Edward E. Baptist

This project is a history of the policing of African-American movement in the United States from slavery to the present. This includes not only what authorities have done and said, but the many ways in which African Americans have been watched, harassed, and imprisoned, as well as African-American individual and collective resistance to policing. The project builds on old and new scholarship on fugitive slaves, abolitionism, the emancipation process, emerging systems of segregation, policing, and incarceration, through the era of Jim Crow’s defeat and the rise of the carceral state. It also incorporates significant new research from an ongoing collaborative database project that collects fugitive slave ads, federal pension records, and oral histories of mass incarceration.