Fighting the Third Degree: Police Violence and Critique in the Depression Years

This paper examines the deep history of police violence in Chicago, as well as the emergence of grassroots critiques of state violence among Chicagoans who were subject to brutality. Investigations of the Chicago Police Department in the early decades of the twentieth century revealed that physical brutality and illegal arrests were rampant among the city’s law enforcement officers. Members of the National Commission on Law Enforcement and Observance collected considerable evidence regarding the scope of police violence in Chicago, as local newspapers and social reformers had also done since the early twentieth century. The regular mistreatment that many African Americans, immigrants, and political radicals suffered at the hands of police prompted a number of local social justice organizations to mount campaigns against police violence, including members of Hull House, the Illinois chapter of the Civil Liberties Union, and the Chicago branch of the NAACP.

The NAACP mounted a concerted campaign against police violence during 1930s, providing legal support to black Chicagoans who had been subject to illegal arrests or police brutality. NAACP lawyers pursued most of these cases under the Illinois Civil Rights Act, which provided for monetary damages to be paid by individuals who violated a person’s enumerated rights on the basis of race or color. These legal guidelines led NAACP lawyers to pursue action against police violence on an individual basis by maximizing damages, attempting to make racial discrimination too costly to continue. NAACP branch officers also carefully selected the plaintiffs for police brutality suits, often restricting their support to respectable, middle-class citizens who had been wrongly accused or convicted. While these legal cases did draw attention to discriminatory policing and state violence, they also adhered to a set of localized legal and political boundaries, providing only a limited critiques based on the protection of individual rights.