Black Power and Black Police in 1970s Chicago

During the 1960s and 1970s, advocates of Black Power were amongst the most trenchant critics of the police. Police repression had real and devastating consequences many black activists, and their rhetoric of armed self-defense and the act of patrolling the police provided an important avenue for defending and empowering black communities. Yet black activism around policing consisted of more than attempts to restrain the power of the police.  

By examining Chicago’s Afro-American Patrolmen’s League, this paper offers a different angle of vision into the place of policing in the story of the black freedom struggle. Nothing demonstrates the broad reach of the protean imagery, rhetoric, and ideas of Black Power as well as its adoption by the black police officers who started the League in 1968 and those who joined in the ensuing years. Instead of calling on their brothers to “Off the Pigs!,” these Afro-cops argued that in favor of “Black Power through Law.” Their 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 was most prominently directed.

This paper explores how these officers repositioned Black Power inside the state. Their simultaneous embrace of law enforcement and a critique of police power highlighted the representation of police as enforcers of racial hierarchies through state power. By opposing the unlawful and unjust exercise of state violence, rather than opposing police generally, the League offered a new vantage point on some of the most pressing urban problems of the age.  Its members’ activities against discriminatory law enforcement and police brutality dovetailed with their efforts as police officers—and activists—to reduce crime and fear in predominantly black neighborhoods (including some of Chicago’s high-rise public housing).