Blue-Coated Terror

A searing chronicle of how racist violence became an ingrained facet of policing in the United States

Contrary to competing popular beliefs, police violence against African Americans has neither remained unchanged since the era of slavery nor is it a recent phenomenon disconnected from the past. In Bluecoated Terror, Jeffrey S. Adler draws on rich archival accounts to show how racialized police brutality is part of a larger system of state oppression with roots in the early twentieth-century South, particularly New Orleans.

Wide racial differentials in the use of lethal force and beatings during arrest and interrogation emerged in the 1930s and 1940s. Adler explains how race control and crime control blended and blurred during this era, when police officers and criminal justice officials began to justify systemic violence against Black people as a crucial—and legal—tool for maintaining law and order. Bluecoated Terrorexplores both the rise of these trends and their chilling persistence, providing critical context for recent horrific police abuses as the ghost of Jim Crow continues to haunt the nation.

“Jeffrey S. Adler’s analysis of New Orleans applies to the entire country and provides key insights as to how we arrived at our present crisis.”—Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America