ABSTRACT
Leafing through New England reflections, a book of pictures from the late 19th century, one comes upon a familiar but discordant image (Newman 1981, image 19). The picture is of a uniformed police officer of the Victorian era (Fig. 4.1). What is out of place is the fact that the person is an Afro-American. To see an Afro-American in a position of authority that entitles him to use physical force on any citizen regardless of colour, in an era when white Americans regularly brutalized Afro-Americans without legal redress, is astonishing. It is no less odd, at first glance, to find such an image in a book about rural New England. After all, had not Afro-Americans only come North to live in urban ghettos in the 20th century in order to pursue opportunities unavailable to them in the racist South? The answer is in fact no, but persisting contemporary stereotypes would scarcely prepare one to encounter an Afro-American cop in a 19th-century rural New England town.
