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The final chapter documents the wide range of Black-led activist efforts to reform the police at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s. The launching point is the assassination of Fred Hampton, Deputy Chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, in a 1969 killing orchestrated by the Chicago Police Department, the Cook County State’s Attorney, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In the aftermath of his killing, a wave of community organizations mobilized or expanded their protests about Chicago’s police. This included groups like the Afro-American Patrolman’s League, comprised of Black CPD officers seeking to end police brutality and ensure better police services for Black Chicago. It included U.S. Congressman Ralph Metcalfe using the power of his office to expose police violence and harassment, and the fight for community control of the police led by the Black Panthers. Some activists who advocated for police reform sought more responsive police services to better community safety from escalating gun violence; others, such as those involved in the push for community control, pursued visions of semi-abolition of the police as currently constituted. Binding them together was a common understanding that the CPD was not working for Black Chicago.

The chapter charts the decade between the April 1968 riots and Marion Barry’s victory in the 1978 mayoral election. The nation’s capital witnessed a remarkable political revolution during this unpredictable period of citizen-driven politics, cultural and political experimentation, and swift change. D.C. gained a measure of local power for the first time in nearly a century, and Washingtonians of all races – including a growing Hispanic community in the Adams Morgan/Mount Pleasant neighborhoods – pushed for self-determination, community control, and participatory democracy. The transformation was tumultuous, marked by devastating riots, surging crime, and middle-class flight from the city. Politics was often uncivil and chaotic as Washingtonians struggled to be heard in a clamorous era marked by attacks on authorities – Congress, the police, city planners, developers, and others. But for city residents unused to local political power – and particularly for black Washingtonians – it was a thrilling, hopeful time.

The next two chapters (Ch. 4 and 5) examine black Chicagoans’ struggles to win access to the unevenly distributed benefits of the postwar economic boom. This chapter shifts attention from the battles along the color line to efforts to secure housing behind the walls of segregation. The crisis of housing demanded a radical response, yet because the immediate needs for housing were so severe, radicals faced repression, and the opportunities for improved prospects were real at least for some black Chicagoans, many people continued to pursue individualistic efforts to win housing and to work with liberal institutions like the Chicago Housing Authority and the Chicago Urban League. Such efforts achieved important pragmatic improvements in housing, against all odds, while also creating shared experiences of disappointment with liberal housing reform that would set the stage for more radical movements for community control in succeeding decades.

This chapter describes the tension between integration and community development from the 1940s through the end of the 1960s. It describes the conflict within the African-American community between efforts to achieve integration on the one hand and building power and capacity within the community on the other. It describes the emergence and evolution of the fair housing movement in the U.S. Finally, the ways in which this conflict played out during the civil rights and Black Power eras is highlighted.

Get-tough policing was not the only possible response to the urban uprisings of the 1960s as this chapter shows. African American and Mexican American residents challenged punitive crime policy, demanded police accountability, and promoted anti–police abuse activism. Residents and activists, such as the Black Panthers, Brown Berets, imagined the meaning of safety that rested on community control of the police. Yet the LAPD responded to these movements by framing them as a threat to order to justify increased officer discretion to harass, arrest, and repress. This cut short the possibility for alternative models of policing and ensured that grievances with the police persisted.

This chapter focuses on the influence that the Black Power movement and rise of employment discrimination litigation had on the Vulcan Society and Black firefighters across the country. The dialectical relationships between the civil rights and Black Power movements and the Vulcan Society’s old and new guard eventually transformed the organization and its objectives and helped facilitate the IABPFF, a national Black caucus group formed to combat discrimination and increase Black representation in — and community control of — urban fire departments. Both the IABPFF and the Vulcan Society embraced “separatism without separation,” and used their “outsider status within a white-dominated institution,” as well as shifts in employment discrimination case law, to “reveal the inner workings of institutional racism” within the FDNY and urban fire departments more generally. This shift was instrumental in the fight to establish legal remedies to address institutionalized racism and its impact on the racial composition of urban fire departments and became the primary method used by the Vulcan Society and the IABPFF and its local affiliates to make fire departments more representative of and responsive to the people and communities they served