Prof Paula Austin Wins 2022/23 BUCH Junior Faculty Fellowship
The Boston University Center for Humanities (BUCH) offers fellowships for junior faculty each year. Applicants are judged on the basis of their intellectual quality and scholarly significance, as well as on their direct relevance to the humanities. The BUCH Junior Faculty Fellowship for 2022/2023 is Assistant History Professor Paula Austin.
Professor Austin will use the fellowship next spring to work on her second book project, tentatively titled, “‘‘Why Must Such Extreme and Fatal Force Be Used’: Campaigns Against Anti-Black Police Violence in the U.S. Capital From Red Summer to Black Power”
“Why Must Such Extreme and Fatal Force Be Used” examines the history of modern policing in the nation’s capital: the development of the D.C. police department, incidents of police violence, and anti-police brutality movements in the first half of the twentieth century. Inter-racial, multi-faceted, and coalitional campaigns against police violence situated themselves within the contradictory nature of D.C.’s symbolism as the U.S. seat of democracy while simultaneously a racially segregated city, and one lacking the means to harness Congressional representation. The campaigns were inclusive of Black media coverage that humanized victims, called out racist and classist police violence, and announced and reported on rallies, mass meetings, and other related events. These campaigns also contextualized the fight for justice and police accountability within struggles against DC’s Jim Crow in housing and employment, national fights to free the Scottsboro Boys and secure federal anti-lynching legislation, and the on-going movement for DC suffrage and representation. This project begins with police violence in the wake of the 1919 riot in the federal city, looking at Black everyday encounters with police violence, and Black responses, inclusive of self-defense, self-preservation, attempts at legal redress, media coverage, clapbacks, and remonstrations. It traces the development of community consciousness and politicization on anti-Black police violence as part of an expansive Black protest movement in the early twentieth century and adds to the growing scholarship on the history of policing, its relationship to race, its impact on urban life, and its role in the making of the carceral state, in this case a carcerality already articulated in Jim Crow policies and practices in the U.S. capital city. While most scholars focus on the post WWII period to trace origins of mass incarceration alongside police militarization, “Why Must Such Extreme Force Be Used” adds specifically to scholarship on the early “professionalization” of police departments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that allow us to interrogate the idea that the police originated to “protect and serve.”