Peter C. Pihos
Raoul Berger-Mark DeWolfe Howe Fellow
Harvard Law School
September 12, 2012
Black Police and Black Power in 1970s Chicago
Beginning in 1968, Renault Robinson was harassed by his employer for more than a
decade on account of his outspoken criticism of racism on the job and for trying to form a group
with like-minded black employees to combat this unfair treatment. He was reassigned from a
high-status highly independent position to a role as a low-status functionary. He was written up
for minor rule violations. He was subjected to racist caricatures. What’s more, as was true with
many activists of the era, his activities put him under the gaze of Chicago’s political police—the
Department’s notorious Red Squad. He and his wife were even arrested and humiliated at a
public event to which he had been invited as an honoree for his activism. If these events seem
commonplace in the history of Black Power—they are. What was uncommon was that Robinson
was a cop himself and the President and later Executive Director of Chicago’s Afro-American
Patrolmen’s League (AAPL).1
Urban police forces were important actors in the history of the black freedom struggle.
Their role is largely viewed in oppositional terms: The story of black activism since World War
II, especially in the North, demands an account of activism directed against the police. Even as
the sustained wave of civil rights protests that swept the country beginning in 1963 focused on
“long-simmering issues such as discrimination in public accommodations, workplaces, and
schools[,]”they often “became anti-police demonstrations, with a growing number of them
1The scale of harassment can be seen in Robinson’s disciplinary file as well as in various narrative accounts. See
Thomas A. Gottschalk, “Synopsis of Rule Violations in Discharge Proceeding,” June 20, 1970, Afro-American
Patrolmen’s League Collection, Chicago History Museum, Box 22 Folder 1 (“AAPL”); “Conversation between Renault
Robinson and Supervisors at the Third District” (Tape 3), July 1975, AAPL Box 25 Folder 4.
1 turning violent.”2 Advocates of Black Power were amongst the most trenchant critics of the
enforcement of social hierarchy through the use of state violence. The rhetoric of armed selfdefense, the act of patrolling the police, and calls for community control of policing all play a
central role in our understanding of the place of police in this story. Police repression had real
and devastating consequences for people like Fred Hampton, Bobby Hutton, and for the survival
of many Black Power organizations.3
By examining Chicago’s Afro-American Patrolmen’s League, this paper offers a
different angle of vision. The AAPL’s history projects the full depth of influence that Black
Power politics had during the 1970s, by demonstrating how it penetrated the very institution
against which it is usually most prominently arrayed. How could the AAPL reconcile the
quintessential Black Power slogan, “Off the Pigs!”, with its own motto, “Black Power through
Law”? In providing answers to this question, the League offers new departures for thinking
about the broad reach of the protean imagery, rhetoric, and ideas of Black Power. In particular, it
helps to reframe the Black Power critique of the police in a more pointed fashion. The officeractivists who composed the AAPL highlight the ways in which Black Power activists
specifically opposed the unlawful and unjust exercise of state violence, especially against black
people, rather than opposing police powers more generally. The League’s activities against
discriminatory law enforcement and police brutality dovetailed with their efforts as police
2 Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random
House, 2008), 303.
A subfield of Black Power Studies has proliferated in recent years. Authors working in or engaging with this
field offer a broader focus on a variety of activism beyond the critique of policing. Nonetheless, the relationship between
the police and Black Power activists remains important. E.g., Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for
Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Peniel Joseph, Waiting for the Midnight Hour: A Narrative
History of Black Power in America (New York: Owl Books, 2006); Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black
Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Sugure, Sweet Land of Liberty; Donna Murch,
Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2010). For a synthesis of the concerns of the new scholarship, see Peniel Joseph, “The Black
Power Movement: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 96 (2009): 751-776.
3
2 officers—and activists—to reduce crime and fear in predominantly black neighborhoods
(including some of Chicago’s high-rise public housing).
The efforts of the AAPL also highlight the centrality of the movements against state
violence to the broader urban politics of the 1970s. The watchword at the black grassroots as the
1960s turned to the 1970s was not victory. It was survival. Building upon common experiences
with police violence, activists helped to construct a new black politics. This new racial politics
saw ending such state violence as an essential step in black liberation. In Chicago, I suggest that
the AAPL provided a unique credibility for movements against such violence and helped to
channel the formation of black political identity around efforts to resist it.
I: Black Power Talk by Black Policemen
The AAPL was founded in January of 1968, by a handful of black patrolmen, most of
whom had trained begun their training together at the police academy in February of 1965.4
Much of the insight we have on these early years comes from later reflections by Curtis Cowsen
and Renault Robinson, who both wrote on the development of the AAPL during their graduate
studies. According to both men, a small network of friends began meeting about their
dissatisfactions with the treatment of blacks on the force. The suspension of three black officers
for police brutality catalyzed their concerns about disparate treatment. It was alleged that these
black officers had beaten two white youths to obtain a confession. In the minds of League
members, this was something that white cops routinely did to black youth with impunity. Why
4 Curtis Cowsen reported the number of patrolmen as being seven or eight, including Edward ‘Buzz’ Palmer,
Renault Robinson, Frank Lee, George Jones, Willie Ware, Wilbert Crooks, and Curtis Cowsen. Curtis J. Cowsen, “The
Formation of the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League of Chicago” (August 1963), pp. 4-5, AAPL Box 63, Folder 20.
Renault Robinson also includes Jerry Harden, Nathan Silas, and Jack DeBonnett in the group. Renault Robinson, “Black
Police: A Means of Social Change,” August 1971 (M.A. Thesis), AAPL Box 54 Folder 373. Only Crooks left the group
because he found it too radical, according to Cowsen. Cowsen, “Formation,” p. 3. A later annual report highlights Mayor
Richard J. Daley’s famous “shoot to kill, aim to maim” order of April 1968 as precipitating organizing. Afro-American
Patrolmen’s League Annual Report (1974) (draft), AAPL Box 54 Folder 169.
3 did the Department dismiss black claims against white officers while pursuing white claims
against black officers? 5
The League began with the idea that a group of black patrolmen might be able to combat
these injustices at work. As the historic anti-discrimination lawsuit that the officers brought
against the city demonstrated, they were able to do this. If the officers who started the litigation
did not specifically benefit professionally, the near-total vindication of their legal claims paved
the way for increasing the number of black, female, and Latino officers on the force and in
command positions. Although this civil rights agenda geared toward professional advancement
was significant, it was not the whole of the League’s efforts. Instead, it went hand-in-hand with a
broader sense of mission focused on addressing the relationship between the police department
and black Chicagoans.
