The Long History of Policing Black Durham

Abstract

This is a story that I have had unique access to as a concerned community member and student. While I could have focused on one specific moment, this thesis surveys a variety of key periods throughout Durham’s past in order to provide an historical context and broader framework for understanding and looking at the relationship of the Durham Police Department and black community in Durham. My work is divided into four chapters: Durham at the turn of the century, the 1944 Hayti Police, the Civil Rights Era in Durham, and the contemporary period.

A story frames the beginning of each chapter: from an enslaved person running away from Stagville Plantation around 1844, the legal hanging of a black man accused of raping a white woman in 1907, a race riot in 1944 that was sparked by the murder of a black soldier who refused to sit in the back of the bus, the demonstrations after the 1963 election of Mayor Grabarek and growing demand for racial equality in Durham, and the shutdown of North Carolina Highway 147 in December 2014 after the non-indictment of the police officers in Ferguson and New York City who were responsible for killing Michael Brown and Eric Garner, respectively. The product that emerges is a story-based analysis that traces Durham’s history alongside the institution of policing.

This thesis challenges the general American assumption that the police department was created to protect and serve citizens, particularly against crime. On the contrary, the history of policing black Durham is directly intertwined with a perceived need to maintain political and social order, not necessarily to address the problem of crime. I will argue that the institution of policing is enmeshed in the maintenance of white supremacy and the social, economic and political exploitation of black bodies. Policing was never an institution to keep black people safe: there has been little emphasis on protecting and serving the black population. The reality was ⎯ and continues to be ⎯ just the opposite.

In her 2005 article, published in The Journal of American History, historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall coined the term “Long Civil Rights Movement” to recast and extend the dominant narrative of the civil rights movement as a set chronology of events, beginning with the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 and ending with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Hall argues that the civil rights movement was a freedom struggle that was waged long before the 1950s and encapsulates many movements that continue today.

This same concept of a “long” history inspired the title of this thesis. I do not intend to present a linear narrative of the relationship between the Durham Police Department and Black Durham: there are significant continuities throughout the city’s history, but each specific period is rooted in its own distinct moment. While exploring the deep mistrust in the black community towards law enforcement, I will demonstrate how Black Durham continues to experience the police in a very different, and disproportionate way, from the rest of Durham. By placing special emphasis on the human narrative, I hope to uplift stories from Durham that are rarely told. The pages that follow, therefore, are an attempt to broaden and deepen the history of policing black Durham: a story that is rooted in slavery and continues to our current moment.