Race And The Houston Police Department 1930 1990

Download or read book Race and the Houston Police Department, 1930-1990 written by Dwight Watson and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the racial history of the Houston Police Department, drawing on police records and contemporary accounts to look at how Houston, and other police departments, responded to social, political, and institutional change from 1930 to 1990.

Download or read book Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South written by Brandon T. Jett and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2021-07-07 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the Jim Crow era, southern police departments played a vital role in the maintenance of white supremacy. Police targeted African Americans through an array of actions, including violent interactions, unjust arrests, and the enforcement of segregation laws and customs. Scholars have devoted much attention to law enforcement’s use of aggression and brutality as a means of maintaining African American subordination. While these interpretations are vital to the broader understanding of police and minority relations, Black citizens have often come off as powerless in their encounters with law enforcement. Brandon T. Jett’s Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South, by contrast, reveals previously unrecognized efforts by African Americans to use, manage, and exploit policing. In the process, Jett exposes a much more complex relationship, suggesting that while violence or the threat of violence shaped police and minority relations, it did not define all interactions. Black residents of southern cities repeatedly complained about violent policing strategies and law enforcement’s seeming lack of interest in crimes committed against African Americans. These criticisms notwithstanding, Blacks also voiced a desire for the police to become more involved in their communities to reduce the seemingly intractable problem of crime, much of which resulted from racial discrimination and other structural factors related to Jim Crow. Although the actions of the police were problematic, African Americans nonetheless believed that law enforcement could play a role in reducing crime in their communities. During the first half of the twentieth century, Black citizens repeatedly demanded better policing and engaged in behaviors designed to extract services from law enforcement officers in Black neighborhoods as part of a broader strategy to make their communities safer. By examining the myriad ways in which African Americans influenced the police to serve the interests of the Black community, Jett adds a new layer to our understanding of race relations in the urban South in the Jim Crow era and contributes to current debates around the relationship between the police and minorities in the United States.

Download or read book Critical Race Studies Across Disciplines written by Jonathan Langston Chism and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-04-19 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that critical race theory (CRT)—which originated within Legal Studies during the 1970s—has permeated multiple academic disciplines and informs the ethical commitments of scholars in diverse fields of study. Critical Race Studies Across Disciplines includes essays by scholars of African American studies from various disciplines, who directly and indirectly incorporate CRT through signaling a commitment to scholar-activism or scholactivism. Scholactivists hope to understand the roots of anti-Black racism and to actively oppose all forms of oppression. Drawing on CRT, the volume counters the colorblind rhetoric of those who dismiss the notion of systemic racism, discount racial inequities, and disregard racial justice advocates as malcontents fanning the flames of racial dissension. The contributors of this collection challenge racism centering the stories, perspectives, and counter-narratives of African American soldiers, teachers, students, writers, psychologists, and theologians who continually defy and resist oppression in myriad ways.

Download or read book Black Rage in New Orleans written by Leonard N. Moore and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Black Rage in New Orleans, Moore traces the shocking history of police corruption in the Crescent City from World War II to Hurricane Katrina and the concurrent rise of a large and energized black opposition to it. Moore explores a staggering array of NOPD abuses -- police homicides, sexual violence against women, racial profiling, and complicity in drug deals, prostitution rings, burglaries, protection schemes, and gun smuggling -- and the increasingly voceriferous calls for reform by the city's black community. The first book-length study of police brutality and African American protest in a major American city, Black Rage in New Orleans will prove essential for anyone interested in race relations in America's urban centers.

Download or read book Who Gets a Childhood? written by William S. Bush and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using Texas as a case study for understanding change in the American juvenile justice system over the past century, the author tells the story of three cycles of scandal, reform, and retrenchment, each of which played out in ways that tended to extend the privileges of a protected childhood to white middle- and upper-class youth, while denying those protections to blacks, Latinos, and poor whites. On the forefront of both progressive and "get tough" reform campaigns, Texas has led national policy shifts in the treatment of delinquent youth to a surprising degree. Changes in the legal system have included the development of courts devoted exclusively to young offenders, the expanded legal application of psychological expertise, and the rise of the children's rights movement. At the same time, broader cultural ideas about adolescence have also changed. Yet the author demonstrates that as the notion of the teenager gained currency after World War II, white, middle-class teen criminals were increasingly depicted as suffering from curable emotional disorders even as the rate of incarceration rose sharply for black, Latino, and poor teens. He argues that despite the struggles of reformers, child advocates, parents, and youths themselves to make juvenile justice live up to its ideal of offering young people a second chance, the story of twentieth-century juvenile justice in large part boils down to the exclusion of poor and nonwhite youth from modern categories of childhood and adolescence.

Download or read book The Other Great Migration written by Bernadette Pruitt and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-16 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twentieth century has seen two great waves of African American migration from rural areas into the city, changing not only the country’s demographics but also black culture. In her thorough study of migration to Houston, Bernadette Pruitt portrays the move from rural to urban homes in Jim Crow Houston as a form of black activism and resistance to racism. Between 1900 and 1950 nearly fifty thousand blacks left their rural communities and small towns in Texas and Louisiana for Houston. Jim Crow proscription, disfranchisement, acts of violence and brutality, and rural poverty pushed them from their homes; the lure of social advancement and prosperity based on urban-industrial development drew them. Houston’s close proximity to basic minerals, innovations in transportation, increased trade, augmented economic revenue, and industrial development prompted white families, commercial businesses, and industries near the Houston Ship Channel to recruit blacks and other immigrants to the city as domestic laborers and wage earners. Using census data, manuscript collections, government records, and oral history interviews, Pruitt details who the migrants were, why they embarked on their journeys to Houston, the migration networks on which they relied, the jobs they held, the neighborhoods into which they settled, the culture and institutions they transplanted into the city, and the communities and people they transformed in Houston.

Download or read book The Hidden 1970s written by Dan Berger and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1970s were a complex, multilayered, and critical part of an era of profound societal change and an essential component of the decade before-several of the most iconic events of "the sixties" occurred in the ten years that followed. The Hidden 1970s explores the distinctiveness of those years, when radicals tried to change the world as the world changed around them. Essays trace the struggles from the 1960s through the 1970s, providing insight into the ways that radical social movements shaped American political culture in the 1970s and the many ways they continue to do so today.