National Police Week emerged from Jim Crow South Carolina as the handiwork of Olin Dewitt Johnston, a three-term governor elevated to the US Senate in 1944 months after the US Supreme Court struck down the white primary in Smith v. Allwright. As a defiant son of the Palmetto State, Johnston called the state legislature into extraordinary session and, in a torrent of hellfire, conjured the looming specter of a second Reconstruction: “Where you now sit,” he warned, “there [once] sat a majority of negroes. They left a stench in the nostrils of the people of South Carolina that will exist for generations to come.”
With breakneck speed, the legislature scrubbed all mention of the franchise and elections from state statutes before reorganizing the South Carolina Democratic Party as a private segregated club to run the state’s election machinery. Like his antebellum predecessors, Johnston excised black Carolinians from the polity by declaring, “We South Carolinians will use the necessary methods to retain white supremacy and to safeguard the houses and happiness of our people. Let the chips falls where they may!”
As the state’s senior US Senator, Johnston introduced Senate Joint Resolution 65 in 1961 to establish National Police Week, signaling his contempt for the sit-ins of Black youth then raging across South Carolina—and his sanction of police brutality to quell them. SJR 65 called on Americans to “observe with appropriate ceremonies” the “dedicated and selfless efforts” of the police who heroically safeguard the nation’s “internal freedom from fear of violence and civil disorders.” The resolution also decreed May 15 to be National Peace Officers Memorial Day to honor line-of-duty deaths. On October 1, 1962, President John F. Kennedy signed Johnston’s resolution into law; 30 years later, the burgeoning police lobby secured President Bill Clinton’s imprimatur ordering that government buildings fly the flag at half-mast that day.
Johnston’s legacy is truly rancid. Though loyal to the New Deal, he staunchly believed its benefits should be reserved for whites only. As governor, his authoritarian conception of law enforcement is illustrated by his 1935 deployment of the National Guard’s machine gun company to seal off and physically remove the state’s popular highway commissioner from his office in downtown Columbia. (Johnston deemed him “an insurrectionist.”) During the accelerating federal assault on segregation during the 1950s and 1960s, Johnston used his position on the Senate Judiciary Committee to delegitimize and obstruct President Kennedy’s nomination of Thurgood Marshall to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, ushering in the acrimonious practice of politicizing federal judicial appointments—a mantle he passed to his junior colleague Strom Thurmond, who in turn bequeathed it to his successor, Lindsey Graham.