Max Felker-Kantor | Ball State University (original) (raw)

Books by Max Felker-Kantor

University of North Carolina Press, 2024

University of North Carolina Press, 2018

Papers by Max Felker-Kantor

Oxford Bibliographies in Urban Studies, 2023

The Routledge History of Police Brutality in America, 2023

In the aftermath of the urban uprisings of the 1960s, African Americans pointed to the role of po... more In the aftermath of the urban uprisings of the 1960s, African Americans pointed to the role of police violence in sparking and fueling the moments of unrest. The police, Los Angeles civil rights lawyer Loren Miller explained after the 1965 Watts uprising, operated as an arm of the state that occupied Black neighborhoods and enforced a racially segregated and hierarchical social order. "When night falls in the ghetto," Miller observed, "nobody is left except the residents and the police officers who seem to the ghetto dwellers to be an army of occupation sent there to conserve a way of life that seems to enforce the code of the majority that insists on racial separatism." 1 Or, as James Baldwin explained in response to calls for "law and order" following the Harlem uprising of 1964, "Whose law, one is compelled to ask, and what order? There is a very good reason for the Negroes to hate the police in Harlem … their role in Harlem is simply to corral and control the citizens of the ghetto, and protect white business interests. They certainly do not protect the lives or property of Negroes." 2 If Miller and Baldwin pointed to the police as an occupying force that used violence to enforce a racialized "law and order," policymakers, government commissions, and the police themselves ignored the central role of the police as purveyors of violence and the police power as a central grievance motivating participants in urban rebellion. The Kerner report, released by Lyndon Johnson's National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in 1968, pointed out that a routine police action sparked nearly all the 1960s urban uprisings. But portraying the police as a mere spark missed how African Americans-those who were policed-had specific grievances with the daily practices of law enforcement and the use of the police power to maintain a racialized and hierarchical social order through a violent program of occupation and repression prior to, during, and after the uprisings. Because the Kerner report did not view the police as the linchpin upholding racial order and, by implication, the uprisings as a protest against that racial order and its enforcers, the commission's analysis of urban unrest and solutions to it focused on procedural reforms to change officer behavior and weed out "bad apples." It did not question the police power, the structure of the police, or the significance of state violence carried out by the police in the uprisings. 3 As Miller and Baldwin suggested, the problem was rooted in how the police power was bound up in perpetuating white supremacy. To fully understand the meaning of the urban uprisings of the 1960s, as a result, requires taking police violence and power in cities and African American life seriously. 4 Investigations into the causes of the urban uprisings emerged as soon as they ended. 5 Following studies by sociologists and social scientists, a generation of urban historians began to rethink the 1960s unrest in the context of the urban crisis and the structural changes in the political economy of

Journal of Urban History, 2022

The DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program simultaneously changed both the police and sch... more The DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program simultaneously changed both the police and schools through the development of what this article calls a school-police nexus, a framing that explains the reciprocal relationship between the police and schools. By enabling officers to assert expertise in the realm of drug education, DARE not only made the police a regular presence in schools but aimed to transform the image of the police officer from a threatening enemy to a friend and mentor. More broadly, DARE intended to make the police a trusted institution in American cities amid the aggressive policing of the drug war. In turn, DARE transformed schools through their educative and disciplinary roles. Using police officers as teachers enabled DARE to coopt the educative function of schools to advance the police mission by other means. Yet, DARE officers did not shed their law-and-order message when they entered the classroom, reinforcing the carceral approach to the drug war.

Modern American History, 2022

In the fall of 1983, the Los Angeles Police Department sent police officers into elementary schoo... more In the fall of 1983, the Los Angeles Police Department sent police officers into elementary schools to teach the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) Program. Within a decade DARE had become the nation's preeminent antidrug education program. Yet the DARE program accomplished much more than teaching kids to resist drugs. DARE shifted the responsibility of preventing drug use from social and public-health policy to local, police-led, educative projects that taught personal responsibility, the value of morally strengthened families, and respect for the authority of the police. By stressing the consequences of poor behavior and demanding respect for law and order, DARE attempted to cultivate popular consent for policies that divorced drug use from social and economic conditions. DARE's approach helped justify reductions in social welfare spending and the expansion of policing and incarceration during the 1980s and 1990s. I would like to thank Simon Balto, Brent Cebul, Anne Gray Fischer, and Paul Renfro for their comments, as well as the anonymous reviewers. Will Connolly provided crucial research assistance in the development of this article.

