Make Washington Safe for Negro Womanhood The Politics of Police Brutality

Abstract

This chapter chronicles patterns of racialized and gendered interracial police brutality in Washington, D.C. and the efforts of black women and men to end this violence. Between 1928 and 1938 white police officers in the city shot and killed forty black men in the city. While white officers did not shoot and kill black women and girls, but subjected at least twenty nine to a range of violent behaviors, including street harassment, racial epithets, physical assaults, and intrusions into their homes. In addition to these abusive encounters, white officers employed a double standard by refusing to conduct investigates when black women were abused, raped, or murdered; this was a form of negligence. Black women who were the victims of police violence resisted interracial policy brutality by fighting back, alerting the press, and pleading innocence in police court. Black women activists joined with men to stem the crisis of interracial police violence through protest parades, mock trials, mass meetings, and congressional lobbying.