1964: President Johnson’s “War on Crime” and the Black Panther Movement
Big Idea
While civil rights protests led to new legislation, the deeply rooted belief that African Americans were more likely to commit crimes influenced legislation that hindered Black advances during that period. Black activists arose to defend Black Americans from unjust law enforcement targeting.
What’s important to know?
The Irony of the War on Crime & Civil Rights: Even while President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he also signed law enforcement acts the created the apparatus for a more dominant police force.
Persistence of Racism in Law Enforcement: Johnson's "war on crime" exploited and strengthened the existing racism in America’s criminal justice system.
Black Power & the Black Panther Movement: In response to ongoing unfairness in housing, education, and jobs, several Black freedom, power, and nationalist groups started to form.
1: The Irony of the War on Crime & Civil Rights
Report from President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice
Source: Online text
In 1964, as President Johnson prepared to sign the Voting Rights Act into law, he also signed the Law Enforcement Assistance Act. This Act represented a part of Johnson’s new “war on crime,” which sought to clean up urban violence and stem the tide of what some saw as a downward trend towards increased societal disintegration. The Act was significant because it “offered a response to the threat of future disorder by establishing a direct role for the federal government in local police operations, court systems, and state prisons for the first time in American history” (Hinton, 2016, p. 2).
The Law Enforcement Assistance Act and its sister the Safe Streets Act of 1968 authorized Federal engagement in local policing as well as increased funding. This influx of Federal attention and funding led to “the modernization of law enforcement” (Hinton, 2016, p. 2). Combined with existing views within criminology that Black people were predisposed towards violence, this expansion of America’s “carceral state” (prison system) meant that the law enforcement prejudice against Black people was now better funded and organized at the federal level.
As noted by Echebiri, this carceral state had a long history emerging from “slave patrolling and was designed to criminalize and incapacitate Black people rather than to provide justice” (2019, par. 2).
Historian Elizabeth Hinton (2016) wrote that “[i]t is one of the essential ironies of American history that this punitive campaign [the war on crime] began during an era of liberal reform and at the height of the civil rights revolution, a moment when the nation seemed ready to embrace policies that would fully realize its egalitarian founding values” (p. 1).
“It is one of the essential ironies of American history that this punitive campaign [the war on crime] began during an era of liberal reform and at the height of the civil rights revolution, a moment when the nation seemed ready to embrace policies that would fully realize its egalitarian founding values.”
2: Persistence of Racism in Law Enforcement
In reality, Johnson’s “war on crime” tapped into and empowered the systemic racism already prevalent in America’s criminal justice system. As civil right protests and protests against the Vietnam War erupted across the United States, the Johnson Administration blamed African American men (p. 13). Hinton (2016) noted
This group [Black men] quickly emerged as the foremost target of federal policymakers. It seemed that antipoverty programs had failed to reach the ‘hard-core’ black urban youth who appeared particularly susceptible to collective violence, and by extension, crime. Without evoking race explicitly, the White House and Congress then built a set of punitive policies that focused on controlling this group by expanding the field of surveillance and patrol around them. (p. 13)
The “war on crime” thus became a justification for law enforcement to go after civil rights protestors and to keep African American men under surveillance. Given the deeply ingrained racist view that perceived Black men as naturally violent and aggressive, more prone to commit crime and more resistant to government, it is not surprising that most law enforcement officials continued arresting Black men in much larger quantities than White men.
Listen
Listen to a podcast that is part of the series: Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective
3: Black Power & the Black Panther Movement
In response to ongoing inequities in housing, education, and employment, a number of Black freedom, Black power, and Black nationalist organizations began to form. The Liberators, the Zulus, the Black Liberation Front, and The Action Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negroes (ACTION) created important networks of political and social influence that, along with local unions and the local chapter of the NAACP, supported racial justice.
Discouraged over the lack of tangible change in the way Black Americans were treated in their day-to-day life, in 1966 Huey Newton and Bobby Seale from Oakland, California organized the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. they had witnessed police brutality against civil rights organizers and had seen laws passed that further funded and organized law enforcement, which only heightened the intensity of actions against Black men in particular.
