Linda Patero
The fact that the American police had a precedent as a slave patrol team is often referred to as evidence that the issue of racism was ingrained in this force.
Anti-racist protests erupted across the US since the end of last month after black George George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis.
A picture of a patrol force examining slave travel documents in southern America in the 19th century Photo: Corbis
In the southern states of the United States, police originated from the slave patrol, white volunteer teams tracked and captured the slaves who had escaped, suppressed the slave revolt and
Slave patrols were established in South Carolina in the early 1700s, then appeared elsewhere, were legalized through the Abandoned Slave Law, requiring all escaped slaves to be returned.
The slave patrol team can enter anyone's home, regardless of race or ethnicity, if they suspect that they are protecting the escaped slaves.
The slave patrols were not built to ensure public safety but to protect the wealth of whites, Seth Soughton, a professor at South Carolina Law University, once a police officer in Tallahassee,
Slavery was abolished in 1865 by the 13th Amendment at the end of the American Civil War.
Amendment No. 14, adopted in 1868, provided that former slaves were equal to others before the law, making the "code of color" illegal.
Police were deployed to secure a curfew in New York earlier this month Photo: AP
This law institutionalizes economic, educational and social discrimination for African Americans, separating public schools, public places, public transportation, restrooms, restaurants and drinking water between
During this period, "lynch-type executions" (the mass murder they thought were guilty without trial) were very common among African-Americans and the perpetrators were not punished.
The justice system does not hold the police responsible for failing to intervene to save the murdered blacks, nor for their own violent behavior.
One of the violent events during this period was the Tulsa ethnic massacre of 1921. White mobs attacked black people after a 19-year-old black leather shoe shipper was accused of assaulting white girls 17
After World War II and the rise of the civil rights movement, Jim Crow was terminated in 1964, when the Civil Rights Act was passed.
"People often look at contemporary issues without understanding that all that is happening is a continuation of 400 years of injustice," Cobbina said.
