Black Police in America (Blacks in the Diaspora)
Enrollment in the police forces is an accurate barometer of black advancement, and Dulaney takes the measurements since police departments were organized in the mid-nineteenth century. The number of officers followed the pulse of history--up during Reconstruction, down in the Jim Crow backlash, back up after the civil rights movement--and Dulaney recounts the fluctuations as contemporary black newspapers reported them. Dulaney's working thesis correlates black political power with representation on police forces, which in the defeated South reached a 0:0 ratio; blacks in the North had some influence on the political machines of the day and consequently a few jobs in blue. Because the statistics are scattered around in case studies of individual departments, according to the foreword by Reuben Greenberg, the Charleston chief whom60 Minutesonce profiled, Dulaney's book usefully unifies the strands for students. A person researching present problems of racism in police departments won't find the material here directly relevant, but might rely on this work for historical analogies and exemplars of individual officers (especially from New Orleans, St. Louis, and Chicago).Gilbert Taylor--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.