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"In Bluecoated Terror, Jeffrey S. Adler expertly demonstrates the institutionalization of police brutality in New Orleans, tracing the shift from targeted vigilante violence to state-sanctioned killings. Adler's analysis applies not only to New Orleans, but to the entire country, and provides key insights as to how we arrived at our present crisis."—Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
"This provocative, meticulously researched, and vividly narrated book breaks critical new ground, illuminating how policing in Southern urban areas in the interwar years superseded lynching—displacing the noose with bullets and batons and the mob with the badge of the state. Adler's timely and crucial work demonstrates why policing remains perhaps the most accurate barometer of racial justice in the US, sharpening and rendering more urgent the call for a new order."—Margaret Burnham, author of By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners
"For many anguished observers, the persistent pattern of police anti-Black violence in the twenty-first-century United States points back to the violent roots of policing in slave patrols and colonial constabularies. However important those origins, Adler's impeccable research on New Orleans makes clear that it was transformations of police in the 1920s in Southern urban areas and eventually nationwide that locked violence into the policing of Black citizens. Sobering and essential reading for anyone who imagines we can reform our way to an end to police brutality."—Jonathan Simon, author of Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America
"An important and vivid contribution to the history of policing."—Roger Lane, author of Murder in America: A History
List of contents
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 • “Any Slight from a Negro Is a Humiliation That Must Be Instantly Revenged”
2 • “At No Time in the History of Our State Has White Supremacy Been in Greater Danger”
3 • “I Told the Officers to Go Ahead and Kill Me, as They Had Already Half Killed Me”
4 • Buttercup Burns, Bulldog Johnny Grosch, and the Killer Twins
5 • “Negroes Are Willing to Die Rather Than Submit to the White Man’s Terror”
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Jeffrey S. Adler is Professor of History and Criminology and Distinguished Teaching Scholar at the University of Florida, where his research and teaching focus on the history of American violence, law, and race relations.
