Gautham Rao - "White Power: Policing American Slavery" - Alison L. LaCroix

Gautham Rao will discuss White Power: Policing American Slavery. He will be joined in conversation by Alison L. LaCroix. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. About the book: 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. About the author: Gautham Rao is a historian of American law and politics, Associate Professor of history at American University in Washington, DC, and Editor-in-Chief of Law and History Review. About the interlocutor: Alison L. LaCroix is the Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, where she is also an Associate Member of the History Department. She is a scholar of US legal history specializing in constitutional law, federalism, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century legal thought.