Boom California, 2018

While deportations of undocumented immigrants declined slightly in the final years of the Obama a... more While deportations of undocumented immigrants declined slightly in the final years of the Obama administration after a decade of record-high removals, recent federal initiatives have aimed to crack down on unauthorized immigration and expand the authority of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).[1] Zero tolerance policies targeting immigrants and refugees seeking asylum on the U.S.-Mexico border have resulted in high rates of removal and family separation.[2] U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has also demanded the cooperation of municipal police departments in arresting and turning over undocumented immigrants to ICE for detention and deportation. Yet, a number of cities and police departments, including the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), have said they will not cooperate with ICE.[3] Such opposition to federal directives has raised significant questions about the role of local police departments and officers in the enforcement of federal immigration law. However, these debates are not new. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, in fact, the LAPD both cooperated with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to target undocumented immigrants and also resisted enforcing federal immigration law. In the process, police officers often played an important role in the policing of immigrants, the construction of racialized categories of illegality, and in defining the boundaries of citizenship.

Beyond Alliances: The Jewish Role in Reshaping the Racial Landscape of Southern California, 2012

Angeles-based Jewish labor organizer and civil rights activist, ... • Max Mont, developed a commi... more Angeles-based Jewish labor organizer and civil rights activist, ... • Max Mont, developed a commitment to social justice at an early age. "When I was six years old," Mont recalled in 1987, "I was trying to make speeches in our living room about the 'oppressed people'" ("Max Mont, 'Labor Pioneer'"). While Mont remembered his concern for the oppressed as part of his childhood identity, his work as an organizer began in earnest on the floors of machine shops and union halls during the 1930s and 1940s in and around New York City. Still, while Mont's lifelong commitment to social justice and his dedication to the fight for civil rights causes were both forged in the northeast during the depression, it was in Los Angeles after World War II that he made his greatest impact on the advancement of racial and ethnic equality. California's racial demography and Democratic politics reshaped and broadened Mont's definition of civil rights and social justice from one based in the struggle for workers' rights to equal opportunity for all. Yet it must also be noted that his interactions with the wider array of ethnicities in Southern California-Mexican-Americans, Japanese-Americans as well as African-Americans-often led to tensions and conflicts. If Mont always maintained a desire to advance the interests of "oppressed people," his vision and theirs did not always prove to be entirely the same. Born in 1917 in New York City, Max Mont moved to Los Angeles in 1949. During his four decades in Los Angeles, he worked for a number of Southern California branches of national Jewish organizations, including the 111 112 Max Felker-Ktmtor American Jewish Committee (AJC), 1 the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC), and the Jewish Community Relations Conference of Los Angeles (CRC). He was also a key organizer for California civil rights organizations and was active in the Los Angeles labor movement (Mont, "Resume," 1965; "Obituary"). Mont's work with Jewish organizations and organized labor demonstrates the intertwined, multifaceted, and mutually reinforcing nature of his identity as a Jew, a liberal and an activist for equal rights. Although his involvement in Jewish organizations oriented toward civil rights issues pushed Mont into progressive political circles, his background in the labor movement and experience during the Great Depression was an equally important-and formative-source of his commitment to social justice. His work with Jewish organizations, labor, and civil rights groups nurtured a willingness to fight for social justice on multiple fronts and to cooperate with various racial and ethnic groups in Southern California and the Los Angeles area. Yet, by the same token, a close look at Mont's broad-based activism also reveals conflicts among racial groups in the struggle for social justice in California. By exploring Mont's involvement with a variety of labor and civil rights struggles in Los Angeles during the post-World War II period, our aim is to demonstrate Mont's commitment to activism but also closely considers the limits to interracial organizing. Fighting Many Battles 113 and civil rights activity based on mutual interest and liberal anti-communism of the Cold War (3-16). 2 Groups such as the Jewish Community Relations Conference worked alongside Mexican-Americans, African-Americans, and Japanese-Americans to promote civil rights initiatives throughout the 1950s. Max Mont's social democratic and anti-communist leanings reflected this commitment to liberal civil rights activism that bridged the struggles of the 1930s with those of the 1960s. Mont's willingness to work with other groups was not only an aspect of his Jewish identity and his labor organizing ability; it was a product of both. Together they contributed to Mont's willingness to work across racial and ethnic boundaries. As noted above, Mont's commitment to labor developed out of his experience during the Depression and began through his work as a machinist and union organizer during World War II. Throughout his organizing career he remained concerned with issues relating to the exploitation of labor. After moving to Los Angeles, for example, Mont aided unionization efforts of Los Angeles-area office and professional workers, helped organize the Emergency Committee to Aid Farm Workers (ECAF) during the 1960s, and served as a representative for the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. He also became involved in issues beyond labor rights and union organizing. He was active in civil rights causes with the California Committee for Fair Practices, the struggle for fair housing, and the campaign against Proposition 14, a 1964 antifair housing ballot initiative pushed by the California Realtors Association in response to the Rumford Fair Housing Act. At times, however, Mont's broadbased liberal activism conflicted with Los Angeles civil rights organizations, activists, and communities of color. Mont's work with other racial and ethnic groups in the battle against Proposition 14 revealed the different meanings that the "No on Proposition 14" campaign had for different groups as well as organizational tensions that developed amid the effort to create a broad based interracial coalition. While Mont attempted to make the Californians Against Proposition 14 (CAP 14) campaign an interracial one by reaching out to organized civil rights groups such as the NAACP and the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA), other groups saw Mont and CAP 14 as paternalistic, controlling, and unwilling to fully support race and ethnic-based organizations in their efforts to mobilize their communities against the proposition. Mont developed a broad social justice agenda and willingness to work across racial and ethnic groups. What I intend to make clear in this study is that Mont's commitment to interracial organizing and cooperation developed out of his experience working in labor and Jewish community organizations.

