Khalil Gibran Muhammad

Well, Southern leaders empower vigilante groups to do a lot of the day-to-day surveillance and policing of Black people.

And out of that, particularly in 1866, the Ku Klux Klan is born in Pulaski, Tennessee.

A lot of historians have pointed out that the Klan represented the same kind of hybrid constituency, broad cross-section of the community that represented property owners, small business owners, some political elites, either directly involved or most certainly aware of and complicit in their attacks.

And these folks took about the business of terrorizing, policing, surveilling, and controlling Black people.

Well, Black people are less than 5% of the populations of these big cities until the second and third decade of the 20th century, until the Great Migration Period, which begins during World War I in the 1910s.

And so you begin to see populations doubling from 2% to 4% to 8%.

Police officers receive African-American migrants in the same way that their white neighbors and community peers did, which is with contempt and hostility.

And part of the context for early modern policing by the late 1840s was that the immigrant population of Europeans, particularly the Irish, were generating in their own way a similar kind of social anxiety, xenophobic, nativist, racist reaction

to what African Americans certainly were used to in the South with slave patrols and what antebellum black folks had been used to who were free in northern cities in terms of being surveilled and controlled.

The populations that made up early police officers were, unlike the slave patrols, made up of lower class men, often men who were first generation Americans.

There was an early emphasis on people whose status was just a tiny notch better than the folks who they were focused on policing.

And so the Anglo-Saxons are policing the Irish or the Germans are policing the Irish.

The Irish are policing the Poles.

Black people are there.

They're getting policed by everyone, but their numbers are fewer.

And so this dynamic that's playing out is that police officers are a critical feature of establishing a racial hierarchy, even among white people.