Boise State University Islamic and Christian Location 632 to 1000 CE Essay This essay should be about 4-6 double-space pages with both citations and biblio

Boise State University Islamic and Christian Location 632 to 1000 CE Essay This essay should be about 4-6 double-space pages with both citations and bibliography should be in Chicago Style format. The only citations that are to be used in this essay will be attached below. Remember to include all of the books and articles assigned for Part III, 3/19-4/30, and listed on page 3 in your syllabus. Do NOT use other sources, the idea is to demonstrate your comprehension of assigned readings and class discussions. Explore the challenges of policing in post-World-War-II Europe and America, including diversity, integration, and national ideals. Include an exploration of what has changed or not changed in the police mission, image, and culture. Has policing fundamentally changed from its origins in the nineteenth-century? 705497
research-article2017
JUHXXX10.1177/0096144217705497Journal of Urban HistorySchneider et al.
Article
Dirty Work: Police and
Community Relations and
the Limits of Liberalism in
Postwar Philadelphia
Journal of Urban History
?1­–19
© The Author(s) 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144217705497
DOI: 10.1177/0096144217705497
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Eric C. Schneider1,†, Christopher Agee2,
and Themis Chronopoulos3
Abstract
Police abuse of African Americans was an immediate trigger for the urban uprisings of the 1960s,
and civilian review of police actions became a central tenet of civil rights liberalism. The failure
of Philadelphia’s Police Advisory Board (PAB), the nation’s first independent civilian review
board (1958), to meliorate police–community tensions suggests the limitations of civil rights
liberalism: an inability to confront the role of police as “dirty workers,” who performed the
unacknowledged but widely demanded function of maintaining racial hierarchy in the postwar
city. Working-class African Americans, the most frequent victims of police brutality, came to
see civilian review as a charade and rejected the limited vision of civil rights liberals. The PAB’s
failure shows that police reform is impossible without a broader commitment to overturning
racial hierarchy.
Keywords
police–community relations, civilian review boards, liberalism, police reform
. . . the only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive.
—James Baldwin1
Decades of frustration at brutal treatment and police harassment exploded along North
Philadelphia’s Columbia Avenue on August 28, 1964. Like nearly all of the ghetto uprisings of
the 1960s, this one began with a routine police action. Mrs. Odessa Bradford quarreled with her
1University
of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
of Colorado Denver, Denver, CO, USA
3Swansea University, Swansea, UK
†Author passed away during the production process of this article.
2University
Corresponding Authors:
Christopher Agee, Department of History, University of Colorado Denver, Campus Box 182, P.O. Box 173364,
Denver, CO 80217, USA.
Email: chris.agee@ucdenver.edu
Themis Chronopoulos, Department of Political and Cultural Studies, Swansea University, Swansea SA2 8PP, Wales, UK.
Email: T.Chronopoulos@swansea.ac.uk
2
Journal of Urban History 0(0)
husband, Rush, after their car stalled in the middle of a busy intersection. Rush stood outside the
car yelling at his wife, while Odessa attempted to restart the engine; both were drunk and the car
would not move. A police car arrived at the scene, and Officers Robert Wells, an African
American, and John Hoff, who was white, attempted to get Mrs. Bradford to move the car. When
she was unable to do so, the officers tried to extract Mrs. Bradford from behind the wheel. Friday
night revelers packed the bars near the intersection, and patrons gathered to watch the show outside. That one officer was black was less important than the fact that two police officers appeared
to be mishandling a woman. The crowd grew increasingly restive as the officers wrestled with
Mrs. Bradford, and a bystander, James Mettles, struck Officer Hoff. His partner radioed an “assist
officer” call, and a few minutes later a police wagon arrived along with other police cars. After
placing everyone under arrest, the police cleared the intersection as bricks and bottles rained
down from the roofs of nearby buildings. The presence of some twenty-five officers seemed to
quell the disturbance, and police left.2
However, a rumor started in the neighborhood that a white police officer had either shot and
killed a pregnant black woman, or had beaten her to death in a jail cell. Rumors of police killings
swirled through black communities and sometimes directly precipitated a violent response.3 Such
stories seemed credible since abuse of black civilians by police was so common—physical violence to be sure but also less extreme cases of discourtesy, the use of racist language, and harassment. Philadelphia police were notorious for using the “third degree” and severely beating
suspects, as one black attorney put it, “before even asking the Negro if he committed the crime.”