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, 2022

The relationship between policing and crime in American history has been tenuous at best. In fact... more The relationship between policing and crime in American history has been tenuous at best. In fact, policing and crime are imperfectly correlated. Crime is understood as a socially constructed category that varies over time and space. Crime in the American city was produced by the actions of police officers on the street and the laws passed by policymakers that made particular behaviors, often ones associated with minoritized people, into something called "crime." Police create a statistical narrative about crime through the behaviors and activities they choose to target as "crime." As a result, policing the American city has functionally reinforced the nation's dominant racial and gender hierarchies as much as (or more so) than it has served to ensure public safety or reduce crime. Policing and the production of crime in the American city has been broadly shaped by three interrelated historical processes: racism, xenophobia, and capitalism. As part of these processes, policing took many forms across space and time. From origins in the slave patrols in the South, settler colonial campaigns of elimination in the West, and efforts to put down striking workers in the urban North, the police evolved into the modern, professional forces familiar to many Americans in the early 21st century. The police, quite simply, operated to uphold a status quo based on unequal and hierarchical racial, ethnic, and economic orders. Tracing the history of policing and crime from the colonial era to the present demonstrates the ways that policing has evolved through a dialectic of crisis and reform. Moments of protest and unrest routinely exposed the ways policing was corrupt, violent, and brutal, and did little to reduce crime in American cities. In turn, calls for reform produced "new" forms of policing (what was often referred to as professionalization in the early and mid-20th century and community policing in the 21st). But these reforms did not address the fundamental role or power of police in society. Rather, these reforms often expanded it, producing new crises, new protests, and still more "reforms," in a seemingly endless feedback loop. From the vantage point of the 21st century, this evolution demonstrates the inability of reform or professionalization to address the fundamental role of police in American society. In short, it is a history that demands a rethinking of the relationship between policing and crime, the social function of the police, and how to achieve public safety in American cities.

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, 2022

Latinx criminality was a product of racialized policing and policies that constructed various Lat... more Latinx criminality was a product of racialized policing and policies that constructed various Latinx groups as foreign threats over the course of American history. Crime was not an objective category but one produced by policing, vigilantism, border enforcement, and immigration policy, all of which both relied on and produced dominant

