Overview

Beginning in the colonial era and growing through the American Revolution and the Southern plantation system, slaveholders’ violent police regime continued after Emancipation, through Reconstruction, to today. Moving across time, space, and place, White Power uncovers how slaveholders created their own white supremacist police and government to deny Black people rights, power, and humanity. Legal historian Gautham Rao introduces us to laws that empowered white people to forcibly exercise their desired racial superiority over Black people, shows how they spread from the South throughout the nation, and traces the rebellions, fugitivity, activism, and legal systems that challenged them. Rao’s narrative includes slaveholders, lawmakers, and the Ku Klux Klan, dramatic escapes by runaway enslaved people, abolitionist activism in courtroom showdowns, and pitched battles between white paramilitaries and enslaved rebels. He offers a new interpretation of the history of policing in the US, centering the institution and legacy of slavery and speaking to the origins of today’s persistence of white vigilance, white supremacist militia groups, and white racist cops determined to maintain power over Black people by force. Equally determined, however, was Black Americans’ refusal to accept it.

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9781469694849

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Reviews

“A sweeping and strikingly counterintuitive argument that the colonial and antebellum system of white power did not end with emancipation, but was reconfigured afterward with the same motivation and intent. Rao’s longitudinal approach presents a significant contribution to scholarship on the origins of modern policing.”—Stephanie McCurry, author of Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South “Rao has crafted a history of slavery and law that stretches beyond the local or regional, illuminating the long national history of slavery and policing. White Power expertly shows how everyday people and seemingly august institutions were shaped by and bent to the fears and desires of the slaveholding oligarchy, profoundly shaping jurisprudence and practical governance at the local and national level for more than two centuries.”—Ryan A. Quintana, author of Making a Slave State: Political Development in Early South Carolina

""A sweeping and strikingly counterintuitive argument that the colonial and antebellum system of white power did not end with emancipation, but was reconfigured afterward with the same motivation and intent. Rao's longitudinal approach presents a significant contribution to scholarship on the origins of modern policing.""--Stephanie McCurry, author of Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South ""Rao has crafted a history of slavery and law that stretches beyond the local or regional, illuminating the long national history of slavery and policing. White Power expertly shows how everyday people and seemingly august institutions were shaped by and bent to the fears and desires of the slaveholding oligarchy, profoundly shaping jurisprudence and practical governance at the local and national level for more than two centuries.""--Ryan A. Quintana, author of Making a Slave State: Political Development in Early South Carolina

Author Information

Gautham Rao is associate professor of history at American University in Washington, DC, and Editor-in-Chief of Law and History Review.

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