Bluecoated Terror: Jim Crow New Orleans and the Roots of Modern Police Brutality

Bluecoated Terror explores the history of racist violence in law enforcement, tracing its roots back to the early twentieth-century South and showing how it became an ingrained facet of law enforcement in the United States. It highlights the wide racial differentials in the use of lethal force and beatings during arrest and interrogation and explains how race control and crime control blended and blurred during this era.

Format: Hardback
Length: 208 pages
Publication date: 09 April 2024
Publisher: University of California Press

A searing chronicle of how racist violence became an ingrained facet of law enforcement in the United States has been documented in Jeffrey S. Adler's book, Bluecoated Terror. Adler draws on rich archival accounts to show how racialized police brutality is part of a larger system of state oppression with roots in the early twentieth-century South, particularly New Orleans. Wide racial differentials in the use of lethal force and beatings during arrest and interrogation emerged in the 1930s and 1940s, when police officers and criminal justice officials began to justify systemic violence against Black people as a crucial—and legal—tool for maintaining law and order. Bluecoated Terror explores both the rise of these law-enforcement trends and their chilling resilience, providing critical context for recent horrific police abuses as the ghost of Jim Crow law enforcement continues to haunt the nation.

Weight: 408g
Dimension: 229 x 152 x 23 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780520385603