and the Birth of the Atlanta Police

“South of the North, yet north of the South,”^[47] Atlanta is an important location to study the development of policing after the Civil War and the transformation of pre-war law enforcement institutions into a modern police force.^[48] Today, Atlanta is at the epicenter of one of the most highly visible conflicts about the future of policing in the United States.^[49] Before the Civil War, however, Atlanta was little more than a village—a village which was burned to the ground by General William Tecumseh Sherman and his army in 1864. In the decades following the war, Atlanta rapidly transformed from a burnt village to the “Gate City” of the South. By 1868, a teacher would write that Atlanta had become “like a star beaming in every direction, and will be in not many years the first after New York and New Orleans.”^[50] That year, Atlanta became the state capital; by 1880, it had surpassed Savannah to become the state’s most populous city.^[51] The city also boasted a vibrant press, including several Black‑owned newspapers, that reported constantly on crime and policing. During this time of rapid growth, its criminal justice institutions were rebuilt largely from scratch. The new city therefore served as a crucible for, and reflection of, new ideas about crime and policing that developed in response to the challenges of the post-emancipation moment.^[52]

Chief among the challenges that Atlanta’s leaders faced was governing a rapidly growing and diversifying city. Most of Atlanta’s residents, Black and White, had moved to the city from elsewhere in the state, and the Black share of the city’s population grew particularly rapidly. Between the 1870s and 1960s, slightly over 40 percent of the city’s residents were Black.^[53] The vast majority of Black men and women were employed, but their work was almost always low-paid and intermittent. Scholars have estimated that between 93 and 97 percent of Black residents of Atlanta worked in some form of manual labor, with almost no chance at upward mobility.^[54] For about three-quarters of Black men this meant working as unskilled or semi-skilled day laborers, while nearly all employed Black women worked in domestic service.^[55] The small Black leadership class consisted primarily of pastors and other professionals, businessmen, and the educators associated with the city’s Black universities.^[56]

Atlanta’s rapid population growth belied its underdevelopment. In 1880, just three percent of Atlanta’s streets were paved with broken stone, the remaining 97 percent were dirt.^[57] Nevertheless, Atlanta’s boosters were anxious to transform it into an orderly, modern metropolis and the leading city of the New South. Atlanta’s leaders sought to attract business and grow the city by using the police to keep the city’s Black population under control and using chain gang labor to pave and expand roads.^[58] By 1900 the growth project had succeeded: Atlanta was the second largest city in the former Confederacy and hosted national events, such as the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition where Booker T. Washington delivered his famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech.^[59]

Consequently, the Atlanta Police Department’s development was closely tied to the city’s growth and modernization. An 1898 history of the department claimed “[t]o write a history of the Police Department of Atlanta is to give a true picture of its march from an obscure hamlet to a citadel of commercial greatness, its triumph over the devastations of war and its rise from the ashes of desolation to the pyramid of eternal prosperity.”^[60] Yet the scholarly analysis of Atlanta’s and other Southern police forces in the nineteenth century is minimal.^[61] This Part examines the creation of Atlanta’s police force and demonstrates that it developed to maintain White supremacy in the new circumstances created by the abolition of slavery.^[62] The lack of scholarly literature on police forces in other Southern cities in the decades after slavery makes comparison difficult, but it is clear that throughout the region, police forces disproportionately arrested Black residents for minor crimes. Atlanta’s arrest rate was significantly higher than that of other cities. But this is a difference of degree, not of kind, caused largely by Atlanta’s strong focus on growth and modernization.

In the first decade after emancipation, Atlanta haltingly modernized its police force, a widespread process in the nineteenth century. Historians of Anglo-American policing have identified a major transition point in the early nineteenth century when older systems of urban law enforcement, in which constables and watchmen performed a wide variety of tasks, were replaced with the “modern” police force which persists in easily recognizable form to this day.^[63] The key moment in this shift is typically identified as the creation of London’s Metropolitan Police force in 1829.^[64] Scholars agree that there are four key features that define the police forces that first emerged in the nineteenth century. First, they are characterized by a centralized, hierarchical structure, with a police chief at the top.^[65] Second, they are housed in the executive branch of local government rather than the judicial branch, giving mayors and city councils control over the operation of the police force.^[66] Third, officers wear uniforms, making them highly visible to the public.^[67] Finally, modern police actively patrol, rather than simply responding to reports of crimes; to encourage proactive patrolling, officers are paid salaries rather than fees for each arrest.^[68] In addition, in the United States, policemen were usually armed with handguns.^[69]

Although night watchmen and constables had long existed, the idea of a salaried, uniformed force that patrolled day and night and could arrest lawbreakers on sight without a warrant represented a new way for the state to enforce the law in urban areas.^[70] The police forces of the nineteenth century increased the frequency of interactions between police and citizens, making the threat of arrest and violence much more immediate.^[71] In Atlanta, this Section shows, a modern police force was created between 1866 and 1873.

A. Law Enforcement Before the Modern Police Force

Atlanta entered the post-Civil War period without a modern police force. Before the Civil War, Atlanta, like most of Georgia’s towns, had an antiquated system of law enforcement in which a town marshal and a small number of deputies served to keep the peace and perform other diverse duties.^[72] This system, notably, was entirely separate from the Fulton County slave patrol.^[73]

On January 3, 1866, newly elected mayor James E. Williams gave his inaugural speech to the city council.^[74] The “suppression of crime . . . especially such as may be attributable to the changed station of the negro” was at the top of his agenda.^[75] He argued that without slavery, local government would have to take on the role of the plantation and police and punish Black Georgians.^[76] “To this end,” he concluded, “it will be our highest duty—to have a police of the greatest possible efficiency. Upon this more than else depends the security of our persons and property the good name and prosperity of our city.”^[77] It would take eight years for Atlanta to create the police force that Williams desired.

Williams hoped the future of the police would be quite different from its state when he spoke. In 1866, the city’s law enforcement consisted of the city marshal who employed twenty ununiformed “privates.” The privates were paid at most fifty dollars per month but did not necessarily work full time.^[78] Over the next seven years, Atlanta’s leaders attempted to reform this archaic system to meet the needs of the city’s growing population and, particularly, to police its growing Black population.^[79]

Three aspects of Atlanta’s proto-police set it apart from the force that would be created in 1874. First, Atlanta’s privates received a fee of one dollar per arrest in addition to their salaries.^[80] Second, they were selected by the city council, rather than hired through a neutral civil service process; jobs with the city marshal were therefore patronage positions, making the force a key issue in local politics.^[81] Third, they wore civilian clothes rather than uniforms.^[82] These conditions were not ideal. As one newspaper noted in 1871, Atlanta’s officers “receive a dollar for every offender they arrest, wear citizens’ clothes, and are poorly paid, which, considering that Atlanta is the chief city of the South, is not flattering.”^[83] Further, it appears that Atlanta’s “privates” did not take their duties particularly seriously. Numerous instances of drunkenness marred the force, and in the absence of an internal discipline process misbehaving officers faced trial before the Atlanta City Council.^[84]

These difficulties caused the city council to twice enact new regulations for the force before fully reorganizing it in 1874. In mid-1867, the city council replaced the ordinances that defined the duties of the chief marshal with a thirty-five-section set of regulations. The new ordinance eliminated many outmoded duties of the chief marshal, such as licensing peddlers and managing weights and measures, and created new rules that represented a first step toward a modern police force.^[85] The rank-and-file officers—called policemen rather than privates for the first time—were instructed to keep the peace vigilantly and arrest all offenders who violated the city’s laws. The policemen, however, were still required to perform a variety of other duties, including lighting and extinguishing its streetlamps and guarding the city from fire. Most importantly, the new rules did not change the most archaic aspects of the force: policemen would continue to be elected by the Council, wear civilian clothes, and receive fees for various duties, including arrests.^[86]

In 1869, the city council created a stricter set of rules to govern a force that now employed forty-five officers. These rules instituted twice-weekly drills, banned arrest fees, and forbade officers from entering saloons.^[87] Despite these changes, the force was still ununiformed and controlled directly by the mayor and council. In fact, Atlanta’s police would not be uniformed until an 1870 state law required it.^[88]

Although significant steps toward a modern police force were taken in the second half of the 1860s, Atlanta’s police force remained archaic, and the city’s leaders believed it insufficient for the rapidly expanding city. The Black share of Atlanta’s population more than doubled between 1860 and 1870, from 20 percent to 46 percent, and the city’s White political leadership consequently began to press for a more effective police force with more urgency.^[89]

B. Creating a Modern Police Force

Atlanta’s rapid growth convinced the city’s leaders that its archaic police force was plainly insufficient to control the city’s population and prevent crime and disorder.^[90] After the city had spent almost a decade trying to improve its police system with minor reforms, the state government granted Atlanta a new charter in 1874 that created the police force that governs Atlanta to this day.^[91] This new organization was equipped to grow alongside the city and respond to the incipient racialized understanding of urban crime, which is discussed in depth in Part II.

The new charter created a seven-member Board of Commissioners of Police. The mayor occupied one of the board’s seats and the other six members were elected by the city council for three-year terms.^[92] The Board was given “full direction and control of officers and members of the police force,” which included the authority to hire, arm, and uniform as many officers as the city council budgeted for.^[93] The Charter gave the chief of police full authority over the force.^[94] In addition, it was the board, not the city council, that could discipline misbehaving officers and suspend or remove them from the force.^[95] This structure gave the chief of police and board of commissioners a level of independence from the mayor and insulation from electoral politics. Police independence helped to reduce the use of patronage to hire officers and thus stabilized the police force’s personnel.^[96]

The Charter’s provisions were supplemented by city ordinances that provided more detailed rules for the force. Officers, for example, were required to “devote their whole time and attention” to policing and were forbidden from holding outside employment and from entering a saloon, even while off duty.^[97] Officers were required to become familiar with all the people on their beats, paying particular attention to saloons and gambling houses, and report suspicious persons to their commanding officer.^[98] Officers were also empowered to make arrests on the complaint of any citizen without a warrant.^[99] The changes were quickly implemented. One newspaper celebrated the fact that officers now were now required to patrol actively and “put under the strictest of military discipline, and must bear himself like a soldier in arms.”^[100] A key goal of this well-disciplined force was, in the words of the police chief, to prevent the crime that was “necessarily [a] frequent occurrence, while our city is crowded with idle profligate negroes.”^[101]

In contrast to the poor compensation of the privates who made only $600 per year plus fees, the city council set a relatively high initial pay rate for the new policemen. The chief of police would receive a substantial salary of $2,000 per year, while the sergeants would receive $1,820, lieutenants would receive $1,400, and detectives would receive $900.^[102] The force’s thirty patrol officers were paid $730 per year.^[103] The new officers included former farmers, clerks, railroaders, mechanics, and even a florist.^[104]

The patrol officers were required to walk their beats alone and have minimal contact with other policemen, except as needed to carry out their duties.^[105] Policemen patrolled the city’s diverse neighborhoods largely on foot. For much of the period before a three-shift system was introduced in 1896, the men worked twelve-hour shifts, walking beats an average of six miles long in the heat and the rain, up and down Atlanta’s hills.^[106] A few of the higher-ranking officers had horses, but the department was defined by the solitary officer with a baton and a gun.^[107] Although the regulations did not require that officers be a particular race, the force employed only White officers until 1948.^[108]

The new police functioned to the satisfaction of the city’s leaders and no major changes to the force’s organization were made in the following three decades, though the number of officers grew. In 1890, the force employed 118 officers.^[109] Ninety-six of those were patrol officers who served under six sergeants^[110] and three captains.^[111] There were also four officers who were detailed as detectives,^[112] and others in supplementary positions.^[113]

The new structure also allowed for the easy incorporation of new technologies. In the 1890s the department adopted both bicycles and electronic alarm systems, which transformed policing in the city. Bicycles allowed officers to swiftly traverse the city and were much cheaper to maintain than horses. Policemen thus used bicycles to patrol and to dispatch rapidly to reported incidents.^[114] In 1897, the force listed eight men as “bicycle officers,” and by 1900 the department owned eighteen bicycles.^[115] In 1901, bicycle officers responded to 9,451 “quick calls.”^[116] The police chief claimed that bicycles allowed the police to respond quickly to reports of disorder and thus arrest many lawbreakers who would have escaped from foot patrolmen.^[117]

Electronic alarm systems similarly enabled a faster police response. With advances in telegraph—and later telephone—technology, calls to the police increased rapidly. A system of fifty signal boxes was installed in 1890 to allow city residents to alert the police if they needed assistance. The chief of police remarked that they “add greatly to the efficiency of the department.”^[118] The public could and did signal—in 1893 the department received 206,539 calls—and policemen could also signal for backup or the patrol wagon.^[119] The introduction of the telephone allowed callers to report more detailed information to the police, and was quickly adopted by Atlantans: telephonic reports increased from 146 in 1893 to 11,304 in 1901.^[120] These new technologies meant that, rather than arresting only those whom the officers encountered in their patrols, policemen could rapidly respond to any report of disorder and make arrests.

These technological and organizational developments that made the force “modern” also increased the number of arrests that Atlanta’s officers could make, and the resulting pattern of racially disparate arrests and prosecutions is discussed in detail in Part III. First, however, it is necessary to examine the reasons why Atlanta’s police force exercised its power as it did. The answer to that question lies in how White elites understood the racialized causes of crime.

II. Lay Criminology: Connecting Blackness and Crime

Atlanta’s ordinances instructed police officers that “[t]he prevention of crime being the most important object in view, the patrolman’s exertions must be constantly used to accomplish that end.”^[121] The category of “crime,” however, has always been socially constructed and cannot be disentangled from the broader quest for social control.^[122] What is more, police resources are necessarily limited; the decision about how police should use their discretion in determining which criminals to pursue has always been a policy choice determined by beliefs about what causes and prevents crime. This Article labels these popular ideas about crime and its causes “lay criminology.” Although these ideas arose largely independently of the academic study of crime, they still had important influences on policing policy. This Part demonstrates that White Atlantans’ lay criminology, described and promoted by the city’s White-owned newspapers, helped to determine the policing policies described in Part III. This Part first analyzes how White writers linked crime to perceived Black unwillingness to work, and then explores how White lay criminology saw Black leisure activities as a source of serious crime.

A. Black Labor and Idleness

The White community’s consensus that crime was connected to Blackness and needed to be repressed by force was forged shortly after slavery.^[123] More complex, however, were the perceived causes of Black crime, but the city’s newspapers quickly became leading proponents of a theory that posited that popular leisure activities caused Black crime.^[124] The media’s focus on Black working-class leisure^[125] influenced policymakers and made Atlanta’s dive bars and dancehalls common targets of police raids; the police justified petty arrests as preventing more serious crime.^[126] The city’s leaders believed that modernizing the city and making it a regional leader required controlling crime and disorder and thus repressing Black leisure.^[127] Black Atlantans, as we will see below, often dissented from the conclusions of lay criminology.^[128] Their concerns, however, were usually ignored, except when they bolstered existing criminological narratives and provided support for police tactics.

Although anti-Black policing was justified using the rhetoric of crime prevention, the broader goal of social control was ever-present. White residents of Atlanta, informed by the city’s White newspapers, believed that many Black families moved to the city to lead lives of idleness and debauchery.^[129] In addition, they believed the temptations of city life threatened to transform idleness into something even more dangerous and that the “criminal element” of the Black community could be found primarily in cities.^[130] In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, White Southerners thus began to think of their Black neighbors not just as idle or vagrant, but as a “criminal class” whose very existence threatened the safety and security of city residents.^[131] Because the press depicted idleness, vagrancy, and Black leisure activities as the causes of more serious crime, the White public supported police crackdowns on minor offenses and police control over the city’s Black community.

Even in the first years after emancipation, many White observers began to express the belief that Black Georgians were responsible for the city’s crime.^[132] At this point, however, White Atlantans devoted little attention to the causes of crime—the effects of the Civil War and the end of the restraint of slavery seemed explanation enough.^[133] In the 1870s and 1880s, however, White Atlantans began to formulate a lay criminology. Believing crime to be rising, as newspapers constantly reported, Atlanta’s leaders demanded that the police force root out behavior they considered criminogenic.^[134] Race was at the heart of this lay criminology, but in creating the figure of the Black criminal, White Atlantans also considered how race intersected with unwillingness to work, alcohol consumption, and gender.^[135] All of these various theories centered around the idea that Black Atlantans were predisposed to idleness and crime and that the coercion of slavery had been necessary to force them to labor.^[136]

Many Black leaders, most prominently pastors, agreed with elements of this lay criminology. Most were strong temperance supporters and agreed that idleness, alcohol, and poor family life caused crime and should be repressed by the police.^[137] They also argued, however, that social injustice, economic insecurity, and lack of access to education contributed to criminal activity—among both White and Black Southerners.^[138] White powerbrokers, however, listened to Black leaders only when it was convenient—publishing anti-alcohol letters from pastors in the newspapers but ignoring their calls for justice and investment in the Black community and their protests against police brutality.^[139] The key policy debates, then, centered on how to use the police to maintain social control and reduce Black idleness and its attendant criminality.

Even during slavery, White elites had complained of Black theft, but it was the movement of Black Southerners to cities, where “dangerous” entertainments like the dancehall supposedly replaced agricultural employment, that linked idleness and criminality in the White mind.^[140] The fear that urban living contributed to idleness was enhanced by the Black unemployment that resulted from the various economic panics and recessions of the late nineteenth century.^[141] The basic fact of Black employment patterns underlaid the White concerns about Black idleness. As noted above, nearly all Black workers engaged in low-paid manual labor. For many, employment was inconsistent, and they were frequently faced with days without work. There was no way for an observer to know if a man relaxing in a pool hall on a Tuesday afternoon was spending money he had earned the day before (or the morning of), whether he subsisted through theft, or some combination of the two. Unsurprisingly, White observers tended to assume the worst.^[142] Former Navy Secretary Hilary Herbert, for example, presented the two issues as inextricably linked at a 1900 conference on Race Problems of the South: “idleness among the Negroes is undoubtedly growing, and crime appears to be increasing.”^[143]

White writers argued that the source of increasing criminality was the generation of Black men and women born after emancipation, who reached adulthood during the 1880s. In their view, the new generation was idle, disrespectful, and criminal because it had lacked the guiding hand of a master to promote hard work.^[144] For example, Walter Wilcox, one of the country’s foremost statisticians, believed that Black idleness and crime resulted from “defective family life and training,” that is, Black mothers, freed from slavery, were failing to raise their children properly.^[145] White Southerners rarely linked crime to the social conditions in which Black Southerners lived or their inability to access education. Instead, they believed that idleness was rooted in biology and was the cause of both Black poverty and crime.^[146]

Lurid coverage of crime, especially crimes committed by Black men, was particularly prominent in the tabloid press, but all of Atlanta’s papers printed stories about Black criminality from across the nation, contributing to the sense of a nationwide crime wave.^[147] This view was supported by Northern social scientists who claimed that there was a strong “statistical basis for the well-nigh universal opinion that crime among the American Negroes is increasing with alarming rapidity.”^[148] Northern support reinforced existing Southern notions of increasing Black criminality.

White writers often labeled idleness as “vagrancy,” a vague charge that could be used to make any leisure activity sound criminal.^[149] In practice, any Black person not actively at labor in the workplace or home could be called a vagrant, regardless of their employment status. If arrested for a minor offense such as idling, the individual would be labeled a “vagrant” by the newspapers, and his or her misfortune presented as further evidence that crime was increasing.^[150]

Once someone had been labeled a vagrant, they were excluded from even the limited set of rights that Black Southerners could be said to possess. The Atlanta Constitution,^[151] the city’s leading White newspaper, frequently reported on Black idleness and vagrancy. In 1899, for example, it mused that Black lynching victims probably had not been steady workers. “[I]f they could not get wages for their work,” the paper declared, “they could at least have got their [room and] board. Anything would have been better than idleness.”^[152] The narrative connecting idleness to crime is clearest in the paper’s long-running series of columns describing the goings-on at the Recorder’s Court.^[153] Those columns often took on a comic tone, describing the trouble encountered by shiftless Black Atlantans for the entertainment of White readers.^[154] Describing one Black man who appeared before the Recorder’s Court, the Atlanta Constitution wrote “[h]e is good natured, but every characteristic except laziness has long ago leaked out of his makeup,” which explained why he had been arrested multiple times for loitering and other minor infractions.^[155] By mixing extremely minor offenses with more serious crimes, the column had the effect of reducing the distinctions between them, portraying the mass of Black Atlantans as consistently engaged in criminal activity.

Although White writers were concerned about Black idleness on its own, they also believed that idleness led to more serious crime.^[156] Most obviously, newspapers consistently declared that those who did not work would survive by stealing and blamed any theft squarely on Black residents.^[157] In 1875, for example, one newspaper blamed a string of robberies on Black residents, claiming that “[t]he negroes who rob and plunder are not the negroes who spend their days in labor. . . . It is the vagabonds who do the mischief.”^[158] This idea persisted. In 1886, another newspaper praised the police crackdown on vagrants and asserted that “the criminal classes are recruited from the ranks of vagrancy. . . . From indirectly living a dishonest life to becoming a positive factor in the commission of a theft or some other crime, is but a step. Vagrants are criminals in the formative state.”^[159] The conflation of idleness and criminality was an enduring theme of White lay criminology.

