“Skull Trouble”: A Brief History of Police Harassment of Black New Yorkers
By Marcy S. Sacks
As a fresh recruit to the New York City police force at the turn of the twentieth century, Dutch immigrant Cornelius Willemse learned an important lesson from his superior officer about how to treat the black residents on his beat. One day, the novice patrolman encountered a group of black men congregating on a street corner. He attempted to disperse the group. “At my order to move along,” he recalled, “they shuffled off slowly, dragging their feet on the sidewalk, in a way which seemed to say, ‘Feet, we’ll be back as soon as this fool cop is gone.’” Angered by their perceived insolence, Willemse decided that they were “ripe for a lesson.” Without warning, he began beating any black man within reach, “work[ing] with the old nightstick as hard as I could.” In short order, “Negroes were lying all over the sidewalk, some of them half conscious, others bruised and bleeding.” He smugly evaluated his success. “I had made good on my threat of ‘skull trouble.’” He expected no further difficulty from them.
To his surprise, the next morning Willemse discovered that several of the men whom he had assaulted had come to the station house “with their heads swathed in bandages” to register a formal complaint against him. But the nervous patrolman soon received the assurance of his boss, Inspector “Smiling Dick” Walsh,” who gave the greenhorn a “broad wink … and I knew instantly that he was going to guide me through the mix-up.” Speaking loudly, the officer instructed Willemse to “grab that bunch in there, charge them with disorderly conduct and throw them down in the cellar.” The complainants immediately fled, “no one stopping them, of course.” Inspector Walsh subsequently offered some advice. “I certainly gave instructions to keep those corners clear,” he acknowledged, but he cautioned Willemse to be more careful in the future. “Go back to your post, protect women from interference and show them all that you’re boss on that corner.” Walsh then made one final suggestion: “when you use your stick,” he instructed, “always make a collar with it because, you understand,” (here Walsh “smiled knowingly”), “you can always use force to overcome unlawful resistance. Don’t forget that ‘unlawful resistance’ covers a multitude of sins.”[1]
Mount Olivet Baptist Church, 112 W. 26th St. 1880. Credit: Image # 497515 Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library.
This unabashed harassment perpetrated by the police flourished because white residents of the city resented the presence of their black neighbors. By the final decades of the nineteenth century, white northerners had largely developed fatigue over the defense of African Americans’ civil rights that had begun with the end of the Civil War. The collapse of Reconstruction pushed growing numbers of black southerners into northern cities like New York, provoking white hostility and fueling racist claims about the “menacing” black “hordes” that supposedly threatened the well-being of the city’s white residents. New York saw its black population triple between 1880, when it hovered just below 30,000, and 1910, by which time it had exploded to over 90,000.[2] In response, new stereotypes emerged that imagined urban black people (in contrast with rural southerners) as violent and dangerous. “Coon songs,” created by Tin Pan Alley in the 1890s, featured black men itching for a fight, using the flashing steel straight razor as its prevailing image. Composers outdid themselves with tales of the “gastronomical delights of chicken, pork chops, and watermelon …, with jamborees of various sorts and the play of razors … and with the experiences of red-hot ‘mammas’ and their never too faithful ‘papas.’” Newspapers printed the sheet music in their Sunday circulars, disseminating not only the vicious lyrics to a nationwide audience but also caricatures of animal-like “coons” in accompanying drawings. The birth of America’s national consumer culture fostered the spread of these stereotypes as advertisers quickly adopted them for marketing purposes. Between 1880 and 1920, thousands of visual images of black people were produced for white audiences. They could be found on postcards and trade cards (in the style of contemporary baseball cards), tourist souvenirs, household collectibles, magazine and newspaper advertisements, and countless products for everyday use.[3]
Nascent stereotypes about violent and dangerous urban black people translated into more difficult lived experiences for black New Yorkers. The rate of black arrests grew in conjunction with the increased wariness, far outstripping black people’s proportion of the city’s population. They comprised under two percent of New York’s populace throughout the pre-World War I era. During the 1890s, roughly 2.5 percent of arrestees in New York were black; after 1900 the rate more than doubled to over five percent. No other single group in the city experienced comparable levels of animosity from daily encounters with policemen.[4]
An all-white group of NYC policemen, 1909. Image: Library of Congress)
Because of both the stereotypes held by whites regarding black people and the lack of political clout enjoyed by African Americans, in the early decades of the twentieth century patrolmen could often operate with near impunity in black neighborhoods. Operating under the prevailing philosophy that black people needed to be controlled, not protected, members of the all-white force brutalized black people and subverted their civil rights. (The first black policeman, Samuel J. Battle, was not hired until 1910, after a protracted fight by the black community to integrate the force.) One officer who worked in a predominantly black district asserted bluntly, “What chance has a cop without a club against a couple of mad niggers?”[5]
