Headley became police chief in 1948 during a time when the city was booming economically for its white residents and new efforts were underway to change the nature of policing in black neighborhoods. In 1944, members of a black professional class had convinced city officials to hire a handful of black “patrolmen” to preside over black neighborhoods, mostly Colored Town (today, Overtown). These patrolmen could arrest only other black people, however.
These efforts resulted in thousands of new arrests and helped lead to the creation of an all-black police precinct and station as well as a municipal courthouse. Those operated from 1950 until 1963, following orders to desegregate city buildings. Although these efforts created other issues, especially across class lines and tied to the problems of addressing poverty and crime through incarceration, evidence also shows that with an all-black staff on duty, many black suspects experienced the criminal justice system in significantly safer ways than they had with white officers.
Meanwhile, anti-black animus infused attacks on other marginalized groups. During the 1950s and early 1960s, one of Headley’s major preoccupations was with young people and “juvenile delinquency.” When the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency held hearings in Miami in 1954, officials including Headley largely found blame in the city’s “large pervert colony,” as LGBTQ communities were known as then. The police regularly harassed and criminalized them using tactics honed in black neighborhoods, such as heightened and militarized surveillance and entrapment.
But what became known as Headley’s “get tough” policy was always aimed at black communities, particularly younger black men. In 1967, when Headley made the comments Trump quoted, he had grown especially concerned about the criminality he associated with the “young hoodlums who have taken advantage of the civil rights campaign.” Rather than accepting uprisings as a form of resistance to white supremacy, he believed people were using the ground gained by civil rights activists to partake in what the police would broadly identify as criminal behavior. He estimated they constituted about 10 percent of the city’s black population.
By then, racial strife and the violence of police action in the growing black neighborhood that became known as Liberty City had boiled over. The long history of state brutality, exploitation and displacement, including the bulldozing of houses in Colored Town for federal interstate programs and the building of I-95, had destroyed an area once celebrated by black people across the country as the “Harlem of the South.” Black communities in Miami, as elsewhere, fought back.
This is the context of Headley’s now-infamous call for anti-black violence. It was an effort to counteract challenges to white supremacy. “Felons will learn that they can’t be bonded out from the morgue,” Headley added. He sent a clear message to eliminate black people who resisted a regime that required either the submission, disciplining or disposal of black lives. Within a year, in August 1968, civil unrest unfurled in Liberty City, coinciding with the Republican National Convention, which was held in Miami that year.