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FREEDOMWAYS FIRST QUARTER 1968 brutality. But after an experience like mine, you never know, do you?" she said. This summer, countless middle-class Negroes of Newark and Detroit discovered the same lesson that Miss Kennedy learned about police mistreatment. Black students of Fisk and Texas Southern were sub-jected to similar treatment. Even off-duty policemen have been subject to misuse of police power and harassment. Jesse Roy, who resigned from the Detroit police force after thirteen years, testified before the 1960 U.S. Com-mission on Civil Rights that he has twice been a victim of police officer assault. In another example, the New York Times caught a Ne-gro policeman in a moment of candor about his life within the ghetto when he must deal with officers who do not know him as one of their number. "When he [referring to the Negro policeman] is off, he walks through Harlem wearing usually sports, short-sleeved shirt, slacks and loafers. He is a 24-year-old bachelor. He said that-sometimes he would be standing on the corner with other Negro friends talking, when a white policeman would walk up and say: 'Break it up.' I could sense the bitter edge to the white cop's voice when he said 'break it up,' but don't say or do anything." If women attorneys, middle-class Negroes and Negro policemen are not safe from capricious exercise of police power, who is safe? While the well-to-do may be in a better position to articulate their grievances, few non-whites can be sure that they will not be subject to various forms of differential law enforcement-verbal abuse, stop and search, harassment regardless of status or position. Similar situations obtain throughout the nation. Some city police departments have reputations for being "rough." Not coincidentally these are the same cities which have lately been the scenes of urban holocausts, Watts, Newark, and Detroit. In the South, the system of differential law enforcement is gen-erally unmasked, without appeal or possibility of redress. Here the individual policemen may beat without cause as an outlet for his own sadistic impulses as well as vengeance. The Southern Regional Con-ference magazine, The New South, recently contained 18 different affidavits documenting charges of wanton police misconduct in Ala-bama, Mississippi and other states of the South. In rural areas where the reports of police misconduct do not even reach the press, the in-cidents are unreported and uncounted. 50
Transcription Notes:
Should I hit "enter" to indicate the end of the line to correspond with the original text?
The New South, last paragraph, is italicized.