Bluecoated Terror Jim Crow New Orleans and the Roots of Modern Police Brutality

"In Bluecoated Terror, Jeffrey S. Adler expertly demonstrates the institutionalization of police brutality in New Orleans, tracing the shift from targeted vigilante violence to state-sanctioned killings. Adler's analysis applies not only to New Orleans, but to the entire country, and provides key insights as to how we arrived at our present crisis."—Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

"This provocative, meticulously researched, and vividly narrated book breaks critical new ground, illuminating how policing in Southern urban areas in the interwar years superseded lynching—displacing the noose with bullets and batons and the mob with the badge of the state. Adler's timely and crucial work demonstrates why policing remains perhaps the most accurate barometer of racial justice in the US, sharpening and rendering more urgent the call for a new order."—Margaret Burnham, author of By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners

"For many anguished observers, the persistent pattern of police anti-Black violence in the twenty-first-century United States points back to the violent roots of policing in slave patrols and colonial constabularies. However important those origins, Adler's impeccable research on New Orleans makes clear that it was transformations of police in the 1920s in Southern urban areas and eventually nationwide that locked violence into the policing of Black citizens. Sobering and essential reading for anyone who imagines we can reform our way to an end to police brutality."—Jonathan Simon, author of Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America

"An important and vivid contribution to the history of policing."—Roger Lane, author of Murder in America: A History

A searing chronicle of how racist violence became an ingrained facet of law enforcement in the United States.

Too often, scholars and pundits argue either that police violence against African Americans has remained unchanged since the era of slavery or that it is a recent phenomenon and disconnected from the past. Neither view is accurate. In Bluecoated Terror, Jeffrey S. Adler draws on rich archival accounts to show, in narrative detail, how racialized police brutality is part of a larger system of state oppression with roots in the early twentieth-century South, particularly New Orleans.

Wide racial differentials in the use of lethal force and beatings during arrest and interrogation emerged in the 1930s and 1940s. Adler explains how race control and crime control blended and blurred during this era, when police officers and criminal justice officials began to justify systemic violence against Black people as a crucial—and legal—tool for maintaining law and order. Bluecoated Terror explores both the rise of these law-enforcement trends and their chilling resilience, providing critical context for recent horrific police abuses as the ghost of Jim Crow law enforcement continues to haunt the nation.