Fall 2020 with General Baker Institute: Policing Black Power - From Watts to Detroit (Virtual)

The first class will frame the trajectory of our four-week course before moving on to address the impact of the Watts rebellion on state violence. It situates the Watts rebellion as a key turning point that led to increasingly militant Black activism as well as the militarization of police, expanded surveillance, and the promulgation of “copaganda” that built off of growing calls for “law and order” and reinforced and expanded hyper-policing and the criminalization Black urban communities, residents, and politics in the 60s, including in Detroit.

SPEAKERS: 

• Facilitator: David Goldberg (Associate Professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University. His work deals with the intersection of Black labor, urban and social movement history, with a particular focus on Detroit (where he is from). He is currently writing a biography of General Baker and is on the board of the General Baker Institute.)
• Max Felkner-Kantor
• Baba Charles Simmons
• Will McClendon

READINGS:

• Detroit Under Fire: "The Kercheval Incident, August 1966"
  
• Detroit Under Fire: "Aftermath of the Kercheval Incident"
  
• Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance and the Rise of the LAPD: Chapter 1 - Policing Raceriotland: A Journey into Racist Policing and Urban Uprising
  

This class addresses grassroots efforts to organize against police crimes and abuses during the 1970s. In particular, we will examine Detroit’s anti-STRESS movement, the rise of “community policing” during the Young and Bradley administrations in Detroit and L.A., and the relationship between the violence of deindustrialization, austerity, and globalization, community policing, and the rise of the carceral state.

SPEAKERS:

• Facilitator: David Goldberg
• Melba Boyd
• Greg Hicks
• Michael Stauch
  

READINGS:

• 'Detroit: I Do Mind Dying' - Chapter 8: Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets (STRESS)
• "Wildcat of the Streets: Race, Class and the Punitive Turn in 1970s Detroit" - Introduction
  

This session discusses the War on Drugs, federally funded gang initiatives, and the expansion of the prison-industrial complex. We will explore the cost of the War on Drugs, grassroots efforts against violence in Black communities, and the relationship between police escalation, anti-Blackness, and drug criminalization and the Los Angeles rebellion and the DPD’s murder of Malice Green in 1993.

SPEAKERS:

• Facilitator: David Goldberg (see bio above)
• Yusef Shakur
• Baba Jamon Jordan
• Diane Bukowski
• Kenneth Reed

READINGS:

• "Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History" (Heather Ann Thompson)
• "The Chickens Have Come Home to Roost: Police Violence and Urban Rebellion Redux" (Max Felkner)
  
• "The (Last) Rights of Malice Green: Cops kill man; Community creates Memorial" (G. Raffito)
  

The last session will recap the previous three courses before expanding our definition of state violence and violence beyond formal “policing.” Using local examples, our speakers will address how the elite elide democracy as a means to profit off of Black people while punitively blaming them for conditions externally imposed upon them. These containment and policing schemes endanger Black lives and futures, and force the poorest urban residents to subsidize the cost of welfare capitalism and gentrification.

SPEAKERS:

• Facilitator: David Goldberg (see bio above)
• Claire M. 
• Josh Akers 
• Maureen Taylor 
• Jerry Goldberg
  

READINGS:

• Detroit: The evolution of a housing crisis
• Neoliberalism’s Deadly Experiment
• ‘Nothing to worry about. The water is fine’: how Flint poisoned its people