Silvan Niedermeier. The Color of the Third Degree: Racism, Police Torture, and Civil Rights in the American South, 1930–1955.

Abstract

In The Color of the Third Degree: Racism, Police Torture, and Civil Rights in the American South, 1930–1955, Silvan Niedermeier provides an in-depth examination of the rampant police torture that characterized the experiences of African American prisoners and suspects throughout the period under study. Superbly researched and very well organized, the book concludes that there is a symbiotic relationship between the decline of lynching in the South and the “growing number of African American offenders who were executed by state authorities” (23). In the process, the author shows how law enforcement officials carried out barbaric acts of torture in seclusion as a way to plausibly deny they coerced confessions from Black people accused of such crimes as theft, rape, and murder. From the start of the Great Depression through the passage of the Brown decisions in 1954 and 1955, scores of Black men and women throughout the South endured beatings, whippings, burnings, and worse as whites sought to keep them in their designated place. Because maintaining the social, political, and economic status quo proved essential in perpetuating white supremacy and the significant community-wide benefits that flowed from this ideology, southern whites, especially those who served on juries, routinely accepted torture as a valid means of holding the line against any type of Black advancement. Using primary source materials from newspapers, trial transcripts, FBI reports, and the voluminous files of the NAACP, the book succeeds in driving home the point that the struggle against this brutal practice constitutes a vital chapter in the now much acknowledged Long Civil Rights Movement. Though Jacquelyn Hall’s notion of a long civil rights movement has been questioned by some, Niedermeier’s study fits easily into this scholarship. Her work adds to the discussion by raising the question of human rights, a topic that traditionally emerges during the Black Power era of the sixties and seventies. As such, this intervention will resonate with lay readers seeking to understand the Black Lives Matter movement and with scholars looking to complicate not only the time line of a long Black freedom struggle but because it more thoroughly plumbs the movement’s depths. The Color of the Third Degree helps to illuminate its very foundations.