Journal of Urban History, 2018

Testifying at congressional hearings on juvenile delinquency in 1974, Los Angeles Police Departme... more Testifying at congressional hearings on juvenile delinquency in 1974, Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Chief of Police Ed Davis described a new type of violent behavior among African American youth. There was, according to Davis, a "current, new phenomenon of killing someone you have never seen before on the street, by a juvenile." Responsibility for such wanton violence and crime, according to Davis, rested with antisocial black youth gang members who were "infecting" innocent children into a life of crime. Although a group of twenty young black and Latino gang leaders told politicians that investing in social and employment programs would be an effective route to reducing youth violence and crime, Davis emphasized the need for "an effective Criminal Justice System." 1 Such views reinforced beliefs that youth violence and gang activity had to be met with punitive measures and aggressive policing. Rising youth violence in the 1970s and 1980s, which police and political officials defined as a problem of gangs, occurred within the context of a powerful policing apparatus operating in inner-city neighborhoods of color. The expansion of police power, law enforcement officials recognized, played a significant role in fueling opposition to the police and youth violence after the 1960s. Chief Davis advised his captain school in 1969: In areas where there has been a pattern of using strong physical force to achieve police objectives, a concurrent pattern of resistance develops within the individual or group. .. and the subsequent necessity for resorting to force on the part of the police. The use of force is thus self perpetuating. 2 Despite the warning, the LAPD contributed to gang activity and violence in the following decades by waging an aggressive campaign of arrest and removal of youth of color from the streets.

Journal of Urban History, 2020

After his election in 1973, Los Angeles's first African American mayor, Tom Bradley, worked to im... more After his election in 1973, Los Angeles's first African American mayor, Tom Bradley, worked to implement reforms that would increase civilian oversight and accountability of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Ensuring procedural fairness that treated all residents equally, Bradley and other liberals believed, would lead to reductions in police harassment, abuse, and shootings. Placing their faith in the power of government to effectively manage the police allowed liberals to pledge both strong support for tough law enforcement and propose police reforms. This liberal law-and-order, however, did not result in similar police reforms, such as civilian review, pursued in other Democratic-run cities. No event demonstrated this limitation of Bradley's liberal law-and-order approach to police reform as the Rodney King beating and the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. Rather than demonstrating the failure of liberal reform, Los Angeles shows how liberal law-and-order facilitated the expansion of police authority after the 1960s.

Journal of Urban History, 2018

Over the course of the 1970s, liberal and conservative officials in Los Angeles worked to reform ... more Over the course of the 1970s, liberal and conservative officials in Los Angeles worked to reform a juvenile justice system they believed to be too lenient on children and teenagers who committed crimes. They intended for diversion programs, vocational training, and rehabilitation measures to complement punitive approaches of surveillance, arrest, and incarceration. By posing rehabilitation as complementary to imprisonment, liberal officials contributed to the development of a dual system of juvenile justice. As a result, the carceral state extended beyond the formal criminal justice system and into a range of other institutions, such as schools and social welfare agencies. The two-tiered system, however, also drove the criminalization of black and Latino youth by focusing punishment on them. In contrast to white suburbanites, who were treated as status offenders, black and Latino kids and teenagers received juvenile criminal and court records and increasingly came into contact with an expanded juvenile justice system over the course of the 1970s.

Journal of Civil and Human Rights, 2016

This article explores the Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) and the resis- tance to police ab... more This article explores the Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) and the resis- tance to police abuse in Los Angeles during the 1970s. It argues that the use of force directed at social movements by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) after the 1965 Watts uprising did not destroy resistance but rather pro- vided the foundation for a new phase in the struggle against police violence. Evolving out of the repression of Black Power and Chicano movements, CAPA rejected the idea that the LAPD could be reformed from within. In order to fundamentally alter the relationship between residents and local criminal justice systems, CAPA demanded community control of the police. Activists worked to build a broad-based coalition to channel anger at police violence into an organized movement based on nonviolent protest, documentation of police abuse, redress through lawsuits, and political pressure in public hearings. By the 1980s, CAPA’s movement gained popular support from political of cials, middle-class residents, church leaders, and civil rights organizations. This coalition, however, sought only minor changes at the margins of the criminal justice system that did not meaningfully alter the balance of power between the community and the police. Opposition to police abuse was consistent over time, but its ideological and political grounding narrowed as demands for accountability and justice were routed into established processes and institutions. Although the anti-police-abuse coalition challenged law-and-order politics, its achievements were moderate compared to CAPA’s initial vision of community control of the police.

This article explores African American and Mexican American struggles for equal employment in Los... more This article explores African American and Mexican American struggles for equal employment in Los Angeles after 1965. It argues that activists and workers used the mechanisms set up by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to attack the barriers that restricted blacks and Mexican Americans to poor job prospects. It shows that imple- mentation of fair employment law was part of a dialectic between policymakers and regulatory officials, on one hand, and grass-roots individuals and civil rights organi- zations, on the other. The bureaucratic mechanisms created by Title VII shaped who would benefit from the implementation of the law. Moreover, blacks and Mexican Americans mixed ethnic power and civil rights frameworks to make the bureaucratic system more capacious and race-conscious, which challenged the intentions of the original legislation.