The liberal license granted to policemen patrolling black neighborhoods made these assignments plum positions. Captain Max F. Schmittberger, testifying in the mid-1890s before the Lexow Committee investigating police corruption, confessed that blackmailing was “a matter of common understanding” in the police department. The captains of the city’s various districts, Schmittberger added, “[took] advantage of any opportunity that presented itself to make money out of their respective precincts.” Bribery schemes run by the city’s police department had long helped officers supplement their civil servant salaries. “I had the best Christmas and New Year’s I had had in years,” one officer admitted after telling about the bribes he received for protecting a gambling ring. “The kids got nice toys and mama could buy things for the house.” Blackmail was more effective in some areas than others, and wards where vice was prevalent became preferred assignments for many of the city’s police officers.[6]
As the police commander of the 19th Precinct in the Tenderloin district, Schmittberger both encouraged and shielded the numerous illegal activities taking place under his watch, making it a lucrative business for himself and his subordinate officers. He testified that policy shops (a form of gambling) in his district paid twenty dollars a month, liquor dealers about eighty, pool rooms two hundred dollars, and “disorderly houses” anywhere from ten to five hundred dollars, depending on their quality and clientele. He personally earned nearly four hundred dollars each month from the vice industries in his precinct. Regular patrolmen involved in collecting the monthly “dues” each earned approximately one hundred dollars of blackmail money per month. Anyone who was captain in the Tenderloin for one year, according to one officer, “could live on tenderloin steaks the rest of his life.” Local police inspectors became known as “Czars of the Tenderloin.”[7]
When Cornelius Willemse received a coveted transfer to the Tenderloin in 1902, he began his new commission “excited and eager for adventure.” By his own account, the four years he spent on that beat were among the most enjoyable of his long career in law enforcement. “Altogether,” he later recalled, “there was something to be done every minute I was on post.” He was transferred “as a grafter” in 1906 to the Minetta Lane district. Willemse, though intending to “toe the mark” after the change, discovered to his delight that “there was a good bunch on my platoon and we had a lot of gambling, skylarking and good bosses …. So, happy days were here again!” He explained, “you never heard the word ‘taxpayer’ from complaining property owners and that was a great relief.” The Minetta district, comprised predominantly of poor black people who had resisted moving northward, had almost no influence on New York’s political machine.[8]
In July of 1905, a race war exploded in the San Juan Hill neighborhood that housed a large black population. Tensions had been brewing since the previous year when black witnesses testified that a white police officer had killed a black man. The following summer, policemen in the district conspired to “crack some of the negroes’ heads.” Fighting finally broke out after a scuffle on the street between a white and a black man. Officers quickly joined the fracas, clubbing any black person they could find. In the aftermath, charges of police brutality reached the highest levels of city government, and countless black men and women testified to their mistreatment at the hands of the city’s men in blue. Arthur Moody, shot by police after receiving a beating at their hands, later died. Other officers who “indulged in promiscuous shooting” struck a black carpenter with one of their bullets and succeeded in breaking the man’s leg. And dozens of black men arrested and sent to station houses experienced vicious beatings and were forced to “run the gauntlet” in the squad room with the lights turned out. According to witnesses, each man was led “like an ox to the slaughter pen,” and shoved into a long corridor where police officers with billy clubs “proceeded to beat them upon the head and bodies until they were nearly dead.”[9]
Police Commissioner William McAdoo immediately responded to the outbreak by ordering the black population to disarm. No similar order was issued for whites in the neighborhood. Black people in the city demanded an investigation; instead Commissioner McAdoo left for his vacation home, admonishing blacks to “deposit their revolvers, blackjacks, and razors” with the police. Although McAdoo approved the transfer of Police Captain Cooney from the San Juan Hill precinct, he assured “the lawless colored element of the Twenty-Sixth Precinct” that they “must not construe my act as any change of policy on my part with regard to dealing with them.” The new captain received permission from the Commissioner to “fearlessly” enforce the law and to “suppress promptly any disorder in that section.” Once again, the city’s police protectors treated black people as the aggressors rather than the victims of violence.[10]