From the very beginning, when the small handful of officers began meeting, the process
of articulating their problems with their working conditions and thinking about how to improve
them opened up new vistas on the potential objects for a black police organization. As they
began to organize themselves the League’s founders spoke of doing more than establishing “just
‘another’ police organization formed for the purpose of furthering the policemen’s lot.”6 Led by
Edward “Buzz” Palmer, the men engaged in a series of consciousness-raising sessions. Over the
course of several months, they came to realize that, as black patrolmen, they sat at a unique
nexus between black people and the imperatives of law enforcement. co-founder Curtis Cowsen
put it, “we ... began to think of the plight of black people in a broader sense,” during these
meetings, and “to think in terms of solidifying the black policeman with the black community.”7
5 Robinson, “Formation,” pp. 10-11.
6
Renault Robinson, “Untitled Essay,” p.4 (1971) (first of two untitled essays), AAPL Box 54 Folder 371.
7
Cowsen, “The Formation” p. 3.
4 Right from the start, the organization faced choices about how to frame its relationship
with other black movements. In early 1968, there were a wide range of opinions about how to
proceed with organizing amongst the founders, which spanned the ideological spectrum from
“extremely radical” to “ultra conservative.” Even just agreeing on a name was a serious task for
debate, as there were supporters of describing the group as Negro, as Afro-American, as black,
or with no ethnic designation at all. As the subsequent writings of members reveal, key questions
included whether the designation “black” was too militant or too broad (as it might include more
than black Americans who were the organization’s focus) or whether the word Negro was “a
white man’s definition that was condescending and did not offer any sense of black pride.”8
Choosing Afro-American as a compromise identifier, the officers situated themselves in
relationship to Black Power in multiple ways. One obvious, and evocative, starting place is the
League’s iconography—a raised Black Power fist inside a police star—and its slogan—“Black
Power through Law.” Each gestures simultaneously in two directions. They signify the League’s
adoption of the language and images of Black Power. By doing so, they link the League with a
longer history of activism against police brutality and violence, and announced its presence as an
oppositional block within the police department. At the same time, the officers marked
themselves off distinctly from the world of Black Power as cops. In the insignia, for example, the
Black Power fist was placed within the center of the police star. The relationship between the
two is ambiguous. Was it an organic union? Or, did the star somehow contain or subordinate the
fist? These questions could only be answered over time as the officers acted and built their
legacy. But from the outset, both distanced the AAPL from Black Power, as if in an effort to
demonstrate that the officers were not “hoodlums and thugs” as so many had been tarred.
8 Both Cowsen and Robinson discuss the decision. Cowsen and Palmer favored black, while Robinson
discusses a split between those who favored black and American Negro. The quote is from Cowsen.
5 Nodding towards militancy and moderation simultaneously, the League sought to capture the
aspects of Black Power that projected black strength while limiting the reach of negative
stereotypes about the lawlessness of Black Power.
In writing about and explaining the historic relationship between police and black people
as he saw it, Renault Robinson drew on many of the same impulses, ideas and vocabulary that
shaped Black Power activism across the country. His critique of the traditional role that black
officers had played within the police department was framed in the global terms that broadly
shaped many local activists’ ideas about liberation in the 1960s and 1970s.9 In arguing that the
police dominated black Chicagoans in “a colonial police type relationship,” Robinson drew upon
a long line of thinking that extended from Communists in the 1930 to Aimé Césaire and Franz
Fanon after World War II. This ideas coursed through the rhetoric and ideas of Black Power
activists from Malcolm X to the Black Panther Party.10 Putting this relationship in colonial terms
marked police abuse of blacks as neither accidental nor solely based on individual malice.
(Though there were a significant number of white policemen with wicked hearts.)11 Instead, it
was the product of the fundamental political relationships that shaped the social order. Abuse
“flow[ed] from the policemen’s role as agents of an absentee white citizenry.” The police, he
claimed, proved their “representation of the white power structure by the number of insults,
assaults, arrests and kills, perpetrated against the black community.” Nor were black policemen
9 One of the important contributions of Black Power Studies has been to recognize that even where activists
acted locally, they often thought of themselves as part of a global community of blacks. Joseph, “Black Power
Movement”; Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, p. 355. On the importance of
On the place of anti-colonial thought in the black freedom struggle after World War II, see especially Nikhil
Pal Sing, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for American Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2004), pp. 174-211.
10
This would be highlighted in later AAPL protests that highlighted the membership of white officers in the
KKK. E.g., Letter from Austin Youth Coalition to Brothers of the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League, June 23, 1975, AAPL Box 4
Folder 5 (noting the League’s “concern[] with the growing influence of the KKK inside the Chicago Police
Department”).
11
6 innocent. Historically, Robinson claimed, their “only one useful function … [was as] ‘pawns’ of
the white man to be used against black people.”12
By virtue of their place as the contact point between ordinary people and the state,
Robinson considered black patrolmen to have a unique window into the complications of that
relationship. “Police officers have a unique knowledge of the problems of violence and selfhatred manifested in the conduct of black people toward each other.”13 In saying this, he drew
upon he drew upon what Sugrue has called a “psychological understanding of racism and its
effects.” The argument was that living under white domination shaped black psychology and
black behavior. In alluding to long-standing black worries about crime, Robinson rooted its
causes in this social-psychological analysis. “Blacks are in this position,” he argued, “because of
the slave background and slave mentality that has been passed down from one generation of
blacks to another and carefully maintained by white racism.”14
As the founding officers debated the nature of their organization, they came to believe
that it could play a vital role in breaking with history. “We will no longer permit ourselves to be
relegated to the role of brutal pawns in a chess game affecting the communities which we serve.”
Their marginal position—linked both to the establishment and to the black communities in which
they lived and work—“sharpened our perception of our responsibilities as black males in a
society seemingly unresponsive to the needs of Black people.”15 According to AAPL President
Howard Saffold, a black cop’s first obligation was to “say[] in a very loud and clear voice, ‘I’m a
12 Robinson, “Black Watch”
13
“Untitled Essay,” pp. 2, AAPL Box 63 Folder 20.