During a demonstration in Sacramento, California, Seale described the purpose of the party to be as follows: “‘As the aggression of the racist American government escalates in Vietnam,’ he read, ‘the police agencies in America escalate the repression of Black people throughout the ghettoes of America. Vicious police dogs, cattle prods, and increased patrols have become familiar sights in black communities.’ … Blacks would be destroyed, he said, if Whites were allowed to continue terrorizing them with impunity” (Austin, 2006, p. 13).
While embracing a more militant approach based on similar liberation actions across Africa and Southeast Asia, the movement also created social support programs such as free food for families and children, educational supports, medical clinics, transportation assistance, and other services that in the mainstream discriminated against Black Americans (Austin, 2006, p. 68). While not always following legal or peaceful means of achieving their goals, Black Power organizations pushed back against systemic racism, including police brutality, that had led to decades of inequity between Black and White people in the St. Louis metropolitan area and across the United States (Lang, 2009, p. 220).
Watch
Watch a short documentary on the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and their work to respond to police brutality.
Video from the Black Panthers Revisited | Op-Docs | The New York Times
“We don’t hate nobody because of color. We hate oppression.”
Watch
Malcom X proceeded the Black Panthers in the Black Power Movement. He also advocated for a direct response to racism much like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense did. He was assassinated in 1965 a year before the Black Panther Party formed in California in 1965.
Watch the video below to learn more about him and his influence within the African American and Black Muslim worlds.
Video from Crash Course Black American History.
Your Turn
How did the views of Black men as lawless criminals established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then reaffirmed by pseudoscientists in the early twentieth century impact the attitudes, legislation, and practices of policing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? How did African American communities continue to assert their humanity and dignity in the face of such inhumanity?
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Listen to this podcast: Marcus P. Nevius, Lilia Fernandez, Clayton Howard , "A Long View of Policing in America" , Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective
Explore the materials from the National Museum of African and African American History.
Explore “Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab” website.
President Johnson’s address to Congress on crime in America.
Information on the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense from the National Archives.
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Resources for teaching about policing and African Americans in the United States.
Resource from the American Social History Project on “Historicizing Black Resistance in the U.S.”
Resources related to: “W.E.B. Du Bois Defends Black Resistance.”
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General Resources:
Explore the website, “Police Brutality” at the African American Midwest website (warning, some images may be graphic).
Books & Articles:
Hartman, R. (2014). Six steps—once again—to improve police and race relations in St. Louis. St. Louis Magazine.
Archives:
Rectenwald, M. (2020). ACLU-MO History Spotlight: Reforms to End Police Violence. WashU Libraries.
Museums & Parks:
Exhibit at Oak Hill Presbyterian Church in St. Louis honoring Civil Rights heroes.
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Alexander, M. (2012). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.The New Press.
Austin, C. J. (2006). Up against the wall : Violence in the making and unmaking of the black panther party. University of Arkansas Press.
Brown, E. (1993). A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story. Anchor Press.
Cashin, S. (2005).The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Coalition Politics, 49 St. Louis U. L.J. 1029-1046.
Forman Jr., J. (2017). Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Malcolm X. (1992, reprint). The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley. Ballentine Books.
Muhammed, K. G. (2010). The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern America. Harvard University Press.
Murch, D. J. (2011). Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. University of North Carolina Press.
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Austin, C. J. (2006). Up against the wall : Violence in the making and unmaking of the black panther party. University of Arkansas Press.
Echebiri, C. (2019). The Carceral State and White Supremacy, One and The Same – A Tale of State Sanctioned Violence. GEO. J. L. & MOD. CRIT. RACE PERSP.
Hinton, E. (2016). From the war on poverty to the war on crime: the making of mass incarceration in America. Harvard University Press.
——-. (2021). America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s. Yale University Press.
Lang, C. (2009). Grassroots at the gateway: class politics and Black freedom struggle in St. Louis, 1936-75. University of Michigan Press.