Although idleness was usually connected to theft offenses, some made the connection between idleness and more violent crimes, including rape.^[160] In 1906 for example, a White woman named Autie Cox wrote to the editor of the Atlanta Georgian,

We never hear of a negro leaving his plow handles or hoe to commit this crime. It is invariably the idle, loafing, prowling negro who has no regular job, no permanent place of abode and who is satisfied if he has enough clothes to save him from public indecency and one square meal a day. This is the idle brain in which the desire is incarnate. Every city and town in the state has a lot of idle, loafing negroes who cannot be hired to do a good day’s work at any price and it is from this class that the rapist comes. Put them at work.^[161]

Reflecting the White consensus about how to prevent Black crime, Cox proposed aggressive enforcement of vagrancy laws.

B. Black Leisure

Like working class people everywhere, many Black Atlantans escaped their drudgery by drinking, dancing, and playing cards, but Atlanta’s White leaders saw these activities as connected to crime and sought to repress them.^[162] What is more, Black Atlantans had limited options for entertainment; for example, they were banned from newly built recreation sites such as the Ponce de Leon amusement park.^[163] Consequently, Black Atlantans primarily patronized the commercial entertainments of Decatur Street, near the center of the city.^[164] Although the street was described as a Black-controlled zone of iniquity by the White press, in reality it was a diverse area with a variety of forms of entertainment on offer, from food and shopping to dancing and vaudeville, and was one of the only areas in the city where Black and White residents could interact on anything approaching equal footing.^[165] White Atlantans saw sites of relative racial equality and Black leisure as both a disorderly nuisance and a source of criminality and such spaces were thus targeted by the city’s police.^[166]

The Black Atlantans who were labeled vagrants were not, of course, simply sitting on the curb. Outside of working hours, members of Atlanta’s working-class Black community filled their time with variety of activities, most of which, aside from attending church, were met with White disapproval. Many observers believed that these “hurtful amusements,” such as dives and pool rooms, tempted Black men and women away from work, encouraged idleness, and caused them to commit crimes.^[167] Anyone present in such a location could be labeled a vagrant and arrested for disorderly conduct.^[168] In this era of an increasingly powerful alcohol prohibition movement, many White Atlantans refused to distinguish between dark basement dives and more respectable “saloons,” and frequently blamed alcohol for a variety of crimes.^[169] In 1901, the Atlanta Constitution voiced the widely shared opinion that alcohol consumption led to Black crime and resistance to police because Black people were “cowards when sober but bold and brutal when drunk.”^[170]

Although any saloon that attracted Black patrons was considered potentially dangerous, Atlanta’s leaders considered the dance hall the most pernicious amusement because it combined idleness, alcohol, and the sexual overtones of dancing.^[171] These dance halls were located largely along Decatur and Peters Streets, in the heart of Black Atlanta. Most of them were small, dark establishments, often located in basements, where men and women—primarily, but not exclusively, Black—could drink, smoke, play cards, and dance late into the evening to the sounds of a pianist or string band.^[172] The potential for such intimate contact between the races, particularly when mixed with alcohol, was considered dangerous, especially to White women, and provided an additional basis for White opposition to Black leisure.^[173] In 1901, Police Chief John Ball summarized the effect of dance halls and dives on crime, claiming there was “no more handy rendezvous for idling negroes than the poolrooms which are run on Decatur and Peters streets. All day long and far into the night these places are crowded with negroes who never work, and who drink, steal and gamble.”^[174] Atlanta’s leaders believed that social control and crime prevention required a crackdown against such establishments.

Again, White Atlantans were not alone in their attacks on Black leisure. Black elites, especially religious leaders, were also hostile to many of the same activities. These leaders hoped to raise the first generation born in freedom with Christianity and respectability and were strong advocates of temperance.^[175] Black patronage of dives and dancehalls, and the alcohol consumption that accompanied it, undermined this vision. Leading Black pastor Henry H. Proctor, for example, referred to dance halls as “dance hells” and asked the Atlanta City Council “in the name of God, in the name of Anglo-Saxon Civilization” to eliminate them.^[176] Proctor also connected the establishments to crime, declaring that “[t]hese dens of vice and iniquity that cluster about saloons should be broken up: they are but hotbeds where thieves, cut-throats and rapists are hatched out.”^[177] Even some younger and more radical Black writers shared this view. Atlanta Independent editor B. J. Davis repeatedly denounced dance halls, claiming that the “dancehall is the greatest social evil of the Negro race in the cities and larger towns of the South.”^[178]

Black leaders also emphasized the detrimental effect that leisure activities had on Black women and home life and felt that dancing—because it was public, corporeal, and associated with drinking—was inextricably linked to sexuality.^[179] Davis argued that the “fallen women” who patronized dance halls “should be given rescue homes to reclaim their souls for God instead of dance halls in which to steep and damp their souls.”^[180] Later, his newspaper editorialized, “[t]he Negro will infinitely strengthen his hold upon employment if, instead of dancing and carousing the night away, he (and especially, she) will learn to become proficient in the task he is employed to perform.”^[181] Another Black newspaper editor focused on the harm to young people, writing that dance halls “are doing more to ruin the young negro than any other agency I know of. To think that there are halls in this city where all day long young men and women who ought to be working are dancing and carousing makes some of us shudder for the future.”^[182] Because women were thought to be responsible for imparting moral lessons to their children, opponents of Black leisure believed that the mother’s bad behavior would lead to criminality among the younger generation as well.

Both Black and White elites saw idleness, dancing, alcohol, and improper sexuality as intertwined. In Atlanta’s dives and dancehalls, they perceived an epidemic of immorality and criminality that called out for repression by police. Black leaders, like their White counterparts, called for police to attack the causes of crime by eliminating dives and forcing idle men to work.^[183] In these calls, they demanded that the authorities repress criminality across racial lines, rather than focus exclusively on Black criminals.^[184] As early as 1881, Black leaders asked the police to take action against Black leisure. Several of the “leading color[ed] citizens of the city” presented a petition which called for the abatement of dives which had “become the headquarters of the idle and vicious of the race.”^[185] Such calls continued in the ensuing decades. Black leaders made similar forceful statements in support of rounding up Black vagrants and forcing them to labor on the chain gang. Proctor, for example, argued that vagrants should be arrested, writing that moral suasion “must be reinforced by the strong arm of the law.”^[186] In 1903, the city council attempted to “abolish” dives and dance halls by setting a prohibitive $300 licensing fee. The fee did not successfully abolish dancing, but the press credited Black pastors, including Proctor, for accomplishing this change.^[187] The city government, however, took no actions on Black leaders’ pleas for evenhanded justice.

Atlanta’s lay criminology was developed largely in the newspapers by White writers who believed that idleness and leisure encouraged Black criminality and could lead to more serious crimes, but it soon became more broadly accepted by both White Atlantans and Black leaders. These widely held ideas led the city’s police to target Black leisure establishments and make arrests for the minor offenses that Atlanta’s lay criminologists believed would lead to more serious crimes. No level of arrests, however, could puncture the media narrative that crime was increasing.^[188] In fact, increasing arrests simply provided more content to fill the newspapers’ crime reports. Rather than calming White fears, reports of the ever-rising arrest rate and the sight of Black men and women working on the chain gang in stripes furnished further proof that Black Atlantans were increasingly criminal and in need of police control.^[189] This vicious cycle fueled both White fears and the growing criminalization of these minor offenses. The increase in criminalization had a major detrimental impact on Atlanta’s Black community, as demonstrated in the next Part.

III. Criminalization in Practice

To translate the lay criminology of Atlanta’s elite into practice, the police made mass arrests for minor offenses associated with idleness, especially at Black leisure establishments. This mass arrest policy both helped to ensure White supremacist social control and, in theory, reduced serious crime. This policy also caused Atlanta to have the highest arrest rate in the country at the turn of the twentieth century.^[190] A significant majority of those arrested each year were Black, even though Black Atlantans represented only between 40 and 46 percent of the city’s population.^[191] In 1901, for example, 65 percent of those arrested by the Atlanta Police were Black.^[192] This Part argues that the disproportionate arrest and brutalization of Black Atlantans were a result of the police’s broader goals of maintaining order and punishing the leisure activities of Black residents.^[193] After arrest, Black Atlantans were tried in the Recorder’s Court where the lack of due process caused thousands to be convicted and assessed onerous fines.^[194] Those who could not pay were forced to spend weeks building the city’s streets on the chain gang. Whether they paid cash or paid with their labor, the criminalization of Black Atlantans materially benefitted the city. This Part first describes Atlanta’s arrest pattern and analyzes why a majority of arrestees were Black residents charged with minor offenses. It then explores the trial of criminal defendants in the Recorder’s Court and the punishments faced by those convicted.

A. Arrests and Policing

As soon as a modern police force was created, Atlanta’s arrest rate increased significantly and soon began to outpace comparable cities. In 1874, even with arrest fees for policemen eliminated, Atlanta’s police arrested 3,605 people, 60 percent more people than the old force had in 1873. Of those arrested, 2,078 were Black.^[195] Although Savannah’s population was nearly identical to Atlanta’s, its police force, which dated from the antebellum period, made far fewer arrests. In 1874 Savannah’s force arrested only 2,021 people, 55 percent of them Black.^[196] The number of arrests in Atlanta grew rapidly from there. Ten years later, in 1884, the city’s police arrested 3,247 Black Atlantans out of a total of 5,824 arrests.^[197] In 1904, those numbers had grown to 11,954 and 18,556, respectively.^[198] Between 1880 and 1890, the number of arrests far outpaced population growth, with the arrest rate increasing from 116 per thousand to 195 per thousand.^[199] Black Atlantans were arrested in significantly greater numbers than White Atlantans, and their arrest rate increased more rapidly: between 1884 and 1900, the arrest rate for Black Atlantans nearly doubled from approximately 148 per thousand to 285 per thousand.^[200] When we compare arrest rates among women, the disparities are even starker. In 1896, for example, eight times as many Black women were arrested as White women.^[201] In addition, many Black children were arrested. In 1896, 696 Black boys and forty-eight Black girls under the age of fifteen were arrested. They received no special treatment because of their age and were tried as adults.^[202]

The arrest rate for Black Atlantans peaked in 1901. That year, 11,502 Black men, women, boys, and girls were arrested, representing 64.5 percent of the 17,826 total arrests.^[203] The arrest rate for Black Atlantans that year was 322 arrests per thousand, more than three times the rate of 106 per thousand for White Atlantans.^[204] Presumably some defendants were unlucky enough to be arrested multiple times each year, but even so, the city’s arrest rate was still extremely high: each year, the Atlanta police arrested a number of Black people equivalent to almost one-third of the city’s Black population.^[205]

Black men consistently accounted for the highest number of arrests for any group throughout the period.^[206] After 1890, however, the arrest rates for Black and White men diverged, and the arrest rate for Black men spiked. In contrast, the number of Black women arrested grew relatively constantly across the period.^[207] Many factors, including the growing number of police officers, contributed to the sudden increase in Black male arrests, but this Article concludes that the most important factor was the increasing police focus on conducting mass arrests at dives, the imperative of the lay criminology consensus.

 

Figure 1. Arrests by Race and Gender

The vast majority of those arrested, whether Black or White, were accused of minor crimes. The proportion of arrests for crimes under state law—as opposed to city ordinances—was quite low. State crimes included major offenses such as murder, burglary, and rape, but also included less serious property crimes such as larceny. State crimes accounted for 22 percent of all arrests in 1876, but that proportion dropped steadily over time, bottoming out at 7.5 percent in 1901.^[208] Between 1890 and 1906, there were only two years in which the proportion of state crime arrests reached 15 percent.^[209] What is more, many of these state crime arrests did not lead to state crime convictions.

In 1903, for example, more than 60 percent of state crime cases were dismissed or transferred to the Recorder’s Court to be tried as city offenses.^[210] This left only 290 state crime defendants prosecuted in Fulton County, where Atlanta is located, with 213 more extradited to be prosecuted by nearby counties.^[211] Of 16,088 arrests in 1903, then, at most 503 resulted in felony cases.^[212] Despite media coverage that highlighted violent crimes, the police focused their attention on petty offenses. As late as 1903, the police employed only eight detectives, making it difficult to investigate serious crimes.^[213] Consequently, in addition to arresting Black Atlantans for minor offenses, the police did little to investigate serious crimes committed against them, whether by White or Black perpetrators.^[214]

Throughout this period, minor crimes thus accounted for more than three quarters of arrests in Atlanta.^[215] This reality led one chronicler of the city to claim that Atlanta was “a law-abiding city, barring, of course, the many petty offenses resultant from a large negro population.”^[216] The most common charges for both men and women were petty violations such as drunkenness, disorderly conduct, and other order-maintenance offenses.^[217] Between 1893 and 1906, arrests for drunkenness alone exceeded all state crime arrests.^[218] In every year in that period, drunkenness and disorderly conduct together comprised the majority of arrests.^[219] When the crime of “idling” (i.e., loitering) is included, the proportion of public order arrests is even higher, peaking in 1904 when 83.5 percent of arrests were either for drunkenness, disorderly conduct, or idling. The vagueness of these offenses allowed police officers to enforce the law at their discretion with little risk that the arrestee would be acquitted or that the officer would be successfully sued for false arrest.^[220] The proportion of arrests for minor violations was extraordinarily high, even when compared to the twentieth century.^[221]

Importantly, Black Atlantans were not being arrested in large numbers under new laws that were passed after emancipation to control freedpeople.^[222] Although elites referred to many of those arrested as “vagrants,” they were rarely prosecuted under Georgia’s vagrancy law.^[223] In 1894, for example, the police chief’s annual report listed only two arrests for vagrancy, and in 1905 it listed just one.^[224] Vagrancy was a disfavored charge because a defendant could be acquitted if he or she presented evidence, such as testimony from a supervisor, that he or she was employed.^[225] Nevertheless, the press’s constant references to Black arrestees as “worthless vagrants” who were also implicated in more serious crimes helped build support among the city’s White population for crackdowns on minor offenses.^[226]

Instead, the Atlanta police arrested Black residents for the same minor offenses that were used to criminalize working-class people everywhere.^[227] From the perspective of the police, the virtue of disorderly conduct and similar violations was that they were discretionary “catch-all” offenses and could be employed to achieve the goal of maintaining order and cleaning up the streets.^[228] Police took advantage of the fact that, in this period before Papachristou, there were effectively no Constitutional restrictions on the vagueness of local ordinances.^[229] Indeed the Atlanta police arrested hundreds of people every year “on suspicion.”^[230] Observers recognized that the guilt or innocence of a person arrested for these vague offenses lay in the hands of the policeman who chose to make the arrest.^[231] In short, mass arrests for petty offenses left defendants with little recourse against police officers’ discretion.

Because the vast majority of arrests were for public order offenses, Atlanta’s arrest rate was determined by police tactics rather than by the actions of the city’s residents. Influenced by the lay criminology promoted by Atlanta’s media,^[232] the police force began to be more proactive. Starting in the mid-1880s, the police force increasingly began to go out to find—or rather, create—criminals, arresting Atlantans for disorderly conduct or drunkenness before they could, theoretically, commit worse offenses.^[233] As one newspaper summarized this preventative theory: “It is easier to crush the egg than to catch the eagle it will hatch out.”^[234]

Figure 2. Atlanta Police Headquarters, 1890.^[235]

To achieve their goal of increasing arrests for minor offenses, the police targeted sites of Black leisure with frequent raids. This strategy was aided by relocating police headquarters to an imposing new building on Decatur Street in 1890, in the heart of Black Atlanta’s leisure district.^[236] This juxtaposition was purposeful: The new police headquarters was an imposing symbol of White supremacy, looming over space which Black Atlantans considered their own. The station’s location was a physical representation of the police force’s priorities. The station’s location assisted with the department’s strategy of raiding dives to sweep up low-level offenders in what the city’s leaders considered “breeding places of crime.”^[237] From the earliest years after the department’s creation, the police were “determined to break up riotous negro dances,”^[238] but such raids expanded drastically in the late 1880s when the police began to institute frequent crackdowns on “vagrants.”^[239] These raids could result in dozens of arrests in a single evening and significantly increased the racial disparity in arrests between Black and White men. To take one example, just after midnight on a Sunday in June 1897, the police raided Good Samaritans’ Hall and arrested fifty people. The arrestees, whose Saturday night revelry had carried over into Sunday morning, were charged with disorderly conduct for “dancing, playing cards and drinking beer on the Sabbath day.”^[240] The Atlanta Constitution noted that because each arrestee was fined $3.75 “the raid netted the city about $150.”^[241] This strategy of periodic raids continued for decades. When John Ball became police chief in 1901, he declared a “war on vagrants” and launched a raid that netted 114 people in a single night.^[242] In his words, the raid “was the outcome of the recent determination of the mayor and the police authorities to rid the city of the loafers and vagrants by putting as many of them as possible in the chaingang [sic].”^[243] By 1903, the clerk of the Recorder’s Court estimated that nearly half of cases at the Recorder’s Court were connected to raids on dives and dance halls.^[244]

Atlanta’s version of order-maintenance policing was distinct from the anti-vice policing that later grew across the nation, especially after 1910, in which police focused on repressing offenses against public morality such as gambling and prostitution. In both instances, political leaders were concerned with protecting White women’s virtue from supposed crime and danger, especially at the hands of Black men. In Atlanta, however, the police did not focus on policing prostitution and there was not an attempt to “contain” vice in a “red-light district” during this period, though such efforts became common in the early twentieth century.^[245] Rather, Atlanta’s police focused on sites of alcohol consumption primarily because the city’s leaders saw alcohol consumption as a major cause of crime for both men and women. Although alcohol was allowed to be sold throughout the period, except between 1885 and 1887 when Fulton County went dry, there were numerous restrictions and license fees and some, but far from all, of the dives raided by the police were unlicensed “blind tigers.”^[246] Regardless of the legality of alcohol, the discretionary nature of offenses, such as disorderly conduct, allowed the police to arrest all the patrons of any establishment they chose to raid.

The most important result of Atlanta’s police tactics was the sheer volume of arrests. What accounts for Atlanta having a much higher arrest rate than other similar cities, such as Savannah, and indeed having the highest arrest rate in the country? One factor was that Atlanta employed more police per capita. In 1890, Atlanta employed one officer per 537 residents while Savannah employed one officer per 675 residents. In 1900, those rates had grown more disparate, with one officer per 473 and 624 residents respectively.^[247] The size of Atlanta’s police department, however, was downstream of the broader goals of rapid growth discussed above. Those same goals led Atlanta’s police to embrace proactive, order-maintenance policing. Rather than invest resources into solving or preventing major felonies, the department focused on arresting Black Atlantans for low-level status offenses, such as disorderly conduct and drunkenness. Overall, the police’s discretion allowed them to make any arrest necessary to uphold the city’s racial hierarchy.^[248] Atlanta’s leaders believed that making arrests for petty offenses would both help control the city’s Black population and help reduce more serious crime.

B. The Recorder’s Court and Punishment

Arrest by a police officer was only the first step into the criminal legal system. After being arrested, Atlantans would be booked into the jail beneath the police station, which one newspaper described as a dungeon that “looks about as repulsive as a place of the kind could well look.”^[249] “Many a hardened criminal immured there,” it continued, “would gladly have pleaded guilty to any crime.”^[250] The next day—or on Monday if the arrestee was unfortunate enough to be arrested on a Saturday—the accused would appear before the Recorder’s Court where the fate of thousands of Atlantans each year was decided. Those facing trial for state crimes would be arraigned and then held to await trial in the Superior Court.^[251]

The Recorder’s Court was established in 1872, replacing the Mayor’s Court where the mayor himself decided the fate of those accused of minor offenses.^[252] The recorder was chosen by the mayor and city council and required to post a $5,000 bond to hold office.^[253] The Recorder’s Court had jurisdiction over all offenders against city ordinances and had the power to bind over to the Superior Court those who violated state laws.^[254] Although the Recorder’s Court had jurisdiction over a wide variety of ordinances, including the building, health, and fire codes, most cases were for petty violations, such as disorderly conduct. The recorder could impose the maximum punishment allowed by ordinance or, if no punishment were specified, could exercise his discretion to punish offenders with fines up to $100, a term of imprisonment of up to six months, or up to one year on the city’s chain gang.^[255] The recorder thus had essentially unreviewable authority to dismiss charges or to determine that the defendant labor on the chain gang.^[256]

The proceedings of the Recorder’s Court were frequently covered in the city’s press.^[257] These articles were often comical and contributed to Atlanta’s lay criminology by portraying Black defendants as ignorant and innately criminal.^[258] Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., the son of the Atlanta Independent editor, wrote that the court “provided a form of entertainment, of sport, for the petty officials, at the expense of the hapless, humble Negro workers caught in the complicated toils of jim-crow laws.”^[259] The recorder frequently made racist remarks for which he received supportive coverage in the city’s White papers. The Atlanta Constitution reported that the long-tenured Recorder Andy Calhoun, for example, “can tell the guilt or innocence of a negro by the expression he wears, and is perfectly familiar with ever species of the genus Africanus.”^[260] It is not surprising, then, that the recorder used his discretion to disproportionately punish Black defendants.