14
Robinson “Black Watch”
15
7 black man first.’”16 This was part of identifying with other black people, a necessary step in
changing the image of black officers in the eyes of the public.17
Officers attempted to redefine what it meant to be a black police officer at the level of the
self. Style was one way of identifying with other young black men and women. Through their
embrace of popular styles, AAPL members sought to overturn the historic degradation of black
masculinity in favor of more “authentic form[s] of black racial expression.”18 A simple
manifestation of this desire was the demand that League members made to be allowed to wear
their hair “natural.” In the first edition of the organization’s Grapevine newsletter in 1970,
Wayne Horse highlighted the significance of a haircut. He asked: “Shall we continue to wear our
hair in [the] semi-Yul Brenner style merely to satisfy the upper echelon...? Is the Natural
appearance disliked, as a style, or feared as a symbol of the trend of black self-awareness and the
reversal of self hared that so long characterized the black race?”19 Refusing the order of a white
superior to cut his Afro was, for AAPL member Jack DeBonnett, a way of illustrating the “new
scope of dignity and self-pride in my personal psychological traits.”20
Such expressions of pride broke down the assumption that the Department’s regulation of
appearances was somehow uniform and even-handed. They allowed black officers to visibly
demonstrate to the worlds they policed that they identified as being authentically black, while
still remaining cops. Demonstrating this identification was a key aspect of reconstituting the
relationship between community organization and police action. Establishing a strong bond with
16 Saffold, “” Grapevine, Vol. 1, No.1.
Or, as it was put in an essay, “It shall be necessary that the black police officer achieve and maintain the
image of idealistic and sympathetic members of the black community.” “Untitled Essay,” pp. 1-2, AAPL Box 63 Folder
20.
17
18
Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 355.
19
Wayne Horse, “Jones, You’ll Have to Do Something with that Bushy Hair,” Grapevine, Vol. 1, No. 1, March
1970, p.1.
20
DeBonnett quoted in Cowsen, “The Formation,” p.7.
8 community was essential if the AAPL hoped to change police practices. Robinson highlighted
the deep dependence of police institutions on those who were policed. “Blacks do not understand
the effectiveness of the police has traditionally depended upon the goodwill, respect, and
cooperation of the people in the community toward the police. The police, as history has shown,
originally received their real power from the community.” Only by uniting “with their black
brothers to build a community which will be truly black, truly united, and truly beautiful,” could
black policemen achieve their demands that they be treated as political and social equals by the
police hierarchy.
If identifying community betterment rather than professional enhancement characterized
the AAPL rhetoric, the turn towards community action also had practical benefits. As they noted,
even if 1000 out of 2300 black people on the police force were members of the AAPL (about the
highest level of membership that the organization claimed), they would nonetheless still have
little clout over policy within the 13,000 member organization. Even if they hoped to achieve
their limited work-related goals, black officers needed to create a community of interest around
police issues. Without building a sustained political movement for change, officers themselves
would never be able to generate the necessary pressure. This is why Robinson maintained, “Our
clout is in the community. Our clout is not in the members themselves. … We don’t consider
ourselves a police organization; we’re a community organization.”21
For critics of the police department from the political left, remaining cops at all seemed
like a misplaced strategy for black men. In October 1971, the Chicago Reader, then the city’s
brand-new alternative weekly, ran an interview by reporter Nancy Banks of Robinson. She began
the conversation from a position of critique of the “white power structure” and focused on
21 Renault Robinson, “Untitled Essay,” p.3 (1971) (second of two untitled essays), AAPL Box 54 Folder 371.
9 whether and why blacks ought to be involved in police work at all. She noted, “when you’re
making the arrest of a black man, really what you’re saying in effect is, ‘I think you ought to take
the consequences that the society that’s employing me says you ought to take.’”22 Robinson’s
responses to various iterations of this question over the course of the interview gives great
insight into his understanding of police behavior, the police role, and what it meant to be a black
policeman.
Robinson challenged Banks, arguing that her approach was too abstract and lacked a real
understanding of what happened son the street. At the moment of arrest, he argued, “You’re just
reflecting on your training, that’s all. You’re not saying any of that.” To Robinson, it wasn’t
simply a matter of recognizing injustice, which “[m]ost police officers” saw. As Robinson put it,
“When you know that a cat can murder somebody and get out of it for a technicality, or that
somebody is guilty and they can get out of it because they pay the judge, and when you know the
whole thing is rampant, and you know that everybody at court is always poor and that there
almost never are any rich people to stand before that bar—you’re not under any illusion that
there’s any justice to it.” He believed that policemen had important roles to play, and like many
other black cops wanted to be on the street despite the everyday injustices.
After all, black police had an advantage over other Black Power activists, particularly
those advocating armed self-defense. As Robinson noted, “Black police carry guns and have the
same police powers as the white police.” Having black patrolmen on the street mattered not just
symbolically, but because officers on the street employed a vast amount of discretion in their
22 This was not just the concern of an elite journalist. As Howard Saffold testified when he was interview for
the second season of Eyes on the Prize. Around 1968, “People had begin to ask, you know, ‘What, what, what are you part
of? What is that institution about, really? Are you just pawns? Are you part of the oppressive South African-type army?
Are you part of an occupying army?’” “Interview with Howard Saffold,” conducted by Blackside, Inc. on October 18,
1988, for Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads 1965 to 1985. Washington University Libraries, Film
and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection.
10 contact with urban residents. This was true even when cops acted as professionally as they had
been trained to be—although the casual practices of brutality in Chicago attested that many did
not act this way. Practically speaking, it mattered who was doing the arresting, and officers
recognized that they played a major role in channeling individuals into the criminal justice
system. One reason a lot of whites who could be arrested were not is because “a lot of white
policemen don’t chose to send them to the next step.” More black cops might mean “a lot of
blacks wouldn’t reach those steps, either.”
But the reasons why there ought to be black cops went much deeper than simply the
generous exercise of discretion in favor of their own. Delivering a gentle rebuke to Banks’s
radical critique of the police role in the white power structure, Robinson highlighted the
importance of police to black communities like all other communities. “[T]here is a need for the
police. You must remember that. There is a logical and honest and real need for the police. There
are a certain number of people who, regardless of their circumstances are going to do wrong.”23
Despite the injustices in which police took part, there still remained and important and valuable
core of activity. As the League said in its official proclamation at its first press conference, the
goal was to “elevate the black policeman in the black community to the same status as the white
policeman in the white community—that is, a protector of the citizenry, and not a brutal
oppressor.”24
In doing their jobs, League members believed that they might transform policing. The
leading historian of police reform describes the rise of Black Power, especially calls for
23 This did not mean that there was no social etiology to crime. It might be that no matter “how ‘nice’ things
are, there are still going to be some people who are going to commit crimes,” but at the same time, social circumstances
force more people to do it, who would not be criminally minded.” Nancy Banks, “Blacks in Blue: An Interview with
Renault Robinson,” Chicago Reader, Oct. 22, 1971, http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/blacks-inblue/Content?oid=3006600 (last accessed 9/12/2012).
