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CONCLUSION

For decades, violent white militancy represented the rough edge of a wider national nativism aimed at excluding immigrants and blacks, Indians and foreigners, from full participation in American life. Official policy today, except in some areas of the South and the more hardbitten sections of the North repudiates these aims. Still, a significant minority of white Americans feel driven to the use or contemplation of violence in support of similar aims. Their protest reflects the failure of American society to eradicate the underlying causes of the disaffection of both blacks and whites. On the one hand, the failure to deal with the roots of racism has meant the rise of violent black protest in the cities, which the working-class white fears will spill over into his own neighborhood along with rising crime and sinking property values. On the other hand, the failure to deal with the institutional roots of white marginality has left many whites in a critical state of bitterness and political alienation as they perceive the government passing them by.

For the Minutemen, the Klan, and similar groups, adrift and overwhelmed by the processes of the modern corporate state, the language of racism or anti-Communism structures all discontents and points to drastic solutions. Politically immature groups define the source of their problems in terms provided for them. This should not obscure the fact that their problems are genuine.

Continued political exclusion and organizational fragmentation render such groups increasingly prone to violence as a last political language. An effective response to these groups must transcend mere surveillance and condemnation, which can only aggravate their frame of mind without providing redress of their situation.

For the most part, the political response to white militancy has been either repressive or self-servingly encouraging. The current emphasis on “law and order" partakes of both elements. A continued repressive response to the militancy of both blacks and whites could conceivably lead to a state of guerrilla warfare between the races. There are precedents for such warfare in some of the race riots of the first half of the century, and in recent clashes between armed black and white militants in the South.

Of more immediate importance is the growing militancy among white policemen, as evidenced by the recent activity of the Law Enforcement Group in New York, the beating of black youths by policemen in Detroit, and the revelation of Ku Klux Klan activity in the Chicago police force. The new militancy of the police has obvious and ominous implications for the American racial situation, indeed for the future character of all forms of group protest in America. The policing of protest takes on a new aspect when the policeman carries with him the militant white's racist and anti-radical worldview. The following chapter analyzes the sources and direction of the increasing protest of the police.

References

1. Unless otherwise indicated, data for this section are derived from an unpublished paper submitted to this Task Force by David M. Chalmers.

2.

Jacobus ten Broek, Edward N. Barnhart and Floyd W. Matson, Prejudice, War, and
the Constitution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1954), pp. 13-14.

ten Broek, et al., p. 16.

C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Galaxy, Oxford
University Press, 1966), p. 23.

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4.

5.

6.

7.

Quoted in Chalmers, pp. 20-21.

8.

David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism (Chicago: Quadrangle Paperbacks,
1968), p. 20.

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Chalmers, p. 18.

United States Civil Rights Commission Report, Justice (Washington, D.C.: United
States Government Printing Office, 1961), pp. 266-268.

Chalmers, p. 3.

Quoted in Chalmers, p. 27.

John Higham, Strangers in the Land (New York: Atheneum, 1963), p. 104.
Higham, p. 212.

Patrick Renshaw, The Wobblies (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Anchor,
1967), pp. 163-167.

Arthur I. Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-in (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1966), Chapter 3.

Higham, p. 264.

U. B. Phillips, quoted in Woodward, p. 8.

Allison Davis, "Caste, Economy, and Violence," American Journal of Sociology,
LI, No. 1 (1945), pp. 7-15.

James W. Vander Zanden, Race Relations in Transition (New York: Random
House, 1965), pp. 6-7.

Baltimore Sun, Sept. 18, 1968.

California Department of Justice, Paramilitary Organizations In California (California: Report to State Legislature, 1965).

Quoted in Chalmers, p. 372.

Los Angeles Times, quoting Bowers, July 29, 1968.

Los Angeles Times, quoting Bowers, July 29, 1968.
Chalmers, p. 373.

See Chalmers, Chapter 4.

27. Los Angeles Times, July 29, 1968.

28.

29.

30.

Vander Zanden, p. 43.

Vander Zanden, p. 26.

Quoted in Peter Young, "Appendix to Consultant's Report," Task Force I, this
Commission, p. 6.

31. Quoted in Young, p. 14.

32.

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Quoted in Young, p. 20.

33.

Quoted in Young, p. 21.

34.

Quoted in Young, p. 32.

35.

Quoted in Young, p. 26.

36.

37.

38.

Unpublished paper by Robert Wood delivered at the National Consultation On
Ethnic America, Fordham University, June, 1968.

Reported in The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 20, 1967.

Reported in The Washington Post, April 22, 1968.

39. Richard T. Morris and Vincent Jeffries, The White Reaction Study (Los Angeles: Institute of Government and Public Affairs, University of California, 1967), p. 7. Morris and Jeffries, pp. 16-26.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

Morris and Jeffries, p. 7.

Arnold Katz, Firearms, Violence, and Civil Disorders (Palo Alto: Stanford
Research Institute, 1968), p. 45.

Angus Campbell and Howard Schuman, "Racial Attitudes in Fifteen American
Cities," in Supplemental Studies for the National Advisory Commission On Civil
Disorders (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1968),
pp. 58-59.

Unpublished paper by Robert Shellow, et al., "The Harvest of American Racism:
The Political Meaning of Violence in the Summer of 1967," November, 1967,
pp. 90-92.

Waskow, Chapters 3 and 4; see also unpublished dissertation (University of
Pennsylvania, 1959), by Allan Grimshaw, "A Study In Social Violence."