The primary characteristic of the Recorder’s Court was the high volume of cases that it handled. As the city council declared, the court was created “with a view to the suppression of crime and the bringing of offenders to speedy justice.”^[261] As early as 1872, it was reported that twenty-two cases per day came before the court, but the caseload increased quickly.^[262] On one day in 1909, the court adjudicated a record 160 cases.^[263]

Contemporary notions of due process had no place in the Recorder’s Court. Trials lasted, at most, a few minutes. Defendants were allowed to be represented by counsel and to call witnesses in their own defense, but finding representation and even witnesses was difficult because most defendants were tried the morning after they were arrested.^[264] As a result, nearly all defendants appeared without an attorney. In addition, a Recorder’s Court docket book that covers the period between June 1886 and April 1887 reveals that 65 percent of the 3,699 defendants who appeared before the recorder had no witnesses testify in their defense.^[265] Consequently, most cases came down to the testimony of a police officer against the testimony of the accused.^[266] Attorney Alexander Akerman accurately described the process of being tried by a recorder: “[T]he result is inevitable. The prisoner is promptly found guilty of one or more of the charges, fined beyond his ability to pay, and in default thereof hustled to the chain-gang [sic].”^[267] In addition, a clear racial disparity emerges in dismissal rates: 57 percent of White men had charges dismissed compared to 45 percent of Black men and only 32 percent of Black women.^[268]

The Recorder Court’s fines were particularly onerous for Black Atlantans, the vast majority of whom made less than one dollar per day—with Black women making even less than that amount.^[269] The docket book reveals that even relatively small fines often forced Black Atlantans onto the chain gang. For Black men, the average fine for disorderly conduct that resulted in time on the chain gang was $7.78.^[270] For Black women, it was even lower: $6.70.^[271] In contrast, White men who ended up on the chain gang were assessed, on average, a significantly higher fine of $11.31, reflecting the fact that White Atlantans generally made higher wages and thus had more resources to pay fines.^[272] Consequently, in the period covered by the 1886–87 docket book, 382 White men and 32 White women were sent to the chain gang.^[273] In contrast, 462 Black men and 191 Black women ended up laboring on the city’s streets.^[274]

That year, then, Black Atlantans comprised approximately 61 percent of those sent to the chain gang, though they made up approximately 44 percent of the city’s population. As noted above, the arrest rate, and consequently the proportion of men and women sent to the chain gang, became even more racially disproportionate in the 1890s. Although there was some variation around the state, it appears that fines were generally worked off at a rate of fifty cents per day in Atlanta—thus if a man were unable to pay a five-dollar fine, he would be forced to labor without pay on the chain gang for ten days.^[275] At that rate, Atlantans provided almost 70,000 man-days of unpaid labor working the city’s streets in 1896.^[276] Moreover, the raw number of individuals who served time on the chain gang understates the total proportion of annual chain gang labor done by Black Atlantans. In 1904, the Atlanta Constitution reported that Atlantans served 79,510 days on the chain gang, with Black prisoners accounting for 85 percent of the total.^[277]

Though convicts were rarely forced to work on the city’s chain gang for more than a month, the conditions were dismal.^[278] Prisoners were frequently whipped as punishment for small offenses and the “stockade” where they were housed was infested with cockroaches and rats.^[279] Although there were few formal collateral consequences of conviction, there were still numerous downstream effects.^[280] Spending weeks on the chain gang meant being separated from one’s family and unable to support them. This was particularly harmful for Black Atlantans because many Black families required the earnings of both parents to purchase the necessities of life and had few savings to draw upon when the wages of one parent were lost.^[281]

Figure 3. Atlanta Chain Gang circa 1905.^[282]

This system of fines and chain gang labor materially benefitted the city. In 1903, for example, the value of fines paid amounted to almost one quarter of the police department’s budget.^[283] Chain gang labor had even more tangible benefits. As early as 1875, the Police Committee argued that when “the benefit derived to the City from the labor of the Police Court convicts are considered, it will be readily seen that the actual expense [of the police force] is greatly reduced.”^[284] The next year, the Streets Committee of the Council reported that while it was regrettable that so many Atlantans violated the law, “we believe that these convicts furnish the cheapest and most efficient laborers we can get for our streets and we recommend that measures be taken to secure by legislation their continued service.”^[285] Chain gang prisoners worked to construct new and better roads that supported Atlanta’s rapid expansion. The city thus had little financial incentive to avoid unnecessary arrests, particularly because its growth and prosperity attracted new migrants—many of whom would themselves end up on the chain gang. The Recorder’s Court punishment practices are part of a long American tradition of using criminal law to generate revenue and subsidize the expansion of carceral institutions.

In contrast to Malcolm Feeley’s famous description of New Haven’s municipal courts, in Atlanta’s Recorder’s Court, the process was not the punishment.^[286] Rather, after minimal process, defendants were subjected to heavy fines or forced labor on the chain gang. In 1906, reformist attorney Alexander Akerman summarized the state of local justice in a speech to the Georgia Bar Association. He labeled municipal courts the “greatest menace of the present time to the liberties of the people” and declared that such courts “daily and hourly consign the indiscreet, the helpless and the poor to an involuntary and public servitude in chains, under the public lashings of the whipping boss, not for crimes but for petty municipal offenses, for which no such punishment is meted out by the authorities of any other civilized people.”^[287] Akerman’s indictment was rare among White Georgians, but was common among Black Atlantans of all classes, as demonstrated in the next Part.

IV. Black Challenges to the Crime and Policing Consensus

With a few minor exceptions, discussed above, Black Atlantans had little direct impact on elite criminological theories or on policing policy.^[288] From the first years after the Civil War, however, they engaged in various forms of protest against policing and the criminal legal system. This Part describes the differences between the activism of the Black middle and working class, but nevertheless demonstrates that Black Atlantans were unified across class lines in their opposition to racist explanations for crime and biased policing.

As early as 1867, Black Savannah politician James Simms expressed a widely held sentiment, declaring, “we want no bigoted Mayor and no brutal policemen” but rather Black political power.^[289] That same year, Black Atlantans demanded, unsuccessfully, that the city hire Black policemen.^[290] This Part shows that such formal demands were characteristic of Black elite and middle-class activism, while working-class Black men and women had more direct ways of making their voices heard. Such bifurcated Black protest activity would continue across the ensuing decades. This Part demonstrates that contemporary calls for reform and protests against racist policing are part of a tradition that dates to emancipation itself. This Part first examines the written protests and alternative criminology put forward by middle-class and elite Black Atlantans. It then demonstrates that working-class Black Atlantans more directly challenged the authority of the Atlanta police.

A. Elite and Middle-Class Activism

Atlanta’s Black leaders challenged both the White criminological consensus and racist criminal justice practices. In doing so, they put forward an alternate vision of crime prevention that focused on material inequality. Atlanta’s Black leaders and middle-class professionals denied White claims that there was an inherent connection between Blackness and criminality. As W. E. B. Du Bois, a professor at Atlanta University between 1897 and 1910, declared in his 1904 study Notes on Negro Crime, “the Negro is not naturally criminal.”^[291] As shown above, Black leaders still frequently criticized the elements of the Black community they believed were responsible for crime,^[292] but they argued that crime was essentially a problem of class, not of race.^[293] In the words of pastor Henry H. Proctor, Black leaders sought to distinguish “the educated, property-holding or church going element of the colored race” from the “worthless, irresponsible vaga­bond.”^[294]

At the same time as Black leaders decried “faults of the negro,” such as the alleged idleness of the Black working class, they argued that such traits were consequences of slavery and ongoing discrimination, not an innate trait of Blackness.^[295] Du Bois, for example, saw the long-term effects of slavery everywhere, from the structure of the Black family to the assumption that work did not pay and even asserted that theft was caused by “imperfect ideas of property ownership inseparable from a system of slavery.”^[296] If the impact of slavery were undeniable, its most important legacy to Black thinkers was not idleness or crime but its negative impact on the Black family. They argued that the social problems of the Black masses were linked to improper home life, which in turn caused idleness and intemperance. In The Philadelphia Negro and his other writings, for example, Du Bois demonstrated his low opinion of Black working-class families.^[297] Similarly, in a speech quoted approvingly in the Atlanta Constitution, he declared “we must teach our children to work,” and argued that Black families needed “homes of cleanliness, order and discipline . . . where the training of children is a matter of thoughtful care.”^[298] Other Black writers, including newspaper editor B. J. Davis and pastor W. B. Matthew, agreed that the lack of “clean living” and unwillingness to work resulted from poor conditions in the family.^[299]

Criticism of Black home life was primarily criticism of Black women, especially mothers. Du Bois, in particular, focused on the “sexual looseness” of Black women and believed that their degradation hurt the race and fostered crime.^[300] As he stated in “The Conservation of Races,” “Unless we conquer our present vices they will conquer us; we are diseased, we are developing criminal tendencies, and an alarmingly large percentage of our men and women are sexually impure.”^[301] Yet, even if Black leaders thought slavery had caused crime by injuring the Black family and supported the arrests of women who frequented dives, they acknowledged that the contemporary conditions in which Black families were forced to live made a decent family life difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. How could working-class Black Atlantans raise their children well if they were confined in slums that were replete with alcohol, crime, and brutal policemen? In short, they saw crime not as an inevitable result of Blackness, but as caused by social forces that disrupted family life. Crime, then, could be eradicated not through mass arrests, but through policies that remedied these conditions.^[302]

Black leaders and activists thus proposed an alternate lay criminology, emphasizing environmental factors and the understanding that Black families did not exist in isolation. At a 1904 conference on “Negro Crime” that Du Bois organized, keynote speaker Franklin B. Sanborn told the assembled audience that “what we term crime is the direct or indirect result of poverty and its attendant evils.”^[303] Du Bois embraced this explanation, writing that “crime among Southern Negroes is a symptom of wrong social conditions.”^[304] Du Bois held White elites, who maintained a monopoly on political power, responsible for creating these “wrong social conditions.”^[305] The environmentalist explanation for Black crime was appealing because it was easy for any open-minded observer to see the material deprivation of Southern Black life: poverty, low wages, poor housing conditions, police brutality, and dearth of schools and social services. B. J. Davis, for example, argued that the lack of adequate education facilities and economic opportunities caused crime: “Right here in our city, the authorities are raising up criminals every day by failure to furnish ample educational facilities for Negro education, and by closing the opportunity to make an honest dollar in the face of the Negro youth.”^[306] Consequently, Black elites and professionals frequently demanded improved social services, increased access to education, and a modicum of political power.^[307] Although Atlanta’s politicians were happy to embrace Black leaders’ calls to eliminate dives, they ignored Black pleas for racial equality and social services.^[308]

Both Black elites and middle-class professionals thus rejected the core element of Atlanta’s lay criminology, which held that criminality and idleness were innate traits of Black people that could only be remedied through the application of force. Instead, they saw social conditions as the cause of crime and believed that heavy-handed policing would serve only to deprive Black Atlantans of opportunities and contribute to criminality. Black Atlantans thus consistently denounced the brutality and unfairness of the criminal legal system.^[309]

Criticism of policing was common in Atlanta’s Black-owned newspapers, but the newspaperman who attacked the police most aggressively was Alonzo W. Burnett, editor of the aptly named Weekly Defiance. Burnett labeled the Atlanta Police “low down cut throats, scrapes and murderers” whose sole aim was to enforce White dominance. He challenged Black Atlantans to protest, asking, “[a]re we going to be murdered like dogs right here in this community and not open our mouths?”^[310] Though Burnett was more radical than most, he was not alone in criticizing police violence. After the police killed a Black woman in 1883, for example, the Black-owned Atlanta Vindicator asked, “[o]h! Jupiter when will these things cease” and connected the killing to another killing in Athens, Georgia, as well as to the economic exploitation of Black sharecroppers.^[311] Similarly, the Atlanta Independent frequently took aim at the police and justice system. In 1905, for example, it demanded harsher punishment for a White policeman who was temporarily suspended after killing a Black man without cause.^[312] That same year, J. Max Barber took up Burnett’s mantle of forceful opposition to White supremacy in his magazine The Voice of the Negro. The magazine published a piece by Rev. John H. Grant that located the causes of crime in the police department and city government. Grant argued that “this habit of clubbing Negroes by officers of this city is as common as walking down the street” and that police officers “are the advance agents of trouble.”^[313] In other words, he argued, racist policing produced the very outcomes the police sought to prevent.

Police violence was not the only target of Black critiques. Many Black elites, even conservative ones such as Proctor and Davis, identified the criminal legal system as a cause of crime.^[314] The most blatant example of this phenomenon was convict labor. Du Bois, for example, argued that when convicts were forced to labor, punishment became “a means of public and private revenue rather than . . . a means of preventing the making of criminals,” and thus the city was incentivized to arrest as many people as possible.^[315]

Other Black writers also decried the profits made from unpaid Black labor and the conditions convicts were forced to endure.^[316] In 1904, for example, B. J. Davis attacked the chain gang system and asked if White Atlantans believed that “an impartial enforcement of the law would impair their ability to fill their contracts with lessees?”^[317] That same year, a number of prominent Black men protested the use of convicts on the new Atlanta waterworks: “We Solemnly remind our [W]hite fellow citizens,” they wrote, “that criminals are made more often than born—that a social system that seeks to make money out of crime is sure to reap more crime as a harvest.”^[318] Two years later, J. Max Barber argued that the Recorder’s Court was “one of the greatest incentives to crime.”^[319] The court, he claimed, “is run mostly for the money the city gets out of the fines and for the humiliation than can be dealt the Negro.”^[320] Rather than preventing crime, these Black thinkers argued that brutal and profit-making punishments only served to create more criminals.

Sometimes, Black writers went further and indicted the entire criminal legal system. They rejected the premises of White criminology and argued that increasing arrests were caused by more stringent enforcement rather than an uptick in criminal activity.^[321] B. J. Davis, for example, connected the crime panic to newspaper reporting, writing, “[a]s a rule the [W]hite press of the country is busy magnifying the vices [of] the Negro and minimizing his virtues. Crimes committed by [W]hite men which never get into the press if committed by a Negro are heralded to the windward in glaring headlines.”^[322] Similar attitudes were reflected in the results of a survey of Black Georgians that Du Bois conducted as part of his Notes on Negro Crime. While some respondents averred that crime was caused by gambling, drinking, and idleness, many others described the blatant unfairness of “Georgia justice.” Based on this testimony, Du Bois concluded “so customary had it become to convict any Negro upon a mere accusation, that public opinion was loathe to allow a fair trial to [B]lack suspects.”^[323] Thus, they argued, racism in the criminal legal system contributed to crime because Black Atlantans understood that they could be arrested and convicted even if they had not violated any law.

The protests of Black leaders represent important dissents from the lay criminology of Atlanta’s White leaders. They prefigure contemporary critiques of the criminal legal system and demonstrate that alternative visions of crime, policing, and justice were present over a century ago. At the same time, it is important to note that even when there were shared critiques of the justice system, there was no consensus. Some more conservative leaders such as Henry H. Proctor focused more on the behavior of the Black working class, while more radical thinkers such as J. Max Barber placed a greater blame for criminality on the unfairness of the criminal legal system. Yet the total exclusion of Black Atlantans from political power in this period meant that neither conservative nor radical Black voices had any significant influence on city policy. Consequently, the positions expounded by Atlanta’s Black leaders and professionals did not change the quotidian experiences of Black Atlantans with the police and criminal legal system. These Atlantans did not write in the city’s newspapers but demonstrated their dissent in other ways.

B. Working Class Protest

Working-class Black Atlantans were the primary targets of the city’s criminal legal system, accounting for virtually all Black people arrested. Though their complaints were less likely to be recorded in writing, they expressed their opposition to Georgia’s justice system in ways that had more immediate effects.

The late nineteenth century was a difficult time for working-class Black Southerners. The urban economy offered them little room for economic advancement, they lost the right to vote and thus their voice in politics, and they lived in the shadow of weekly reports of lynchings.^[324] Despite the raids, arrests, and lectures from White and Black leaders, many Black Atlantans refused to give up their favored leisure activities and continued to patronize dance halls, dives, and pool rooms, which offered respite from their daily toil, even if a night of fun could lead to weeks on the chain gang.^[325]

Their experiences of unjust arrest and prosecution led many working-class Black Atlantans to reject the criminal legal system altogether. Given Atlanta’s extremely high arrest rate, it is certain that most Black working-class people knew someone who had been arrested for a minor offense or had themselves been arrested. Even if they were not personally acquainted with the criminal legal system, Black Atlantans frequently observed Recorder’s Court proceedings from the gallery.^[326] Anyone who sat through a day of the Recorder’s Court could not help but notice the overrepresentation of Black defendants and the dozens of Black men, women, and children sent to the chain gang.^[327] Given that nearly all of those tried in the Recorder’s Court were arrested for petty order-maintenance offenses, Black observers would not have seen the defendants as dangerous criminals. Rather they were friends, neighbors, or dance partners simply trying to find meaning and joy within the suffocating structure of Atlanta’s White supremacy.

These experiences led many Black Atlantans to engage in what historian Tera Hunter calls “collective self-defense.”^[328] They frequently defended their neighbors by running off the policemen as they attempted to make arrests for petty crimes.^[329] By preventing arrests, Black men and women directly protected members of their communities from the violence and coercion of the criminal legal system. For the individual rescued from arrest, these collective actions could mean retaining a week of wages or avoiding a week on the chain gang and thus being able to see one’s spouse and children and keep one’s job. Such actions were so common that the Atlanta Constitution reported in 1883 that “whenever an officer visits a negro locality to make an arrest the negroes congregate and do all in their power to prevent the officers from doing their duty, and a hundred occasions the mobs have stoned the police.”^[330] Two weeks later, the Atlanta Constitution reported that after an officer arrested a “small negro boy,” the boy’s mother and a half dozen other Black women surrounded the officer and demanded the boy’s release. With the assistance of other Black neighbors, they succeeded.^[331]

This sort of “open defiance of police and law” also had broader effects.^[332] There were numerous reports of police unwilling to enter certain notorious neighborhoods. While some of these may have been exaggerated for comic or racist effect, it seems likely that some officers altered their beats to avoid certain streets, allowing the Black men and women in those areas to avoid petty arrests.^[333] In addition, the Black community often raised money to help defendants pay fines and avoid hard labor on the chain gang.^[334]

At other times, Black Atlantans harbored those wanted for crimes. It is difficult to know how common harboring criminals was because White newspapers’ complaints that it happened constantly were almost certainly exaggerated. The Atlanta Constitution wrote in 1883 that “[t]here is nothing more disheartening to the true friends of the negroes than the utter disregard of law manifested in this lawless loyalty to color. The meaning of the whole business is that negro thieves, negro murderers, negro lawbreakers of all kinds, are to be protected at all hazards.”^[335] Indeed, in 1901, a judge lectured his courtroom audience that if Black citizens would assist the police in apprehending lawbreakers, “lynchings would be abolished.”^[336] Black Atlantans, however, understood that the city’s police existed not to protect them, but to enforce the city’s racial hierarchy, and acted accordingly to protect their neighbors and friends.^[337]

Elite, middle- and working-class Black Atlantans thus took different tacks in their protests of the city’s criminal legal system. Siloed by class divisions within the Black community, the two groups acted largely independently, and neither succeeded in achieving fundamental changes to the police or court system. Yet they created a political language that future activists would use to protest both police abuse and their exclusion from equal rights under the law.

V. Policing, Race, and Resistance Today

This case study of race, crime, and policing in a New South city highlights four points for the study of the contemporary criminal legal system and Black protest against it.

First, it provides one of the first in-depth studies of crime and policing in Atlanta. In doing so, it demonstrates that slave emancipation necessitated a new form of control, and that Southerners were able to adopt one that was already in use governing the working class in Northern cities as well as in Europe.^[338] Although the dearth of studies about other Southern cities in this period makes comparison difficult, it seems that policing in Atlanta was not unique. The differences between its police force and those of other Southern cities were of degree rather than kind. Like other Southern police forces, Atlanta’s police force took shape in the late nineteenth century in response to the new challenges of emancipation and a growing urban environment. Across the region, police responded to White fears of Black criminality and disproportionately arrested Black residents. Black Southerners had few legal protections against discriminatory policing; the effective enforcement of Constitutional rights against the police was still decades away.^[339]

What set Atlanta apart, and what explains why its arrest rate was so much higher than that of comparable cities such as Memphis, is how quickly it embraced order-maintenance policing. In this period, Atlanta’s leaders succeeded in transforming Atlanta from a small village to an economic leader in the region. Their development and modernization program relied on the police force to control perceived Black disorder and the crime it supposedly engendered. Consequently, Atlanta hired more police per capita than comparable cities, and the policemen’s efforts were targeted at raiding dives and making arrests for petty offenses. The continued willingness of Atlanta to put large amounts of resources toward policing rather than other social services has also been highlighted by contemporary activists opposing Cop City.^[340] Although the scale of Atlanta’s focus on policing Black leisure was unusual at the time, in the twentieth century, especially in the wake of the Great Migration, similar strategies were deployed in cities with large Black populations across the country.^[341]

In the broadest view, the development of Atlanta’s police force has much in common with the development of police forces across the globe during this period. Modern police forces were a nineteenth‑century innovation, used to establish social control of free, urban people who were, in theory, equal before the law.^[342] The end of slavery put Southern cities in a similar position to cities elsewhere. Suddenly, the size of the free population increased dramatically, and many people, Black and White, left the agricultural economy and moved to cities.^[343] Atlanta and other Southern cities used policing to solve one of the new questions raised by emancipation: how to control a free, urban population now that the private power of slaveholders had been removed. To borrow a phrase from historian Andrew Baker, Atlanta’s police “was an American premonition rather than a symptom of the South’s blighted history”; the experience of Black Atlantans in this period foreshadowed the police violence and mass incarceration of today.^[344]

Second, this Article demonstrates that discretion was central to policing in Atlanta, as it was elsewhere. Discretion was, and remains, central to racialized social control.^[345] Both policemen and the recorder understood that the city’s vague ordinances could be used to make mass arrests and crack down on Black leisure activities. Policemen faced few, if any, consequences for brutality or unjustified arrests. Black residents had no effective way to vindicate their constitutional rights and insufficient political power to change policing tactics or priorities.^[346] In short, this case study demonstrates that the problem of policing is a modern one. Police forces are a constitutive element of our urbanized, industrialized world. The Atlanta police force that was created 150 years ago is the same force that governs the city today. Its brutality and injustice are not vestiges of slavery—not unthinking carryovers from the horrific regime of human bondage. Rather, the massive discontinuity of the Civil War, emancipation, and the Reconstruction Amendments made the South more like the rest of the country and the rest of the industrialized world. It forced Southern elites to seek a new means of social control that could work within these new constitutional constraints. The solution they chose, a police force, has been used across space and time to achieve social control in urban space.^[347] In the post-emancipation South, police forces focused much of their energy on policing Black residents. In other times and places, however, police have targeted other disfavored groups, including immigrants, minority ethnic groups, opposing political factions, and the poor.^[348] Recognizing how American policing is both similar to and different from policing in other countries can help us place it in a broader global context and recognize how policing fits into broader currents of social and economic change.

