Birmingham Slowly Integrates City Police, But How Much Difference Does It Make?

It is a few minutes before ten o'clock, it is dark, it is August, and it is hot. The sounds are of traffic rushing down one of Birmingham, Alabama's major arteries a hundred yards away. The occasional car that squeals around the corner and drives northward flashes past groups of dark figures lounging on rickety wooden chairs transplanted from living rooms to front lawns.

The headlights of a passing car gleam off the white police squad car parked on the left, off the white facade of a church a few doors down.

The scene is a Negro housing project. What is happening is not very dramatic; it is certainly not very unusual. Two white patrolmen have stopped, as they do two or three times a week, in front of one of the low, red-brick buildings that are each nearly a block long.

The policemen will spend anywhere from a few minutes to an hour relaxing in the box-sized living room of a man who neighborhood residents simply call "Winehead." A blind man with a wife and family to support, Winehead sells liquor in his home. His wife buys it at one of the "state stores" supervised by Alabama's beverage control commission. On Sundays or late in the evening, when the state stores are closed, Winehead's business picks up. The profit averages $60 per week -- split 50-50 with the two cops on the three-to-eleven shift.

Bootlegging

Bootlegging is a violation of an assortment of state and local laws, but it is a commonplace that there is a lot of it -- and that a good many policemen profit from it. Any Negro who drinks -- and many who don't -- knows where Bambam, Ratkiller, Shep, or Blue, to name a few of the biggest bootleggers in Birmingham, sell their wares.

In addition to those who simply resell state store liquor, there are countless neighborhood retailers of moonshine liquor including beer-like "home brew" and a local concoction known variously as "white lightning" or "Joe Louis" (the name stems from the punch it packs).

A housewife in the Titusville neighborhood points out four whiskey houses in the block-long alley behind her home. What must be the largest Negro shoe-shine stand in the state does a brisk business in liquor. A factory worker estimates that there are 20 whiskey houses in a 12-block area around his plant. A hippie who works as a part-time mail clerk for an insurance firm prefers four smaller houses near the sprawling University of Alabama Medical Center -- they have juke boxes. But as for reliable estimates of the total number, one Negro professional man who, like the housewife who does her shopping at the corner grocery, buys most of his booze from Bambam, put it this way: "I only know where the three or four I go to are. Don't ask me where any more are. Ask the police. They know."

Penny-ante police corruption is apparently almost as much a fact of life in Birmingham's Negro neighborhoods as bootlegging.

It is surprising that Winehead pays so much for police protection, and that the police are evidently unaware of the far more profitable whiskey house that one Miles operates right across the street. For jealousy among bootleggers and cooperation among police usually guarantee a certain uniformity in the relations between the two groups.

Let some neighbor begin trying to pay the rent by bootlegging, and established members of the trade are sure to notify the police rather than allow the newcomer an unfair business advantage. The two policemen who patrol the area on one shift pass the word to the two on the next shift, and the new bootlegger suddenly has a hefty overhead: each of three shifts.

Protection

The protection fee is more/if the liquor sold is moonshine. Produced in backyard stills to avoid the state's exorbitant whiskey tax, moonshine is occasionally poisoned by the lead piping often used in the stills, but it is cheap. It is the favorite drink of the unemployed or of those, like construction workers, whose employment depends on the vagaries of business cycles and white foremen. For retailers of moonshine, the customer turnover is great, the clientele uproarious, the profit margin low, and the danger ever-present that state agents will move in on whatever still happens at the moment to be supplying whiskey houses in the area.

Sales, of necessity, are geared to the poorest of the poor who can afford nothing better: 25 cents a shot, $1.25 a pint, on credit if need be. Those bootleggers who live in areas where there are at least a few relatively well-heeled customers will have nothing to do with untaxed liquor: the amount of cash involved is far too little and there is too much uncertainty. The police, for whom it is the simplest of errands to run someone in for possession of untaxed liquor, refrain on payment of a staggering $8 per week for each patrolman.

More Protection

For an additional sum, those cops who accept pay-offs (and again, reliable estimates are not to be found) are willing to overlook a number of other offenses which may be carried on at whiskey houses -- gambling, prostitution, sale of stolen items. The general rule of thumb: add $5 per man for each additional vice.

"A Negro alley is just an entirely different world," muses Charles Denaburg, a white lawyer who sits occasionally as judge in Recorder's Court (police court). He doubts that more than a few policemen take bribes, and he also believes that a police crack-down on whiskey houses would have little effect. "If you made it a capital offense," he says, "they're going to drink and gamble."

