The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation

Justice, Power, and Politics

by Adam Malka

What if racialized mass incarceration is not a perversion of our criminal justice system's liberal ideals, but rather a natural conclusion? Adam Malka raises this disturbing possibility through a gripping look at the origins of modern policing in the influential hub of Baltimore during and after slavery's final decades. He argues that America's new professional police forces and prisons were developed to expand, not curb, the reach of white vigilantes, and are best understood as a uniformed wing of the gangs that controlled free black people by branding them&;and treating them&;as criminals. The post&;Civil War triumph of liberal ideals thus also marked a triumph of an institutionalized belief in black criminality.

Mass incarceration may be a recent phenomenon, but the problems that undergird the "new Jim Crow" are very, very old. As Malka makes clear, a real reckoning with this national calamity requires not easy reforms but a deeper, more radical effort to overcome the racial legacies encoded into the very DNA of our police institutions.

Genres: History, American History, Police, Nonfiction

336 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2018

Reviews

[Dean Jobb · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Men of Mobtown explores timely and important issues of racism and inequality before the law. Historian Adam Malka uses Baltimore – on the borderline between North and South and considered the capital of black America in the mid-nineteenth century – to reveal how racism became ingrained in early police forces.

[Bill Sleeman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was excited about this book as it seemed as if it would combine my interest in Maryland and Baltimore history with crime and focused on a historical era that I am familiar with. Unfortunately I cannot recommend it. Author Adam Malka has an interesting idea but it was my impression (which others might not share – read it for yourself to decide) that he wasn’t as conversant with issues of the period as the work demanded. In a work that was focused so intently on the development of community enforcement of law and rules and how that process helped to create a professional police force that worked against the rights of Freedman Malka’s lack of attention to the role of the established religion is glaring. Yes, he acknowledges early on that churches were a cultural influence in the community but then proceeds to ignore their presence throughout, except when African-American churches are attacked. Malka’s presentation of his supporting research was also, at least to this reader, presented in an inconsistent manner. For example in the chapter devoted to “policing the black criminal” where he is writing about the policing of the Black community in Baltimore by white (non-official) citizens in the 1850s and 1860s but he reaches back to Nat Turner and 1830s Virginia. Yes, it is considered fact that Turner’s aborted revolt sent shock waves through the white slave-holding community at the time but by the 1850s and 60’s it was long addressed event and not likely a motivating factor in Baltimore’s white community’s reaction to the Freedman in their midst. In fact, Malka’s own comments later in the same chapter seem to suggest that Baltimore and Maryland generally had laws on the books for controlling free people of color. Note that it isn’t meant to suggest that Malka is wrong it just that he doesn’t seem to use his sources to actually support his contention.

In my opinion this was a great idea that needed much more work before it was completed. Author Adam Malka has an excellent idea and is seemingly on the right track to explore and to expose how policing (with a small p = rules/law enforcing) by whites against people of color both free and enslaved shaped both the antebellum era and our own contemporary notions of justice but he wasn’t as clear on his own thesis or where his research had taken him as he might have been.