Occupied Territory
Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power
By Simon Balto
360 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 17 halftones, 2 maps
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Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-4959-7
Published: April 2019 -
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4696-4960-3
Published: March 2019
Justice, Power, and Politics
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In this history of Chicago from 1919 to the rise and fall of Black Power in the 1960s and 1970s, Simon Balto narrates the evolution of racially repressive policing in black neighborhoods as well as how black citizen-activists challenged that repression. Balto demonstrates that punitive practices by and inadequate protection from the police were central to black Chicagoans’ lives long before the late-century "wars" on crime and drugs. By exploring the deeper origins of this toxic system, Balto reveals how modern mass incarceration, built upon racialized police practices, emerged as a fully formed machine of profoundly antiblack subjugation.
About the Author
Simon Balto is assistant professor of history and African American studies at the University of Iowa.
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Reviews
"Simon Balto’s study of twentieth-century black Chicago provides new insights into the historical roots of police abuse in black communities while challenging scholarship that posits the mid-twentieth century as a turning point for deteriorating relationships between the police and black Americans. This beautifully written history is a model of clarity and moral passion."--Beryl Satter, author of Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America
"The last several years have seen important histories written about the rise of mass incarceration in the United States, but what has been missing are studies that deepen our understanding of American policing. Simon Balto offers a much-needed history of policing in Chicago, clearly articulating the connection between the Chicago Police Department’s record of racism and abuse and its contemporary crisis of police brutality."--Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
"As police violence gains much-needed attention across the nation, this book provides crucial context for the ways in which these issues are not new. Using the War on Crime as 'an endpoint rather than a launching pad,' Balto gives a harrowing, meticulously researched account of the way the roots of policing have been deeply violent and more preoccupied with social control than with safety since the inception of the institution. It is a disturbing history, which makes it all the more urgent. This is an important read for anyone who wants to understand how we arrived at this dispiriting state--and how we might ever possibly escape its grasp."--Eve L. Ewing, author of Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side
"A timely and important history, Balto skillfully creates an original interpretation of race and policing as well as the campaigns waged against racism and political repression by the black freedom struggle in twentieth-century Chicago that will be widely read."--Jordan T. Camp, author of Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State


