One of the most potent tools used to suppress and disenfranchise southern blacks was the convict-lease program, which allowed incarcerated black people to be lent to farms and landowners as laborers. This program returned blacks to a status close to slavery. The sight of chain gangs composed of black leased convicts, toiling away in prison stripes on farms, roads, and railroad lines in horrendous conditions, was common in the post-bellum South right into the 20th century.
In most instances the suppression of newly freed black people after the Civil War was by local southern police forces. Police and sheriff organizations enforced the Black Codes, arrested blacks, and submitted them to the convict-lease programs. Southern segregation, made legal by the Supreme Court's 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, was also enforced by local police and sheriffs.
It is undeniable that southern public officials, motivated by white supremacy, worked to deny voting rights to blacks and used local law enforcement to unjustly imprison them. At the behest of white Democratic leaders, white southern police and sheriffs were deployed to block the black civil-rights movement. In many southern jurisdictions, white police officers were members of the Ku Klux Klan or cooperated with it, and they made no effort to arrest or deter white vigilantes who terrorized civil-rights workers. A climactic moment was the "Bloody Sunday" incident in 1965, when Alabama police brutally beat civil-rights activists as they attempted to march peacefully from Selma, Alabama, to the state's capital in Montgomery, to petition for the constitutionally mandated right to vote.
As the history above demonstrates, the slave-patrol model did influence and evolve seamlessly into the post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow era of policing in the American South. This was more a specific feature of southern policing, however, rather than the defining origin or characteristic of all police in America. A closer look at policing in other parts of the country reveals different models and challenges.
NORTHERN POLICING
Slave patrols were not an integral part of policing in the northern states. Starting in the late 18th century and into the early 19th century, the northern states abolished slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 did legalize the apprehension of escaped slaves living in the North, but abolitionist and northern politicians vigorously opposed it.
This is not to say that northern states were immune from corruption or racial bias. The political era of policing, in which unscrupulous politicians controlled the daily operations of northern urban police departments, is well known. In the 19th century the North experienced an influx of immigrants from Ireland and Central and Eastern Europe, including Jews. The police subjected the Irish to exceptional discrimination and harsh treatment. They were not Anglo-Saxon; and worse, they were Roman Catholics in a Protestant country.