Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City

Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City, by Clarence Taylor (New York, N.Y.: NYU Press, 2018)

Reviewed by Brian Greenberg, the Emeritus Jules Plangere Chair in American Social History at Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey. A member of NYLHA’s Executive Board, he, along with Robert Wechsler, oversees the annual Barbara Wertheimer and Bernard Bellush prizes for the best undergraduate and graduate essays in labor history.

On July 17, 2014, while arresting Eric Garner, a forty-three-year-old African American father of six, for selling loose cigarettes, New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo grabbed Garner in a chokehold and wrestled him to the ground. After gasping “I can’t breathe” eleven times, Garner died. Captured on video, Garner’s words became but the latest rallying cry of a tenacious protest movement to expose and end police brutality against African Americans in New York City and across the nation. In Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City, Clarence Taylor chronicles, starting with the early 1940s, an unrelenting campaign led by black activists and their allies in New York City to stop “this form of racial terror by the arm of the state,” that is, by the police, whose tactics were often abetted by local elected officials. Taylor’s book provides an effective “counter narrative” that exposes the false racist assumptions that continue to impede the civil rights struggle for change.

Declaring itself a “‘working class paper,’” the People’s Voice, a black-owned newspaper launched in 1942 by Charles P. Buchanan and the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr, looked to empower black New Yorkers in their battle against police brutality. Unlike the white press, which treated black victims as criminals, the Voice conducted “‘investigations’” that were intended to expose to the public the use of excessive force by the police. Often, the paper’s investigations also proved the innocence of the African American arrestees. To demonstrate to city officials the collective anger of the black community about the brutality that regularly accompanied the arrests of African American citizens, the Voice exhorted the community to hold mass protest rallies.

The Communist Party (CP) joined New York’s black community in their demonstrations against police terror in the 1940s. The party also helped produce publications that decried the brutality. The CP was led during World War II by Benjamin Davis, who was the first declared black member of the party to be elected to the New York City Council, and, during the Cold War, by William Patterson, the executive secretary of the party’s International Labor Defense affiliate. In 1947, Patterson helped prepare a petition to the United Nations General Assembly that charged the United States with engaging in genocide against black Americans. Understanding police brutality as a means of “fragmenting the working class” in order to maintain “the capitalist economic structure,” the Communist Party, Taylor concludes, more than any other civil rights organization, effectively connected the issues of race and class.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Nation of Islam (NOI), led by Elijah Muhammad and its spokesperson Malcom X, mobilized black people to take action against state dominance. Although the NOI was known for its physical confrontations with the police, Taylor calls attention to its strategies for de-escalating confrontations with law enforcement. These strategies to end police violence against people of color included negotiating with police officials, filing civil lawsuits, and applying public pressure through the media. Like the Voice and the Communist Party, the NOI and Malcolm challenged the racist profiling of African Americans as criminals by which the police justified their use of excessive force against them.

As the Second World War came to an end, civil rights advocacy groups in New York City like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began focusing on police brutality as a civil rights issue. At a time when blacks made up less than 1 percent of the New York Police Department (NYPD), civil rights groups demanded, as had the Voice, that the number of African Americans on the police force be increased. They also called for the formation of an independent civilian complaint review board to ensure that black citizens’ constitutional rights were protected. The proposed board would monitor police behavior in African American communities and punish abusive police officers. Intense resistance to such a board, led by the NYPD and the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA), encouraged city officials to disregard black complaints about police brutality. Not until the mid-1960s, in the aftermath of riots in the black communities of Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant, did city officials begin to take demands for civilian oversight of the police seriously.

Having just been elected New York City’s mayor, John Lindsay created a seven-member Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) in May 1966, of which three members represented the NYPD. Despite the board’s very limited power – it could only recommend to the police commissioner that action be taken against an officer found guilty of violating the law or department regulations – the PBA fought its formation. The police union mounted a racist advertising campaign against the CCRB. The campaign’s appeal to a white backlash succeeded, and by a 3 to 1 margin, New Yorkers voted in a public referendum in November 1966 to abolish the civilian board. As Taylor observes, the PBA’s “false narrative” was repeated in the campaigns that met each subsequent attempt to revive the CCRB.

Both police violence against members of the black community and citywide protests aimed at reviving the CCRB and instituting other law enforcement reforms continued through the two decades following Lindsay’s failed reform effort. In 1993, while David Dinkins was mayor, the City Council passed a bill creating an all-civilian CCRB. However, Rudy Giuliani, who defeated Dinkins later that year, succeeded in rendering the new board ineffective. William Bratton, Giuliani’s police commissioner, adopted a “‘Zero Tolerance’” anti-crime program that targeted quality-of-life offenses such as panhandling, applying graffiti, drug dealing, and prostitution. Promoted as a police-led effort aimed at “‘reclaiming the streets,’” Zero Tolerance disproportionately targeted African Americans and Latinos. Between June 1996 and June 1997, New York City settled 503 cases of police brutality in court; not one member of the police department involved in those arrests was ever punished.

In the late 1990s, three appalling cases of police violence, progenitors of the Eric Garner incident, mobilized protests by New Yorkers “across racial, class, and ideological grounds” and forced Giuliani to take action. In one incident, Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant, suffered an attack by the police that even Giuliani found “‘horrible and terrible.’” Nevertheless, the mayor’s efforts to improve interactions between the police and the African American community still centered on better crime fighting. Although Giuliani created a task force to explore police-community relations, he then rejected its final report.

Giuliani’s focus on quality-of-life crimes was maintained under Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s program of “stop, question, and frisk.” From January 2004 to June 2012, the NYPD stopped 4.4 million people, more than 80 percent of whom were either black or Latino. Almost 90 percent of those individuals who were stopped were found to be innocent of any wrongdoing. Twenty-five percent of the blacks and Latinos stopped under the program experienced the excessive use of force by the police. Commenting on Bloomberg’s November 2019 decision to run for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States, Charles Blow of the New York Times indicted Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk program as a “city-sanctioned system of racial terror” and asserted that in light of it, “No black person – or Hispanic person or ally of people of color – should even consider voting for Michael Bloomberg in the primary.”

In 2013, when he ran for mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio featured his black son in a campaign ad to demonstrate that the candidate was committed to changing the way that the police treated black residents of the city. De Blasio’s record in office has been mixed. During his time as mayor, the number of police stops has been reduced even while reported crimes continue to decrease. Moreover, the NYPD has adopted body-worn cameras for its officers. Still, as reported by the city’s Department of Investigation, the NYPD has not substantiated a single one of the nearly 2,500 public complaints of biased policing it has received since 2014.

Following five years of litigation, in August 2019, the police officer whose chokehold led to Eric Garner’s death was fired by the NYPD. Although it may be, as Mayor De Blasio proclaimed, that in this case “justice was served,” newspaper headlines continue to offer evidence that police abuse of people of color endures. Fight the Power is a thoughtful as well as thought-provoking history of the anti-police brutality movement in New York City since the 1940s. But even more important, the book makes an overwhelming case that ending police brutality is in everyone’s interest.