Frustrated by the constant abuse they received at the hands of the police, some black New Yorkers sought revenge. White patrolmen periodically complained of having “missiles” – bricks, bottles, and rocks – thrown at them from the anonymity of the tenements. In 1903, San Juan Hill residents launched a successful offensive against local beat officers. Witnessing the arrest of a black man, black tenement dwellers sent a volley of bricks onto the policemen below. When officers opened fire on the assailants (in a crowded residential area), a number of residents responded with their own gunfire. Despite a prolonged chase, the police failed to capture any of the harassers. Just as peace seemed to be restored, a black woman in an apartment above the street emptied a pail of dirty water onto the men, drenching them “to the skin.” She too managed to escape. Some years later, the black newspaper, the New York Age, warned that harassment “is a game that two can play at.” Directing its attention at “the police who single out Afro-Americans when there is a riot for the purpose of smashing heads,” the traditionally conservative newspaper promoted self-defense. “A razor properly handled,” it cautioned obliquely, “leaves hurts that talk a long time … [When] Afro-Americans are put on the defensive it is right that they fight to a finish in holding up their end. Cowardice under any circumstances is the basest sort of thing.” Despite a few temporary victories, however, in the long run these efforts merely provided policemen with greater ammunition with which to excuse their mistreatment of black people – both the criminal and innocent alike.[11]
Black people’s abuse at the hands of the city’s police officers created a climate of fear and mistrust. African Americans legitimately viewed the men in blue as perpetrators of violence, not as protectors. They complained about police brutality and corruption and struggled to combat it, but their efforts went ignored by city officials and even sparked reprisals. Consequently, black people endured insecurity and vulnerability, both from within their communities when crimes went uninvestigated, and from without, by the police themselves who committed violence and abetted vice. Though legally they could claim equal citizenship, black people did not receive the treatment of equal citizens. Their harassment at the hands of the city’s policemen effectively removed them from full-fledged participation in the body politic because they could not expect the protection of their due process rights. Their unfettered movement within the city, their freedom from harassment or physical assault, and their ability to speak up about their mistreatment – black New Yorkers had all of these rights stripped by the very people entrusted with protected them. That legacy persists.
Marcy S. Sacks is the Julian S. Rammelkamp Professor of History at Albion College (Michigan). She is the author of two books, including Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City before World War I (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
[1] Cornelius W. Willemse Behind the Green Lights (New York, 1931), pp. 84-86.
[2] Joseph S. Fried to Mayor Gaynor, 1913, Box 77, Folder 1, William Gaynor Papers (New York Municipal Archives); Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (1963; Chicago, 1996), pp. 3, 8; Seth M. Scheiner, Negro Mecca: A History of the Negro in New York City, 1865-1920, (New York, 1965), p.221.
[3] James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way, pp. 52-53; Tom Fletcher 100 Years of the Negro in Show Business (New York, 1984), p. 139; Richard M. Sudhalter, “Don’t Give the Name a Bad Place: Types and Stereotypes in American Musical Theater, 1870-1900,” Compact Disc Insert. (New York, 1978), pp. 6-7; Kenneth W. Goings Mammy and Uncle Mose: Black Collectibles and American Stereotyping (Bloomington, 1994), pp. 1-14; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Trope of the New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black,” Representations (Fall 1988), pp. 149-50.
[4] Christopher P. Thale, “Civilizing New York City: Police Patrol, 1880-1915,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago, 1995), pp. 104-106, 109; Seth Scheiner, Negro Mecca: A History of the Negro in New York City, 1865-1920 (New York, 1965), p. 222; New York City Police Department Annual Report (New York, 1890-1905).
[5] Bureau of Municipal Research, “A Report on the Homes and Family Budgets of 100 Patrolmen, Submitted to the Aldermanic Committee on Police Investigation as of March 31, 1913,” in Board of Aldermen Police in New York City: An Investigation (New York, 1971), p. 4507.
[6] Willemse A Cop Remembers, p. 129; Police Commissioner William McAdoo to Mayor George McClellan, November 6, 1905, Box 20, Folder 4, George B. McClellan Papers. (New York Municipal Archives).
[7] W. T. Stead Satan’s Invisible World Displayed, or Despairing Democracy (New York, 1897), pp. 96-97, 102; Osofsky, Harlem, p. 14. In 1905, Schmittberger was accused of using excessive violence in a raid on a gambling house occupied by white and black patrons. When no complainants appeared at the hearings, the matter was dismissed. McAdoo to McClellan, November 6, 1905, Box 20, Folder 4, George B. McClellan Papers.
[8] Willemse Behind the Green Lights, pp. 64, 72, 111; Willemse A Cop Remembers, p. 132.
[9] The New York Times, July 20, 1905, p. 12; New York Age, July 27, 1905, p. 1.
[10] The New York Times, July 20, 1905, p. 12; The New York Times July 25, 1905, p. 12.
[11] William Fielding Ogburn, “The Richmond Negro in New York City,” MA Thesis (Columbia University, 1909), pp. 51-52; New York Times, July 13, 1903, p. 1; New York Age, August 1, 1907, p. 4.