A brief relationship history of America’s Thin Blue Line and America’s Black population, from post-Civil War beginnings to modern day protests.
by Mauve Maude
September 23, 2020
To understand this story, it’s probably best to start from the beginning. The breaking point our country reached this year, in the flood-lit aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, began here:
This blog entry from the National Law Enforcement Museum is, of course, a very short version of how the relationship between American police and African Americans developed. And though there are people of other races who’ve experienced unfair or brutal treatment by American police, though there are definite issues in how American police treat crimes against women, in particular sexual assault, it’s fair to say that no other population in America has experienced such widespread and disproportionate harassment, mistreatment, and brutality as Black Americans. In fact, the general distrust of the police that exists in the Black community pre-dates the current manifestation of the police, with its roots and the roots of African Americans both firmly planted in slavery. By the time freed slaves and their descendants began migrating en masse to other parts of the country, the foundation for that distrust had already been put down, in the South.
Not only did post-Civil War police agencies “carry over” the practices of pre-Civil War slave patrols, the Ku Klux Klan did also. And it’s widely known that the two entities co-mingled for more than a century after the Civil War, which they still quietly do. Between the Civil War and the present day lay the 155 years in which generations of Black Americans have endured Jim Crow laws, lynchings, massacres, the battle for civil rights, heavily involving police, the “War on Drugs“, and police profiling and brutality.
. . . the actions of bad officers have done a tremendous amount of damage to the uniform.
In addition to the trauma endured by the Black community as a whole, individual accounts of profiling, harassment, brutality, or all of the above, as often as daily, depending on where one lives, tell consistent stories. Distrust of police officers among the Black community has sprung directly from the actions of police officers, for generations.
This is, of course, not to say that all police officers are bad officers or bad people, but that the actions of bad officers have done a tremendous amount of damage to the uniform. And considering that every uniformed officer wears the same uniform as the rest of their force, not good uniforms and bad ones, a certain level of accountability is necessary to undo that damage.
The perceived uptick in bias-motivated killings of unarmed Black people, by police officers as well as vigilantes, in the last several years, seems to most likely be the result of prolific cell phone video footage and the ensuing media coverage. This would indicate that incidences have increased, or that they were this frequent all along. Either story is supported by history, and progress seems to be moving in the opposite direction of accountability. When the country watched the eight-minute, forty-six-second video of the murder of George Floyd, more Americans fully realized that than ever before.
Today, the officers responsible for the death of Breonna Taylor dodged accountability like many before them.
The rest of this story, with much unfolding left to do, is always doing just that.