ABSTRACT
Charles Sims's life unraveled on August 6, 1941. At 3:00 pm, as the African American gardener repaired a screen on his house, two white New Orleans policemen, Sergeant James Smith and Patrolman Emery Landry, approached the 29-year-old father of six. The police officer asked Sims where he could find his cousin, Cornelius Williams. Sims supplied the address, adding that Williams was probably home at the time. Racial violence did begin during the early twentieth century, but policemen assumed a significantly expanded role in such brutality and emerged as the principal cudgel in the crusade to safeguard the region's racial order. The roots of police brutality against African Americans run deep. In early America, white Southerners relied primarily on informal methods of racial control. Planters, overseers, and slave patrollers possessed no formal authority but nonetheless beat and murdered African Americans in defense of the region's racial order.