24
Quoted in Robert McClory, The Man Who Beat Clout City (Chicago: Sparrow Press, 1977), 19.
11 community control, as being in opposition to the aspiration of making police more professional
and less political.25 But this was not how League members understood things. In elaborating their
role, League members argued that policing could be both democratized and professionalized.
The League’s members explicitly and repeatedly highlighted the professionalism with which
they worked. They took particular pride in the kind of self-improvement that had long been a
part of plans to upgrade the quality of officers. A number of leaders went on to complete college
degrees and in some case professional degrees. By engaging their jobs through their coursework,
League members developed and articulated a broader sociological understanding of policecommunity relations—one in which officers would serve the people they policed.
Part II: Black Power Police in Action
In the apocalyptic rhetoric common to the late 1960s and early 1970s, the League saw
itself as a tool for black survival. Such language seems strained today, but it had considerable
resonance for black Chicagoans in the aftermath of the assignation of the Illinois Panthers Mark
Clark and Fred Hampton in December of 1969. Because of their embrace of Black Power, the
AAPL were jokingly called the “Black Panther Police” by white policemen. Yet they had no real
connection to the Panthers.26 (In fact, the League’s president Howard Saffold, had even been
25 Robert Fogelson, Big-City Police (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977).
26 Robinson would later largely defend the Panthers in a televised interview on the ABC News “NOW”
Program with ABC News commentator Edward P. Morgan, in which the AAPL leader squared off against John
Harrington, President of the Fraternal Order of Police. Robinson defense proceeded as follows:
Number one, I think that the Black Panther Party as well as other political organizations
should be allowed to exist. Number two, I think that the criminal elements of any
organization, you know, as a police officer I can't condone. Number three, they have a lot of
principles that are similar to ours--such as protecting black people, as so I support those
parts of their program that talk about protecting black people.
Number four, nobody can be against medical centers and breakfast programs, and we aren't
either and I'm not. Number five, I'm sorry that certain parts of their programs that make the
Panthers appear suicidal and that many of them are being killed and jailed. However, that
might be the price that they have to pay for our freedom.
12 assigned to take part in an earlier raid of the Panther headquarters). Yet the deliberate murder of
two Panthers and its aftermath put the members of the League in a position of particular trust.
When Bobby Rush went to turn himself in the police shortly after Hampton was killed, he
reached out the League to ensure that nothing happened to him.27 He would eventually turn
himself in to the police accompanied by Robinson and AAPL Pastor George Clements at the
Saturday morning political Southern Christian Leadership Conference Operation Breadbasket
meeting run by Jesse Jackson. This was a political statement, and it sent the message that the
police were so determined to destroy the Panthers that Rush’s life was in danger and that only
black solidarity could protect him. Even as a piece of political theater, it leant credibility to the
League’s position that something was rotten in the Police Department and that they provided a
bulwark against it.
Already by the time of the Panther shootings in December of 1969, the AAPL was in its
own battle for survival. Almost immediately after the organization incorporated, the Police
Department hierarchy made it clear that membership would have consequences. Much of the
organization’s focus over its first decade was directed towards enduring. This repression was
perhaps different in degree, but not kind, to the provocative tactics that police forces and the FBI
used to destroy many radical movements. The League’s founders started the organization
because they did not like their working conditions; in the aftermath of its founding those working
conditions deteriorated dramatically.28 ‘Buzz’ Palmer, who had been the leader in
conceptualizing a radical community-oriented mission for the organization, was not allowed to
Quoted in “2 Cops Disagree on Panthers on TV,” New York Amsterdam News, June 11, 1970, p. 21.
27 Interview with Saffold. The practice of turning oneself in to a neutral but prominent black community
member was not uncommon during the 1960s and 1970s.
Such spiraling escalation seems quite common in the history of social movements against state violence. The
answer on the part of the state is the intensification of violent repression. See, e.g., Murch, Living for the City; Peter C.
Pihos “Moving MOVE: Race, Police, and Liberal Politics in 1970s Philadelphia.” (2008) (unpublished paper).
28
13 return to the force after taking a leave of absence. By virtue of the fact that he was no longer a
patrolman, he was no longer a member of the AAPL.29
For Robinson, who was the face of the organization, fate presented many more twists and
turns. Before starting the AAPL, Robinson had been a vice cop on the South Side, working with
Frank Lee in one of the city’s only all-black vice teams. He earned a 97 percent efficiency rating,
and he was the recipient of many citations and commendations from the force. With the birth of
the League, both he and Lee quickly were dumped by the vice squad. Robinson was moved to
duty as a traffic cop. Worse than the diminution in status was the constant trouble he faced as his
superiors tried to build a case for removing him from the force. As was suspected by many
Chicago activists, but only later confirmed during the League’s civil rights litigation against the
city, the League (and many others) also was subject to extensive spying by the Police
Department.30 Over 1969, 1970, and 1971, Robinson accumulated more than a year’s worth of
suspensions, Robinson was written up for all manner of violations. He described them as being,
“For not having my hat on, not being respectful, bringing discredit upon the department,
improperly loading a shotgun, being late to work, not filling out a report properly, calling a
supervisor crazy, things of that nature.”31 By 1973, Robinson’s status was so reduced that he had
been assigned to patrolling a the cobblestone driveway behind central police headquarters.32
29 The background to Palmer’s removal from the Force is not entirely clear. There seems to have been some
trickery employed in removing Palmer. The minutes from a January 4, 1970 board meeting reveal that the dept sent
Palmer a letter saying that if he did not report back to duty by September 26, 1970, he would be considered to have
resigned. Palmer did not received the letter until October 5, at which time he requested an extension of his leave, which
was not granted. See Board Minutes, Jan. 4, 1970, AAPL Box 69.
30 At least a portion of the CPD investigative files on Robinson are contained in the AAPL files. See AAPL
Box 23 Folder 2.
31
“Blacks in Blue.”