Third, this Article also demonstrates that there are important continuities in the history of policing. The fundamental arbitrariness of the enforcement priorities of the Atlanta police are an important reminder that police are, and always have been, “sovereigns of the street.”^[349] The quotidian, discretionary decisions of police officers and other local officials, such as the recorder, to arrest or punish citizens for minor offenses have a major impact on the lives of Black Americans.^[350] Law is actualized through its enforcement, and thus Atlanta’s lay criminology did more to determine the actions of the city’s police than the content of written ordinances. For Black Atlantans who had little influence over the crafting of statutes, their interaction with the law was experienced primarily as physical force: the steel of the service revolver, the iron spikes of manacles, the dirty jail and jeering judge, and the wooden handle of the chain gang pickaxe. Today, as well, many Americans are more likely to experience state power as the coercion of the criminal legal system rather than the benefits of the welfare state.

Atlanta’s nineteenth-century policing and court system has many features that remain familiar to those who are familiar with policing and low-level criminal enforcement today. The major difference, however, is that we now inhabit a legal structure that provides more avenues for redress, even if they are often insufficient. Section 1983 suits were impossible in the time period covered in this Article,^[351] and the doctrine that state criminal laws could be void for vagueness had not been established.^[352] Although twentieth-century reforms to criminal law and procedure were not sufficient to eliminate racist policing, these reforms have allowed Americans to have the possibility of recompense if their rights are violated.

Finally, though recent protests against policing have been unprecedented in scale, it is important to recognize that activists’ core complaints of biased and brutal policing have characterized Black protest for a century and a half. The protests against Cop City are just the most recent and prominent instantiation of the broader critique of policing in the city. The legacy of policing in Atlanta, then, is not only racist law enforcement, but also the sustained critique of and resistance to the brutality and injustice of the criminal legal system. Working-class Black Atlantans lived with the constant threat of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment on vague charges that pitted their word against that of a White policeman in front of a White judge. Atlanta’s Black working class resisted the policing system both passively and actively. They attempted to keep their leisure activities free from White control and acted when they could to reduce the harm the system caused.

Black leaders also saw the harm caused by the city’s criminal legal system. They penned critiques of its brutality and unfairness and developed a political language, still present today, that argued that crime could be reduced by improving the material conditions of the Black working class. Their lack of success reminds us that, as Jocelyn Simonson has written, the “antidemocratic work” of policing “is especially acute because of the domination inherent in the everyday nature of modern policing.”^[353] Centering the long history of Black protest against the criminal legal system demonstrates that contemporary protest movements did not spring up out of nowhere. Rather, they are the latest instantiation of a long-running struggle for racial equality within the criminal legal system. The failures and successes of the past contain essential lessons for today’s activists, such as the necessity of winning political power, the importance of unity across class lines, and the impact of direct action when political solutions are not available.

Neither the direct action of the Black working class nor the proposed reforms of Black leaders succeeded in reducing the power of White supremacy in Atlanta. As the first decade of the twentieth century came to a close, the number of Black men and women arrested by the Atlanta police continued to rise, segregation laws spread, and disfranchisement became part of Georgia’s Constitution. Yet even during the nadir, the broader political movement that would dismantle segregation had begun. In 1905 W. E. B. Du Bois traveled from Atlanta to help found the Niagara Movement, which became the NAACP four years later.^[354] Then, as now, reforms to the criminal legal system can only be achieved through sustained political pressure.

Conclusion

This Article has emphasized the multifaceted nature of policing in Atlanta and demonstrated the connections between the institutions of policing, lay criminology, the prosecution and punishment of order-maintenance offenses, and Black protest. It illustrates the importance of new police forces in enforcing White supremacy after emancipation and catalogs the harms that policing imposed on Black Atlantans. This history demonstrates how oppressive structures such as White supremacy can survive even revolutionary changes in the law such as the Reconstruction Amendments. Similarly, the twentieth century civil rights movement transformed American law and vastly increased Black political power, resulting in, among other things, the election of Black mayors in cities as diverse as Chicago, New York, and Atlanta. But the problem of discriminatory policing in those cities and beyond remains, accompanied as always, by demands for police reform and abolition. The pro-police backlash of the past two years has demonstrated how difficult it is to achieve even minor police reforms. Only time will tell which side will determine the future of law enforcement in American cities; but the struggle over Cop City, however it is resolved, may portend the future.

Appendix: Atlanta Arrests and Fines, 1866–1906

Year	Population	Total Arrests	Black	White	Black Women	Black Men	White Women	White Men	City	State	Fines Assessed	Fines Paid	Chain Gang	Drunk	Disorderly Conduct	Idling	Black Boys under 15	Black Girls under 15
1866												$1,011 (1st Quarter)
1867
1868
1869												$ 2,678.00
1870	21,789
1871		2,288										$2,313 (3rd Quarter)
1872		2,340										$ 4,224.15
1873		2,256									$ 14,171.00	$ 8,213.00
1874		3,605	2,078	1,527	357	1,721	233	1,294				$ 15,000.00	$ 6,771.70
1875												$ 7,357.00
1876		3,703							2,900	803	$ 13,323.00	$ 4,758.00	$ 7,462.00
1877		3,418							2,695	723		$ 10,419.00
1878		2,864							2,364	500	$ 6,727.00		$ 3,515.55
1879		4,112							3,452	660	$ 10,058.95	$ 5,308.15	$ 4,035.45
1880	37,409	4,345							3,619	726	$ 9,808.00	$ 5,926.25	$ 2,718.75
1881
1882
1883
1884		5,824	3,247	2,399	888	2,359	241	2,158	4,799	1,025	$ 20,843.00	$ 12,955.60	$ 5,484.55
1885		6,305	3,625	2,680	980	2,645	234	2,446	5,154	1,151	$ 21,903.25	$ 14,182.00	$ 6,153.00
1886		5,578	3,146	2,432	776	2,370	195	2,237	4,677	901	$ 23,817.00	$ 13,818.85	$ 4,235.05
1887		6,138	3,625	2,513	907	2,718	170	2,343	5,160	978	$ 27,738.00	$ 16,816.20	$ 4,474.65
1888		7,817	4,446	3,371	1,218	3,228	207	3,164	6,652	1,165	$ 28,260.20	$17.886.40	$ 8,419.85
1889		10,379	5,844	4,535	1,313	4,531	340	4,195	8,814	1,565	$ 37,004.45	$ 19,470.08	$ 12,890.42
1890	65,533	12,837	7,236	5,601	1,715	5,521	380	5,221	11,389	1,448	$ 42,699.01	$ 25,744.93	$ 16,924.08
1891		13,351	7,764	5,587	1,555	6,209	341	5,246	11,600	2,051	$ 41,143.10	$ 23,731.76	$ 14,635.09
1892		12,862	8,010	4,852	1,720	6,290	323	4,529	11,049	1,813	$ 49,153.40	$ 19,222.55	$ 25,500.45
1893		12,903	8,278	4,625	2,087	6,191	314	4,311			$ 48,926.60	$ 19,600.10	$ 26,420.00	2,940	3,614	1,131	1,248	96
1894		12,383	8,247	4,136	2,086	6,161	296	3,840	10,862	1,521	$ 48,313.25	$ 17,214.02	$ 28,665.73	2,903	3,876	1,256	1,074	119
1895		14,190	8,967	5,223	2,054	6,913	308	4,915	12,170	2,020	$ 52,745.45	$ 19,547.18	$ 30,611.33
1896		12,241	8,456	3,785	2,122	6,334	265	3,520	10,025	2,216	$ 53,786.38	$ 15,876.18	$ 34,715.70	2,313	4,545	1,271	596	48
1897		13,122	8,646	4,476	2,144	6,502	337	4,139	11,199	1,923	$ 55,985.77	$ 19,523.65	$ 32,743.12	3,195	4,867	1,465
1898		14,307	9,370	4,937	2,470	6,900	416	4,521	12,344	1,963	$ 57,231.75	$ 20,720.30	$ 33,821.70	3,696	5,711	1,641	758	70
1899		15,172	10,245	4,927	2,658	7,587	388	4,539	13,203	1,969	$ 56,792.00	$ 25,550.23	$ 27,204.27	3,891	5,933	1,695	758	105
1900	89,872	15,632	10,202	5,430	2,786	7,416	467	4,963	14,045	1,587	$ 69,674.00	$ 37,766.20	$ 29,701.05	4,244	6,770	1,523	781	107
1901		17,826	11,502	5,784	2,964	8,538	401	5,383	15,951	1,335	$ 85,296.00	$ 46,243.45	$ 35,893.15	4,163	8,466	1,794	842	110
1902		16,434	10,698	5,736	2,889	7,809	447	5,289	15,088	1,346	$ 88,330.00	$ 45,491.56	$ 40,510.19	3,122	9,456	1,061	854	90
1903		16,088	10,163	5,925	2,619	7,544	512	5,413	14,741	1,347	$ 83,110.70	$ 47,355.05	$ 34,483.40	2,734	9,559	1,124	934	74
1904		18,556	11,954	6,602	2,761	9,193	465	6,137	16,957	1,599	$ 106,644.31	$ 59,073.26	$ 45,949.30	4,876	9,404	1,216	1,015	77
1905		17,195									$ 99,971.25	$ 55,149.60	$ 42,461.90
1906		21,702	13,511	8,191	3,194	10,317	676	7,515	19,601	2,101	$ 141,809.84	$ 86,294.20	$ 53,048.39	5,230	11,260	1,314	2,507	781

 

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* Jonathon J. Booth is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School. He received his Ph.D. in History from Harvard University in 2021 and his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2019. The editors at the University of Colorado Law Review greatly improved this piece. Many other people have provided useful feedback on this Article and I would especially like to thank Julian Go, Fred O. Smith, Keith Hollingsworth, Anna Lvovsky, Brenner Fissell, Sandra Mayson, Thomas Frampton, Jocelyn Simonson, Deborah Denno, Danielle Jefferis, Erin Braatz, Laurent Sacharoff, Andreas Kuersten, Sheila Devaney, Barrington D. Parker, Kate Redburn, Vincent Brown, Walter Johnson, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Annette Gordon Reed, Kenneth Mack, Sam Backer, Liz Gyori, Ian Kumekawa, Aaron Bekemeyer, Abigail Modaff, Corinne Wolfson, the attendees of the Markelloquium, the Chronophages, and the archivists at the Atlanta History Center.

