Lawmakers Versus Black Freedom: Civil Rights and State Repression Through the Prism of the Statehouse

The paper examines the legislation enacted by local, state, and federal officials in the face of civil rights and Black Power challenges. Elected officials considered (and sometimes passed) bills to enlarge the powers of the police, outlaw specific organizations, curb free speech, and enact harsher penalties for certain crimes. In Detroit and other northern cities with robust movements, city councils legalized stop-and-frisk policies, carved out larger slices of the budget for the police department, and helped to ensure their police received military-grade weaponry. In its emphasis on policing and surveillance, the scholarship on state repression of the Black freedom movement tends to overlook this flurry of legislative activity and the impact it had on the movement. Not only did many bills propose to constrict civil liberties, but many others expanded the criminal code. This paper asks not only about the content and driving purpose for these bills, but also how activists responded to and resisted their power. At times, activists raised the alarm on the rising tide of repression that they saw coming from their statehouses. They engaged in a framing war with officials (and often the media), writing op-eds and pamphlets in which they insisted that their aim was to expand rights and not destroy the fabric of society. But this war of words often did not stop legislation from being passed or enacted. Some of the legislation, for instance that which paved the way for H. Rap Brown’s charge of “inciting a riot” in 1967, proved incredibly costly to the movement. Ultimately, this paper raises the question of why the state constricts democratic structures and expands criminal structures in the face of a democratic challenge.