Khalil Gibran Muhammad

But one of their dogs, a great ravenous hound, gripped him by the leg and held him fast.

The patrollers whipped him severely.

Absolutely, yes.

So the fact of chattel slavery, by the time of the founding of the United States—

had already for 200 years served as a form of social insurance against the insurrection and dissent and potential political rebellion of the majority of landless white men who didn't have slaves and lived precarious lives.

So that they would serve in this capacity alongside major plantation owners was a kind of way to build community around the notion of protecting the white community from the enslaved black population.

One of the really powerful expressions of how important policing and punishment were in the conception of the end of slavery was

was that the 13th Amendment abolished slavery except as punishment for crime.

So in some ways, the genius of the former Confederate states was to say, oh, well, if all we need to do is make them criminals and they can be put back in slavery, well, then that's what we'll do.

And that's exactly what the Black Code set out to do.

The Black Codes, for all intents and purposes, criminalized every form of African-American freedom and mobility, political power, economic power, except the one thing it didn't criminalize was the right to work for a white man on a white man's terms.

Yeah, so this system of essentially tracking black people's movements to control them needed a similar kind of armed and or empowered

law enforcement constituency.

So on one hand, you do have the growth of a formal bureaucratic nuts and bolts police system that emerges by the late 1860s, 1870s.

Prisons are being remodeled or expanded and built.

Prison farms are beginning to open

I say all that to say because the South had a very anemic infrastructure when it came to criminal justice by a very stark contrast to northern states.

And one of the things that it doesn't really have is it doesn't have a formal professional police force, certainly like big cities from Boston to New York, Philadelphia, the old colonial cities now.

essentially industrial, thriving, modern places by the 1870s and 1880s.

And so what does the South do?