History
“Why Must Such Extreme and Fatal Force Be Used”: Campaigns Against Anti-BlackPolice Violence in the U.S. Capital, 1919 – 1945
“Why Must Such Extreme and Fatal Force Be Used” examines the history of modern policing in the District of Columbia: the development of the D.C. police department, incidents of anti-Black police violence, and antipolice brutality campaigns during the first half of the twentieth century. These multi-faceted and coalitional campaigns against police violence situate themselves within the contradictory nature of D.C.’s symbolism as the U.S. seat of democracy while simultaneously a racially segregated city, and one lacking the means to harness Congressional representation. The campaigns were inclusive of Black media coverage that humanized victims, called out racist and classist police violence, and announced and reported on rallies, mass meetings, and other related events. An examination of this history and the results of these campaigns in Washington D.C. help historicize and contextualize the current shift, a century in the making, to calls for defunding police departments and abolishing carceral systems that include policing. It aims to add to the growing scholarship on the history of policing, its relationship to race, its impact on urban life, and its role in the making of the carceral state, in this case a carcerality already articulated in and practiced through Jim Crow policies in the U.S. capital city.