1. The Editorial Board of the University of Colorado Law Review Volume 96 advises readers that this Article contains outdated and derogatory language. This Article contains historical material presented as it was written. As a result, there is racially charged language within this Article that does not reflect the author’s or the University of Colorado Law Review’s endorsement of the use of these terms.  ↑
2. Atlanta Community Press Collective, A Brief History of the Atlanta City Prison‑Farm, Atlanta Cmty. Press Collective, Aug. 14, 2021, https://‌‌atlpresscollective.com‌‌/2021‌‌/08‌‌/14‌‌/history-of-the-atlanta-city-prison-farm‌‌/comment-page-1 [https://‌‌perma.cc‌‌/H2WC-2DSE]. ↑
3. Amna K. Akbar, The Fight Against Cop City, Dissent, Spring, 2023, https://‌‌www.dissentmagazine.org‌‌/article‌‌/the-fight-against-cop-city [https://‌‌perma.cc‌‌/X2XY-3TQQ]; Natasha Lennard, Police Shot Atlanta Cop City Protester 57 Times, Autopsy Finds, Intercept, Apr. 20, 2023, https://‌‌theintercept.com‌‌/2023‌‌/04‌‌/20‌‌/atlanta-cop-city-protester-autopsy [https://‌‌perma.cc‌‌/QE5Q-VTLP]; Odette Yousef, Domestic Terrorism Charges in Georgia are Prompting Concern over Political Repression, NPR, June 28, 2023, https://‌‌www.npr.org‌‌/2023‌‌/06‌‌/28‌‌/1184782128‌‌/cop-city-atlanta-domestic-terrorism [https://‌‌perma.cc‌‌/J7SJ-DRA9]; Grace Glass & Sasha Tycko, Not One Tree, 46 n+1, 2023, https://‌‌www.nplusonemag.com‌‌/issue-46‌‌/essays‌‌/not-one-tree [https://‌‌perma.cc‌‌/CFL9-YTNV]; Sam Worley, No Atlanta Way​, 13 The Drift, July 19, 2024, https://‌‌www.thedriftmag.com‌‌/no-atlanta-way [https://‌‌perma.cc‌‌/L5TZ-3NXC]. ↑
4. Indictment at 1–3, State v. Beaman, No. 23SC189192 (Fulton Co. Sup. Ct. August 29, 2023) [hereinafter Indictment], https://‌‌www.documentcloud.org‌‌/documents‌‌/23940338-cop-city-rico-indictment [https://‌‌perma.cc‌‌/2FRK-T5EK]. Notably, charges were brought by the Attorney General rather than the Fulton or Dekalb county prosecutor as is standard procedure, raising the specter of a political prosecution. ↑
5. Id.; Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, Ga. Code Ann. § 16‑14‑4(c) (2023). ↑
6. Indictment, supra note 4, at 24; Timothy Pratt, Inside the Attempt to Charge Georgia’s ‘Cop City’ Activists with Racketeering, Guardian, Nov. 10, 2023, https://‌‌www.theguardian.com‌‌/us-news‌‌/2023‌‌/nov‌‌/10‌‌/cop-city-racketeering-atlanta-georgia [https://‌‌perma.cc‌‌/XV3V-5BGK]. ↑
7. Indictment, supra note 4, at 25–30. ↑
8. Id. at 82. ↑
9. Id. at 57. On September 17, 2024, the Attorney General dropped all fifteen of the money laundering counts that had been brought against three defendants for allegedly misusing money donated to a bail fund to use for “forest kitchen materials” among other things. R. J. Rico, Georgia Prosecutors Drop All 15 Counts of Money Laundering Against 3 ‘Cop City’ Activists, Associated Press, Sept. 17, 2024, https://‌‌apnews.com‌‌/article‌‌/atlanta-cop-city-charges-dropped-solidarity-fund-360fad48beddfb970b145fc6577cc113 [https://‌‌perma.cc‌‌/A27P-6QSN]. ↑
10. Indictment, supra note 4, at 83. ACAB is an acronym that stands for “all cops are bastards.” ↑
11. Id. at 46. ↑
12. Policeman’s Relief Ass’n, History of the Atlanta Police Department 19 (1898). ↑
13. See infra Section III.B. ↑
14. See infra Section III.B. ↑
15. See infra notes 267–285 and accompanying text. ↑
16. See Benjamin Levin, After the Criminal Justice System, 98 Wash. L. Rev. 899, 921–27 (2023) (discussing the use of the term “criminal legal system”). ↑
17. See infra Part IV. ↑
18. In 1906, a massive anti‑Black riot and massacre marked the triumph of Jim Crow in Atlanta. See Gregory Mixon, The Atlanta Riot: Race, Class, and Violence in a New South City (2005). ↑
19. See infra Appendix. ↑
20. Order‑maintenance policing is a form of policing that focuses on repressing minor crimes on the theory that maintaining order prevents more serious crimes. It is most commonly associated with the 1980s concept of “broken windows policing” but, as this article shows, order-maintenance policing has a much longer history. See Adam Walsh & William Sousa, Preventing Crime Involves Paying Attention to the Little Things, Police Chief Online, Mar. 22, 2023, https://‌‌www.policechiefmagazine.org‌‌/paying-attention-little-things [https://‌‌perma.cc‌‌/6C6E-4EH2] (“if police and community members are able to proactively manage minor offenses (i.e., order‑maintenance), they can help to reduce fear, maintain the quality of life in neighborhoods, and potentially prevent serious crime from developing into a significant problem”); see also David E. Thacher, Order Maintenance Policing, in The Oxford Handbook of Police and Policing (Michael D. Reisig & Robert J. Kane eds., 2014) (providing a more critical analysis). ↑
21. See infra Section III.A. ↑
22. See infra Part I. ↑
23. Eric H. Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860–1920 31 (1981); Samuel Walker, Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice 56–57 (1980). ↑
24. See, e.g., Robert M. Fogelson, Big‑city Police 11, 35 (1977); Walker, supra note 23, at 64–65; Monkkonen, supra note 23, at 1. This branch of the historiography, to paraphrase Michel Foucault, treats the history of policing as the history of police reform. Many authors, who focus primarily on Northern cities, appear to have taken the critiques of Progressive Era activists as truth and portray the period between 1890 and 1960 as an era of professionalization that slowly dragged police forces away from the corruption and incompetence of the nineteenth century. At least in Atlanta, this narrative is inaccurate. See, e.g., Fogelson, supra, at 1–117; Walker, supra note 23, at 35, 125–220. ↑
25. See, e.g., Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas 203–20 (2001); Larry H. Spruill, Slave Patrols, “Packs of Negro Dogs” and Policing Black Communities, 53 Phylon 42, 43–44 (2016) (“Refusal to acknowledge links between slavery and Southern law enforcement is contrary to numerous scholars supporting plantation origins of police forces. Rejection of slave patrolling as the root of modern policing is a slippery slope into political and emotional insensitivity to police crimes against citizens they were sworn to protect and serve.”); NAACP, The Origins of Modern Day Policing, NAACP: History Explained, https://‌‌naacp.org‌‌/find-resources‌‌/history-explained‌‌/origins-modern-day-policing [https://‌‌perma.cc‌‌/BME3-33G9] (“The origins of modern-day policing can be traced back to the ‘Slave Patrol.’”); Rachel Harmon, The Law of Police 61 (2d ed. 2024) (“Southern [police] departments . . . often evolved out of slave patrols”); Ben Brucato, Policing Race and Racing Police: The Origin of US Police in Slave Patrols, 47 Soc. Just. 115, 133 (2020) (“As the patrols proved insufficient [after emancipation], cities and towns that did not have police forces before the war, such as Atlanta, Augusta, Nashville, Memphis, and Richmond, established professional, uniformed police during Reconstruction.”). Finally, one oft‑cited article argues that slave patrols were a “transitional” form of policing but does not actually make any argument connecting slave patrols to post‑emancipation policing. See Philip L. Reichel, Southern Slave Patrols as a Transitional Police Type, 7 Am. J. Police 51 (1988). I plan to write a future piece that addresses the relationship of slave patrols to post‑emancipation law enforcement in more detail, demonstrating that the impact of slave patrols on post‑emancipation law enforcement varied greatly between rural and urban areas. For a brief discussion of the much clearer connections between slave patrols and post‑emancipation rural White supremacist violence see James Gray Pope, Snubbed Landmark: Why United States v. Cruikshank (1876) Belongs at the Heart of the American Constitutional Canon, 49 Harv. C.R.‑C.L. L. Rev. 385, 399–400 (2014). ↑
26. See, e.g., Emily M. Brooks, Gotham’s War within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law‑and‑Order Liberalism in World War II‑Era New York City (2023); Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (2016); Stuart Schrader, Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (2019); Max Felker‑Kantor, Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (2018); Christopher Lowen Agee, The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950­­–1972 (2014); Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (2019); Marisol Lebrón, Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (2019); Donna Murch, Crack in Los Angeles: Crisis, Militarization, and Black Response to the Late Twentieth‑Century War on Drugs, 102 J. Am. Hist. 162 (2015); Anne Gray Fischer, The Streets Belong To Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification (2022); Danielle Wiggins, “Order as well as Decency”: The Development of Order Maintenance Policing in Black Atlanta, 46 J. Urb. Hist. 711 (2020). Even work that does touch on the South does so glancingly and incompletely. Fogelson, for example, conducted extensive research on Atlanta’s police, but only discusses the relationship between the police and the city’s Black population in relation to the mid‑twentieth century push to hire more Black officers. Fogelson, supra note 24, at 248, 287. ↑
27. Dennis N. Rousey, Policing the Southern City: New Orleans, 1805–1889, at 11–39 (1996); Julian Go, Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US 81–102 (2023). ↑
28. See sources cited infra notes 61–62. Unfortunately, these sources focus very little attention on the formation of post‑Civil War police forces in Southern cities. ↑
29. This phenomenon is sometimes called “popular criminology,” but that term usually refers to the interplay between popular media and people’s perceptions of the causes of crime. See Steven Kohm, Popular Criminology, Oxford Rsch. Encyc. of Criminology and Crim. Just. (2017); Nicole Rafter & Michelle Brown, Criminology Goes to the Movies: Crime Theory and Popular Culture (2011).  ↑
30. See Stuart Hall, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (2d ed. 2013); Raymond Fosdick et al., Criminal Justice in Cleveland: Reports of the Cleveland Foundation Survey of the Administration of Criminal Justice in Cleveland, Ohio 515–58 (Roscoe Pound & Felix Frankfurter eds., 1922); Daniel Romer et al., Television News and the Cultivation of Fear of Crime, 53 J. Comm. 88 (2003); Nicola Mastrorocco & Luigi Minale, News Media and Crime Perceptions: Evidence from a Natural Experiment, 165 J. Pub. Econ. 230 (2018). ↑
31. See, e.g., Jonathan Simon, Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (2009); Kevin Drakulich et al., Race and Policing in the 2016 Presidential Election: Black Lives Matter, the Police, and Dog Whistle Politics, 58 Criminology 370 (2020). ↑
32. See infra Part II. ↑
33. See infra Part III. Policing has similar effects today. See Jamelia N. Morgan, Rethinking Disorderly Conduct, 109 Cal. L. Rev. 1637 (2021). ↑
34. For a concise summary of the vast literature on the meaning of social control see Issa Kohler‑Hausmann, Misdemeanorland: Criminal Courts and Social Control in an Age of Broken Windows Policing 5–9 (2018). The idea of social control is not an anachronistic imposition, but an idea very much in vogue in this era. See Edward Alsworth Ross, Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order (1901); see also Kohler‑Hausmann, supra, at 106–25 (discussing law and social control). For a brief discussion of policing minor offenses in the nineteenth‑century North see David Montgomery, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century 64–71 (1994). ↑
35. See, e.g., Dorothy E. Roberts, Race, Vagueness, and the Social Meaning of Order‑Maintenance Policing, 89 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 775 (1999); Bernard E. Harcourt, Reflecting on the Subject: A Critique of the Social Influence Conception of Deterrence, the Broken Windows Theory, and Order‑Maintenance Policing New York Style, 97 Mich. L. Rev. 291 (1998); K. Babe Howell, Broken Lives from Broken Windows: The Hidden Costs of Aggressive Order‑Maintenance Policing, 33 N.Y.U. Rev. L. & Soc. Change 271 (2009); Monica C. Bell, Police Reform and the Dismantling of Legal Estrangement, 126 Yale L. J. 2054 (2017); Monica C. Bell, Anti‑Segregation Policing, 95 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 650 (2020); Eisha Jain, Arrests as Regulation, 67 Stan. L. Rev. 809 (2015). ↑
36. See, e.g., Fosdick et al., supra note 30, at 85–374; Roscoe Pound, Criminal Justice in America (1930); Caleb Foote, Vagrancy‑Type Law and Its Administration, 104 U. Pa. L. Rev. 603 (1956); Malcolm M. Feeley, The Process is the Punishment: Handling Cases in a Lower Criminal Court (1979); Symposium, Misdemeanor Machinery: The Hidden Heart of the American Criminal Justice System, 98 B.U. L. Rev. 669 (2018) (nine‑article symposium analyzing the misdemeanor system); William J. Stuntz, The Pathological Politics of Criminal Law, 100 Mich. L. Rev. 505, 519 (2001); Shaun Ossei‑Owusu, Kangaroo Courts, 134 Harv. L. Rev. F. 200 (2020); Issa Kohler‑Hausmann, Misdemeanor Justice: Control without Conviction, 119 Am. J. Socio. 351 (2013); Sara Sternberg Greene & Kristen M. Renberg, Judging Without a J.D., 122 Colum. L. Rev. 1287 (2022); Alexandra Natapoff, Criminal Municipal Courts, 134 Harv. L. Rev. 964, 1040–43 (2021); Alexandra Natapoff, Atwater and the Misdemeanor Carceral State, 133 Harv. L. Rev. F. 147, 152 (2020); Alexandra Natapoff, Misdemeanors, 11 Ann. Rev. L. & Soc. Sci. 255, 256 (2015) (“The lowly misdemeanor is in fact the paradigmatic American crime.”); Justin Weinstein˗Tull, Traffic Courts, 112 Calif. L. Rev. 1183 (2024); Walker, supra note 23, at 6, 55. ↑
37. U.S. Dep’t Of Just., Civ. Rts. Div., Investigation Of The Ferguson Police Department (2015). ↑
38. See, e.g., Alec Karakatsanis, The Punishment Bureaucracy: How to Think About “Criminal Justice Reform,” 128 Yale L. J. F. 848, 852 (2019) (“the punishment bureaucracy [is] a tool of power in service of White supremacy and profit”); Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism (2018); Josh Pacewicz & John N. Robinson III, Pocketbook Policing: How Race Shapes Municipal Reliance on Punitive Fines and Fees in the Chicago Suburbs, 19 Socio‑Economic Rev. 275 (2020); Devon W. Carbado, Predatory Policing, 85 UMKC L. Rev. 545 (2017); Allison P. Harris et al., Fiscal Pressures and Discriminatory Policing: Evidence from Traffic Stops in Missouri, 5 J. Race, Ethnicity, and Pol. 450 (2020). ↑
39. On Black protest of the police and criminal justice system during the twentieth century see, for example, Elizabeth Hinton, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s (2021); Orisanmi Burton, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (2023); Shannon King, The Politics of Safety: The Black Struggle for Police Accountability in La Guardia’s New York (2024); Nora C. Krinitsky, The Politics of Crime Control: Race, Policing, and Reform in Twentieth‑Century Chicago 284–335 (2017) (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan) (on file with author). ↑
40. See infra Part IV. ↑
41. See, e.g., Democratizing Criminal Justice Symposium, 111 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1367 (2017); Tracey L. Meares, The Path Forward: Improving the Dynamics of Community‑Police Relationships to Achieve Effective Law Enforcement Policies, 117 Colum. L. Rev. 1355 (2017); Rachel A. Harmon, The Problem of Policing, 110 Mich. L. Rev. 761 (2012); Howell, supra note 35; Stephen J. Schulhofer et al., American Policing at a Crossroads: Unsustainable Policies and the Procedural Justice Alternative, 101 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 335, 338 (2011); Joshua Kleinfeld, Manifesto of Democratic Criminal Justice, 111 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1367 (2017); Tom R. Tyler, Enhancing Police Legitimacy, 593 Annals Am. Acad. of Pol. & Soc. Sci. 84 (2004); Tom R. Tyler, From Harm Reduction to Community Engagement: Redefining the Goals of American Policing in the Twenty‑First Century, 111 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1537, 1546 (2017); Seth W. Stoughton, Principled Policing: Warrior Cops and Guardian Officers, 51 Wake Forest L. Rev. 611 (2016); Statement of Principles of Democratic Policing, Policing Project (2015), https://‌‌static1.squarespace.com‌‌/static‌‌/58a33e881b631bc60d4f8b31‌‌/t‌‌/59dfa277a803bb57bb93252e‌‌/1510756941918 [https://‌‌perma.cc‌‌/X9VB-P7GZ]; see also Shawn Fields, The Procedural Justice Industrial Complex, 99 Indiana L. J. 563 (2024) (critiquing the procedural justice focus of the growing procedural justice industry); John Rappaport, Some Doubts About “Democratizing” Criminal Justice, 87 U. Chi. L. Rev. 711 (2020) (critiquing democratization scholarship). ↑
42. The literature has undoubtedly grown greatly since 2020, but many scholars were exploring abolitionist ideas before that. See, e.g., Dorothy E. Roberts, Constructing a Criminal Justice System Free of Racial Bias: An Abolitionist Framework, 39 Colum. Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 261 (2007); Derecka Purnell, What Does Police Abolition Mean?, Bos. Rev. (Aug. 23, 2017), https://‌‌www.bostonreview.net‌‌/articles‌‌/derecka-purnell-how-will-we-be-safe-police [https://‌‌perma.cc‌‌/M3F9-X9A2]; Developments in the Law—Prison Abolition, 132 Harv. L. Rev. 1567 (2019) (including essays by Dylan Rodriguez, Allegra M. McLeod, Angel E. Sanchez, and Patrisse Cullors); V. Noah Gimbel & Craig Muhammad, Are Police Obsolete: Breaking Cycles of Violence Through Abolition Democracy, 40 Cardozo L. Rev. 1453 (2019). ↑
43. See, e.g., Jocelyn Simonson, Police Reform Through a Power Lens, 130 Yale L.J. 778, 784 (2021); Barry Friedman, Disaggregating the Policing Function 169 U. Pa. L. Rev. 925 (2021); Nirej Sekhon, Police and The Limit of Law, 119 Colum. L. Rev. 1711 (2019); Amna A. Akbar, An Abolitionist Horizon for (Police) Reform, 108 Calif. L. Rev. 1781 (2020); Anthony O’Rourke, Rick Su & Guyora Binder, Disbanding Police Agencies, 121 Colum. L. Rev. 1327 (2021); Rick Su, Anthony O’Rourke & Guyora Binder, Defunding Police Agencies, 71 Emory L.J. 1197 (2022); Tiffany Yang, “Send Freedom House!”: A Study in Police Abolition, 96 Wash. L. Rev. 1067 (2021); Barbara Fedders, The End of School Policing, 109 Calif. L. Rev. 1443 (2021); I. Bennett Capers, Afrofuturism, Critical Race Theory, and Policing in the Year 2044, 94 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1, 39–58 (2019); Jordan Blair Woods, Traffic Without the Police, 73 Stan. L. Rev. 1471 (2021). ↑
44. Simonson, supra note 43, at 799–810. ↑
45. See, e.g., Amna A. Akbar, Toward a Radical Imagination of Law, 93 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 405 (2018); Amanda Alexander, Nurturing Freedom Dreams: An Approach to Movement Lawyering in the Black Lives Matter Era, 5 How. Hum. & Civil Rts. L. Rev. 101 (2021); Jamillah Bowman Williams, Naomi Mezey & Lisa O. Singh, #BlackLivesMatter—Getting from Contemporary Social Movements to Structural Change, 12 Calif. L. Rev. Online 1 (2021); Zackary Okun Dunivin et al., Black Lives Matter Protests Shift Public Discourse, 119 PNAS (2022). ↑
46. Megan Ming Francis & Leah Wright‑Rigueur, Black Lives Matter in Historical Perspective, 17 Ann. Rev. L. & Soc. Sci. 441, 445 (2021) (starting the historical discussion with Ida B. Wells in the 1890s). But see Dylan C. Penningroth, Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (2023); Blair L. M. Kelley, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (2010); Shawn Leigh Alexander, An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACP (2013); Andrew Baker, To Poison a Nation: The Murder of Robert Charles and the Rise of Jim Crow Policing in America (2021). ↑
47. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk 75 (1904). ↑
48. During the period of this paper, the City of Atlanta was fully within Fulton County. Today, the city also includes part of Dekalb County. The Atlanta Metropolitan Area includes Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, Gwinnett, and Clayton counties. In addition, Milton County previously formed part of Atlanta’s suburbs but was merged with Fulton County in 1931. ↑
49. See supra notes 2–11 and accompanying text. ↑
50. Adelaide L. Fries, The Elizabeth Sterchi Letters, 5 Atlanta Hist. Bulletin 197, 198, 200 (1940); Arthur R. Taylor, From the Ashes: Atlanta During Reconstruction 111, 119 (1973) (Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University) (on file with author); see also Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy my Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War 44–50 (1997); Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865–1890, at 6–7 (1978). ↑
51. Ernest Ingersoll, The City of Atlanta, 60 Harper’s Magazine 30 (Dec. 1879). ↑
52. See infra Parts I–II. ↑
53. Rabinowitz, supra note 50, at 19. ↑
54. William Harris, Work and Family in Black Atlanta, 1880, 9 J. Soc. Hist. 319, 320 (1976); Richard J. Hopkins, Occupational and Geographic Mobility in Atlanta, 1870–1896, 34 J. S. Hist. 200, 205–08 (1968). ↑
55. Hunter, supra note 50, at 50–51; Rabinowitz, supra note 50, at 64–67. ↑
56. Rabinowitz, supra note 50, at 64–67, 77–96. ↑
57. George E. Waring, Jr., Report on the Social Statistics of Cities. Part II. The Southern and Western States 159 (1887). ↑
58. Bryan Wagner, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery 128 (2009); Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity 11–12 (2016). ↑
59. Booker T. Washington, Atlanta Exposition Address from Sept. 18, 1895, National Park Service (July 16, 2021), https://‌‌www.nps.gov‌‌/bowa‌‌/learn‌‌/historyculture‌‌/atlanta1-1.htm [https://‌‌perma.cc‌‌/JXY6-XF7J]. ↑
60. Policeman’s Relief Ass’n, supra note 12, at 9. ↑
