Associate Professor of History and African American & Black Diaspora Studies
“You May Be Next”: A History of Anti-Black Police Violence and Police Reform in the US Capital
“You May Be Next,” my second book, is a social history of twentieth century policing in Washington, D.C., tracing the Metropolitan Police Department’s professional development, racist and gendered police violence, and Washingtonians’ multi-dimensional anti-police brutality campaigns from 1920 to 1970. Mining DC’s Black newspapers and organizational records of the NAACP and MPD, “You May Be Next” investigates how interracial coalitions of activists and Black media outlets made demands to both local police authorities and the federal government to mitigate police abuses and improve community relations. The book recalibrates a fifty-year history of the short-lived successes and longer-term failures of local police reforms in the nation’s capital and the impact on federal police and carceral policies. Especially in the voteless capital, the project posits that this local history can tell us something about the (im)possibilities of lasting police reform nationally and about the community impact of police violence.