Abstract
The vast archival records of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Washington, D.C., contain a surprising and unsettling document: a color drawing made by an unknown person in the late 1940s. It is located in one of the hundreds of legal folders concerning the issue of “police brutality” (Figure 6.1).1 The drawing shows the lashing of a prisoner by three men. One of the men is wearing a police uniform, including a sheriff’s hat and a badge. The nude body of the male prisoner in the middle of the picture is drawn in shades of gray. The prisoner is hanging from handcuffs affixed to a pipe above his head. His chest, back, and thighs are covered with wounds inflicted by the ongoing lashes from his three tormentors.2
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Notes
See Steven Lawson, David Colburn, and Darryl Paulson, “Groveland: Florida’s Little Scottsboro Case,” Florida Historical Quarterly 65 (1986), 1–26.
On lynching see, among others: W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993);
Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998);
Michael J. Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004);
Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002);
Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
On the issue of police brutality in the American South see: Silvan Niedermeier, “Police Brutality,” in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Vol. 19, Violence, ed. Amy L. Wood (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 130–132;
Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘Slanging Rocks Palestinian Style.’ Dispatches from the Occupied Zones of North America,” in Police Brutality: An Anthology, ed. Jill Nelson (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000);
Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma. The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper, 1944), 535–546.
On the use of the so-called third degree—the use of physical or physical force by police to gain confessions—in early-twentieth-century America see: Richard A. Leo, Police Interrogation and American Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 41–77;
Darius M. Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 70–73.
See also the Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement published by the Wickersham Commission in 1931: Zechariah Chafee, Walter H. Pollak, and Carl S. Stern, Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1931);
Ernest Jerome Hopkins, Our Lawless Police: a Study of the Unlawful Enforcement of the Law (New York: Viking Press, 1931).
See Silvan Niedermeier, “Torture and ‘Modern Civilization’: The NAACP’s Fight against Forced Confessions in the American South (1935–1945),” in: Fractured Modernity. America Confronts Modern Times, 1890s to 1940s, eds. Thomas Welskopp and Alan Lessoff (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2012), 169–189.
See Arthur F. Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933), 13–19.
See John T. Elliff, The United States Department of Justice and Individual Rights, 1937–1962 (New York: Garland, 1987), 66–73;
Christopher Waldrep, “National Policing, Lynching, and Constitutional Change,” The Journal of Southern History, 74 (2008), 589–626;
Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade against Lynching, 1909–1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).
See Dominic J. Capeci Jr., “The Lynching of Cleo Wright: Federal Protection of Constitutional Rights during World War II,” The Journal of American History 72 (1986), 859–887;
Eliff, The United States Department of Justice and Individual Rights, 134–154; Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 83–124.
See Robert K. Carr, Federal Protection of Civil Rights: Quest for a Sword (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1947), 1–32, 56–84.
See Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones: The FBI: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 81–99;
Claire Bond Potter, War on Crime: Bandits, G-Men, and the Politics of Mass Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998).
On the meaning of observation, description, documentation and other scientific and bureaucratic “tools of knowledge” see also: Peter Becker, William Clark, “Introduction,” in: Little Tools of Knowledge: Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic Practices, eds. Peter Becker, William Clark (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 1–34.
In regard to racial discrimination southern courts and the role of black suspects within southern court procedures see Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: the Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Myrdal, American Dilemma, 550.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 80, 87. As Susan Sontag notes in this context, “[a] photograph […] seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects.”
See Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 5–6.
John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 3.
On the federal trial against Evans and Faucett see also: Robert J. Norrell, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 44–58.
For similar observations in regard to the complexity and heterogeneity of Southern social relations in Southern history see the chapters in: Other Souths: Diversity and Difference in the U.S. South, Reconstruction to Present, ed. Pippa Holloway (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008).
On states’ rights and federalism in American history see States’ Rights and American Federalism: A Documentary History, eds. Frederick D. Drake and Lynn R. Nelson (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999).
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© 2013 Jürgen Martschukat and Silvan Niedermeier
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Niedermeier, S. (2013). Violence, Visibility, and the Investigation of Police Torture in the American South, 1940–1955. In: Martschukat, J., Niedermeier, S. (eds) Violence and Visibility in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137378699_6
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