61. But see William J. Mathias & Stuart Anderson, Horse to Helicopter: The First Century of the Atlanta Police Department (1973); Eugene J. Watts, The Police in Atlanta, 1890−1905, 39 J. Southern Hist. 165 (1973); Wagner, supra note 58; Howard N. Rabinowitz, The Conflict between Blacks and the Police in the Urban South, 1865–1900, 39 Historian 62 (1976); Rousey, supra note 27. Although this scholarship is fairly substantive, only Watts provides a sustained historical analysis of the Atlanta department—his work is more than a half‑century old and begins only in 1890. Matthias and Anderson devote only sixty pages to years before 1910. Wagner, Rabinowitz, and Rousey are eminent scholars, but focus only a portion of their attention on Atlanta’s police. ↑
62. Several recent works examine policing in other Southern cities in the early twentieth century, but focus little, if at all, on the nineteenth century. See Baker, supra note 46; Brandon T. Jett, Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South: African Americans and Law Enforcement in Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans, 1920−1945 (2021); Jeffrey S. Adler, Murder in New Orleans: The Creation of Jim Crow Policing (2019); Jeffrey S. Adler, Bluecoated Terror: Jim Crow New Orleans and the Roots of Modern Police Brutality (2024); Go, supra note 27, at 91–98. ↑
63. See, e.g., Walker, supra note 23, at 49–79; Allen Steinberg, The Transformation of Criminal Justice: Philadelphia, 1800–1880 (1989); Fogelson, supra note 24; Wilbur R. Miller, Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London, 1830−1870 (2d ed. 1999). ↑
64. Eric H. Monkkonen, History of Urban Police, 15 Crime and Just., 547, 549 (1992). Modern British policing began in colonized Ireland and was imported back to London by Prime Minister Robert Peel. See Stanley H. Palmer, Police and Protest in England and Ireland, 1780−1850: The Origins of Modern Police Forces (1973); Go, supra note 27, at 33–67. ↑
65. Monkkonen, supra note 64, at 550–52; Walker, supra note 23, at 53. ↑
66. Monkkonen, supra note 64, at 550–52; Walker, supra note 23, at 53. ↑
67. Monkkonen, supra note 64, at 550–52; Walker, supra note 23, at 53. ↑
68. Monkkonen, supra note 64, at 550–52; Walker, supra note 23, at 53. ↑
69. See P. A. J. Waddington, Armed and Unarmed Policing, in Policing Across the World: Issues for the Twenty‑First Century (R. I. Mawby ed. 1999). ↑
70. Roger Lane, Urban Police and Crime in Nineteenth‑Century America, 2 Crime & Justice 1, 5–6 (1980); Thomas S. Stone, Arrest Without Warrant, 1939 Wisc. L. Rev. 385, 385 (1939); Ian Beattie, Taming Modernity: The Rise of the Modern State in Early Industrial Manchester 384–85 (2021) (Ph.D. dissertation, McGill University) (on file with McGill University). ↑
71. Robert Liebman & Michael Polen, Perspectives on Policing in Nineteenth‑Century America, 2 Soc. Sci. Hist. 346, 354–56 (1978). ↑
72. N.J. Hammond, The Revised Code of the City of Atlanta §§ 235–244 (1866) [hereinafter Atlanta, Ga. Code (1866)]. ↑
73. 1853–54 Ga. Laws 101. ↑
74. Editorial, Daily Intelligencer (Atlanta, Ga.), Dec. 31, 1865, at 3. ↑
75. 4 Atlanta City Council Minutes, Jan. 17, 1862–June 1, 1866, at 395 Atlanta City Council and Board of Aldermen, 1848–2013, City of Atlanta Records, Atlanta History Center. ↑
76. Id.; see also Daniel Farbman, Plantation Localism, 50 Fordham Urb. L.J. 771 (2023). ↑
77. 4 Atlanta City Council Minutes, supra, note 75, at 395. ↑
78. Id. at 316, 340, 347, 364, 385. ↑
79. Mathias & Anderson, supra note 61, at 3–14; 5 Atlanta City Council Minutes, June 8, 1866–Aug. 13, 1869, at 98, Atlanta City Council and Board of Aldermen, 1848–2013, City of Atlanta Records, Atlanta History Center; Taylor, supra note 50, at 119. ↑
80. Atlanta, Ga. Code (1866), supra note 72, § 244; Card of T. Stobo Barrow to the Citizens of Atlanta, Atlanta Daily Sun, Nov. 20, 1872, at 3. ↑
81. Policeman’s Relief Ass’n, supra note 12, at 33; Organization of the Police Force, The Atlanta Wkly. Sun, Jan. 10, 1872, at 2.; Card of T. Stobo Barrow to the Citizens of Atlanta, Atlanta Daily Sun, Nov. 20, 1872, at 3. ↑
82. 1870 Ga. Laws 485. ↑
83. Georgia News, Savannah Daily Advertiser, Aug. 25, 1871, at 2. ↑
84. Harold Paul Thompson, Race, Temperance, and Prohibition in the Postbellum South: Black Atlanta, 1865–1890, at 46 (2005) (Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University) (on file with author); 4 Atlanta City Council Minutes, supra note 75, at 438, 461; 5 Atlanta City Council Minutes, supra note 79, at 34. ↑
85. Atlanta, Ga. Code (1866), supra note 72, at §§ 275–277; Municipal Affairs, Daily Intelligencer, June 2, 1867, at 3. ↑
86. Municipal Affairs, Daily Intelligencer, June 2, 1867, at 3; 5 Atlanta City Council Minutes, supra note 75, at 106. Policemen continued to light and extinguish streetlamps until 1880. City of Atlanta, Ann. Rep. of the Comm. of Council, Officers and Dep’ts of the City of Atlanta, for the year ending December 31, 1880, at 7 (1881). ↑
87. 7 Atlanta City Council Minutes, June 30, 1871–Dec. 12, 1873, at 143–44, Atlanta City Council and Board of Aldermen, 1848–2013, City of Atlanta Records, Atlanta History Center. On Northern police in saloons, see Sidney Harring, Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865–1915, at 169–72 (1983). ↑
88. 1870 Ga. Laws 485; see also Adam Malka, The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation 65–66 (2018). ↑
89. Hunter, supra note 50, at 241. ↑
90. Franklin M. Garrett, Atlanta and Environs: A Chronicle of Its People and Events, 1820s–1870s, at 891 (vol. 1, 1969) (Atlanta “had simply outgrown what was basically a frontier type law enforcement agency”); see also City of Atlanta, Ann. Rep. of the Comm. of Council, Officers and Dep’ts of the City of Atlanta, for the year ending December 31, 1878, at 12 (1879). ↑
91. 1874 Ga. Laws 116; see also 7 Atlanta City Council Minutes, supra note 87, at 702; 8 Atlanta City Council Minutes, Jan. 1874−Dec. 1877, at 2, Atlanta City Council and Board of Aldermen, 1848–2013, City of Atlanta Records, Atlanta History Center; Mathias & Anderson, supra note 61, at 171. ↑
92. J.A. Anderson, The Code of the City of Atlanta containing the Charter of 1874 and the amendments thereto § 174 (1899) [hereinafter Atlanta, Ga. Code (1899)]. ↑
93. Id. at § 176. ↑
94. Id. at § 1599. ↑
95. Id. at §§ 176, 1738; Queen v. City of Atlanta, 59 Ga. 318, 321 (1877) (upholding the dismissal of an officer fired for seducing a woman). ↑
96. In 1901, for example, 58 of the 200 police employees had been on the force for more than a decade. Atlanta Police Dep’t, Ann. Rep. of the Chief of Police of the city of Atlanta, for the year ending December 31, 1901, at 19, 28–33 (1902). In fact, that number is misleadingly small, given that in 1891 the police force employed only 122 officers, so many of the shorter‑tenured officers were hired as part of the expansion of the force. City of Atlanta, Ann. Rep. of the Comm. of Council, Officers and Dep’ts of the City of Atlanta, for the year ending December 31, 1891, at 246 (1892). In other words, nearly half of those employed in the Atlanta Police force in 1891 were still employed in 1901. ↑
97. Atlanta, Ga. Code (1899), supra note 92, § 1671. ↑
98. Id. at §§ 1680–1682. ↑
99. Id. ↑
100. The Georgia Press, Ga. Wkly. Tel. & J. Messenger (Macon, Ga.), Apr. 7, 1874, at 1. ↑
101. Our Police, Atlanta Const., Sept. 14, 1875, at 3. ↑
102. What Salaries Will be Paid Next Year, Atlanta Daily Herald, Dec. 10, 1874, at 3. ↑
103. Id. The shift toward paying salaries to government officials was part of a broader transformation in the nineteenth century. See Nicholas R. Parrillo, Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780–1940 (2013). ↑
104. The Atlanta Police, Atlanta Const., Jan. 6, 1875, at 5. ↑
105. Atlanta, Ga. Code (1899), supra note 92, § 1678. ↑
106. Eight Hours Again, Atlanta Const., Jan. 9, 1896, at 8; Atlanta Police Dep’t, Ann. Rep. of the Chief of Police of the city of Atlanta, for the year ending December 31, 1900, at 7–8 (1901); Mathias & Anderson, supra note 61, at 36. ↑
107. Work of the Mounted Men, Atlanta J., Mar. 19, 1884, at 4; The Knights of the Baton, Atlanta Const., Apr. 12, 1877, at 4; Wagner, supra note 58, at 135–37; Watts, supra note 61, at 168. ↑
108. Rolfe Edmonson, Atlanta’s First Patrol of Negroes on Duty, Atlanta Const., Apr. 4, 1948, at 1A. ↑
109. City of Atlanta, Ann. Rep. of the Comm. of Council, Officers and Dep’ts of the City of Atlanta, for the year ending December 31, 1890, at 236 (1891). ↑
110. Atlanta, Ga. Code (1899), supra note 92, §§ 1652–1656 (Sergeants’ duties). ↑
111. Id. at §§ 1631–1655 (Captains’ duties). ↑
112. Id. at §§ 1610–1628 (Detectives’ duties). ↑
113. City of Atlanta Ann. Rep., 1890, supra note 109, at 236. ↑
114. Id. Atlanta’s bicycle squad was formed approximately fifteen years before August Vollmer’s more famous Berkeley, California bicycle squad. Go, supra note 27, at 115. ↑
115. Atlanta Police Dep’t, Ann. Rep. of the Chief of Police of the city of Atlanta, for the year ending December 31, 1897, at 6 (1898); Atlanta Police Ann. Rep., 1900, supra note 106, at 18. ↑
116. Atlanta Police Ann. Rep., 1901, supra note 96, at 28; see also Sister Was Cruel Says Pretty Girl, Atlanta Georgian, June 11, 1906, at 4 (noting an arrest made by bicycle policeman). ↑
117. Atlanta Police Dep’t, Ann. Rep. of the Chief of Police of the city of Atlanta, for the year ending December 31, 1898, at 4 (1899); Drunken Crowd at River, Atlanta Const., Aug. 28, 1899, at 4; New Bicycles for Police, Atlanta Const., June 11, 1902, at 3; May Abolish Bicycle “Cops,” Atlanta Const., Mar. 19, 1904, at 3. ↑
118. City of Atlanta Ann. Rep., 1890, supra note 109, at 236; see also Atlanta, Ga. Code (1899), supra note 92, §§ 1726–1734 (ordinances related to signal boxes); Atlanta Police Ann. Rep., 1901, supra note 96, at 24–26 (location of signal boxes); Rousey, supra note 27, at 188 (similar systems elsewhere). ↑
119. Atlanta Police Dep’t, Ann. Rep. of the Chief of Police of the city of Atlanta, for the year ending December 31, 1893, at 15 (1894); Plans to Perfect Police System, Atlanta Const., June 27, 1898, at 8. ↑
120. Atlanta Police Ann. Rep., 1893, supra note 119, at 15; Atlanta Police Ann. Rep., 1901, supra note 96, at 24; see also Police Chief’s Report Ready, Atlanta Const., Jan. 2, 1898, at 5; Police ‘Phones Out of Date, Atlanta Const., July 31, 1903, at 4; Mathias & Anderson, supra note 61, at 25, 34–40. On the long‑term impact of telephone reporting on policing see Jessica W. Gillooly & David Thacher, How the Public Became the Caller: The Emergence of Reactive Policing, 1880–1970, L. & Soc. Inquiry, Jan. 2024, https://‌‌www.cambridge.org‌‌/core‌‌/journals‌‌/law-and-social-inquiry‌‌/article‌‌/how-the-public-became-the-caller-the-emergence-of-reactive-policing-18801970‌‌/B781A13A0D8CB4A86FD9CB62071C28EF [https://‌‌perma.cc‌‌/G74Q-WXSW]. ↑
121. Atlanta, Ga. Code (1899), supra note 92, § 1681. ↑
122. See Monkkonen, supra note 23, at 42 (arguing that the class control elements of policing resulted from attempts at crime prevention). ↑
123. See Roberts, supra note 35, at 805 (discussing the “longstanding association between blackness and criminality”); Krinitsky, supra note 39, at 138. ↑
124. See infra Section II.B. ↑
125. Black Atlantans occupied their free time with a wide variety of activities, but those activities were often divided by class. Among the working class, who made up nearly all of the city’s Black population, many enjoyed the drinking and dancing offered at the city’s saloons and dancehalls. See infra notes 164–186 and accompanying text. ↑
126. See infra notes 227–234 and accompanying text. ↑
127. See sources cited supra note 58. ↑
128. See infra Part IV. ↑
129. Rabinowitz, supra note 50, at 24; George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro‑American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914, at 251–52 (1971). ↑
130. See The Negro North and South, Augusta Herald, Feb. 19, 1908, at 4 (“The negroes on the farms rarely figure in the criminal courts.”). ↑
131. See Rabinowitz, supra note 50, at 44. ↑
132. See Samuel P. Richards, Diary Entry, in Samuel P. Richards Diary Volume 11 (Oct. 17, 1868), https://‌‌dlg.galileo.usg.edu‌‌/turningpoint‌‌/ahc‌‌/cw‌‌/pdfs‌‌/ahc0176-003-003.pdf [https://‌‌perma.cc‌‌/GC7Z-54GS]; A Magnificent Nuisance!, Daily Intelligencer, (Aug. 28, 1866), at 3. ↑
133. Taylor, supra note 50, at 115–16; see also John K. Bardes, Redefining Vagrancy: Policing Freedom and Disorder in Reconstruction New Orleans, 1862–1868, 84 J. of S. Hist. 69, 85, 92–93 (2018). ↑
134. See infra Section III.A, notes 167–178 and accompanying text. ↑
135. See Shot by Her Black Lover, Atlanta J., Jan. 4, 1884, at 3; Arp on Lynchings, Sunny South (Atlanta, Ga.), July 22, 1893, at 16. ↑
136. See infra notes 156–161 and accompanying text. The idea that freedpeople were naturally idle and would not work without coercion was frequently expressed in the immediate aftermath of emancipation and shaped the legal structure of the post‑emancipation South. See Jonathon J. Booth, Dethroning Justice: Race, Law, and Police after Slavery 207–20 (2021) (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University) (on file with author). ↑
137. See infra notes 175–187 and accompanying text. ↑
138. Until the 1890s, Black Atlantans had some voice in local politics, though their power was never particularly strong. Black leaders who could deliver votes for candidates thus had open lines of communication to the city’s White leaders. See C. A. Bacote, The Negro in Atlanta Politics, 16 Phylon 333, 333–41 (1955); Eugene J. Watts, Black Political Progress in Atlanta: 1868−1895, 59 J. of Negro Hist. 268 (1974); Alton Hornsby, Jr., Black Power in Dixie: A Political History of African Americans in Atlanta 12–27 (2009). ↑
139. See infra Sections II.B, IV.A. ↑
140. See Alex Lichtenstein, “That Disposition to Theft, with Which They Have Been Branded”: Moral Economy, Slave Management, and the Law, 21 J. of Soc. Hist. 413 (1988). ↑
141. See Hunter, supra note 50, at 77. ↑
142. How to Get Rid of Loafers, Atlanta Const., Apr. 6, 1882, at 2; The Idleness of Colored Children, Atlanta Const., July 20, 1888, at 2; Loafers and Loungers, Atlanta Const., Sept. 3, 1891, at 11; Labor Problem and Drug Habit, Atlanta Const., July 13, 1905, at 6; Negro Character, Atlanta Const., July 23, 1893, at 10; Wagner, supra note 58, at 140–41. ↑
143. S. Soc’y for the Promotion of the Study of Race Conditions and Probs. in the S., Report of the Proceedings of the First Annual Conference on Race Problems of the South 29 (1900). ↑
144. The Real Question, Atlanta Const., May 19, 1883, at 4 (arguing that “slavery bettered the condition of the negroes”); Sidney Ormond, The Man Who Writes Police Matinee Stories, Atlanta Const., Dec. 30, 1900, at 24 (“The negroes who have grown up since the war are far worse than those who were raised in slavery[.]”); Has Done No Good, Atlanta Const., Dec. 1, 1901, at 9 (arguing that Black morality has declined among “[the] new generation [that] know nothing of slavery”); We are Creating Negro Criminals, Atlanta Const., Aug. 29, 1903, at B4 (“The negro race and its children . . . is barely three generations removed from the jungle[.]”); Talk to the Farmers, Speech of Benjamin H. Hill, Newnan Herald, Aug. 29, 1873, at 1 (“When the present generation of negroes, who acquired their disciplinary habits in slavery—shall pass away, the troubles alluded to will increase with every future generation”); see also Howard Steven Goodson, ‘South of the North, North of the South’: Public Entertainment in Atlanta, 1880–1930, at 287–88 (1995) (Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University) (on file with author) (arguing that most White Southerners believed that “[B]lacks had flourished under strict white [sic] control during the days of slavery, but the race had degenerated to a shocking degree since emancipation”); W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930, at 58–59 (1993) (stating that White Southerners believed that rape had been unknown during slavery and that Black rape of White women was a product of Reconstruction). ↑
145. Walter F. Wilcox, Studies in the American Race Problem 447–49 (Alfred Holt Stone ed., 1908); Haley, supra note 58, at 37–38, 68. ↑
146. See Letter from W. H. Felton, Harper’s Wkly. (New York City), Nov. 20, 1903, at 1830; The Negro Problem and the New Negro Crime, Harper’s Wkly. (New York City), June 20, 1903, at 1050–51. On the biological concept of race in the late nineteenth century see Fredrickson, supra note 129, at 228–82; Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America 35–145 (2010). ↑
147. See Wagner, supra note 58, at 138; Crime Among Negroes, Atlanta Georgian, Oct. 17, 1906, at 9; New York Mob Seeks Negro’s Life for Stabbing Man, Atlanta Georgian, Aug. 30, 1906, at 7; Not Contented with Lynching Negro, Atlanta Const., Mar. 9, 1904 at 1; Outraged and Murdered, Atlanta Const., Feb. 27, 1890, at 2; The Godwin Murder: A Shocking Revelation of Negro Crime, Atlanta Const., Dec. 22, 1884, at 2; A Negro Brute, Atlanta Const., Mar. 2, 1880, at 1; Is Crime on the Increase?, Danielsville Monitor, June 28, 1895, at 2. ↑
148. Wilcox, supra note 145, at 446. The speech was given in 1899. Professor Wilcox on the Negro, Atlanta Const., Sept. 18, 1899, at 4; see also Muhammad, supra note 146, at 74–90. ↑
149. See Bardes, supra note 133, at 80. ↑
150. See, e.g., The Only Way To Deal with the Loafing Brigade, Atlanta Const., June 23, 1901, at 16; Vagrants to Suffer for Footpads’ Work, Atlanta Const., Jan. 23, 1902, at 7. ↑
151. The Atlanta Constitution was the city’s leading paper and was owned by Evan Howell until his death in 1905 when his son Clark Howell took it over. Its primary rival was the Atlanta Journal which had been owned by Hoke Smith. Smith and Clark Howell were both candidates for governor in the highly contentious 1906 campaign during which the press fomented a rape panic that resulted in the 1906 Atlanta Massacre. ↑
152. Enforcement of Vagrant Laws, Atlanta Const., Mar. 25, 1899, at 6. ↑
153. The Recorder’s Court is discussed in detail infra Section III.B. ↑
154. See, e.g., Lively Scenes in The Police Court, Atlanta Const., Feb. 1, 1900, at 9; see also W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 700 (1935); Sidney Ormond, The Man Who Writes Police Matinee Stories, Atlanta Const., Dec. 30, 1900, at 24 (“Humor, broad and irresistible, is the dominant note of the negro when in the tolls of the law confronted with crime[.]”). ↑
155. The Lost Is Found, Atlanta Const., Oct. 1, 1894, at 8. ↑
156. But see William A. Sinclair, The Aftermath of Slavery: A Study of the Condition and Environment of the American Negro 218, 256 (1905) (arguing that it was economic discrimination that led to idleness and thus to criminality). ↑
157. See, e.g., The Only Way To Deal with the Loafing Brigade, Atlanta Const., June 23, 1901, at 16; Atlanta Letter, Ga. Wkly. Tel. & J. Messenger (Macon, Ga.), Aug. 30, 1883, at 1 (stating that most burglars are Black men and recommending violence be used against them). ↑
158. The Georgia Press, Ga. Wkly. Tel. & J. Messenger (Macon, Ga.), Sept. 7, 1875, at 4 (quoting Atlanta Herald). ↑
159. Vagrancy, Columbus Daily Enquirer, Aug. 3, 1886, at 4; see also Bardes, supra note 133, at 107; Loafing Vagrants, Marietta J, Nov. 30, 1882, at 3; Vagrancy, Wkly. Const., Apr. 25, 1882, at 4 (calling for vagrancy crackdown because vagrancy leads to other crime); Idle Negroes, Daily Intelligencer (Atlanta, Ga.), Mar. 31, 1871, at 3 (if idle negroes were sent to the fields “we would have fewer larcenies and burglaries than are daily chronicled in our city papers”); The Real and the Politician’s Negro, Sunny South (Atlanta, Ga.), Jan. 31, 1891, at 4. ↑
160. Black rape of White women was the primary justification of lynchings, even though the vast majority of lynchings were not caused by an allegation of rape. See Ida B. Wells‑Barnett, The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (1895); Brundage, supra note 144, at 58–72; The Reign of Terror for Southern Women, Atlanta Georgian, Aug. 21, 1906, at 6. ↑
161. Enforce the Vagrancy Laws, Atlanta Georgian, Sept. 1, 1906, at 9; see also [No Title], North Georgia Citizen (Dalton, Ga.), Aug. 8, 1901, at 2; Negro Character, Atlanta Const., July 23, 1893, at 10; Thinks Vagrancy the Root of the Evil, Atlanta Const., Aug. 21, 1899, at 4; The Negro Problem And Other Subjects Discussed By Georgian Readers, Atlanta Georgian, Sept. 1, 1906, at 9; Hunter, supra note 50, at 126; Carl V. Harris, Reforms in Government Control of Negroes in Birmingham, Alabama, 1890–1920, 38 J. of S. Hist. 567, 569 (1972). ↑
162. Hunter, supra note 50, at 162–63, 170–79. ↑
163. Id. at 146–47. ↑
164. Id. at 146–47, 152–53. ↑
165. Id. at 152–55. ↑
166. See infra Section III.A. ↑
167. Fears about the dangers of such amusements, especially to women, were widespread throughout the country. See, e.g., Kathy Lee Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn‑of‑the‑century New York (1986). ↑
168. Vagrants Swarm City’s Streets, Atlanta Const., Aug. 24, 1903, at 5. ↑
169. Praise for Newspapers, Atlanta Georgian, Oct. 8, 1906, at 7 (“all saloons are dives”); Local Option and Sunday Excursions, Wkly. Gwinnett Herald, Aug. 1, 1883, at 1 (“Murder and other crimes of violence are always probable where there is a crowd of frollicking [sic] negroes soaked with whiskey.”); The Swiped Turkey; Story of a Convict, Atlanta Const., Jan. 10, 1905, at 7. Fulton County banned alcohol sales in 1885, but the ban was overturned in an 1887 vote. Thompson, supra note 84, at 211–345. ↑