Public Scholarship by Max Felker-Kantor

Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, 2017

The Washington Post, 2021

History News Network, 2020

Oxford Bibliographies in Urban Studies, 2023

The Routledge History of Police Brutality in America, 2023

In the aftermath of the urban uprisings of the 1960s, African Americans pointed to the role of po... more In the aftermath of the urban uprisings of the 1960s, African Americans pointed to the role of police violence in sparking and fueling the moments of unrest. The police, Los Angeles civil rights lawyer Loren Miller explained after the 1965 Watts uprising, operated as an arm of the state that occupied Black neighborhoods and enforced a racially segregated and hierarchical social order. "When night falls in the ghetto," Miller observed, "nobody is left except the residents and the police officers who seem to the ghetto dwellers to be an army of occupation sent there to conserve a way of life that seems to enforce the code of the majority that insists on racial separatism." 1 Or, as James Baldwin explained in response to calls for "law and order" following the Harlem uprising of 1964, "Whose law, one is compelled to ask, and what order? There is a very good reason for the Negroes to hate the police in Harlem … their role in Harlem is simply to corral and control the citizens of the ghetto, and protect white business interests. They certainly do not protect the lives or property of Negroes." 2 If Miller and Baldwin pointed to the police as an occupying force that used violence to enforce a racialized "law and order," policymakers, government commissions, and the police themselves ignored the central role of the police as purveyors of violence and the police power as a central grievance motivating participants in urban rebellion. The Kerner report, released by Lyndon Johnson's National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in 1968, pointed out that a routine police action sparked nearly all the 1960s urban uprisings. But portraying the police as a mere spark missed how African Americans-those who were policed-had specific grievances with the daily practices of law enforcement and the use of the police power to maintain a racialized and hierarchical social order through a violent program of occupation and repression prior to, during, and after the uprisings. Because the Kerner report did not view the police as the linchpin upholding racial order and, by implication, the uprisings as a protest against that racial order and its enforcers, the commission's analysis of urban unrest and solutions to it focused on procedural reforms to change officer behavior and weed out "bad apples." It did not question the police power, the structure of the police, or the significance of state violence carried out by the police in the uprisings. 3 As Miller and Baldwin suggested, the problem was rooted in how the police power was bound up in perpetuating white supremacy. To fully understand the meaning of the urban uprisings of the 1960s, as a result, requires taking police violence and power in cities and African American life seriously. 4 Investigations into the causes of the urban uprisings emerged as soon as they ended. 5 Following studies by sociologists and social scientists, a generation of urban historians began to rethink the 1960s unrest in the context of the urban crisis and the structural changes in the political economy of

Journal of Urban History, 2022

The DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program simultaneously changed both the police and sch... more The DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program simultaneously changed both the police and schools through the development of what this article calls a school-police nexus, a framing that explains the reciprocal relationship between the police and schools. By enabling officers to assert expertise in the realm of drug education, DARE not only made the police a regular presence in schools but aimed to transform the image of the police officer from a threatening enemy to a friend and mentor. More broadly, DARE intended to make the police a trusted institution in American cities amid the aggressive policing of the drug war. In turn, DARE transformed schools through their educative and disciplinary roles. Using police officers as teachers enabled DARE to coopt the educative function of schools to advance the police mission by other means. Yet, DARE officers did not shed their law-and-order message when they entered the classroom, reinforcing the carceral approach to the drug war.

Modern American History, 2022

In the fall of 1983, the Los Angeles Police Department sent police officers into elementary schoo... more In the fall of 1983, the Los Angeles Police Department sent police officers into elementary schools to teach the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) Program. Within a decade DARE had become the nation's preeminent antidrug education program. Yet the DARE program accomplished much more than teaching kids to resist drugs. DARE shifted the responsibility of preventing drug use from social and public-health policy to local, police-led, educative projects that taught personal responsibility, the value of morally strengthened families, and respect for the authority of the police. By stressing the consequences of poor behavior and demanding respect for law and order, DARE attempted to cultivate popular consent for policies that divorced drug use from social and economic conditions. DARE's approach helped justify reductions in social welfare spending and the expansion of policing and incarceration during the 1980s and 1990s. I would like to thank Simon Balto, Brent Cebul, Anne Gray Fischer, and Paul Renfro for their comments, as well as the anonymous reviewers. Will Connolly provided crucial research assistance in the development of this article.

