Ford Evening Book Talk: Policing American Slavery

Beginning in the colonial era and growing through the American Revolution and the Southern plantation system, slaveholders’ violent police regime continued after Emancipation, through Reconstruction, to today. Moving across time, space, and place, White Power uncovers how slaveholders created their own white supremacist police and government to deny Black people rights, power, and humanity.

Legal historian Gautham Rao introduces us to laws that empowered white people to forcibly exercise their desired racial superiority over Black people, shows how they spread from the South throughout the nation, and traces the rebellions, fugitivity, activism, and legal systems that challenged them. Rao’s narrative includes slaveholders, lawmakers, and the Ku Klux Klan, dramatic escapes by runaway enslaved people, abolitionist activism in courtroom showdowns, and pitched battles between white paramilitaries and enslaved rebels. He offers a new interpretation of the history of policing in the US, centering the institution and legacy of slavery and speaking to the origins of today’s persistence of white vigilance, white supremacist militia groups, and white racist cops determined to maintain power over Black people by force. Equally determined, however, was Black Americans’ refusal to accept it.

Gautham Rao is a legal historian of early America and the United States and an associate professor of history at American University in Washington, DC. His first book, National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2016.

Rao is currently working on a book about the historical importance of the television show The West Wing. He is also beginning work on a new legal and constitutional history of the Confederate States of America.

Since 2017, he has served as Editor-in-Chief of Law & History Review, the leading scholarly journal of legal history. In 2025, he received the Craig Joyce Medal from the American Society for Legal History for meritorious service to the Society. Currently, Rao is Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Bibliography of Legal History. He previously served on the Advisory Council of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and is a founding member of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Historians’ Council on the Constitution.