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48.

49.

Paul Goldberger, "Tony Imperiale Stands Vigilant for Law and Order," New York
Times Magazine, September 29, 1968.

Higham, p. 66.

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55.

56.

J. Harry Jones, Jr., The Minutemen (Garden City, New York: Doubleday,
1968), p. 410.

See generally an unpublished paper by Richard P. Albares (University of Chicago,
Center For Social Organization Studies, 1968), “Nativist Paramilitarism in the
United States: The Minutemen Organization."

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68.

69.

See generally The Radical Right, ed. Daniel Bell (Garden City, New York:
Doubleday, Anchor, 1964), Chapter 1.

Alan F. Westin, "The John Birch Society," in Bell, p. 239; see also generally
Benjamin R. Epstein and Arnold Forster, The Radical Right (New York: Vintage
Books, 1967).

Unpublished paper by Robert B. DePugh, "Blueprint for Victory," 1966, p. 20.
Quoted in Albares, p. 11.

Unpublished dissertation (Columbia, 1957) by Martin Trow, "Rightwing Radicalism and Political Intolerance," pp. 30-31.

70.

71.

72.

Quoted in Albares, p. 13.

73.

74.

75.

76.

Quoted in Jones, p. 407.

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See John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Boston: Signet, 1967).
DePugh, p. 32.

78. Richard Hofstader, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Vintage,

1967), pp. 39-40.

Chapter 7

THE POLICE IN PROTEST

THE POLICE AND MASS PROTEST:

THE ESCALATION OF CONFLICT, HOSTILITY AND VIOLENCE

One central fact emerges from any study of police encounters with student protesters, anti-war demonstrators or black militants; there has been a steady escalation of conflict, hostility and violence.

The Black Community

Writing in 1962, three years before the Watts riots and almost the distant past in this respect, James Baldwin vividly portrayed the social isolation of the policeman in the black ghetto:

... The only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive. None of the Police Commissioner's men, even with the best will in the world, have any way of understanding the lives led by the people; they swagger about in twos and threes patrolling. Their very presence is an insult, and it would be, even if they spent their entire day feeding gumdrops to children. They represent the force of the white world, and that world's real intentions are, simply, for that world's criminal profit and ease, to keep the black man corralled up here, in his place. The badge, the gun in the holster, and the swinging club, make vivid what will happen should his rebellion become overt . . .

It is hard, on the other hand, to blame the policeman, blank, goodnatured, thoughtless, and insuperably innocent, for being such a perfect representative of the people he serves. He, too, believes in good intentions and is astounded and offended when they are not taken for the deed. He has never, himself, done anything for which to be hatedwhich of us has? And yet he is facing, daily and nightly, the people who would gladly see him dead, and he knows it. There is no way for him not to know it: There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people. He moves through Harlem, therefore, like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country; which is precisely what, and where he is, and is the reason he walks in twos and threes.1

Today the situation is even more polarized. There have been riots, and both black Americans and police have been killed. Black anger has become more and more focused on the police: the Watts battle cry of "Get Whitey" has been replaced by the Black Panther slogan: "Off the pigs." The black

community is virtually unanimous in demanding major reforms, including police review boards and local control of the police. According to the Kerner Commission2 and other studies,3 conflict with the police was one of the most important factors in producing black riots. In short, anger, hatred and fear of the police are a major common denominator among black Americans at the present time.

The police return these sentiments in kind-they both fear the black community and openly express violent hostility and prejudice toward it. Our review of studies of the police revealed unanimity in findings on this point: the majority of rank and file policemen are hostile toward black people.4 Usually such hostility does not reflect official policy, although in isolated instances, as in the Miami Police Department under Chief Headley, official policy may encourage anti-black actions.5 Judging from these studies, there is no reason to suppose that anti-black hostility is a new development brought on by recent conflicts between the police and the black community. What appears to have changed is not police attitudes, but the fact that black people are fighting back.

The Harlem Riot Commission Report of 1935 reserved its most severe criticism for the police:

The police of Harlem show too little regard for human rights and constantly violate their fundamental rights as citizens... The insecurity of the individual in Harlem against police aggression is one of the most potent causes for the existing hostility to authority. . . It is clearly the responsibility of the police to act in such a way as to win the confidence of the citizens of Harlem and to prove themselves the guardians of the rights and safety of the community rather than its enemies and oppressors.6

And William A. Westley reported from his studies of police in the late forties: No white policeman with whom the author has had contact failed to mock the Negro, to use some type of stereotyped categorization, and to refer to interaction with the Negro in an exaggerated dialect, when the subject arose.7

Students of police seem unanimous in agreeing that police attitudes have not changed much since those studies. In a study done under a grant from the Office of Law Enforcement Assistance of the United States Department of Justice, and submitted to the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Criminal Justice in 1966, Donald J. Black and Albert J. Reiss, Jr. found overwhelming evidence of widespread, virulent prejudice by police against Negroes.8 The study was based on field observations by thirty-six observers who accompanied police officers for a period of seven weeks in the summer of 1966 in Boston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. It was found that thirty-eight percent of the officers had expressed “extreme prejudice," while an additional thirty-four percent had expressed "considerable prejudice" in front of the observers. Thus, seventy-two percent of these policemen qualified as prejudiced against black Americans. It must be remembered that these views were not solicited, but were merely recorded when voluntarily expressed. And it seems fair to assume that some proportion of remaining twenty-eight percent were sophisticated enough to exercise a

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