32
The Chicago Defender reporter Robert McClory described the alley scene. It was
a narrow cobblestone driveway with cars, squadrols, and trucks parked along both sides. …
Overhead, the elevated tracks shut out the light and kept the area in a state of perpetual
gloom. An unending string of commuter trains running back and forth … created a
14 These retaliatory acts led Judge Prentice Marshall of the Northern District of Illinois to later
conclude in ruling upon the League’s claims in its lawsuit that “the command of the Chicago
Police Department was offended by Mr. Robinson’s position and that of the Afro-American
Patrolmen’s League, and they set out to get Mr. Robinson.”33
Police repression was a double-edged sword. It made life difficult for the AAPL’s leaders
and forced them to expend massive amounts of their time and energy fighting for organizational
survival rather than their positive agenda of community renewal. At the same time, the
impression that the Police Department unfairly singled out these officers for their attempts to
organize against discrimination legitimized their claims against the Department in the eyes of
many Black Chicagoans and the white, liberal, independents who chafed under the Daley
machine. Robinson’s public profile skyrocketed. This was due in part to very positive, in-depth
coverage of the organization by the city’s leading black newspaper The Chicago Daily Defender,
which gave Robinson his own weekly column “The Black Watch.” But it also was due to the
AAPL’s political savvy and the police hierarchy’s bungling.
One of the key incidents came on May 9, 1970. Robinson had just been indefinitely
suspended by the Department, which was trying to terminate his employment. On the morning of
May 9, Robinson and other AAPL leaders attended the weekly operation Breadbasket Meeting
before 2000 people. Whatever the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s flaws as a leader might be, his
weekly meeting was the most important locale for grassroots black politics in the city. Being up
defeaning roar. And a long line of garbage bins emitting foul odors stretched as far as the eye
could see and the nose detect. It was here that Renault Robinson, attired in his police cap, a
white open-neck, shortsleeve shirt and dark pants, with his service revolver and a can of
mace at his side, was to fight crime for another day.
McClory, The Man Who Beat Clout City, 142.
Judge Prentice H. Marshall, Transcript of Proceedings, Sept. 23, 1977, quoted in AAPL Press Release “Federal
Judge Prentice Marshall Finds Command of Chicago Police Department Guilty of ‘Repeated Planned Systematic
Violations’ of AAPL Members Constitutional Rights.” (n.d.), AAPL Box 2 Folder 7.
33
15 on the dais signified that one had been accepted by Chicago’s black activist elite.34 That morning
Robinson sat on stage dressed in a grey suit, unlike the other officers sporting their blues. When
the time came, he dramatically handed his badge, gun, baton and other police paraphernalia over
to the assembled community. He said, “It was you who gave me this gun and badge. Now I
surrender them back to you for safekeeping. If I ever get them back, it will be because of you.”35
If the Police command’s decision to suspend him for minor infractions gave Robinson the
opportunity to score points with the civil rights establishment, it expanded the breadth of that
opening twelve hours later by arresting Robinson, his wife Annette, and AAPL member Nathan
Silas were all in police custody. The trio had gone to the Goodman Theater for a mixed-media
satire of Chicago society and politics presented by the Young Artists’ Studio that include a
segment on the League’s trevails. Despite the fact that Silas was an off-duty police officer
required to carry his weapon, the police were called when a security guard saw it under his
jacket. Like so many other dubious collars, the arrest in this case for disorderly conduct, as the
three guests failed to leave the theater as ordered by the police.36 This translated directly into
sympathy for Robinson, and it provided the fodder for a public rally of more than 800 that
brought together disparate elements of Chicago’s black (and white) civil rights community
around their dissatisfaction with the Chicago Police Department. If the League spent much of its
time fighting the department, its leaders also responded to the City’s attempts to silence them in
ways that built credibility with the black public.37
34 Gary Rivlin gives a good overview of the important of the Breadbasket (later Operation PUSH) Saturday
morning meetings in his book on Harold Washington, Fire on the Prarie (New York: Henry Holt, 1987).
35
McClory, The Man Who Beat Clout City, p.74.
36
“Arrest Robinson After He Resigned from Force,” Chicago Daily Defender, May 11, 1970, p.3.
37
McClory, The Man Who Beat Clout City.
16 Despite the suffocating dynamics of repression, the League provided a counterweight to
business-as-usual in the Police Department. It continually talked about the need to end state
violence as central to black survival. Given the track record of the police department, there were
many opportunities to voice this concern. In 1969, the AAPL rallied civic groups against the
installation of shotguns in patrol cars.38 They called for justice in the case of black people who
were shot by the police under suspicious circumstances. Foremost among these cases were
shootings of black officers by their co-workers. One particularly bizarre situation involved the
black officer Lamont Knazze, who was shot by three times by a white officer working the same
undercover shift from the same precienct.39 The League also drew continual attention to the
disparate impact of high profile police policies. For example, Patrolmen Jack DeBonnett
criticized the Illinois legislature’s passage of a “stop-and-frisk” law “because it will only add
friction to an already bad situation. We know it will only be used to harass minorities. I can't see
any policeman on the North Shore stopping anybody.”40 At other points, the League highlighted
racism with various aspects of the Department’s administration, such the running of the Youth
Division, the CTA Task Force, and the Beat Representative Program.41
38 Sheryl Fitzgerald, “Black Cops Charge Gun Order is Racist; Urge Black Citizens’ Protest” Chicago Daily
Defender, April 8, 1969, p.1 For examples of the opposition, see the statement of the Metropolitan Welfare Council of
Chicago, “Position Statement,” June 18, 1969, AAPL Box 1 Folder 3; and the League’s own fact sheet, attached to
Coalition for United Community Action, Press Release, May 14, 1969, AAPL Box 3 F8. Additionally, the most serious
charge against Robinson came when he discharged a shotgun into the ground while on duty. His reasons for doing so
were never made explicitly clear, but in the context of the controversy surrounding the department’s shotgun policy it is
difficult not to wonder if Robinson acted intentionally to illustrate the danger of shotguns. The League’s factsheet on the
issue cribbed the following notes from the instructed issued by Superintendent James B. Conlisk in the Department’s
factsheet on the issue: “The shotgun has a psychological effect on persons who believe it may be used against them” and
“The effectiveness of the shotgun results from its shocking power at close range.” Attachment to for United
Community Action, Press Release, May 14, 1969, p.1.
