“Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”
—George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 1972
Memphis is a city built on slavery. Black African slaves picked the cotton that was shipped up to the city wharfs. Black slaves worked the docks loading the cotton onto the steamboats. From its founding in 1819 until abolition, the buying and selling of slaves was one of the most lucrative businesses in Memphis. Nathan Bedford Forrest, city alderman, owned a slaving firm that charged between $800 and $1,000 for each individual person sold as chattel. In a good year, Forrest and his partner Byrd Hill sold more than 1,000 slaves, with a net profit of somewhere in the realm of $10,000-$30,000 1850 dollars — the equivalent buying power of $370,000-$1.1m in 2023 dollars.
The city fathers were uneasy — by 1860, there were 16,953 slaves within Shelby County and only 22,000 free whites. The danger to the white slave masters was obvious. None of the slavers nor the enslaved were likely to forget the fate (or the lesson) of Haiti; the enslaved looked to their Haitian brothers for inspiration, while the slavers looked on in horror. A law of 1848 created the office of city marshal. On March 27, 1850, a bill was passed by the government of Memphis that required
State laws against slaves, free blacks, and mulattoes to be enforced by city marshal.
Slaves not allowed to be entertained or permitted to visit or remain on Sabbath in the house of any free person of color.
Large collection of slaves banned, except for public worship conducted in an orderly manner under superintendence of a white person.
Unlawful for slaves to remain in corporate limits of city after sun set or any part of the Sabbath, except by permission of owner specifying limit of time.
This was the foundation of the Memphis police department. In 1852, a resolution was passed to furnish the “Day and Night police” with badges and uniforms. By 1857, the city marshal, the same one who was to enforce the anti-slave laws, was made chief of police and, on February 20, 1860, the marshal title was changed to just that: Chief of Police.
Slaves were property, Black men and women who were held and sold as any other piece of property was. The Memphis police force was founded, like every police department in the entire United States, to protect property. In Memphis, it served a double purpose: protecting the investments of property owners, and protecting property owners (slavers) from the rightful vengeance of their own property, the slaves. The legal end of human beings as property didn’t simply extinguish the legacy of slavery. Although the end of the Civil War saw a formal end to the enslavement of Black individuals, new property relations were quickly erected by the white-supremacist ruling classes. In the South, these were created by the Dixiecrats to protect their huge plantations and their monopoly on politics. In the North, these new property relations were primarily the work of industrialists keen to win over the allegiance of a mostly imported, white, European work force, often with the active collaboration of those workers themselves.
Mid 19th-century Memphis was home to a large number of poor Irish laborers, mostly confined to slums and excluded from city politics. City police records often described them as “Irishman; no account” and “low Irishman,” hounding them and dogging their tracks. However, by the late 1850s, Irish settlers coming into the country from New York and other East Coast ports established a foothold in the Memphis business community. In 1861 Ireland-born John Park, who had married a young Bourbon-Dixie widow and was a successful real estate speculator, was elected mayor. Irish settlers soon dominated the city government and were determined to stay in power no matter the cost. After the close of the Civil War, as thousands of Black refugees and soldiers from the embattled regions of the former secessionist states poured into Memphis, the Irish community of the city, conscious of its shaky hold on power when compared with the old Bourbon Dixiecrats, essentially went to war with the new Black community. Irish laborers tried to prevent Black workers from entering the skilled trades. By early 1866, the city was a powder keg.
In January of that year, Mayor Park and Shelby County sheriff T.M. Winters asked Major General George Stoneman to remove his federal troops from the city streets and turn them back over to the Memphis police. In late April, the army discharged the last of its Black troops at nearby Fort Pickering. They came into South Memphis waiting for their pay vouchers. On May Day a crowd of one hundred or so former soldiers congregated on South Street where they celebrated and discharged their weapons in the air. In the middle of the May celebration, a white wagon driver turning onto South Street crashed into a Black wagon driver; the two men started arguing. The soldiers rushed to the Black driver’s defense, and the Irish police to the white driver’s. Gunfire was exchanged, and soon there was a full-on street battle between former federal soldiers from the Black Union regiments and the Memphis police. Local whites stiffened the police line, joining them with their own weapons as irregulars.
It was only when Maj. Gen. Stoneman’s federal soldiers arrived to separate the sides in the late afternoon that the fighting stopped. With peace more or less restored, two Black soldiers arrested, and the rest still waiting for their pay, the fall of night saw white Memphians swarm into South Memphis and slaughter every Black person they saw. A reporter from the New York Times wrote:
Large numbers of armed citizens repaired to the scene of the fight and commenced firing upon every negro who made himself visible. One negro upon South Street, a quiet, inoffensive laborer, was shot down almost in front of his own cabin, and after life was extinct, his body was fired into, cut and beat in a most horrible manner.