170. Mathias & Anderson, supra note 61, at 42; Chief Manly Orders Arrests of Loiterers in City Limit, Atlanta Const., Mar. 1, 1901, at 1; see also Thompson, supra note 84, at 60–61, 178 (describing perceived links between alcohol and crime); High License, Atlanta J., Mar. 21, 1884, at 2; Reign of Terror, Atlanta Georgian, Aug. 27, 1906, at 6; Frances A. Kellor, The Criminal Negro: III Some of His Characteristics, 25 The Arena 308 (Mar. 1901); Inconsistent, Marietta J., Oct. 15, 1903, at 4; Negro Criminals and Dives, Augusta Herald, Dec. 11, 1906, at 6 (“the disreputable dives of the cities produce a great number of negro criminals”); W. E. B. Du Bois, Some Notes on Negro Crime, Particularly in Georgia 49 (1904) (“There is no doubt but that the removal of strong drink from the city would decrease crime by half.”). ↑
171. The Only Way to Deal with the Loafing Brigade, Atlanta Const., June 23, 1901, at 16; Rare Festivities down in “Dive,” Atlanta Const., Sept. 18, 1898, at 6; Negro Dives Must Go, Atlanta Const., July 30, 1903, at 6. For a more neutral description see Hunter, supra note 50, at 151–61, 168–75. ↑
172. Beattie’s “Dive” on Decatur Street where Darktown’s Dancers Meet at Night, Atlanta Const., Aug. 6, 1900, at 5; Hunter, supra note 50, at 168–73; Ingersoll, supra note 51, at 43; see also Georgina Hickey, Waging War on “Loose Living Hotels” and “Cheap Soda Water Joints”: The Criminalization of Working‑Class Women in Atlanta’s Public Space, 82 Ga. Hist. Q. 775 (1998). ↑
173. Hunter, supra note 50, at 126; see also Harris, supra note 161, at 568. ↑
174. War on Vagrants Begun by Police, Atlanta Const., Mar. 23, 1901, at 1; No More Negro Dance Halls, Atlanta Const., Feb. 21, 1905, at 6. ↑
175. The ideas of racial uplift and respectability were central to middle‑class Black activism around the turn of the twentieth century and were also embraced by some Christian working‑class people. See Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (1996); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (1993). ↑
176. Negro Pastor Prays at Council Meeting, Atlanta Const., July 7, 1903, at 3; see also An Alarm Sounded, Savannah Tribune, Apr. 9, 1904, at 2; Council’s Action Indorsed, Atlanta Const., July 13, 1903, at 7; Du Bois, supra note 170, at 42–45, 50–51; Hunter, supra note 50, at 173–74. ↑
177. H. H, Proctor, Rev. H. H. Proctor’s Strong Views, Atlanta Georgian, Sept. 1, 1906, at 9; B. J. Davis, A Heart to Heart Talk with Our White Neighbors, Atlanta Georgian, Sept. 1, 1906, at 9; Editorials, Atlanta Indep., Sept. 22, 1906, at 4; Drive Out Dives, Say Negro Leaders, Atlanta Const., Aug. 30, 1906, at 6; Drive Out the Dives!, Atlanta Const., Aug. 31, 1906, at 6; Believes Negro Detectives Would Help, Atlanta Const., Sept. 4, 1906, at 6; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Problem of Negro Crime (Jan. 1, 1899), in W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, 26–27 (Univ. Mass. Amherst), https://‌‌credo.library.umass.edu‌‌/view‌‌/pageturn‌‌/mums312-b196-i036 [https://‌‌perma.cc‌‌/M4UV-SQSR]. ↑
178. No More Negro Dance Halls, Atlanta Indep. Feb. 25, 1905, at 4; The 2,255 Negroes in Barrooms Saturday Night, Atlanta Indep., Sept. 22, 1906, at 4. ↑
179. Hunter, supra note 50, at 175–79. ↑
180. No Dace Halls in the City, Atlanta Indep., Feb. 25, 1905, at 4; see also A Sermon on Amusements, Savannah Trib., July 30, 1898, at 3; Lawyer Stubbs on Reform, Savannah Trib., Sept. 16, 1905, at 2. ↑
181. No More Negro Dance Halls, Atlanta Indep., Feb. 25, 1905, at 4; Editorials, Atlanta Indep., Sept. 22, 1906, at 4. ↑
182. Worthy of Serious Attention, Atlanta Const., Apr. 13, 1899, at 6. ↑
183. Although the Black and White communities were usually at odds, they occasionally cooperated on areas of joint concern. White newspapers were happy to publish articles by Black leaders denouncing crime and dancehalls, and in one instance an interracial organization was formed to reduce tuberculosis, which was seen as a disease of Black servants. Hunter, supra note 50, at 216. On interracial cooperation in the Jim Crow South see Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920, at 177–202 (1996). ↑
184. The “Before Day Clubs” a Myth and a Fake and Exist Only in the Diseased Imagination of the Sensational Alarmist of the John Temple Graves Stripe, Atlanta Indep., Sept. 24, 1904, at 4; Editorials, Atlanta Indep., Jan. 28, 1905, at 4; see also The Vagrancy Problem, 2 Voice of the Negro 604 (Sept. 1905). ↑
185. A Hopeful Sign, Atlanta Const., Apr. 2, 1881, at 2; see also City of Atlanta Ann. Rep., 1878, supra note 90, at 43. ↑
186. Rev. H. H. Proctor’s Strong Views, Atlanta Georgian, Sept. 1, 1906, at 9; see also Calvin Law is Indorsed, Atlanta Const., Aug. 24, 1903, at 3; Wants Loafers to Work, Atlanta Const., Aug. 28, 1906, at 4; Believes Negro Detectives Would Help, supra note 177; Editorials, Atlanta Indep., Dec. 10, 1904, at 4; Don’t Let Up, Atlanta Indep., Sept. 15, 1906, at 4. For more recent examples of Black leaders supporting punitive criminal punishment policies see Michael Javen Fortner, Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment (2015); James Forman Jr., Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow, 87 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 101 (2012). ↑
187. Police Chairman at Board Meeting, Atlanta Const., Feb. 11, 1903, at 2; Higher License on Dance Halls, Atlanta Const., May 28, 1903, at 6; Negro Pastor Prays at Board Meeting, Atlanta Const., July 7, 1903, at 3; Hunter, supra note 50, at 170. ↑
188. Is Crime Increasing, Atlanta Const., May 8, 1889, at 4; Bardes, supra note 133, at 109. On the media and crime waves see Hall, supra note 30; Vincent F. Sacco, Media Constructions of Crime, 539 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 141 (1995); Yvonne Jewkes & Travis Linnemann, Media and Crime in the US 41–102 (2017). ↑
189. Muhammad, supra note 146, at 15–87; City Prisoners are Increasing, Atlanta Const., Dec. 30, 1904, at 7; see also Thomas C. Holt, Marking: Race, Race‑making, and the Writing of History, 100 Am. Hist. Rev. 1 (1995); Roberts, supra note 35, at 813. ↑
190. Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy 46 (1908). For a comparative graph see Du Bois, supra note 170, at 25. Police statistics are notoriously unreliable, but they are the only source for quantitative data on Atlanta’s criminal legal system in this period. I do not take the number of arrests as indicative of the crime rate, but rather as describing police activity. See generally Eric Monkkonen, Municipal Reports as an Indicator Source: The Nineteenth‑Century Police, 12 Hist. Methods 57 (1979). ↑
191. Hunter, supra note 50, at 241. ↑
192. See infra Appendix. ↑
193. See infra Section III.A. ↑
194. See infra Section III.B. ↑
195. See infra Appendix. ↑
196. See infra Appendix; Savannah, Ga., Rep. of Edward C. Anderson, Mayor of Savannah for the Year Ending December 31, 1874, at 34 (1875). In Savannah, in contrast, arrests did not increase. In fact, slightly fewer Black residents were arrested in 1874 than 1873. Thus, it is unlikely that the Panic of 1873 caused Atlanta’s increase in arrests. ↑
197. See infra Appendix. ↑
198. See infra Appendix. During this two‑decade span Atlanta’s population increased by approximately 120 percent. ↑
199. See infra Appendix. ↑
200. Arrest statistics by race are not available for 1880, but by estimating the city’s Black population for 1884, a rate for that year can be approximated. Mathias & Anderson, supra note 61, at 181. In 1900 in Atlanta, the White arrest rate was 100 per thousand, nearly unchanged from 1884. See infra Appendix; Hunter, supra note 50, at 241. In contrast, New York City’s arrest rate in 2022 was 15.6 per thousand. How Many Criminal Cases Are Prosecuted in NYC?, N. Y. City Crim. Just. Agency, https://‌‌www.nycja.org‌‌/arrests-dashboard [https://‌‌perma.cc‌‌/AB9F-HWKR]. ↑
201. The police arrested 2,122 Black women and 265 White women. Atlanta Police Dep’t, Ann. Rep. of the Chief of Police of the city of Atlanta, for the year ending December 31, 1896, at 13 (1897); see also Haley, supra note 58, at 33. ↑
202. Atlanta Police Ann. Rep., 1896, supra note 201, at 13. In comparison, 104 White boys and two White girls under fifteen were arrested. Id.; see also Baker, supra note 190, at 50; Du Bois, supra note 170, at 50; Petty Criminals Before Calhoun, Atlanta J., Sept. 4, 1900, at 5 (eleven‑year‑old Black boy sentenced to six months for stealing a butter dish); Haley, supra note 58, at 31 (twelve‑year‑old Black girl sentenced to stockade for stealing a lump of coal). Arrest statistics broken down by age are not available before 1896. ↑
203. See infra Appendix. ↑
204. See infra Appendix; Hunter, supra note 50, at 241. ↑
205. See Du Bois, supra note 170, at 50; Hunter, supra note 50, at 241. A point of comparison: in 1899 Atlanta’s police arrested 15,172 people, including 10,245 Black people. Atlanta Police Dep’t, Ann. Rep. of the Chief of Police of the city of Atlanta, for the year ending December 31, 1899, at 15 (1900). That same year, the New Orleans police arrested 17,609 people, 6,832 of them Black. New Orleans’s population was approximately three times larger than Atlanta’s. Baker, supra note 46, at 319 n.13. In Memphis, Tennessee, which had extremely similar demographics to Atlanta, the police arrested 4,931 people, 2,747 of them Black. Memphis Legis. Council, Ann. Reps. of the City of Mem. for the Year Ending December 31, 1899, at 32 (1900). ↑
206. See Figure 1. Figure 1 graphs the data contained in the Appendix. ↑
207. See Figure 1. It is unclear why the number of White men arrested declined in the early 1890s. There may have been a decision to redirect resources away from arresting White people, but the sources do not reveal a clear explanation. ↑
208. See infra Appendix; see also Harring, supra note 87, at 46, 225. In Memphis in 1899, 26 percent of arrests were for state crimes. Memphis Legis. Council, supra note 205, at 32. ↑
209. See infra Appendix. In comparison, in 2022, the 25.2 percent of New York Police Department’s arrests were for felonies and 13.6 percent of total arrests were for violent felonies. N. Y. City Crim. Just. Agency, supra note 200. ↑
210. Atlanta Police Dep’t, Ann. Rep. of the Chief of Police of the city of Atlanta, for the year ending December 31, 1903, at 20 (1904). Because the sources provide only overall numbers, it is hard to know exactly why any individual case was dismissed or transferred to the Recorder’s Court. Most likely there was insufficient evidence to prove that the defendant had committed a state crime such as assault or larceny. When a case was transferred to the Recorder’s Court, however, it is likely that there was sufficient evidence to demonstrate that the defendant had, for example, acted in a disorderly manner. ↑
211. Id. ↑
212. Id. ↑
213. Id. at 19. ↑
214. See Jett, supra note 62, at 47–73 (describing how Black communities in other Southern cities cooperated with police to prosecute serious crimes committed against Black victims). ↑
215. See infra Appendix. ↑
216. 2 Thomas H. Martin, Atlanta and its Builders 249 (1902). ↑
217. Du Bois, supra note 170, at 51. ↑
218. See infra Appendix. ↑
219. See infra Appendix. These offenses were defined with various degrees of specificity by city ordinances. Disorderly conduct, for example, was not criminalized by name but fell under the purview of “public indecency” which criminalized those “quarrelling, . . . using obscene, vulgar, [or] profane language; or [who commit] malicious mischief, or otherwise act in a disorderly manner, (which offense is not recognized as penal by the laws of this State).” Atlanta, Ga. Code (1866), supra note 72, §§ 267–268. The crime of drunkenness was defined more specifically as criminalizing “any person who shall be found drunk, hooting, hallooing, or making any other unnecessary or unusual noise, to the disturbance of any citizen,” though it is unclear if the noisiness element actually had to be proved before the Recorder’s Court. Id. § 269. Between 1886 and 1899, a new ordinance was adopted that more broadly criminalized “appear[ing] on the streets of said city in an intoxicated condition.” Atlanta, Ga. Code (1899), supra note 92, § 1807. Idling was committed by one who “shall loiter or idle his or her time away on the sidewalks or public streets.” Id. at § 1849. ↑
220. Roberts, supra note 35, at 783 (“The vaguer the law, the greater the benefit it provides as a prophylactic tool.”). In comparison, in Memphis, arrests for drunkenness, disorderly conduct, “misdemeanor,” and vagrancy accounted for 36.4 percent of total arrests. Memphis Legis. Council, supra note 205, at 44. Around 1900 in New Orleans, approximately 66 percent of arrests were for “ordinance violations and minor offenses” while about a fifth of arrests “involved serious threats to public safety.” Baker, supra note 46, at 112. Eric H. Monkkonen reports that in 1880, “62.5% of all arrests in eighteen of the largest cities . . . came under the categories of drunkenness, drunk and disorderly, suspicion, vagrancy, or corner lounging.” Monkkonen, supra note 23, at 103. ↑
221. Foote, supra note 36, at 614 n.22 (stating that “vagrancy type crimes” constituted between 39 and 45 percent of arrests in Philadelphia); Feeley, supra note 36, at 41 (stating that public order offenses accounted for 43 percent of arrests in New Haven). ↑
222. In addition to vagrancy laws, other new laws restricting contract breaking, hunting and gathering, and agriculture. See Booth, supra note 136, at 228–31, 281–87; William Cohen, At Freedom’s Edge: Black Mobility and the Southern White Quest for Racial Control, 1861–1915, at 201–47 (1991). ↑
223. On the rhetorical use of “vagrant” see Wagner, supra note 58, at 139–41. Scholars have argued that the major shift from prosecution for vagrancy to prosecution for disorderly conduct occurred after the repeal of vagrancy statutes and Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156 (1972). In Atlanta, at least, the shift occurred much earlier. See Rachel Moran, Doing Away with Disorderly Conduct, 63 B.C. L. Rev. 65, 77–79 (2022); Risa Goluboff, Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s 70–74, 340 (2016); Christopher Lowen Agee, From the Vagrancy Law Regime to the Carceral State, 43 L. & Soc. Inquiry 1141 (2018). ↑
224. Atlanta Police Dep’t, Ann. Rep. of the Chief of Police of the city of Atlanta, for the year ending December 31, 1894, at 16 (1895); Atlanta Police Dep’t, Ann. Rep. of the Chief of Police of the city of Atlanta, for the year ending December 31, 1905, at 15 (1906). Other years do not include the number of vagrancy arrests, presumably because there were none. In addition, the vagrancy law was amended in 1903, which the chief of police lobbied for and claimed “has proven a great terror to the shiftless and worthless class[,]” but it does not seem to have increased the actual number of vagrancy arrests. 1903 Ga. Laws 46; The Abolition of Vagrancy, Atlanta Const., Aug. 5, 1903, at 6; Atlanta Police Ann. Rep., 1903, supra note 210, at 9; see also Brenner Fissell, Police‑Made Law, 108 Minn. L. Rev. 2561 (2024). Systematic statistics that break down arrests by offense do not become available in Atlanta until 1893, but earlier sources point to the same conclusion. Atlanta Police Department Court Docket, 1886–1887, MSS 787, Atlanta History Center (listing no vagrancy arrests); Fulton County Superior Court Minutes, 1854–1901, Family Search (no vagrancy prosecutions in 1875 or 1886); Misdemeanor Chain Gangs Monthly Reports, March 1901, NEWS 261, 21‌‌/1‌‌/8, Prisons, State Prison Commission, Georgia State Archives (few vagrancy prisoners). ↑
225. Similar testimony occasionally aided those charged with drunkenness or disorderly conduct. See Defended his Negro Cook, Atlanta Const., Apr. 29, 1902, at 7 (recounting a White pastor’s testimony in defense of his cook who had been arrested for drunkenness because he walked with a limp). ↑
226. See, e.g., An Ugly Vagrant, Atlanta Daily Sun, June 13, 1871, at 3; The Ever Present Question, Atlanta Georgian, Oct. 22, 1906, at 7; Two Atlanta Negroes, Atlanta Georgian, Dec. 18, 1907, at 6. ↑
227. Go, supra note 27, at 63–64, 81, 89–90, 93. ↑
228. See Foote, supra note 36, at 614, 631–43. ↑
229. See Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156 (1972). ↑
230. See, e.g., Atlanta Police Ann. Rep., 1898, supra note 117, at 9 (recording 687 arrests for “suspicion”). ↑
231. Alexander Akerman, The Power of Municipal Courts, in Rep. of the Twenty‑Third Ann. Session of the Ga. Bar Ass’n 185 (Orville A. Park ed., 1906). ↑
232. See supra Part II. ↑
233. See, e.g., City of Atlanta, Ann. Rep. of the Comm. of Council, Officers and Dep’ts of the City of Atlanta, for the year ending December 31, 1884, at 23 (1885) (stating, in Mayor Hillyer’s inaugural address, “healthy public conscience dictates a firm policy of repression towards gambling, the social evil, and barrooms, especially those nurseries of idleness and crime located in the outskirts of the city, away from police control”); see also Figure 1. ↑
234. Vagrancy, Columbus Daily Enquirer, Aug. 3, 1886, at 4. ↑
235. Photograph of Atlanta Police Headquarters in Atlanta History Photograph Collection (1895), https://‌‌album.atlantahistorycenter.com‌‌/digital‌‌/collection‌‌/athpc‌‌/id‌‌/1205 [https://‌‌perma.cc‌‌/C8TP-9KBB]. ↑
236. City of Atlanta Ann. Rep., 1890, supra note 109, at 36; Atlanta Police Ann. Rep., 1893, supra note 119, at 4; Baker, supra note 190, at 45; Mathias & Anderson, supra note 61, at 29–30; Hunter, supra note 50, at 66, 168–86. ↑
237. County Police in Desperate Fight, Atlanta Const., Mar. 18, 1901, at 5; A Word to the Police, Atlanta Const., Aug. 26, 1883, at 6. ↑
238. Fact and Rumor, Atlanta Const., Aug. 26, 1877, at 4; see also The Dark Gamesters, Atlanta Const., Aug. 10, 1879, at 1; Hunter, supra note 50, at 180; Rabinowitz, supra note 50, at 244; Harring, supra note 87, at 198 (“The criminologist’s definition of ‘public order crimes’ comes perilously close to the historian’s description of ‘working‑class leisure‑time activity.’”). ↑
239. The Vagrant Must Go: The Chief of Police Issues a General Order to the Police Force, Atlanta Const., July 20, 1886, at 8; see also Tried and Bound Over, Atlanta Const., Aug. 11, 1887, at 5; Negro Dives Must Close Up Shop, Atlanta Const., July 16, 1897, at 9; Affairs in Atlanta, Columbus Enquirer‑Sun, May 21, 1889, at 1 (stating that the Atlanta Police were “after the street corner loafers”). ↑
240. Negro Merry Makers Fined, Atlanta Const., June 1, 1897, at 12. ↑
241. Id.; see also Sunday Liqor [sic] and Sunday Gaming, Atlanta Const., Sept. 14, 1885, at 7 (6 arrests); Trapped Forty‑Nine, Atlanta Const., Aug. 6, 1895, at 11 (49 arrests, $675 in fines); It Was a Stampede, Atlanta Const., Dec. 3, 1894, at 8 (60 arrests); Big Police Raid on a Negro Dive, Atlanta Const., June 13, 1897, at A17 (65 arrests); Gambling Dive Broken Up, Atlanta Const., Jan. 14, 1901, at 10 (14 arrests); Negro Dive Raided, Atlanta Georgian, June 27, 1906, at 4 (14 arrests); Police Court Day Breaks All Records, Atlanta Georgian, May 24, 1909, at 7 (46 arrests). ↑
242. War on Vagrants Begun by Police, Atlanta Const., Mar. 23, 1901, at 1. ↑
243. Id.; see also Many Vagrants Go to Chain Gang, Atlanta Const., Mar. 24, 1901, at 7; Many Vagrants Are Arrested, Atlanta Const., Aug. 26, 1903, at 7; Negro Dives Must Close up Shop, Atlanta Const., July 16, 1897, at 9; Thompson, supra note 84, at 285. ↑
244. Higher License on Dance Halls, Atlanta Const., May 28, 1903, at 6. ↑
245. Fischer, supra note 26, at 10, 19–24; Mara L. Keire, For Business & Pleasure: Red‑Light Districts and the Regulation of Vice in the United States, 1890–1933 5–22 (2010); India Thusi, The Racialized History of Vice Policing, 69 UCLA L. Rev. 1576, 1600–12 (2023); Gretchen Ehrmann Maclachan, Women’s Work: Atlanta’s Industrialization and Urbanization, 1879–1929 214–21 (1992) (Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University) (on file with author) (noting that anti‑vice crusades began around 1910); Hunter, supra note 50, at 113–14, 125, 139; Haley, supra note 58, at 42. ↑
246. Thompson, supra note 84, at 285, 358; Raided a Blind Tiger, Atlanta Const., Nov. 18, 1901, at 5; John Hammond Moore, The Negro and Prohibition in Atlanta, 1885–1887, 69 S. Atlantic Q. 38, 53 (1970). ↑
247. City of Atlanta Ann. Rep., 1890, supra note 109, at 234; Atlanta Police Ann. Rep., 1900, supra note 106, at 15; Savannah, Ga., Rep. of John Schwarz, Mayor of the City of Savannah, for the Year Ending December 31, 1890, at 46 (1890); Thomas Gamble, Jr., Rep. of Hon. Herman Myers, Mayor, Together with the Reps. of the City Officers of the City of Savannah, GA., for the Year Ending December 31, 1900, at 55 (1901). In New Orleans around 1900 the rate was one officer per 800 residents. Baker, supra note 46, at 312 n.113. In Memphis in 1899 the rate was one officer per 1,233 residents. Memphis Legis. Council, supra note 205, at 31. In New York in 1918, the rate was one officer per 553 residents. Krinitsky, supra note 39, at 149–50. ↑
248. Rabinowitz, supra note 50, at 36, 48–49; John Dittmer, Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920, at 87 (1977). ↑
249. A Dungeon Deep, Ga. Wkly. Tel. & J. Messenger (Macon, Ga.), June 17, 1885, at 4. ↑
250. Id. The article continued, “[a] negro imprisoned there . . . amused himself in the lonely hours by drawing on the roof all manner of birds and animals. He used the smoke from a tallow dip, and, remarkable as it may seem, the figures are perfect. It is a marvelous piece of work. The criminal was certainly a genius, and with training and facilities might have astonished the world.” Id.; see also Sinclair, supra note 156, at 237. ↑