Boom California, 2018

While deportations of undocumented immigrants declined slightly in the final years of the Obama a... more While deportations of undocumented immigrants declined slightly in the final years of the Obama administration after a decade of record-high removals, recent federal initiatives have aimed to crack down on unauthorized immigration and expand the authority of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).[1] Zero tolerance policies targeting immigrants and refugees seeking asylum on the U.S.-Mexico border have resulted in high rates of removal and family separation.[2] U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has also demanded the cooperation of municipal police departments in arresting and turning over undocumented immigrants to ICE for detention and deportation. Yet, a number of cities and police departments, including the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), have said they will not cooperate with ICE.[3] Such opposition to federal directives has raised significant questions about the role of local police departments and officers in the enforcement of federal immigration law. However, these debates are not new. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, in fact, the LAPD both cooperated with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to target undocumented immigrants and also resisted enforcing federal immigration law. In the process, police officers often played an important role in the policing of immigrants, the construction of racialized categories of illegality, and in defining the boundaries of citizenship.

Beyond Alliances: The Jewish Role in Reshaping the Racial Landscape of Southern California, 2012

Angeles-based Jewish labor organizer and civil rights activist, ... • Max Mont, developed a commi... more Angeles-based Jewish labor organizer and civil rights activist, ... • Max Mont, developed a commitment to social justice at an early age. "When I was six years old," Mont recalled in 1987, "I was trying to make speeches in our living room about the 'oppressed people'" ("Max Mont, 'Labor Pioneer'"). While Mont remembered his concern for the oppressed as part of his childhood identity, his work as an organizer began in earnest on the floors of machine shops and union halls during the 1930s and 1940s in and around New York City. Still, while Mont's lifelong commitment to social justice and his dedication to the fight for civil rights causes were both forged in the northeast during the depression, it was in Los Angeles after World War II that he made his greatest impact on the advancement of racial and ethnic equality. California's racial demography and Democratic politics reshaped and broadened Mont's definition of civil rights and social justice from one based in the struggle for workers' rights to equal opportunity for all. Yet it must also be noted that his interactions with the wider array of ethnicities in Southern California-Mexican-Americans, Japanese-Americans as well as African-Americans-often led to tensions and conflicts. If Mont always maintained a desire to advance the interests of "oppressed people," his vision and theirs did not always prove to be entirely the same. Born in 1917 in New York City, Max Mont moved to Los Angeles in 1949. During his four decades in Los Angeles, he worked for a number of Southern California branches of national Jewish organizations, including the 111 112 Max Felker-Ktmtor American Jewish Committee (AJC), 1 the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC), and the Jewish Community Relations Conference of Los Angeles (CRC). He was also a key organizer for California civil rights organizations and was active in the Los Angeles labor movement (Mont, "Resume," 1965; "Obituary"). Mont's work with Jewish organizations and organized labor demonstrates the intertwined, multifaceted, and mutually reinforcing nature of his identity as a Jew, a liberal and an activist for equal rights. Although his involvement in Jewish organizations oriented toward civil rights issues pushed Mont into progressive political circles, his background in the labor movement and experience during the Great Depression was an equally important-and formative-source of his commitment to social justice. His work with Jewish organizations, labor, and civil rights groups nurtured a willingness to fight for social justice on multiple fronts and to cooperate with various racial and ethnic groups in Southern California and the Los Angeles area. Yet, by the same token, a close look at Mont's broad-based activism also reveals conflicts among racial groups in the struggle for social justice in California. By exploring Mont's involvement with a variety of labor and civil rights struggles in Los Angeles during the post-World War II period, our aim is to demonstrate Mont's commitment to activism but also closely considers the limits to interracial organizing. Fighting Many Battles 113 and civil rights activity based on mutual interest and liberal anti-communism of the Cold War (3-16). 2 Groups such as the Jewish Community Relations Conference worked alongside Mexican-Americans, African-Americans, and Japanese-Americans to promote civil rights initiatives throughout the 1950s. Max Mont's social democratic and anti-communist leanings reflected this commitment to liberal civil rights activism that bridged the struggles of the 1930s with those of the 1960s. Mont's willingness to work with other groups was not only an aspect of his Jewish identity and his labor organizing ability; it was a product of both. Together they contributed to Mont's willingness to work across racial and ethnic boundaries. As noted above, Mont's commitment to labor developed out of his experience during the Depression and began through his work as a machinist and union organizer during World War II. Throughout his organizing career he remained concerned with issues relating to the exploitation of labor. After moving to Los Angeles, for example, Mont aided unionization efforts of Los Angeles-area office and professional workers, helped organize the Emergency Committee to Aid Farm Workers (ECAF) during the 1960s, and served as a representative for the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. He also became involved in issues beyond labor rights and union organizing. He was active in civil rights causes with the California Committee for Fair Practices, the struggle for fair housing, and the campaign against Proposition 14, a 1964 antifair housing ballot initiative pushed by the California Realtors Association in response to the Rumford Fair Housing Act. At times, however, Mont's broadbased liberal activism conflicted with Los Angeles civil rights organizations, activists, and communities of color. Mont's work with other racial and ethnic groups in the battle against Proposition 14 revealed the different meanings that the "No on Proposition 14" campaign had for different groups as well as organizational tensions that developed amid the effort to create a broad based interracial coalition. While Mont attempted to make the Californians Against Proposition 14 (CAP 14) campaign an interracial one by reaching out to organized civil rights groups such as the NAACP and the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA), other groups saw Mont and CAP 14 as paternalistic, controlling, and unwilling to fully support race and ethnic-based organizations in their efforts to mobilize their communities against the proposition. Mont developed a broad social justice agenda and willingness to work across racial and ethnic groups. What I intend to make clear in this study is that Mont's commitment to interracial organizing and cooperation developed out of his experience working in labor and Jewish community organizations.

