Introduction

The police's version of the story was different. In their version, the officers had stopped to see if the sleeping Watson was drunk. The officers pulled out their guns and began firing. The systematic police brutality that existed in the smalltown South in the decade following World War II was a brutality that was fundamentally dependent upon a racist culture in the police force and carried out by white officers who abused the rights of Black citizens, assuming that their status as policemen and the racial assumptions of all-white juries would protect. The historiography of police brutality in the United States, for example, usually frames the phenomenon in urban settings, one that has existed since the first police forces of the antebellum period and was given its ultimate succor in the development of ethnic enclaves policed by white cops in the throes of the Great Migration and proliferating in the aftermath of World War II.