39
Renault Robinson, “The Black Watch: Is Cop Probe a ‘Brownwash?’,” Chicago Daily Defender, Feb. 27, 1971,
40
Sheryl Fitzgerald, “Black Police League has Tough Job Ahead,” Chicago Daily Defender, Sept. 14, 1968, p. 1.
p. 4.
AAPL, The Youth Division of the Chicago Police Department” (n.d.), AAPL Box 60 Folder 452; AAPL,
“The Task Force C.T.A. Section” (n.d.), AAPL Box 12 Folder 2; AAPL, “Untitled Document” (n.d.), AAPL Box 100
Folder 7.
41
17 The centerpiece of the AAPL’s attempt to root itself in the community was its Police
Brutality Complaint and Referral Service. Begun in 1970, the Service worked to assist survivors
of police harassment and brutality. It was initially funded by local grants and later with some
federal support through the Illinois Law Enforcement Commission (ILEC). Members of the
League and paralegal personnel met the staffing needs.42 Working with the Chicago Council of
Lawyers, the AAPL put together a standard information form for police brutality intake.43
Unfortunately for researchers, the extensive files of the Complaint and Referral Service are not
open to the public. Nonetheless, there are pieces of evidence that hint at the various ways in
which it worked.
Many of the claims brought to the Service were run-of-the mill allegations against police
officers for harassment or verbal abuse, poor service, or other requests for help in dealing with
the police. These could be dealt with directly, often just by giving advice. The other claims fit
more squarely within the framework of police brutality: physical abuse by the police or wrongful
arrests or searches. In those cases, justice for individual victims of police abuse might be more
elusive. If the Service was able to assist in some cases, by filing complaints and steering
potential litigants to lawyers, in many others its efforts were met with frustration. Part of what
stands out in Robinson’s interview with Nancy Banks of the Reader in 1971 is his annoyance
with the cumbersome legal architecture. In another part of the office during the interview, a
black man with a new white cast on his arm, courtesy of an argument with a white police officer
over a traffic ticket was busy filling out a claim of police misconduct to submit to the
Department. When asked about the man’s chances of waging a court battle and getting any
42 Simon Tonkin, “Afro-American Patrolmen’s League Complaint Referral Service: A Description and Proposal
for Continued Funding,” October 20, 1976, p. 2, AAPL Box 63 Folder 21.
Lawyers involved included Joel Henning, Marshall Patner, Kermit Coleman, Jerold Salzman, and Warren
Wolfson. Joel Henning, Memo Regarding Police Abuse and Brutality Project of Chicago Council of Lawyers and Afro-American
Patrolman's League, Aug. 8, 1969, AAPL Box 3 Folder 9.
43
18 compensation, Robinson answered: “Well, it might be very little, if you take the cases that have
gone before.” The pace of litigation required real faith to see things through, with little guarantee
of success. Yet, the case remained worth filing. “[A]ll it takes is the first case to influence the
activities of the officers around the guy who gets stuck.”44
The Service did not wait around for individual legal cases to pan out—or not—to try to
influence the behavior of the Department. Rather, the AAPL aggressively pressed its cases on
multiple fronts. It sought to leverage other state institutions against the City, guiding people to
alternatives avenues through which they might seek redress. It sought criminal prosecution of
police brutality complaints by informing prosecutors at the Department of Justice, as well as the
Cook County State’s Attorney of potential cases. For example, from January 1972, through April
of 1973, the League notified the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Northern District of Illinois, which
was then run by future Republican governor of Illinois James R. Thompson, of 55 separate
brutality cases. In each case, they sent a one page write up of the details of the case, providing
information on the complainant, the criminal charges pending, a narrative of the incident, the
names of the officers involved, a description of the injuries sustained, and the names of potential
witnesses. After black voters played an instrumental role in removing Edward Harahan, the
State’s Attorney who had overseen the Black Panther raid from office, the League was able to
build a productive relationships with his Republican successor, former FBI man Bernard Carey.45
44 Quoted in Banks, “Black and Blue.”
In addition to pursuing criminal litigation, the League also put together a civil suit against the Chicago Police
Department, under the caption Calvin v. Conlisk. The lawsuit was headlined by seven plaintiffs who had initially come to
the AAPL through the Complaint Referral Service. The League also brought in its allies from the Chicago Urban League
and a new organization formed to lend political support to the question for accountability, the Concerned Citizens for
Police Reform. The suit made an argument that the Superintendent, Police Board members, and the City itself had failed
in their duty to supervise officers and prevent them from committing misconduct against citizens, and sought injunctive
relief requiring the city implement an effective police discipline system, as well as damages. Complaint, Calvin v. Conlisk,
72 C 3230 (1972), Chicago Urban League Records Series III Box 173 Folder 1894. Calvin v. Conlisk, 367 F.Supp. 476
(N.D. Ill. 1973). The suit was ultimately dismissed for lack of standing.
45
19 Finally, as the Chicago Police Department lessened its persecution of the League near the
end of the 1970s, the patrolmen were able to turn their attention more fully to the kind of
community organizing that they initially envisioned. Their original understanding of the failures
of the police department extended beyond brutality to its failure to protect black people from
private violence. They saw the Department as both incapable and uninterested in combating the
crime in black neighborhoods that many black Chicagoans saw as the principle challenge of
urban life. At the end of the 1970s, the League got a federal grant through ILEC to work with the
organizing council in Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes to prevent criminal victimization. An
important part of the capacity-building they sought to develop was fundamentally political. One
of the League’s primary goals was to assist residents in demanding adequate police patrols and
responses to service calls within the complex. Just as the program was getting of the ground,
however, President Reagan eliminated the Law Enforcement Assistance Agency, and funding for
this type of community organizing dried up.
III: Black Power Police Politics
Perhaps most significant contribution over the course of the 1970s was the AAPL’s role
in making police reform a constitutive element of an independent black political agenda in
Chicago. Understanding how and when this happened requires taking a slight detour into the
fascinating world of black politics in Chicago. Black voters and politicians have played an
important role in electoral coalitions in the City since the 1920s. By the 1960s and 1970s, the
place of black officials in these coalitions seemed too secure to younger, more militant activists.
