“To Show Who was in Charge”

Abstract

This article argues that beginning in the late nineteenth century, New York City’s black population experienced targeted harassment and abuse from the city’s police officers. Antiblack prejudice proved to be fundamentally different from the Progressive Era attitudes about other ethnic groups who often faced scorn but who were still considered to be capable of reform. Blacks were perceived to be innately immoral and therefore irredeemable. Consequently, white reformers and policemen alike sought to limit the impact of black people on the (white) city, while permitting vice and crime to flourish in black neighborhoods.