The Memphis police joined the white mob. For two days, white Memphis burned and massacred the Black community in South Memphis. Forty-six Black people had been killed. Two whites had died. Ninety-one Black homes, twelve Black schools, and four Black churches had been burned.
The Police as White Guard
Tyre Nichols was murdered by the Memphis police. The ruling class has been doing its best to try to confine the public dialogue to the five officers their lackeys have indicted. It shouldn’t escape us that these instant suspensions and indictments fell on five Black policemen. But they, the capitalists and their mouthpieces, desperately want (need) you to believe that the capitalist police are a good institution, a necessary institution. A permanent institution. The only way for them to do this is to perform the same sleight-of-hand game they always do. You remember the phrases: “a bad apple,” rogue cops, even whole rogue departments.
But the young U.S. settler-republic didn’t build police departments. In the English colonies and the early republic, police simply did not exist. By the 1830s and ‘40s, every urban center in the new settler-republic faced crises in public order spurred on by the development of industrial capitalism. All of a sudden, between the 1840s and ‘80s, every major U.S. city built up a large police force. Why? Sam Mitrani answers this question precisely and elegantly in The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850-1894: “The most basic answer is that the leading businessmen who dominated both urban economies and their politics pushed city governments to build powerful armed institutions that could defend their property and their interests from the new threats that accompanied the development of a wage labor economy.”
The police are the frontline, the shock troops, of the capitalist class. The Dixiecrat planters are gone; formal chattel slavery has been abolished. Legal enslavement is now permitted only through the criminal “justice” system and the state’s prisons, where prisoners, disproportionately Black, toil to produce commodities for private corporations. But though the legal framework of slavery is gone, the property relations of race remain, transformed and reconfigured, but no less poisonous.
Although only 13% of the U.S. population is Black, 38% of all inmates in prison or jail are. Black citizens are disenfranchised by felony convictions at a rate of 5.3 times that of the white population. In the largest 50 metropolitan areas of the country, mortgage denial rates for Black applicants is twice that of the overall population. Black homeownership is lower across the board than white homeownership. Between 1910 and 1997, Black farmland has decreased (gone into foreclosure, been purchased away, etc.) by 90%. Black wage-earners earn 30% less than white wage-earners on average, and Black households have one-eighth the wealth of white households.
These facts of racial inequality are rooted in the property relations of white supremacy. Black-owned property can be seized by the state, by the banks, and by white capitalists and landlords by a variety of legal means much easier than white-owned property can. Who enforces this regime of property rights and relations? Why, the U.S. garrison-police. The hyper-exploited regions of the U.S., those places where Black and Indigenous peoples have been forced by white supremacist zoning, lending, and other laws, are treated as internal frontiers. In the Black Belt and the urban centers, the police don’t serve the local community; they are a foreign garrison, preventing rebellion. Today, nearly 25% of all police officers in the U.S. first serve in the military. The U.S. police force, no matter the state, no matter the municipality, no matter the national composition, is an occupying army. Killer cops aren’t the exception and they aren’t “the bad apple that spoils the bunch.” They are the intended outcome of the policy that unleashes stormtroopers in blue on the streets of every poor and majority-Black neighborhood in every city across the U.S. Empire. The capitalist relies on the law officer and their truncheon just as much as they rely on strikebreaker and the Pinkerton, the warden and the prison walls, and just as much as they rely on their lackeys in the Congress to pass their laws.
These killer cops are the front line of the struggle between capital and labor in the United States. The horrific murder of Tyre Nichols is not an aberration, but a byproduct of a system working as intended. Every day, Black people are tortured, terrorized, and slain by the U.S. police. While the police kill white persons too, they target Black, Indigenous, and Latinx persons at a disproportionately high rate; they swarm majority-minority neighborhoods, always on the lookout for racially oppressed people to brutalize. This is by design. Those groups form the internal colonies or semi-colonies of the U.S. and those nations oppressed by the white settler majority — and it is not stretching the meaning to call it what it is, the U.S. Empire.
Tyre Nichols now joins the other names of the slain, including Elton Hayes, murdered in much the same fashion by the very same Memphis police, 52 years ago in 1971. But the legacy of murder and terror stretches back to the middle of the 19th century, and it will end only when property relations themselves are reformed. No reform to a capitalist police department can prevent it from being monstrous.
Left-liberals, “progressives,” and loyal Democrat voters cannot understand why this keeps happening. Their politicians, of course, know exactly the reasons — or else they purposefully blind themselves to them. These “elected” mouthpieces climb onto pulpits and on the big capitalist news networks to moan and stamp their feet, making promises to provide “oversight” over these “renegade” officers, but as soon as the lights are off and the cameras have been packed up, the left-liberal politicians go right back to their offices and start drafting expanded police budgets. Why, maybe if we give them body cameras, and tanks, and specialized sensitivity training, and enormous murder-theaters to prepare their urban counter-insurgency tactics, we’ll see fewer murders done by our boys in blue!
