Police brutality and corruption are painful realities. So are officers who die honorably performing their obligation. However the memorial in Washington fails to differentiate between them.
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The Phoenix Police Division honor guard is the primary division to face watch through the “Standing Look ahead to the Fallen” flag ceremony on the Nationwide Legislation Enforcement Officers Memorial Might 14, 2014, in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Photographs)
Within the wake of President Trump’s April 29 Govt Order bearing the ominous title, “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Legislation Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Shield Harmless Residents,” tens of hundreds of cops will descend on Washington subsequent week for the 62nd annual commemoration of Nationwide Police Week operating Might 11–17.
Underwritten by the Nationwide Legislation Enforcement Memorial Fund (NLEOMF), the week’s capstone occasion is scheduled for Tuesday night, Might 13, when a swelling crowd will overflow the east finish of the Nationwide Mall to listen to the roll name of on-duty officers who died final 12 months. Their names might be added to the 24,067 already chiseled into the marble partitions of the Nationwide Legislation Enforcement Officers Memorial in Judiciary Sq., a brief stroll from the US Capitol. Homeland Safety Secretary Kristi Noem would be the keynote speaker.
Regardless of the potent propaganda perform of Nationwide Police Week and the NLEOMF, journalists, historians, and activists have didn’t scrutinize the origins and significance of both. Having constructed the Judiciary Sq. memorial and its adjoining Nationwide Legislation Enforcement Museum, the NLEOMF is a strong public relations machine that bolsters police solidarity by means of a gentle drumbeat of messaging that theirs is an unfairly maligned and martyred occupation. Each the museum and the group’s on-line shops promote all method of merchandise stamped with the “Skinny Blue Line” American flag—a controversial emblem decried by many as a white supremacist image.
Nationwide Police Week emerged from Jim Crow South Carolina because the handiwork of Olin Dewitt Johnston, a three-term governor elevated to the US Senate in 1944 months after the US Supreme Court docket struck down the white major in Smith v. Allwright. As a defiant son of the Palmetto State, Johnston known as the state legislature into extraordinary session and, in a torrent of hellfire, conjured the looming specter of a second Reconstruction: “The place you now sit,” he warned, “there (as soon as) sat a majority of negroes. They left a stench within the nostrils of the individuals of South Carolina that can exist for generations to return.”
With breakneck pace, the legislature scrubbed all point out of the franchise and elections from state statutes earlier than reorganizing the South Carolina Democratic Social gathering as a personal segregated membership to run the state’s election equipment. Like his antebellum predecessors, Johnston excised black Carolinians from the polity by declaring, “We South Carolinians will use the mandatory strategies to retain white supremacy and to safeguard the homes and happiness of our individuals. Let the chips falls the place they might!”
Because the state’s senior US Senator, Johnston launched Senate Joint Decision 65 in 1961 to determine Nationwide Police Week, signaling his contempt for the sit-ins of Black youth then raging throughout South Carolina—and his sanction of police brutality to quell them. SJR 65 known as on Individuals to “observe with acceptable ceremonies” the “devoted and selfless efforts” of the police who heroically safeguard the nation’s “inner freedom from concern of violence and civil problems.” The decision additionally decreed Might 15 to be Nationwide Peace Officers Memorial Day to honor line-of-duty deaths. On October 1, 1962, President John F. Kennedy signed Johnston’s decision into legislation; 30 years later, the burgeoning police foyer secured President Invoice Clinton’s imprimatur ordering that authorities buildings fly the flag at half-mast that day.
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Johnston’s legacy is really rancid. Although loyal to the New Deal, he staunchly believed its advantages must be reserved for whites solely. As governor, his authoritarian conception of legislation enforcement is illustrated by his 1935 deployment of the Nationwide Guard’s machine gun firm to seal off and bodily take away the state’s standard freeway commissioner from his workplace in downtown Columbia. (Johnston deemed him “an insurrectionist.”) In the course of the accelerating federal assault on segregation through the Fifties and Nineteen Sixties, Johnston used his place on the Senate Judiciary Committee to delegitimize and impede President Kennedy’s nomination of Thurgood Marshall to the US Court docket of Appeals for the Second Circuit, ushering within the acrimonious observe of politicizing federal judicial appointments—a mantle he handed to his junior colleague Strom Thurmond, who in flip bequeathed it to his successor, Lindsey Graham.