Feelings that police treated blacks unfairly, that they offered “neither justice nor protection,”
were widespread and of long standing, according to a study published by the Philadelphia’s
Bureau of Municipal Research in 1947. The Philadelphia police were also a bastion of whiteness:
in 1950, only 195 out of 4,500 officers in the Philadelphia Police Department were black, a
smaller percentage than had existed in the 1920s. Racism was entrenched in a department where
a survey revealed that 59 percent of white officers objected to partnering with a black officer. In
this environment, police mistreatment of black civilians was ignored, leading to bitter confrontations between police and community members. Incidents, such as police shootings, led to marches
around City Hall in 1960 and a near riot in 1963. The 1964 uprising tapped a deep vein of grievances against police.4
The anger against police mistreatment boiled over as the rumor of Mrs. Bradford’s death
spread. Crowds filled Columbia Avenue, a main street in North Philadelphia, which was already
thick with pedestrians on a warm August night. A woman yelled to the crowd, “We’re going to
get an eye for an eye, a life for a life,” while someone else hollered, “Let’s run them out of North
Philadelphia. Those white cops have no business up here.” Shortly after, a police car heading up
Columbia had its rear window broken by debris hurled by pedestrians, and an “assist officer’s”
call drew police cars back to the area. Crowds attacked police, smashed store windows, and
looted businesses along the main commercial streets, and police were unable to control them.
Some 600 police officers cordoned off the area to keep unrest from spreading farther.5
The uprising also made apparent the frustration of common folk with middle-class African
American leaders and their liberal civil rights agenda. In the midst of the looting, African
American ministers, political leaders, and civil rights activists rode through the streets on flatbed
trucks and used megaphones to urge people to disperse. The largely young and male crowd (categorized as “hoodlums” by the mainstream black press) would have none of it and mocked
middle-class black leaders. Judge Raymond Pace Alexander, the city’s most prominent African
American, told the crowd that looting only made things worse. Someone yelled in response, “Go
home you Uncle Tom. We don’t need any handkerchief-head judges around here.” Cecil B.
Moore, the activist president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP), who lived in the neighborhood and made his living as a firebrand criminal defense
attorney, famously called more moderate civil rights leaders “part-time Negroes.” Yet even
Schneider et al.
3
Moore found himself stoned and jeered by the crowd—a measure of people’s impatience with
moderation. “We don’t need civil rights,” one yelled, “We can take care of ourselves.”6
Police arrested rioters—308 altogether—but it was just a fraction of the total, and they
refrained from firing weapons or using other forms of force to suppress the disturbance. This
became a major issue later as police claimed they had been “handcuffed” by their superiors.