Denaburg estimates that, exclusive of traffic cases, more than 80 per cent of the defendants in Recorder's Court are Negroes ("that's because of the conditions they live in"), but he insists that 'they get more than a square shake." The meaning is clear: crimes involving only Negroes are simply not regarded as serious by law enforcement officials. One top prosecuting attorney has remarked, for example, that a Negro who kills another Negro is generally charged with man-slaughter, while a white man who kills another white under similar circumstances is usually tried for murder.

As to lesser offenses, Denaburg says, "They have a hell of a lot of whiskey houses operating in niggertown. It doesn't really hurt society for Negroes to sit in a house and drink whiskey and have skin games. They're not bothering anyone else besides themselves."

Still, in the higher reaches of City Hall, the talk is of equal and exact justice for all. "We know the law isn't being enforced out there," commented a top aide to Mayor Albert Boutwell soon after the city hired its first Negro policemen last April. "Those people just don't call the police. We know they don't trust them." That, he said, was one of the main reasons for putting two Negroes (two more have since been hired) on the 572-man force. Until then, Birmingham was the largest city in the nation without a single Negro cop.

Hiring Negroes on the police force was the recurrent demand of civil rights groups since 1955. The lily-white police force was cited again and again as the symbol of the segregated life of Birmingham. The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who stepped into the national limelight when he asked Dr. Martin Luther King to lead massive demonstrations in 1963, became a well-known local leader eight years earlier when he began carrying petitions to Police Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor asking that the force be integrated.

Piecemeal Integration

But the hiring of Negro policemen is, perhaps, more significant as an illustration of the complexities of piecemeal integration. For putting Negroes on the force has, it is safe to say, done little to overcome the alienation of many Negroes towards the white government; in many ways, it has compounded the alienation.

One portent of that was Bull Connor's own statement, when he first became commissioner back in the '30's, that he favored Negro police on the force. The idea, no doubt, was to relieve whites of the task of looking after Negroes. The cops themselves were adamantly opposed. As late as October, 1963, five months after Birmingham's voters ousted the three-man city commission and replaced it with a racially moderate mayor and city council, and one month to the day after the Birmingham church bombing, the Fraternal Order of Police issued a statement asserting that hiring Negro policemen would lower the morale of the force.

The police were bitter at the forced departure of their long-time boss, whose claim to international fame was his order to sic police dogs on Negro demonstrators earlier that year. "When Albert Boutwell was elected mayor," recalls a Boutwell aide, "85 per cent of the police here wouldn't even look at him when he said hello."

There is little wonder that Boutwell approached with timidity the demand, raised during the 1963 demonstrations and frequently thereafter, to put Negroes on the force. Officials of the new mayor-council government privately assured prominent Negroes that the force would be integrated. But it seemed that Negroes just couldn't pass the stiff civil service exam administered by the county Personnel Board. Encouraged by city officials, Negro businessmen organized schools to train Negroes to take the test, while the city diligently quaried officials in some 89 other Southern towns to see how they had made out with Negro cops, and even paid $10,000 for an independent study of the personnel exam to see if it was rigged against Negroes (the report said no).

All the assurances were not reassuring to Negroes. Arthur D. Shores, a wealthy attorney and political wheeler-dealer who is one of five Negroes on the local Chamber of Commerce, said during one lull in the dialogue with city officials, "It's really hard to trust them after so much foot-dragging."

Last February, a white man shot into a crowd of Negroes picketing the Liberty Supermarket. The already effective demonstration picked up, and the huge store, losing $100,000 per week in Negro business, agreed to hire Negro checkers. But Negro civil rights leaders planned one more demonstration--a march on the courthouse to protest city inaction in other areas, such as hiring Negro policemen. Leaflets calling for the late-March demonstration also recommended a "period of self-denial"--Negroes would not buy new clothes for Easter "to call attention to the need for renewing our commitment to justice."

Boycott

Among downtown businessmen, word spread that the Negroes planned to go store by store through the down-town shopping district, boycotting each one until it agreed to hire vast numbers of Negroes. Two of the city's most powerful businessmen called in the Rev. Joseph Lowery, a middle-class minister who had helped organize the courthouse march. They promised that if the boycott were called off, Negroes would be in uniform by the third week in April; not seeing a way to effect the boycott in any event, Lowery agreed. The businessmen kept their promise. "When these racial things flare up, who gets it in the neck?" rasped one of them afterwards. "City Hall? Hell, no; we do."

