"The Law Has a Bad Opinion of Me": Policing, Space, and Race in World War II-Era Black Chicago

As historians come increasingly to confront the problems of the modern carceral state, the central issue of race’s role in its development demands particular attention.  The passage of punitive sentencing policies beginning in the 1970s and the subsequent War on Drugs are widely acknowledged by scholars as critical turning points in transforming American prisons into institutions disproportionately populated by people of color. 

To be sure, these state and federal actions represent important watersheds in the modern carceral state’s evolution, both in a racial sense and more broadly.  Yet this paper demonstrates that when our attention shifts toward local practice, the disproportionate burdens wrought on urban communities of color by today’s criminal justice system are less radical a departure from earlier precedent than has hitherto been appreciated.  For instance, by the end of World War II, Black Chicagoans constituted roughly ten percent of that city’s population, but more than one-third of the inmate population at the Cook County Jail and roughly half that of the local House of Corrections.  Black citizens of different stripes and backgrounds consistently discussed the dysfuncationality of their relationships with the police, and struggled against police power in myriad ways.

In seeking to understand these phenomena, I explore the social attitudes and law enforcement practices and mechanisms that fueled the ways that African Americans disproportionately felt the weight of midcentury urban criminal justice systems. I examine how migration, urban space, racism, and inequality both shaped and were shaped by policing in the 1940s and 1950s.  In so doing, I show how local law enforcement practices and strategies such as racial targeting of new urban migrants and arrest for minor infractions produced breathtakingly discriminatory outcomes—decades before the 1980s War on Drugs, the 1970s punitive turn, the 1960s urban rebellions, or the heyday of northern civil rights insurgencies.