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, 2022

The relationship between policing and crime in American history has been tenuous at best. In fact... more The relationship between policing and crime in American history has been tenuous at best. In fact, policing and crime are imperfectly correlated. Crime is understood as a socially constructed category that varies over time and space. Crime in the American city was produced by the actions of police officers on the street and the laws passed by policymakers that made particular behaviors, often ones associated with minoritized people, into something called "crime." Police create a statistical narrative about crime through the behaviors and activities they choose to target as "crime." As a result, policing the American city has functionally reinforced the nation's dominant racial and gender hierarchies as much as (or more so) than it has served to ensure public safety or reduce crime. Policing and the production of crime in the American city has been broadly shaped by three interrelated historical processes: racism, xenophobia, and capitalism. As part of these processes, policing took many forms across space and time. From origins in the slave patrols in the South, settler colonial campaigns of elimination in the West, and efforts to put down striking workers in the urban North, the police evolved into the modern, professional forces familiar to many Americans in the early 21st century. The police, quite simply, operated to uphold a status quo based on unequal and hierarchical racial, ethnic, and economic orders. Tracing the history of policing and crime from the colonial era to the present demonstrates the ways that policing has evolved through a dialectic of crisis and reform. Moments of protest and unrest routinely exposed the ways policing was corrupt, violent, and brutal, and did little to reduce crime in American cities. In turn, calls for reform produced "new" forms of policing (what was often referred to as professionalization in the early and mid-20th century and community policing in the 21st). But these reforms did not address the fundamental role or power of police in society. Rather, these reforms often expanded it, producing new crises, new protests, and still more "reforms," in a seemingly endless feedback loop. From the vantage point of the 21st century, this evolution demonstrates the inability of reform or professionalization to address the fundamental role of police in American society. In short, it is a history that demands a rethinking of the relationship between policing and crime, the social function of the police, and how to achieve public safety in American cities.

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, 2022

Latinx criminality was a product of racialized policing and policies that constructed various Lat... more Latinx criminality was a product of racialized policing and policies that constructed various Latinx groups as foreign threats over the course of American history. Crime was not an objective category but one produced by policing, vigilantism, border enforcement, and immigration policy, all of which both relied on and produced dominant

Journal of Urban History, 2018

Testifying at congressional hearings on juvenile delinquency in 1974, Los Angeles Police Departme... more Testifying at congressional hearings on juvenile delinquency in 1974, Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Chief of Police Ed Davis described a new type of violent behavior among African American youth. There was, according to Davis, a "current, new phenomenon of killing someone you have never seen before on the street, by a juvenile." Responsibility for such wanton violence and crime, according to Davis, rested with antisocial black youth gang members who were "infecting" innocent children into a life of crime. Although a group of twenty young black and Latino gang leaders told politicians that investing in social and employment programs would be an effective route to reducing youth violence and crime, Davis emphasized the need for "an effective Criminal Justice System." 1 Such views reinforced beliefs that youth violence and gang activity had to be met with punitive measures and aggressive policing. Rising youth violence in the 1970s and 1980s, which police and political officials defined as a problem of gangs, occurred within the context of a powerful policing apparatus operating in inner-city neighborhoods of color. The expansion of police power, law enforcement officials recognized, played a significant role in fueling opposition to the police and youth violence after the 1960s. Chief Davis advised his captain school in 1969: In areas where there has been a pattern of using strong physical force to achieve police objectives, a concurrent pattern of resistance develops within the individual or group. .. and the subsequent necessity for resorting to force on the part of the police. The use of force is thus self perpetuating. 2 Despite the warning, the LAPD contributed to gang activity and violence in the following decades by waging an aggressive campaign of arrest and removal of youth of color from the streets.

