Slave Patrols – Black Freedom, White Violence PDF

( Ujl\'H)!hl ii' lt'IOI hy th,· l'rr,llknl ,Intl I t'll,1\\, nl ll.11v,11d ( ,,llq:1·.\ll l< These ideas about eral officials-were secretly approved of by many white Southerners white law enforcement stemmed not only from patrolling but also from who came to see the Klan as t...

( Ujl\'H)!hl ii' lt'IOI hy th,· l'rr,llknl ,Intl I t'll,1\\, nl ll.11v,11d ( ,,llq:1·.\ll l< These ideas about eral officials-were secretly approved of by many white Southerners white law enforcement stemmed not only from patrolling but also from who came to see the Klan as the South's true "law enforcers." Mean- strongly embedded ideas about Southern honor that dictated that white while, policemen in Southern towns continued to carry out those as- men must rule while black men remained subservient.95 For.whites, pa- pects of urban slave patrolling that seemed race-neutral but that in real- trols did not carry negative associations in the postbellum era. Nine- ity were applied selectively. Police saw that nightly curfews and vagrancy teenth-century lawyers used patrollers as illustrations of proper police laws kept blacks off city stree1S. just as patrollers had done in the colo- behavior well after slavery's end. In criminal digests, arrests made by nial and antebellum eras. Fonner slaves knew how insignificantly things 220 Slave Patrols had changed. Freedmen like W L Bost and J. T. Tims recognized chat precious little difference existed between the brucalicy of slave patrols, whice Southern policemen, or the Klan.'"' The work of concrolling "mar- ginal" members of Southern society had merely shifted from slave pa- trollers to Klansmen and policemen. Although slavery had died, the white community's need for racial dominance lived on.