Blue Coated Terror
I’ve been reading about US police brutality this week – particularly the way death by civilian lynching morphed into state backed policing in New Orleans in the 1920s.
While looking for a soundtrack to accompany Jeffrey S Adler’s Blue Coated Terror – Jim Crow New Orleans and the Roots of Modern Police Brutality – I came across some articles saying that Gershwin’s Summertime was very highly influenced by the work of William Grant Still.
The book itself makes for uncomfortable reading.
Adler says that white-on-black killings (lynchings) were ad hoc civilian affairs designed to control and intimidate slaves and reassert white supremacy at every opportunity.
But then the police was invented. Policemen were very often untrained, keen to assert racial dominance, and felt very threatened by even the smallest perceived threat to their authority.
The first chapter gives several examples of drunk power hungry police officers taking offence at everything and anything and being constantly abusive and even frequently killing black Americans for perceived insubordination.
I guess it’s lack of self esteem on the part of the cops that led to so much killing – it feels like many of the elements in the story are still with us in different ways.
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This Rachmaninov tune goes well straight after the Still
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