Quickening the pace of change, they believed, would require confronting Daley and his allies not
cooperating with them. Independent black politics was offered as an antidote to participation in
20 the Cook County Democratic Organization. But winning an election against the Organization’s
disciplined and well-organized precinct workers in the city’s black wards—and managing to stay
independent after one was elected—was really difficult.46
In the 1970s, police brutality became a wedge issue that allowed for the first glimpses of
what an independent black political coalition might look like. As a fight broke out between
Mayor Daley and his key black ally on the City Council, the city’s politics appeared on the verge
of a major transformation. As Chicago Tribune columnist Vernon Jarrett declared, “Black unity […] busting out all over in Chicago.”47 If the Afro‐American Policeman’s League was not in the headlines during this period, they had laid the foundation with their relentless confrontation of the Police Department over police brutality. Moreover, the relationships they had built over the last four years supplied by the infrastructure and the ammunition for the epic battle. In 1972, Ralph Metcalfe became the first committeeman ever to break free of Daley’s
control—and to maintain his independence despite the Mayor’s best efforts to defeat him in the
subsequent election. Twenty years earlier, Richard J. Daley had convinced his fellow committeemen to slate the political neophyte as the alderman of Ward Three on the City’s South Side.48 Daley believed that Metcalfe’s celebrity—he had medaled four times at the 46 William J. Grimshaw, Bitter Fruit: Black Politics and the Chicago Machine, 1931-1991 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1995). The lone independent on the council for much of this period was a white alderman from Hyde
Park, Leon Despres. As noted in his obituary by political science professor and former alderman Dick Simpson, during
this period, “some publications dubbed Despres ‘the only Negro on the City Council’ …” Ron Grossman and Trevor
Jensen, “Obituary: Leon Despres, 1908-2009: Chicago Alderman Challenged Elder Mayor Daley; Liberal Voice of City,
101, also Championed Civil Rights and Political Reforms,” Chicago Tribune, May 7, 2009,
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2009-05-07/news/0905061124_1_mayor-daley-chicago-alderman-leon-despres
(visited 9/12/2012).
47
Vernon Jarrett, “Chicago Black Unity Busting Out All Over,” Chicago Tribune, May 10, 72, p.14
48 In the Kelly-Nash-Daley machine that dominated Democratic politics in Cook County over the middle of
the century being an alderman was actually less influential than being a committeeman. Alderman were merely members
of the City Council; committeemen were members of the Cook County Democratic Organization who made all of the
real decisions.
21 1932 and 1936 Olympic Games—would bring needed prestige to the Organization in black wards. He was right. Metcalfe’s inexperience was counterbalanced by the fact that he was conscientious, smart, and extremely hard‐working. In 1955, Metcalfe’s ward helped Daley defeat the incumbent mayor in the Democratic primary. In 1963, in the midst of wide‐
spread strife over schools in black Chicago neighborhoods, Metcalfe’s ward delivered the single largest surplus of Daley votes of any ward in the city. He would go on to become Daley’s right hand man in black Chicago. If Metcalfe was more complex than his critics alleged, he nonetheless served on many occasions as Daley’s bulwark against the most aggressive claims for black equality. Highlights included a speech at the 1964 Democratic National Conventions speaking against the seating of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and the then‐alderman’s service as the administration’s prime counterweight to Dr. King efforts at improving black housing in 1965 and 1966. As liberal white Alderman Leon Despres would note, after King’s exit had been successfully negotiated, “Metcalfe could hardly conceal his pleasure with the thought that King was ready to leave town.”49 If civil rights died in Chicago—as many believed after King’s campaign—Ralph Metcalfe was known amongst black militants as the “Uncle Tom” who threw a shovelful of dirt on its grave. Yet, on Saturday May 6, 1972, Congressman Ralph Metcalfe stood before a capacity crowd at Jesse Jackson’s weekly gathering. It was the same crowd that had watched Rush turn himself into the police, and the same crowd to which Robinson gave his badge and gun two years earlier. On this day, Metcalfe turned on Daley. If he had in the past come too often to praise Daley before black audiences, he now took the podium wearing Brutus’s robes. 49 Quoted in Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, American Pharoah: Mayor Richard Daley: His Battle for Chicago and
the Nation (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2000), 395.
22 Before these activists, Metcalfe underwent a remarkable transformation. He beamed, “I never felt so good being black and taking a stand in the struggle.” Staking his career on the issues of police brutality and harassment of black people, Metcalfe demanded that “the mayor … must come here to the ghetto where we have the criminally‐minded police on one hand and criminals on the other.” Note: he said, “the Mayor.” No committeeman, no black committeeman, not even the legendary Congressman William Dawson, had survived even a political assault on Richard J. Daley. When Metcalfe laid a series of demands for reform at the feet of Police Chief James B. Conlisk, Jr., a few months earlier, he knew that they would reverberate in the Mayor’s Office on the Fifth Floor of City Hall. When he got no answer, he turned directly upon Caesar. Metcalfe displayed an understanding hard won in the trenches of power politics. He highlighted to the audience the stark terms of the struggle to come. Chicago’s massive black population represented a still inchoate political power because of its sheer numbers. As he put it, “that’s power if used correctly and we can be powerful from this moment on.” But as the Congressman knew, any challenge to the status quo would be bitterly resisted. At City Hall, he informed his audience, “they’re not too sure that we blacks mean what we're saying and are sure we're going to do nothing but make a lot of noise, since they're convinced we can’t stick together for a long time.’” At the close of his May 6 speech, Metcalfe reflected on what had brought him to the Operation PUSH meeting. He had “held a personal meeting with myself, my conscience and the people who elected me and decided that when I look into the mirror I can be proud of a man who has the guts to participate in the struggle.” “He said that when people ask ‘what has happened to Ralph Metcalfe,’ and ‘what took him so long’ he replies, ‘it is never too late 23 to be black ...’”50 Of course, Ralph Metcalfe had been colored, or a Negro, nearly his whole life. In his mind, he had advanced the cause of his people throughout his career in politics.51 So, why did he turn black? That is, why did he describe his new political position in racial terms? After all, Ralph Metcalfe had often found himself politically in opposition to other black people. He knew, perhaps better than anyone else in the City of Chicago, that there could be—that there were—multiple positions in black politics. None of these was perforce more authentically black than the others. Rather, each constructed a particularized version of what it meant to be black. Yet, Metcalfe still framed his decision as becoming “black.”52 Without access to Metcalfe’s personal papers (which remain privately held), we may never know what was in his heart. But we do know what catalyzed his change: The police mistreated one of Metcalfe’s constituents, the respectable Dr. Herbert Odom, who headed fundraising for the Third Ward Organization. As the Chicago Defender would later explain, “Dr. Odom, an Englewood dentist, was arrested March 13 by two Brighton Park Area Task Force police officers on charges of disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, striking a police officer and a minor traffic violation.” He was “stopped by the two policemen for driving his white 1969 Cadillac with no rear light over his license plate. … [A]fter he had identified himself, he was handcuffed, forced over the hood of his car, shoved into a squad car and taken to the Englewood District Police Station, 6120 S. Racine, where he said he was processed like a common criminal.” 50 Faith C. Christmas, “Metcalfe: Unity is Key to Victory,” Chicago Defender, May 8, 1972, p.1
51 Earl and Miriam Selby’s interviews with Ralph Metcalfe and his militant son, Ralph Metcalfe, Jr., which were
done well before the switch, are particularly revealing in this regard. Odyssey: A Journey Through Black America (New
York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971).
