Blue-Coated Terror: Jim Crow New Orleans and the Roots of Modern Police Brutality

· RB Media · Narrated by Arnell Powell
Audiobook
7 hr 42 min
Unabridged
Eligible
Ratings and reviews aren’t verified  Learn More
Want a 46 min sample? Listen anytime, even offline. 
Add

About this audiobook

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

Rate this audiobook

Tell us what you think.

Listening information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can read books purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.