The right liberals and their fascist allies, the GOP and its extreme right flank, are at least honest about the trend of police slayings. They have no qualms about the truth. Anyone murdered by a cop on duty is an outlaw, slime, someone beyond the “social contract” that we shouldn’t be worried about. “What were they doing?” the right liberals thunder. “Why didn’t they just follow orders? Listen to the cop? They must have been high. They were reaching for the cop’s gun. They were thieves, criminals, thugs, gangsters. They deserved it.” Disgusting as it may be, these right liberals and fascists are at least in touch with the truth: the purpose of capitalist policing is to do murder and inspire terror.
We have seen why the Memphis police exist. Their purpose today is the same as it was in 1850: they exist to protect property, and in the U.S., the property boundaries include the boundaries that the liberals call “race.” For both left and right liberals, racism is a social attitude, a kind of free-floating ideology that people have by virtue of a good or bad education. They cannot understand racism as a systemic force, a social relation that embodies an economic, a property, relation. To them, racism is a feeling or a thought. This is why neither the Democrats or the GOP can really fight against racism in any meaningful way; they don’t understand it, or don’t want to understand it.
How long can you frighten people with a rabid dog? Eventually, anger overcomes terror, and the dog will either slip its chain or the people will risk its jaws to end their fear. For surely the police are rabid dogs — in treating others as animals, they dehumanize themselves; in treating the Black, the Latinx, the Indigenous peoples living under U.S. dominion as beasts, they make themselves into beasts; who can feign surprise when an animal bred to violence as a cop is bred to violence breaks his leash and “goes too far”? The job of the police is to produce this White Terror. Law and order is merely a code for compliance and brutality.
The Conscription of the Oppressed
Liberalism, whether right- or left-wing, has a tendency to try to use individuals as proof that a systemic problem has been “cured,” or that the problem never existed at all. The system of capitalist control is complex and nuanced. It is not the identity of the actors in an all-encompassing social system that shapes their actions, but rather their position within that system. A Black prosecutor who forgets what it means to be the target of the state, a Black judge who issues disproportionately harsh sentences on Black defendants, and yes, the brutal behavior of Black police who terrorize Black “suspects.” These are the feeble defenses raised by an evil system. And how does the ruling class win over these adherents? Through force. Join us, or suffer like your siblings, they warn.
We must not only ignore the lies of the politicians and the talking heads on television when they bring up the “race” of the five officers who killed Tyre Nichols, we must be prepared to refute them. The race of the officers, the nationality of the officers, is unimportant, or perhaps perversely important. In order to demonstrate their loyalty to a system that despises them, the Black and oppressed conscripts of all identities and types must double down on the worst and most violent aspects of white supremacy.
This is actually how liberal “identity politics” operates, never mind what others say. The white supremacist, patriarchal social order does admit individuals from the oppressed groups. Contrary to popular opinion, all oppressive social orders always have. The “exceptional” individual serves as the lightning rod for social dissent. Black police, like gay and trans Republicans, are held up for the world to see, paraded in front of the cameras (even when it’s only as a statistic — we have this many Black officers, how can we be racist?) while the real problems go unaddressed.
Social oppression, the social categories of race, is grounded in economic oppression. The lower-class a socially oppressed person is, the more of that economic oppression they are exposed to, until we reach the proletarian and sub-proletarian masses. The precarious wage workers, the unhoused, the food insecure, etc., all of these persons are exposed to the full might of the social categories to which they have been assigned. As long as there are Black proletarians suffering a special Black economic oppression, the social oppression of race will persist. Black police and judges share in that social oppression, even if they have mitigated the worst of the economic relations that give rise to it. For whatever accommodation they’ve made, whatever private arrangement they have with the order that oppresses, with the ruling order, that private accommodation does not disarm the broader social issues, does not cure the social ills, and does not rescue the Black toilers from their bondage in a white-supremacist system.
Great Britain drafted colonized subjects into the colonial police. It was the Indian gurkha armies that conquered the princedoms of the subcontinent. The Portuguese and Dutch merchant houses in Indonesia, Singapore, and Ceylon elevated local merchants to be their agents, their compradors. The same is true of the oppressed who reach a side-deal with the system that oppresses them here in the U.S. Empire. The Black policeman is a colonial turncoat. The Black Democrat mayors of cities like Chicago, Atlanta, and Minneapolis never even try to stand in the way of police militarization and expansion.
James Baldwin warned:
We used to say, “If you just must call a policeman”—for we hardly ever did—”for God’s sake, try to make sure it’s a white one.” A Black policeman could completely demolish you. He knew far more about you than a white policeman could and you were without defenses before this Black brother in uniform whose entire reason for breathing seemed to be his hope to offer proof that, though he was Black, he was not Black like you.
