As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, during Reconstruction, Black Americans “stood a brief moment in the sun,” and multiracial democracy appeared possible. A society that had organized itself around the profits of enslaved Black labor for more than two centuries was — often literally — in rubble, and the former ruling class was unmoored. In the spring of 1865, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of a prominent Georgia family wrote in her diary: “The props that held society up are broken.… The suspense and anxiety in which we live are terrible.” For the formerly enslaved, on the other hand, 1865 was a year of jubilee: a time to imbue freedom with meaning, to start new lives independent of their former masters, to locate friends and family members who had been sold away during slavery. The South in 1865 was not a blank slate, but an open field for a new battle. This fresh struggle would pit those who embraced Black citizenship and wished to consolidate the gains of emancipation against those who aimed to use the law and the power of the state to continue profiting from Black labor. In the mid-1870s, the federal government retreated from its support of the freedpeople, and white planters violently retook control of the region. The political wing of this counterrevolution was the Democratic Party, but its paramilitary wing was divided in two: in rural areas, it wore Klan hoods; in cities, it donned police uniforms.
This bifurcation of state power across urban police forces and rural sheriffs is one that persists today. Urban police, especially those in our biggest cities, receive the bulk of media attention, but for millions of rural Americans the primary agent of law enforcement is the county sheriff, just as it was for Big Harris Rood in 1866 — a distinction that tends to get lost in contemporary discourse that treats all “cops” as identical. It understandably matters little to a protestor getting beaten whether the person doing the beating is a sheriff’s deputy or a city police officer. But as we begin the process of rethinking American law enforcement as a whole, these structural differences can help us determine what kind of change is possible.
The past few years have seen a growing awareness that American law enforcement — across departments and agencies — is not politically neutral. On January 6th, the nation watched as Capitol Police posed for selfies with white supremacist insurrectionists. Many off-duty officers attended, and police leaders across the country expressed support. Millions more Americans now see the police not as enforcing the law, but rather upholding racial hierarchy and advancing conservative “law and order” politics. Thanks to last summer’s massive Black Lives Matter protests, the range of potential solutions to police abuse has expanded dramatically, and the possibility of defunding or abolishing the police has become a major topic of debate.