Police Commissioner Howard Leary had ordered police to keep their weapons holstered unless
attacked and to leave their department-issued blackjacks in their back pockets unless absolutely
necessary. Leary wanted to de-escalate the situation and was willing to sacrifice property in
return for fewer casualties, even though this alienated rank and file police.7
Leary’s approach to the violence was controversial. Some African American leaders called for
a sterner response, perhaps realizing that a community with few jobs and resources was in the
process of losing even those. Obviously, white business owners were angry at the loss of their
properties and disagreed with Leary’s handling of the violence. Observers noted Deputy Police
Commissioner Frank Rizzo, popular with the rank and file, arguing heatedly with Leary about his
orders. Afterward, however, the media and many public officials credited Leary for the restraint
shown by Philadelphia police. Philadelphia suffered far fewer casualties than other American
cities during the 1960s uprisings: only two people died and 339 were injured, including about a
hundred police officers. Leary’s handling of the disturbance led directly to his appointment as
police commissioner in New York City, which opened the door to Frank Rizzo’s eventual appointment as a very different kind of police commissioner, one who emboldened Philadelphia police
to act more aggressively.8
Investigations of 1960s urban uprisings pointed directly to police actions as immediate triggers to civil disturbances, and reform of police practices was one of the core demands of civil
rights activists. Harlen Hahn, Judson Jeffries, Robert Fogelson, and Thomas Sugrue have all
noted the relationship between police actions and civil disorders, while case studies by Leonard
Moore on New Orleans, Matthew Countryman on Philadelphia, Dwight Watson on Houston,
Patrick Jones on Milwaukee, and Tera Agyepong on Chicago explore more specific contexts of
the police mistreatment of civilians that frequently worsened during the civil rights era as white
supremacy was challenged.9 While many other issues contributed to the civil unrest of the 1960s,
the actions of police were the most readily visible. Unlike housing discrimination, overcrowded
and segregated schools, limited employment opportunities, and general poverty, the perpetrators
of police abuse were obvious and at hand. At the same time, police misbehavior seemed more
remediable, if only because it did not require vast changes in public attitude or large infusions of
federal money. A coalition of interracial liberals—the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),
the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality, and other civil rights activists—promoted civilian
review of police actions as the best check on abusive policing. As Martha Biondi has noted,
demands for civilian review became a staple of civil rights activism as early as the 1940s, and, a
generation later, the Kerner Commission included civilian review as a necessary reform in its
report on civil disorders.10
Yet Philadelphia already had a civilian review board, the first independent board in the nation,
established in 1958. Despite that, the city had exploded with the same rage found in other cities.
That uprising contributed to the eventual demise of the Philadelphia’s Police Advisory Board
(PAB) and to New York City’s fractious debate over civilian review. Historians have analyzed the
defeat of a civilian review board in New York City, but little attention has been paid to the
nation’s first and longest lived board.11 And although there is a growing literature on police and
police–community relations, many historians, as Themis Chronopoulos has noted, “have taken
the antagonistic police-community relationship for granted.”12 The case files of the PAB, although
incomplete, provide evidence of the fractious relations between police and members of minority
communities in the period leading up to and immediately following the 1964 civil disturbance.13
The turbulent history of the PAB, which was eliminated by Mayor James Tate in 1969 at the
4
Journal of Urban History 0(0)
behest of then Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo, is an ideal lens through which to view the limitations of postwar liberalism, the difficulties of police reform, and the endemic nature of police–
minority community violence.
Police–minority community violence was endemic because police were “dirty workers,” in
sociologist Lee Rainwater’s phrase, performing tasks that mainstream society wanted done but
did not wish to recognize overtly.14 Dirty workers’ role was to confine and control out-groups,
submerged and disenfranchised people, and for police in the United States, this has frequently
meant African Americans. Increasingly in the twentieth century as black urban populations
swelled with migration, dirty work meant upholding the informal apartheid found in American
cities. Intensive policing—car stops, frisks, and frequent searches of persons and property—concentrated in minority communities in part because of their high crime rates but also as a way of
controlling and surveilling a restive population.15 As dirty work, however, the police’s maintenance of racial order could not be directly acknowledged—in fact it was officially denied—and
therefore it was not something learned in training manuals or found in directives from police
headquarters. Rather, new officers learned how to patrol minority communities as part of the
informal norms of policing, the “street knowledge” or “worklore” imparted by veterans.16
Moreover, with mid-twentieth-century police forces still dominated by white ethnic, frequently
Irish Catholic, males, intensive policing of black neighborhoods was a form of self-interest with
the intent of containing a threatening population.17 Official tolerance for different standards of
policing for different communities, and for all but the most extreme examples of police abuse,
made individual self-interest into collective dirty work. Since civilian review threatened to subject dirty work to public scrutiny, police and their supporters vehemently resisted it in Philadelphia
and prevented its implementation in other cities, such as New York, when it was proposed.
Opponents argued that civilians could never judge police actions fairly, that civilian review was
subversive of public order, and that any complaint about an officer could only be handled internally by the police department. What white liberals and civil rights advocates wanted to expose,
police and their supporters wished to leave covered up. Dirty work by its very nature had to
remain under wraps.
