Summary

Representatives of their Race – The Rise of African American Police, 1948 – 78. The author opens this chapter with a description of a landmark conference in 1976 involving black police chiefs from all over America. He states that the conference was governed by one key question: “How would black chiefs – and black officers – be different from their white predecessors?” (79). He then describes how one of the attendees at that conference – Washington D.C. assistant police chief Burtell Jefferson – would eventually become that city’s chief of police, and how important it was for him and the other attendees to answer this question for themselves, for their forces, and for the population at large.

The author then goes into an extensive, detailed consideration of the very slow, often difficult, integration of black officers into police forces, with steps in that process often being defined, according to the...