JHU, Policing, and Our Origin Stories.
Three Historians Explain the Roots of Baltimore City Policing in Racism
How does Hopkins reconcile resuming its private police force given all that the amazing Hard History project has uncovered about Hopkins's complicity in systemic racism from its founding to the present? — Lynda Davis
This post begins with a thank you to our follower Lynda Davis who posed an important question during our most recent webinar. (That event featured Lisa Snowden, Editor-in-Chief of the newly relaunched Baltimore Beat in conversation with Adam Holofcener of the Lillian Holofcener Foundation and you can catch the replay here.)
We answered Ms. Davis’s question only briefly during the broadcast to say that there is no evident reconciliation between, on the one hand, JHU’s efforts to establish a university police force and, on the other hand, the work that Hard Histories does to examine how racism and discrimination have (and continue to) shape JHU. This is perhaps a tension, and some might say a contradiction, that frames our work.
Ms. Davis’s question led us to another, surely more pointed question about what the role of Hard Histories can and should be when a new and major university policy — the establishment of a police force — is being subjected to intense and sustained opposition both from within and without JHU. What can we contribute to explaining the history out of which this initiative and the opposition to it emerges?
We’ll take time over a few posts to share a Hard Histories perspective on the these questions, starting today with some reading suggestions about how racism and policing have long been intertwined in Baltimore City.
Historian Dennis Halpin’s short article for Perspectives on History from 2015, “‘Manufacturing Criminals’: The Historical Roots of Baltimore’s Racialized Criminal Justice System,” examines how rhetoric that today is used to characterize Baltimore’s citizens, particularly younger Black men, has its roots in misguided and explicitly racist views developed in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Take note, Dr. Halpin suggests, when hearing that old rhetoric deployed in our own time. That is evidence of how racism persists across time and taints our present day debates.1
Historian Adam Malka discovers the roots of Baltimore’s present day policing in his book The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation2 Dr. Malka explains how today’s professional police forces and prisons were developed to expand, not curb, the reach of white vigilantes in Baltimore City. At their beginnings, Baltimore’s police, as Dr. Malka puts it, “are best understood as a uniformed wing of the gangs that controlled free black people by branding them—and treating them—as criminals” in the 19th century. Dr. Malka challenges us to understand when, if ever, policing in Baltimore broke away from this origin. You can watch an interview with Dr. Malka here.
Finally, lawyer Gordon H. Shufelt, The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown: How a White Police Officer Was Convicted of Killing a Black Citizen is a close-up look at an 1875 police killing in Baltimore City.3 Unearthing Daniel Brown’s story, and the wake of his tragic death, is Mr. Shufelt’s way of explaining how Black Baltimoreans learned to distrust city police and came to expect little in the way of justice from City Hall and the courts. You can listen to a brief interview with Mr. Shufelt here.
While their approaches differ, these authors all conclude that the 19th-century origins of policing in Baltimore were conceived, executed and explained by way of anti-Black, racist ideas and practices. Each asks us to consider how this beginning remained part of the city’s policing culture into the 20th century and on through today. They provide the foundation for a question that runs through debates over present day establishment of a university police force at JHU. How, their work urges us to ask, is it possible for a present day police force to break with that past, if at all?
Next time, we’ll take a closer look at the early relationship between JHU and the Baltimore City police.
— MSJ.
Dennis Halpin, “‘Manufacturing Criminals’: The Historical Roots of Baltimore’s Racialized Criminal Justice System,” Perspectives on History (Summer 2015): 1-4.
Adam Malka, The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
Gordon H. Shufelt, The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown: How a White Police Officer Was Convicted of King a Black Citizen (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2021).