Journal of Urban History, 2020

After his election in 1973, Los Angeles's first African American mayor, Tom Bradley, worked to im... more After his election in 1973, Los Angeles's first African American mayor, Tom Bradley, worked to implement reforms that would increase civilian oversight and accountability of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Ensuring procedural fairness that treated all residents equally, Bradley and other liberals believed, would lead to reductions in police harassment, abuse, and shootings. Placing their faith in the power of government to effectively manage the police allowed liberals to pledge both strong support for tough law enforcement and propose police reforms. This liberal law-and-order, however, did not result in similar police reforms, such as civilian review, pursued in other Democratic-run cities. No event demonstrated this limitation of Bradley's liberal law-and-order approach to police reform as the Rodney King beating and the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. Rather than demonstrating the failure of liberal reform, Los Angeles shows how liberal law-and-order facilitated the expansion of police authority after the 1960s.

Journal of Urban History, 2018

Over the course of the 1970s, liberal and conservative officials in Los Angeles worked to reform ... more Over the course of the 1970s, liberal and conservative officials in Los Angeles worked to reform a juvenile justice system they believed to be too lenient on children and teenagers who committed crimes. They intended for diversion programs, vocational training, and rehabilitation measures to complement punitive approaches of surveillance, arrest, and incarceration. By posing rehabilitation as complementary to imprisonment, liberal officials contributed to the development of a dual system of juvenile justice. As a result, the carceral state extended beyond the formal criminal justice system and into a range of other institutions, such as schools and social welfare agencies. The two-tiered system, however, also drove the criminalization of black and Latino youth by focusing punishment on them. In contrast to white suburbanites, who were treated as status offenders, black and Latino kids and teenagers received juvenile criminal and court records and increasingly came into contact with an expanded juvenile justice system over the course of the 1970s.

Journal of Civil and Human Rights, 2016

This article explores the Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) and the resis- tance to police ab... more This article explores the Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) and the resis- tance to police abuse in Los Angeles during the 1970s. It argues that the use of force directed at social movements by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) after the 1965 Watts uprising did not destroy resistance but rather pro- vided the foundation for a new phase in the struggle against police violence. Evolving out of the repression of Black Power and Chicano movements, CAPA rejected the idea that the LAPD could be reformed from within. In order to fundamentally alter the relationship between residents and local criminal justice systems, CAPA demanded community control of the police. Activists worked to build a broad-based coalition to channel anger at police violence into an organized movement based on nonviolent protest, documentation of police abuse, redress through lawsuits, and political pressure in public hearings. By the 1980s, CAPA’s movement gained popular support from political of cials, middle-class residents, church leaders, and civil rights organizations. This coalition, however, sought only minor changes at the margins of the criminal justice system that did not meaningfully alter the balance of power between the community and the police. Opposition to police abuse was consistent over time, but its ideological and political grounding narrowed as demands for accountability and justice were routed into established processes and institutions. Although the anti-police-abuse coalition challenged law-and-order politics, its achievements were moderate compared to CAPA’s initial vision of community control of the police.

This article explores African American and Mexican American struggles for equal employment in Los... more This article explores African American and Mexican American struggles for equal employment in Los Angeles after 1965. It argues that activists and workers used the mechanisms set up by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to attack the barriers that restricted blacks and Mexican Americans to poor job prospects. It shows that imple- mentation of fair employment law was part of a dialectic between policymakers and regulatory officials, on one hand, and grass-roots individuals and civil rights organi- zations, on the other. The bureaucratic mechanisms created by Title VII shaped who would benefit from the implementation of the law. Moreover, blacks and Mexican Americans mixed ethnic power and civil rights frameworks to make the bureaucratic system more capacious and race-conscious, which challenged the intentions of the original legislation.