But advising one reporter on how to write up the story, he approached poetry. "Say it's a great new day for Birmingham," he declared. "Say we're anxious to have a fine city, and we're on the right road."

The mayor's assistant--he, rather than the mayor, briefs newsmen, but asks that nothing be attributed directly to either--said that the city would like to hire "many more" Negro police, that those who had been hired would be assigned to cars with white cops. "But don't print that," he added. "We'd lose our entire police force."

Peace Measure

City officials hoped aloud that the move would ensure racial peace. They said it would improve the law enforcement in Negro neighborhoods. It had certainly removed from the list of civil rights demands the most galling example of discrimination. Or had it?

To Negroes who had been in contact with downtown businessmen and city officials, the whites had finally come through. True, one of the Negroes commented later, "It just showed what we'd been saying all along: Once the white folks made up their minds that we would have Negro policemen, we'd have it." But many of the wealthier Negroes had talked at one time or another about what one called the "nagging thought in my mind that not enough people have gone down to take that exam." There was the feeling that they, as self-styled Negro leaders, were at leas tpartially to blame for the delay in hiring Negro cops.

For a good many Negroes in Birmingham, token integration of the police force simply had very little meaning. A lawyer who keeps in time with the grass-roots folks and frequently stops off at Ratkiller's on his way home from work remarked recently, "I see these Negro cops in there with whites. I doubt if any of them have any real authority to do anything."

There was some muttering that Negroes were just being used to rat on other Negroes (not entirely true: though the Negro cops were used initially for undercover work in Negro areas, the integrated squad cars patrol white as well as Negro neighborhoods). Still, one retired steelworker has not altered his opinion: "The police department here is rotten to the core."

The reason is simple. It is not just that the police are constantly in view ("They live out here," says an elderly housewife in one northside neighborhood) or that they try to enforce the white man's law ("There are too many instances where police here have been trying to teach manners instead of enforce the law," maintains one Negro lawyer). It is, as much as anything, that police behavior can be utterly capricious, that an officer can be brutal or civil, that it is impossible to predict which one he will be, that to his superiors, it is apparently all the same. In Birmingham, moreover, the predilection has too often been towards brutality; Negroes no longer wish to take chances.

Excessive police violence is by no means a thing of the past. No fewer than three Negroes were killed by police during the month of August. In no case was the victim said to be armed with more than a knife, or evne, where he did have a knife, to be close enough to the policeman to have used it. Some policemen have garnered reputations as slayers of Ne- groes, and one cop has placidly referred to a colleague as "Killer C--."

Birmingham is not likely to confront its police department and demand more cordial treatment of Negroes. It is, instead, likely to follow the lead of Atlanta, prodding to guarantee that Negroes trickle into the police department (there are 73 Negroes on Atlanta's 785-man force), and trying to warm up relationships with the Negro business leaders.

To a degree, that is fine with bootleggers and their customers, for whom, job opportunities and liquor prices being what they are, any major shake-up in the police force would be for a while, at any rate, a sobering catastrophe. But even the bootleggers are dissatisfied with the present state of affairs; some are murmuring vaguely to each other of forming a united front and simply cutting off payments to the police. They want the police to ignore bootlegging, but without being paid to do so.

The results of Birmingham's efforts will no doubt be less spectacular than Atlanta's. For one thing, Atlanta, which Birmingham still considers its chief rival, was becoming "the city too busy to hate" while Birmingham was re-electing Bull Connor. And even now, Birmingham officials will not be prone to make the sweeping statements of support for legislation that Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen proudly puts forth. The powerful Birmingham businessmen who got Negro police warns, "We've got some pretty tough whites in this town."

Even Atlanta found, however, that statements which won the hearts and minds of the Negro middle class had little effect on the most alienated members of the Negro community. And Atlanta still has not learned how to reach those people. Mayor Allen was no doubt surprised to learn from his chief poverty official in the riottorn neighborhood around the Boulevard that the all-Negro staff of the local poverty program could first start trying to find out who was involved in the riot and why "as soon as it's safe."

In Birmingham, as in Atlanta, the police force is the sole governmental agency having regular, direct contact with the very poor. It is contact that now produces a great deal of bitterness. During the second straight night of rioting in Atlanta, a Negro minster sadly shook his head as he watched heavily armed police confront small groups of jeering youths. "The cops just don't seem to realize that these kids aren't afraid of them. They're saying, 'You've done everything else to us. Now go ahead and shoot.'