Race against Crime: Criminal Justice in the Urban South since the 1960s

The archetypal southern lawman of the 1960s was a potbellied sheriff. He unleashed the dogs or cracked the bullwhip on violent criminals and nonviolent protestors alike. The civil rights movement and professionalization of law enforcement gradually changed policing in the South, a transformation dramatized by the film In the Heat of the Night (1967) and the television series of the same name that ran from 1988 to 1995. From the 1960s to the 1990s, southern law enforcement became more “community oriented,” addressing institutional racism and police brutality. Sun Belt cities from Houston to Miami, New Orleans to Atlanta, hired their first black police chiefs. Simultaneously, however, city officials warned of an urban crime wave unparalleled in modern American history. A chorus of politicians, pundits, and police chiefs called for cities to get “tough on crime,” yielding mandatory minimum sentences, three-strikes laws, and a local prison-industrial complex that rivaled the national military-industrial complex.
The paper I propose for the 2009 American Historical Association meeting looks at these crosscurrents in criminal justice around the South, but particularly in the city of Charleston, South Carolina, which hired its first African American (and Jewish) police chief in 1982. Over a career that spanned three decades, Reuben Greenberg came to symbolize both the promise and problems of policing the post-civil rights south. Like other black police chiefs in the region, Greenberg’s professionalism and racial identity shielded him from the kinds of allegations that had historically plagued southern lawmen, but he worked in a political environment in which coded rhetoric linked “law and order” with control and containment of minority communities. In the paper, I will argue that a history of criminal justice is crucial to understanding the ways the civil rights movement succeeded and failed in altering power relations in the urban South.