52 Adolph Reed, J.r., has written from this position of critique for years. E.g., Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in
the Post-Segregation Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
24 It seems ironic that the harassment of a well‐to‐do dentist led Metcalfe to become the champion of the people. As Dr. Charles Hurst, the president of Malcolm X Community College, noted in an op‐ed in the Defender, “the only relatively new factor in the syndrome of police mistreatment of blacks is the publicity given because Dr. Odom and Dr. Claiborne were professional black men of impeccable reputation. Blacks without the means of protecting themselves, or the status to command public attention as individuals, are brutally treated on a massive scale in the streets of Chicago.” Yet, to characterize it as irony misses the precisely why police brutality was such an effective fulcrum for Metcalfe to turn. In a moment at which black social stratification was beginning to accelerate, black people of all classes remained at risk of mistreatment by the police—even if they did not face precisely the same risks. The consequence was that observers at subsequent meetings in Metcalfe’s crusade for police reform could see “every brand of conservative seriously and joyously mixing with every shade of militant.” Metcalfe brought his long‐time supporters together with the activists who had long ago given up on working with the Daley’s Organization. Around the question of police brutality and mistreatment, something that looked like the mythic “black community” so often referenced by the League and other Black Power activists did at least momentarily come together. The language of racial authenticity that shaped so much Black Power activism was the same language that Metcalfe embraced. In the context of policing, that language took on concrete and contextual meaning. It put all blacks—especially all black men—in the same position vis‐à‐vis state power. “‘[I]t is not only Ralph Metcalfe on the spot today,' he declared, 'every black man is on the spot …”53 People did not flock to see Metcalfe because 53 Christmas, “Metcalfe: Unity is Key to Victory.”
25 he said he was now “black,” though they seemed to like that. They came because of what it signified within the ongoing political conversation about police brutality and harassment. Metcalfe’s actions and the response to them were part of a longer history of activism that by 1972 made police brutality had become a constitutive part of black political identity. The Afro‐American Patrolmen’s League was perhaps the key organization in putting police brutality on the political agenda in the half decade leading up to Metcalfe’s crusade. Although they did not invent the language of Black Power, they employed it as part of an program that brought them widespread support from many different kinds of blacks (and whites). When Metcalfe turned against Daley, he turned towards a (still skeptical) Renault Robinson and AAPL. When the Congressman simply could not get the changes he demanded from Daley, he put the Mayor and the Police Department on trial in front a Blue Ribbon Panel. The League and its attorney, ACLU litigator Kermit Coleman, supplied all of the witnesses. Most were survivors of police brutality whose testimony had emerged though the outreach of the Complaint Referral service, and a few were experts who suggested reforms. State’s Attorney Hanrahan, Superintendent Conlisk, and the president of the Police Board (the Department’s oversight body), all declined to show up. The hearings were only possible because the previous four years activity had laid the groundwork. When it came time to draft the report on the hearings, condemning the Police Department, and laying out future steps for action, the AAPL and Coleman did that, too.54 If public activities never regained the fervor of Metcalfe initial reversal, his reform organization worked with the AAPL to keep pressure on the Mayor and the Superintendent by passing petitions, and held meetings and mass rallies. Their activities built real support 54 McClory, The Man Who Beat Clout City, 128.
26 for reform. They did not achieve all they hoped. Despite the initial enthusiasm, Metcalfe was not the messiah come to lead black Chicagoans to the promised land of political power. But important changes were afoot in policing. Through a variety of mechanisms, the Department became more transparent and less resistant to change, did more to incorporate citizens into its decision‐making processes, became less openly discriminatory in its promotion policies, and constructed an improved system for monitoring police brutality—although the dynamic changes that continued to remake the city would produce a new set of problems. And important changes were afoot in politics, too. The Metcalfe rebellion was one of a number of surges that would lay the groundwork for Harold Washington’s eventual triumph as Mayor in 1983. Conclusion Understanding these black patrolmen helps to reshape the conversation on Black Power.
It reinforces the centrality of state violence to the roots of Black Power and to the broader
trajectory of the black freedom struggle. This is an especially useful historical link to a present in
which state violence, channeled through the legal system, remains a central fact of life for the
most marginalized group of black men in our society. Understanding this link ought to be a
central project for historical enquiry in our contemporary moment.
The typical arguments used to dismiss Black Power organizations have been challenged
by others. But when one looks at the claims articulated by the AAPL—which were often
derivative of those made by other Black Power—there can be no mistake. The Leagues members
offers no romantic adventurism and they destroyed no great Rooseveltian inter-racial coalition.
To the contrary, if there was romantic adventurism, it was on the part of those police officers
27 who with their guns and fists saw themselves preserving order against the encroachment of chaos
in the bodies of black activists or criminals. If the League sharpened the conflict over race within
the city, they did so only by revealing the severe disparities that were embedded in Daley’s
Organization. Moreover, they built black political capacity in part by working with whites and
Latinos of goodwill. White liberals who had been major advocates for civil rights in Chicago,
such as Leon Depres, were amongst the organization’s staunchest supporters. And while other
whites, such as Republican attorney’s Jim Thompson and Bernard Carey, were not staunch civil
rights supporters, they proved effective allies in helping to dismantle the racial hierarchies that
pervaded some Chicago institutions. The course of Black Power activism for the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League was
neither smooth nor easy, but rather than leading down a rabbit hole of nihilism and despair, it
had a transformative impact on the ways in which black solidarities were articulated. Along with
many other developments it played an important role in translating the felt-grievances of
ordinary Chicagoans into a political program that shaped the course of black politics in the city.
28