However the true measure of Johnston’s despicableness is enshrined in his refusal as governor to train clemency for underage and mentally incompetent Black youth, together with Robert Ashley, 17, Frank Sprint Jr., 16, and Jesse Jones, 19, who all went to the electrical chair regardless of the state psychiatrist’s dedication that every possessed the respective psychological capacities of kids, ages 10 (Ashley) and 6 (Sprint and Jones).
In June 1944, whereas American GIs stormed the seashores of Normandy, Johnston topped this abominable file by thumbing his nostril on the nationwide outcry over the scheduled electrocution of George Junius Stinney Jr., a frail 14-year-old Black youth and the youngest American sufferer of capital punishment. Convicted in lower than 10 minutes by an all-white jury in a rural Clarendon County present trial, Stinney’s dying sentence rested on circumstantial proof and the blatant lies of legislation enforcement alleging that he raped two younger white ladies after bludgeoning them to dying, regardless of there being no forensic proof of sexual violation or any witness to the crime.
Johnston repeated these abhorrent lies to justify his denial of clemency. To a lady who pleaded that he spare the kid’s life, Johnston wrote, “It might be attention-grabbing so that you can know that Stinney killed the smaller lady to rape the bigger one. Then he killed the bigger lady and raped her lifeless physique. Twenty minutes later he returned and tried to rape her once more, however her physique was too chilly.” In 2014, Circuit Decide Carmen T. Mullen vacated Stinney’s wrongful conviction after listening to the egregious details of the case and horrifying testimony from his surviving household.
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Within the put up–Vietnam Struggle period, Johnston’s Nationwide Police Week germinated the seed for a nationwide memorial round which legislation enforcement might recast its picture because the benevolent guardians of order by means of extremely publicized commemorations. Devoted in 1991, the police memorial in Judiciary Sq. is legislation enforcement’s nationwide shrine and point of interest for Nationwide Police Week guests. Regrettably, the memorial will not be a cautious curation of those that died honorably.
Of the 378 South Carolinians on the wall, nicely over a 3rd died below the Redeemer and Jim Crow regimes; they embrace Klansmen, lynch leaders, chain gang guards, extortionists, and murderers. Maybe a dozen died heroic deaths. A considerable quantity misplaced their lives by means of vehicular recklessness, whereas others weren’t on obligation nor sworn officers. Archival excavation of those deaths has yielded a chilling chronicle of police terror as irrefutable proof that with out its energetic violence, intimidation, and corruption, a century of crushing apartheid couldn’t have been sustained.
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Take into account the contrasting instances of three martyred heroes from Jim Crow South Carolina.
In 1915, a mob led by native police gunned down Fairfield County sheriff Adam Hood and his deputy Raleigh Boulware on the courthouse steps as they escorted to trial a younger Black defendant improbably accused of rape. (He, too, died within the ambush.) A jury of white males acquitted the killers because the chivalrous defenders of white womanhood. A number of years later, Aiken County sheriff Henry H. Howard, a confirmed Klansman, died whereas operating a bogus liquor raid as a Klan vendetta on the house of a affluent Black farmer that additionally killed the household matriarch and an unborn baby. Posthumously, the state Supreme Court docket declared the raid to have been an unlawful use of drive. But Howard continues to be hailed as an area hero, regardless of his bearing duty for 5 lynchings in two separate occasions—a double execution in 1921, and a triple in 1926. The victims, all Black, included two boys, ages 13 and 14, a lady, and two younger grownup males, killed by a cadre of Aiken’s Klan-controlled officer-vigilantes. The county coroner, one other Klansman, cynically attributed the deaths to the ever-present “individuals unknown.”
Police homicide, violence, and corruption are painful and irrefutable realities, each historic and modern. So is the mindless and tragic lack of life amongst officers who die honorably within the efficiency of obligation. Their sacrifices are cheapened by the memorial’s inclusion of males like Howard and dozens too quite a few to elaborate on right here. Till America’s legislation enforcement institution conducts an sincere reckoning with this darkish historical past, its encomiums to police heroism will proceed to alienate broad swaths of American society whose individuals can solely dream of a police tradition really grounded within the now jaded motto, “Serve and Shield.”
Elizabeth Robeson
Elizabeth Robeson is an unbiased historian with experience in South Carolina’s vigilante and state-sponsored violence.
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