“Came to Police Headquarters and Surrendered”: African Americans Surrendering to Police in the Jim Crow South

Following the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, issues surrounding police violence against African Americans garnered national attention in the last few years, sparking renewed scholarly interest police violence against African Americans. Historians, criminologists, and sociologists have shed much light on the underlying causes of police brutality over the last several decades. The scholarly focus on violence and abuse often portrays African Americans as passive victims in their interactions with police. Violent interactions, however, did not define the totality of experiences between African Americans and law enforcement officers. Utilizing an unusually detailed dataset of homicides and their subsequent investigations from the Memphis Police Department and New Orleans Police Department homicide reports, this paper highlights African-American self-determination during interactions with officers. In Memphis and New Orleans 417 black murder suspects surrendered themselves to police between 1920 and 1945. Despite the well-known reputations of southern law enforcement for manipulating, abusing, and killing African Americans, this paper explains why black homicide suspects surrendered to police. By turning themselves in, African Americans dictated the nature of their arrest, attempted to curtail the violence they faced on the run, and sought to shape the narrative surrounding the homicides they were suspected of committing. Well aware of their vulnerability as a homicide suspect, these black southerners exercised a limited amount of leverage in their interactions with police when they surrendered. Although police existed to maintain black subordination and the Jim Crow racial hierarchy, this paper stresses African-Americans’ acumen in finding ways to manage and even exploit Jim Crow law enforcement.