The creation of Philadelphia’s review board was the last product of the interracial liberals who
shaped the city in the 1950s. A coalition of “young Turks,” supported by black and ethnic white
voters, the Americans for Democratic Action, and business interests tired of the corruption of
Philadelphia’s Republican machine and concerned about the visible decay of the city, marched
into power in 1951 with the election of Joseph Clark as mayor and Richardson Dilworth as district attorney. Simultaneously, a new home rule charter banned discrimination in public employment, housing, and accommodations, and established a Commission on Human Relations to
investigate discriminatory practices. The reformers wanted to open Philadelphia government up
to those previously unrepresented, including African Americans, but they were primarily interested in good government. They wanted to make meritorious rather than patronage appointments
and to bring expertise to bear on the city’s social and economic problems, so theirs was a technocratic liberalism as much as one concerned with civil rights and social justice.18 As District
Attorney (DA), Dilworth responded to demands from the civil rights community for inclusion
and appointed the first African Americans and women to the DA’s office in the city’s history, and
the prospects for interracial liberalism seemed bright. But by the time Dilworth succeeded Clark
as mayor in 1956, the interracial coalition that had supported reform was showing signs of fracture. Urban renewal of the city’s downtown, which appealed to the city’s business elite, had
worsened a crisis of affordable housing; white home owners, who had supported the idea of more
responsive government, opposed the movement of African Americans into their neighborhoods;
and Dilworth’s proposal for scattered site public housing was blocked in city council.19 Although
the Democrats had cemented their control over the city’s power structure, passage of civil rights–
related legislation had become more difficult as reform Democrats were outmaneuvered by
Schneider et al.
5
“regulars” more attentive to white ethnic voters than to African Americans. When concerns about
police practices grew too numerous to ignore by the late 1950s, the city council held hearings but
was unable to agree on a legislative remedy.
Civilian review of police actions had not been part of the original set of reform proposals
enacted in the early 1950s—attention was focused more on an unfolding police corruption scandal and removing the Republican machine’s holdover appointments to the police department—
and the city charter left the police commissioner, who received the recommendations of a Police
Trial Board, with the sole authority to discipline police officers. The Trial Board, which consisted
of three members of the police department, focused on internal disciplinary issues brought by
superior officers, not civilian complaints, and the Philadelphia ACLU found that not a single
civilian complaint about police abuse had been upheld by the department’s internal review process. Anger at police raids of numbers writing establishments (illegal lotteries) that often were in
people’s homes or in storefront businesses led to city council hearings on police practices in
1957. Concerns about warrantless searches soon expanded to include other forms of abuse of city
residents, particularly African Americans. Henry Sawyer, the president of the Philadelphia ACLU
who was also a city council member and a key ally of Mayor Dilworth, introduced a bill to establish a civilian review board, but the city council rejected it. Sawyer then approached Mayor
Dilworth, who bypassed the council and used his executive authority to establish the Police
Review Board in the fall of 1958.20
The Police Review Board, as it was initially titled, was charged with investigating complaints
brought to it by any party (not necessarily the victim) concerning police abuse, racial or religious
discrimination, or a violation of state or constitutional rights. Any member of the five-person
board, all of whom were appointed by the mayor, could order an investigation, but before any
punitive action could be recommended to the police commissioner, a police officer had a right to
a public hearing and legal representation. At least three members had to be present for the hearing, and a majority had to agree on a recommendation.21
The review board faced immediate challenges. Since Dilworth established it by executive
order, the board confronted significant financial and administrative hurdles. Miffed at the mayor,
the city council refused to appropriate money for its support, and the five-member volunteer
board had neither subpoena power nor an investigative staff. Although the city council eventually
appropriated sufficient funding to hire a part-time executive director and a secretary, the other
administrative problems were never addressed, and the board never received any independent
legislative authorization, meaning that any future mayor could eliminate it. Its investigations
continued to be conducted by members of the police department, and any disciplinary sanctions
it proposed were only recommendations to the police commissioner, who had the sole power to
implement them.22
Despite the obvious weaknesses of the review board, it faced immediate political opposition
from the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which represented the interests of police rank and file.
The FOP, which had argued that there would be a “revolt” in the department if the board were
created, filed a court challenge requesting an injunction against the board’s operations, alleging
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