251. Strange Conception of Time Puts Negro in Tower Cell, Atlanta Georgian, June 29, 1906, at 4 (Black boy bound over to the Superior Court); Girl Steals from Mother, Atlanta Const., July 19, 1902, at 7 (similar). ↑
252. Atlanta, Ga. Code (1866), supra note 72, § 160; 1871–72 Ga. Laws 57; 1872 Ga. Laws 136; 1873 Ga. Laws 119; Taylor, supra note 50, at 144–46. ↑
253. Atlanta, Ga. Code (1899), supra note 92, §§ 40, 198. ↑
254. Id., §§ 200, 306–07, 1759–92. ↑
255. 1874 Ga. Laws 146–47; Atlanta, Ga. Code (1899), supra note 92, §§ 1774–79; Cocaine Peddlers Fined, Atlanta Const., Apr. 27, 1901, at 12. ↑
256. Appeals to the Superior Court were possible, but I could find no record of an appeal from an order‑maintenance conviction in Atlanta’s Recorder’s Court. Appeals that were made were usually on behalf of businesses. See, e.g., Thrower v. City of Atlanta, 124 Ga. 1, 76–77 (1905) (reversing a conviction because the city ordinance was preempted by state law). In 1897, the total fines assessed in the Recorder’s Court were $55,985.77, and only a total of $403 worth of fines were appealed. Atlanta Police Ann. Rep., 1897, supra note 115, at 252. Prisoners could, but rarely did, seek a writ of habeas corpus. A habeas case that originated in Macon Recorder’s Court led to Pearson v. Wimbish, 124 Ga. 701 (1906), which restricted the ability of municipal courts to sentence offenders against city ordinances to the county—as opposed to the city—chain gang. That case was argued by Alexander Akerman. See supra note 231. Akerman also represented a Black defendant in Wimbish v. Jamison, 199 U.S. 599 (1905), winning at the district court but being reversed in a one‑line Supreme Court decision. ↑
257. See supra text accompanying notes 153–155. ↑
258. A Busy Session at the Police Barracks, Atlanta Const., Dec. 17, 1898, at 10; see also The Police Court, Atlanta Const., July 22, 1875, at 3; The Recorder’s Court, Atlanta Const., July 20, 1881, at 4; Queer Actors on the World’s Stage, Atlanta Const., Oct. 22, 1897, at 10; Lively Scenes in the Police Court, Atlanta Const., July 8, 1899, at 5; Wagner, supra note 58, at 137. ↑
259. Benjamin J. Davis, Communist Councilman From Harlem: Autobiographical Notes Written in a Federal Penitentiary 41 (1969); Goodson, supra note 144, at 283–87. ↑
260. The Lost Is Found, Atlanta Const., Oct. 1, 1894, at 8; see also Robert E. Adamson, Character in Police Court: A Stray Etchings, Atlanta Const., Aug. 20, 1893, at 5; Judge Norwood Gives Negroes Good Advice, Atlanta Indep., Feb. 3, 1906, at 4. ↑
261. 7 Atlanta City Council Minutes, supra note 87, at 130–31. ↑
262. Georgia News, Augusta Chron., Feb. 22, 1872, at 3. ↑
263. Police Court Day Breaks All Records, Atlanta Georgian, May 24, 1909, at 7; see also Police Court Smashes Record, Atlanta Const., Dec. 27, 1900, at 7 (62 sent to chain gang, $435 in fines assessed). ↑
264. Atlanta, Ga. Code (1899), supra note 92, § 1766. ↑
265. Atlanta Police Department Court Docket, 1886–1887, supra note 224. ↑
266. Akerman, supra note 231, at 185–86; The Abuse of Police Courts, 3 Voice of the Negro 619 (Sept. 1906). ↑
267. Akerman, supra note 231, at 186. In the period covered by the docket book, the recorder dismissed 36 percent of cases and levied fines in over 98 percent of the remaining cases. Atlanta Police Department Court Docket, 1886–1887, supra note 224; see also Heavy Sentences Imposed, Atlanta Const., Mar. 26, 1901, at 9; War Session of the Police Court, Atlanta Const., May 3, 1898, at 10. ↑
268. Atlanta Police Department Court Docket, 1886–1887, supra note 224. Although a dismissal was obviously preferable to a defendant than a fine or a stint on the chain gang, even an arrest and a night in jail could disrupt one’s livelihood, and an arrestee could face violence from the police or in the jail. What is more, arrests even without convictions could achieve the police goal of repressing Black leisure activity. ↑
269. Rabinowitz, supra note 50, at 48, 71–74; Hunter, supra note 50, at 52–53, 106–13. ↑
270. Calculated from Atlanta Police Department Court Docket, 1886–1887, supra note 224. Historical inflation calculations are difficult, but a useful comparison can be drawn using today’s minimum wage. In 1886, $7.78 was roughly a week‑and‑a‑half’s wages for a Black laborer in Atlanta. A forty‑hour work week at the federal minimum wage is $290. Thus, a contemporary equivalent would be a minimum wage worker being fined roughly $400. ↑
271. Id.; see also Baker, supra note 190, at 49 (noting that a fine of ten or fifteen dollars often forced Black convicts onto the chain gang). ↑
272. Atlanta Police Department Court Docket, 1886–1887, supra note 224; see also Jamison v. Wimbish, 130 F. 351, 353 (S.D. Ga. 1904), rev’d, 199 U.S. 599 (1905). ↑
273. Atlanta Police Department Court Docket, 1886–1887, supra note 224. ↑
274. In the period covered by the docket book, 1,007 White men, 66 White women, 902 Black men, and 369 Black women were convicted by the Recorder’s Court. Thus, 38 percent of White male convicts, 45 percent of White female convicts, 51 percent of Black male convicts and 52 percent of Black female convicts could not pay their fines and served time on the chain gang. Calculated from Atlanta Police Department Court Docket, 1886–1887, supra note 224. In 1904, 1,081 White men, 101 White women and 23 White boys served time on the chain gang compared to 2,859 Black men, 1,251 Black women, and 346 Black boys. The average number of chain gang prisoners on a given day was 217.8 and the average term of service was 14.04 days. City Prisoners Are Increasing, Atlanta Const., Dec. 30, 1904, at 7. ↑
275. Du Bois, supra note 170, at 44; Rabinowitz, supra note 50, at 48, 51; Race Menaced by Low Element, Atlanta Const., Aug. 22, 1903, at 7 (stating that a $10.75 fine led to three weeks on the chain gang); Trapped Forty‑Nine, Atlanta Const., Aug. 6, 1895, at 11 (noting that $675 dollars in fines equaled 1,350 days of chain gang labor). ↑
276. Atlanta Police Ann. Rep., 1896, supra note 201, at 17 (reporting that $34,715.70 worth of fines were “[w]orked out on streets”). In 1871, the city marshal reported that prisoners worked 7,208 days on the streets. 7 Atlanta City Council Minutes, supra note 87, at 123. ↑
277. City Prisoners are Increasing, Atlanta Const., Dec. 30, 1904, at 7; see also City Chain‑Gang, Atlanta Const., July 28, 1882, at 7 (stating that forty‑one of forty‑five chain gang prisoners were Black). ↑
278. In rural areas, those convicted of misdemeanors were sentenced to longer stints on county chain gangs. In contrast, those convicted of felonies were generally sentenced to the state prison where they were leased to private corporations, usually railroads. See Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South 55, 66, 93 (1996); Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re‑enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II 54, 74, 91 (2008); Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South 172 (2015); Haley, supra note 58. ↑
279. Dittmer, supra note 248, at 88; Our Chain Gang, Atlanta Const., Jan. 19, 1882, at 1; The Haunted Stockade, Atlanta Const., July 20, 1883, at 7; Life with the Gang, Atlanta Const., Aug. 29, 1888, at 2; Stocks May Succeed Strap, Atlanta Const., May 26, 1901, at 8; The Lash to be Used, Atlanta Const., Sept. 18, 1886, at 8; Brutal Treatment Charged by Thomas, Atlanta Const., Feb. 12, 1901, at 5; City Stockade is Arraigned, Atlanta Const., June 29, 1905, at 7 (stating “that filth and dirt which menaced health and offended common decency prevailed throughout every department of the prison. . . . The negro men’s department . . . was found to have a temperature of nearly 100 degrees and to be extremely uncomfortable as well as unhealthy”); Robert L. Adamson, At the Stockade, Atlanta Const., Jan. 8, 1893, at 4; Taylor, supra note 50, at 339. ↑
280. See Jain, supra note 35; Sandra G. Mayson, Collateral Consequences and the Preventative State, 91 Notre Dame L. Rev. 301 (2015); Roberts, supra note 35, at 816. ↑
281. Hunter, supra note 50, at 50–53, 64, 131–36. ↑
282. A Chain Gang in Atlanta History Photograph Collection (1905), https://‌‌album.atlantahistorycenter.com‌‌/digital‌‌/collection‌‌/athpc‌‌/id‌‌/2568‌‌/rec‌‌/14 [https://‌‌perma.cc‌‌/HM9Q-PPB7]. ↑
283. Atlanta Police Ann. Rep., 1903, supra note 210, at 7, 23 (stating that $47,335 was collected in fines from the Recorder’s Court, compared to a total police budget of $188,002); see also The Tombs of Atlanta, Atlanta Daily Herald, Jan. 11, 1874, at 8 (stating the Recorder’s Court “is a source of revenue”). ↑
284. City of Atlanta, Ann. Rep. of the Comm. of Council, Officers and Dep’ts of the City of Atlanta, for the year ending December 31, 1875, at 22 (1876); see also Fifty‑One Miles of Paving, Atlanta Const., Jan. 10, 1885, at 7 (stating that road paving cost $316,000 but that “in that amount is quite a sum done by the city and county chain gang”). ↑
285. 8 Atlanta City Council Minutes, supra note 91, at 317–18; Convict Labor and Good Roads, Atlanta Const., Aug. 19, 1902, at 6; Wagner, supra note 58, at 140–41. ↑
286. Feeley, supra note 36. ↑
287. Akerman, supra note 231, at 185, 196. ↑
288. Unjust Treatment the Cause, Savannah Trib., Mar. 18, 1893, at 2 (explaining that Black Georgians “are absolutely denied all participation in the forming of the laws and almost never granted the protection of the law”); Rabinowitz, supra note 50, at 22. ↑
289. Jacqueline Jones, Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War 285 (2008); see also Bardes, supra note 133, at 86–87. ↑
290. Negro Policemen for Atlanta, Daily Intelligencer, Sept. 8, 1867, at 3. Demands for Black policemen would continue in the ensuing decades. See The New Captains, Atlanta Const., Apr. 2, 1885, at 7; Believes Negro Detectives Would Help, supra note 177; Book Review, 2 Voice of the Negro 274 (Apr. 1905) (reviewing Thomas N. Page, The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem); Rabinowitz, supra note 50, at 41; Allison Dorsey, To Build Our Lives Together: Community Formation in Black Atlanta, 1875–1906, at 150 (2004). ↑
291. Du Bois, supra note 170, at 8, 56; see also Negro Character, Atlanta Const., July 23, 1893, at 10. ↑
292. See supra text accompanying note 196. ↑
293. Rabinowitz, supra note 61, at 64. ↑
294. Rev. H. H. Proctor’s Strong Views, Atlanta Georgian, Sept. 1, 1906, at 9. ↑
295. See Du Bois, supra note 170, at 55, vi–viii (listing more than a dozen books about slavery in the bibliography); A Terrible Indictment, Atlanta Indep., Dec. 16, 1905, at 4. ↑
296. Du Bois, supra note 170, at 16 ; see also W. E. B. Du Bois, The Spawn of Slavery: The Convict‑Lease System in the South, 24 Missionary Rev. of the World 737 (1901); Du Bois, supra note 177, at 21. ↑
297. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro 164–96 (1899); W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro American Family (1908). ↑
298. Emancipation Exercises, Atlanta Const., Jan. 3, 1900, at 10; see also Du Bois, supra note 177, at 24; Race Menaced by Low Element, Atlanta Const., Aug. 22, 1903, at 7. ↑
299. W. N. Hartshorn, An Era of Progress and Promise, 1863−1910: The Religious, Moral, and Educational Development of the American Negro Since His Emancipation 58–59 (1910); Negro Criminality in the North, its Cause and Increase, Atlanta Indep., Feb. 20, 1904, at 4; Dorsey, supra note 290, at 119. ↑
300. Du Bois, supra note 170, at 56; Du Bois, supra note 297, at 72, 319. ↑
301. W. E. B. Du Bois, Conservation of Races, 2 Am. Negro Acad. Occasional Papers 5, 14 (1897). ↑
302. See infra notes 304–308 and accompanying text. ↑
303. Du Bois, supra note 170, at 1. Sanborn had been an abolitionist before the Civil War and was a financial backer of John Brown. ↑
304. Du Bois, supra note 170, at 8 ; see also Sinclair, supra note 156, at 215−17. ↑
305. Du Bois, supra note 170, at 8; see also Hartshorn, supra note 299, at 58−60 (poor housing conditions “foster criminals”); Dorsey, supra note 290, at 118−19; S. Rose Werth, Social Disharmony and Racial Injustice: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Theories on Crime, 71 Soc. Probs. 18 (2024). ↑
306. A Terrible Indictment, Atlanta Indep., Dec. 16, 1905, at 4; see also Du Bois, supra note 170, at 7; Baker, supra note 46, at 65; Malka, supra note 88, at 141. ↑
307. Du Bois, supra note 170, at 55; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Hampton Idea, 3 Voice of the Negro 631, 631–32 (Sept. 1906). ↑
308. This pattern continues today. See Bell, Anti‑Segregation Policing, supra note 35, at 750; Elizabeth Hinton, Julilly Kohler‑Hausmann & Vesla M. Weaver, Did Blacks Really Endorse the 1994 Crime Bill?, N.Y. Times (Apr. 13, 2016), https://‌‌www.nytimes.com‌‌/2016‌‌/04‌‌/13‌‌/opinion‌‌/did-blacks-really-endorse-the-1994-crime-bill.html [https://‌‌perma.cc‌‌/P8FZ-DAD6]. ↑
309. See infra notes 332–344 and accompanying text. ↑
310. Watts, supra note 61, at 172; Hunter, supra note 50, at 122. ↑
311. A Drunken Policeman, The Vindicator (Atlanta, Ga.), Aug. 3, 1883, John Emory Bryant Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book Manuscript Libr., Duke Univ. ↑
312. Human Life Too Cheap, Atlanta Indep., Apr. 2, 1905, at 4; Editorials, Atlanta Indep., Apr. 15, 1905, at 4; see also Our Policemen, Atlanta Indep., Sept. 22, 1906, at 4. ↑
313. Rev. John H. Grant, Some of the Evils Which Are Producing Desperadoes and Murderers Among the Negroes, and Remedies, 2 Voice of the Negro 544, 544–47 (Aug. 1905). ↑
314. Jones, supra note 289, at 294; Jonathan M. Bryant, “We Defy You!”: Politics and Violence in Reconstruction Savannah, in Slavery and Freedom in Savannah 172 (Leslie M. Harris & Daina Ramey Berry eds., 2014); Sinclair, supra note 156, at 240. ↑
315. Du Bois, supra note 170, at 57, 63, 66; Baker, supra note 46, at 50; Rabinowitz, supra note 61, at 49. ↑
316. Du Bois, supra note 170, at 34–35. ↑
317. Editorials, Atlanta Indep., Jan. 23, 1904, at 4. ↑
318. Negroes Make Fight on Convict Labor in County, Atlanta J., May 5, 1904, at 7; see also Convict Labor is an Insult to Free Labor and a Breach of Faith with the People, Atlanta Indep., July 8, 1904, at 4. ↑
319. The Abuse of the Police Courts, 3 Voice of the Negro 619, 620 (Sept. 1906). ↑
320. Id.; see also The Scarcity of Farm Labor, 3 Voice of the Negro, 620 (Sept. 1906); H. B. Watson, Suggestions for Black Atlanta, 3 Voice of the Negro, 652 (Sept. 1906); In the Sanctum, 2 Voice of the Negro 126 (Feb. 1905); Judge Speer and the Chain Gang, 1 Voice of the Negro 300 (Aug. 1904). ↑
321. Du Bois, supra note 170, at 29. ↑
322. B. J. Davis, Editorials, Atlanta Indep., July 30, 1904, at 4. ↑
323. Du Bois, supra note 170, at 5, 43–47, 56. ↑
324. See Rayford W. Logan, Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901 (1954); Brundage, supra note 144. ↑
325. See Hunter, supra note 50, at 170. ↑
326. The Tombs of Atlanta, Atlanta Daily Herald, Jan. 11, 1874, at 8; Compulsory Vaccination, Atlanta Const., May 12, 1882, at 5; Two Women Fight; Almost a Riot, Atlanta Const., July 13, 1898, at 10; Baker, supra note 190, at 45. ↑
327. Atlanta Police Department Court Docket, 1886–1887, supra note 224 (showing the overrepresentation of Black defendants). ↑
328. Hunter, supra note 50, at 121; see also Dittmer, supra note 248, at 138. It is difficult to get a full picture of working‑class Black Atlantans’ opinion about the police and criminal legal system. Black actions against the police, described at length in this Section, spur news coverage and thus create records. Newspapers did not write about Black Atlantans who decided not to intervene when they saw the police making an arrest. That said, I found no evidence of widespread popular support for the Atlanta police among the city’s Black population, but a great deal of evidence of oppositional protest. ↑
329. See, e.g., The Police of Atlanta, Wkly. Gwinnett Herald, Jan. 28, 1874, at 2; The City Police, Atlanta Const., Sept. 27, 1881, at 8; A Word to Police, Atlanta Const. Aug. 26, 1883, at 6; Among the Police, Atlanta Const., Dec. 12, 1887, at 5; Mob in a Saloon, Atlanta Const., Dec. 13, 1896, at C15; A Hornet’s Nest, Atlanta Const., Apr. 19, 1894, at 5; Negroes Disarm Two Officers, Atlanta Const., Jan. 24, 1898, at 5; It was Almost a Riot, Atlanta Const., May 9, 1897, at 13; Almost a Riot About a Prisoner, Atlanta Const., June 13, 1897, at A12; Mob Releases a Prisoner, Atlanta Const., July 9, 1899, at 2; A Fierce Fight with a Prisoner, Atlanta Const., Aug. 28, 1899, at 3; Shot at Officer Hit the Fugitive, Atlanta Const., Sept. 19, 1899, at 8; Attempted to Cut Officer’s Throat, Atlanta Const., July 19, 1902, at 7; Policeman Fires on Mob, Atlanta Const., Sept. 12, 1902, at 12; Bailiff’s Gun Cause of Riot, Atlanta Const., Aug. 9, 1903; Cried Out for Officer’s Death, Atlanta Const., Oct. 7, 1903, at 7 (woman arrested because she “prayed to God that He would in some way have a policeman of Atlanta killed because so many negroes were arrested and sent to the chaingang [sic]”); Police Faced a Negro Riot, Atlanta Const., Sept. 17, 1905, at C1. ↑
330. Scarborough’s Trouble, Atlanta Const., Aug. 1, 1883, at 7; see also A Word to the Police, Atlanta Const., Aug. 26, 1883, at 6 (“The moment that a negro steals or robs, or commits some other crime, . . . he is harbored, protected, defended, and deified. . . . In Atlanta, if an officer refrains from using his pistol, he is followed by a mob of howling women who throw stones at him and attempt to rescue the criminal. This sort of lawlessness marks every attempt to arrest a negro thief in the localities where negroes congregate and it is becoming too common.”); Hunter, supra note 50, at 122–23. ↑
331. A Negro Mob, Atlanta Const., Aug. 17, 1883, at 7. ↑
332. War on Vagrants Begun by Police, Atlanta Const., Mar. 23, 1901, at 1; see also Du Bois, supra note 177, at 23. ↑
333. See, e.g., “Elbow Bend,” Atlanta Const., June 24, 1892, at 6. ↑
334. See, e.g., Much Money From Fines, Atlanta Const., June 5, 1900, at 7. ↑
335. Negro Fools, Atlanta Const., July 19, 1883, at 4; see also Drive Out the Dives!, Atlanta Const., Aug. 31, 1906, at 6; A Word to the Police, Atlanta Const., Aug. 26, 1883, at 6; Editor Burnett’s Crusade, Atlanta Const., Aug. 22, 1903, at 6; Crime Among Negroes, Atlanta Georgian, Oct. 17, 1906, at 9; Hunter, supra note 50, at 123. ↑
336. Judge Gives Good Advice, Atlanta Const., June 20, 1901, at 9. ↑
337. See supra Parts II–III. ↑
338. In contrast, during slavery the power of slave patrols “supplemented and depended upon that of the private masters.” Du Bois, supra note 170, at 3. ↑
339. Harry A. Blackmun, Section 1983 and Federal Protection of Individual Rights—Will the Statute Remain Alive or Fade Away, 60 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1, 15 (1985) (describing the “rebirth” of § 1983 in the mid‑twentieth century). ↑
340. Micah Herskind, This is the Atlanta Way: A Primer on Cop City, Scalawag (May 2023), https://‌‌scalawagmagazine.org‌‌/2023‌‌/05‌‌/cop-city-atlanta-history-timeline [https://‌‌perma.cc‌‌/DX9P-55EX]. ↑
341. Matthew Guariglia, Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York 135–52 (2023); Go, supra note 27, at 105–41. ↑
342. See generally Go, supra note 27. In contrast, slave patrols were primarily rural institutions whose purpose was to control the movement of enslaved people. ↑
343. Before emancipation, the three Southern cities with police forces were Savannah, Charleston, and New Orleans. All three cities had large populations of free people—free Black people and White immigrants—whom elites sought to control, as well as a relatively mobile urban enslaved population. See Go, supra note 27, at 1, 91–98; Rousey, supra note 27, at 11–39. ↑
344. Baker, supra note 46, at 14. ↑
345. Indeed, discretion was also central to social control under slavery, though in the hands of a slaveholder rather than the state. See Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made 41 (1974) (“[T]he heart of the slave law lay with the master’s prerogatives and depended on his discretion.”). ↑
346. See supra Parts II–IV. ↑
347. See generally Go, supra note 27. ↑
348. Harring, supra note 87; Go, supra note 27; Guariglia, supra note 341, at 107–34 (discussing the NYPD’s “Italian Squad”); Roger Swift, Heroes or Villains?: The Irish, Crime, and Disorder in Victorian England, 29 Albion 399 (1997); Jean‑Denis David & Megan Mitchell, Contacts with the Police and the Over Representation of Indigenous Peoples in the Canadian Criminal Justice System, 62 Can. J. Criminology & Crim. Just. 23 (2021); Grace O’Brien, Racial Profiling, Surveillance and Over‑Policing: The Over‑Incarceration of Young First Nations Males in Australia, 10 Soc. Sciences 68 (2021); Schrader, supra note 26, at 27–51; Phillip Thurmond Smith, Policing Victorian London: Political Policing, Public Order, and the London Metropolitan Police (1985); Paul Lawrence, Policing the Poor in England and France, 1850−1900, in Social Control in Europe: 1800–2000 (Clive Emsley et al., eds., 2004). ↑
349. Sekhon, supra note 43, at 1719. ↑
350. See Megan T. Stevenson & Sandra G. Mayson, The Scale of Misdemeanor Justice, 98 B.U. L. Rev. 731 (2018). ↑
351. See Blackmun, supra note 339. ↑
352. See Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156 (1972) (declaring city vagrancy ordinance unconstitutionally vague); Connally v. Gen. Const. Co., 269 U.S. 385 (1926) (“The citizen cannot be held to answer charges based upon penal statutes whose mandates are so uncertain that they will reasonably admit of different constructions.”); see also Note, The Void‑for‑Vagueness Doctrine in the Supreme Court, 109 U. Pa. L. Rev. 67 (1960). ↑
353. Simonson, supra note 43, at 806. ↑
354. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868−1919, at 343–434 (1993). ↑