Blog Post Title One

In the October 1974 edition of The Rag, a writer named “Annie” outlines the idea that drove Austin activism against police brutality throughout the 1970s: “What I think we ought to do is have each community control its police force. The different communities control the hiring and firing and disciplining of its officers.” Citizens in East Austin had been marching, planning, and testifying about police brutality in their community for years.(1) Annie’s belief that communities should control their own police forces as a means of counteracting police violence highlights that when it comes to police violence, space matters. Failing to understand the relationship between space and resistance to police brutality in Austin disregards the fact that policing centers on controlling how and in which spaces people operate, and it downplays the importance of the city’s history of brutality as context for its contemporary policing struggles. By reconsidering space, we open a new method for understanding the history of activism targeting police brutality and thus can better understand racial-spatial identity as a framework for challenging the use of policing to sustain racial hierarchy.

Understanding geography, land, and possession via space and place highlights the importance of this particular fight for social justice. As the continuation of pre-emancipation systems of racial oppression in the post-Reconstruction era became the background noise of our society, “White identity and white dominance over public space became naturalized” in the (not so) new post-slavery society.(2) Historians can challenge the naturalization of white dominance by uncovering the nuances of space and how people of color have fought to shape it. Political geographer Edward Soja defines space as not only geography but as a living entity:

Throughout our lives, we are enmeshed in efforts to shape the spaces in which we live while at the same time these established and evolving spaces are shaping our lives in many different ways. We are thus inescapably embedded in the geographies around us in much the same way as we are integral actors in social contexts and always involved in one way or another in the making of our individual biographies and collective histories.

Soja takes the common academic position that “space matters” a step further, arguing that by adopting this lens we are able to advance efforts for social justice.(3) Space goes hand-in-hand with its cousin: place. “Place is what gives a space meaning, ‘personality’ and a connection to a cultural or personal identity. It is the culturally ascribed meaning given to a space.”(4) Austin is a racially-charged space. Despite its reputation for progressivism, the city has a deep and troubling history of segregation. When the Austin City Council adopted the 1928 City Plan, the city forcibly relocated Black residents to the severely underserved East Austin area. This history informed East Austin activism in the 1970s and continues to play a significant role in Austin politics today.(5) By showing that demonstrations and proposals resisting brutality were meaningful specifically because of the spatial narratives they laid bare, we can better comprehend Austin’s geography of oppression regarding policing.

Anti-brutality resistance in 1970s Austin built on Texas’s history of violence perpetrated by law enforcement, a perceived uptick in police brutality, and the rise of the Chicano and Black power movements. From lynching to frontier violence to police brutality, Texas law enforcement agencies have consistently been instruments of racial oppression; in fact, modern police forces in the South evolved out of slave patrols.(6) In Austin, increased attention to a series of killings by police in the 1970s sparked protests in the city, especially in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement.(7) The growth of the Chicano and Black power movements, begun against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, primed community activists to protest police brutality. The ideologies of Black and Chicano power influenced the Brown Berets and the Black Citizens’ Task Force, two major activist organizations.(8) 

The intermingling of policing issues with the nationalist trends of the Chicano and Black power movements not only influenced the construction of the collective identity of the groups that resisted police brutality, but also of East Austin as a whole. Policing is fundamentally a spatial practice. Nikki Jones makes the argument that “routine policing is conscripted into the project of maintaining and reproducing spatial racism in urban settings,” a continuation of the United States’ “legacy of racial exclusion, spatial containment, and racially targeted policing.”(9) Police forces ensure that racial boundaries are kept, thus protecting White supremacy and White-dominated institutions. Austin is no exception to this; a piece in a 1971 issue of the countercultural Austin newspaper The Rag simply entitled “Police” concisely expressed the conventional wisdom popular at the time that police catered to the White establishment.(10) The realization that police officers served an elite White “them” could not exist without the development of a community consciousness of East Austin as a poor, Black, and Chicano “us.” A piece written about the 1974 killing of Teburcio Soto in The Rag expresses this palpable separation. It identifies the rampant inequality in resources and wealth between East and North Austin (at the time considered a wealthy, White part of the city) and frames the law as a mechanism through which space can be policed, an instrument created by rich white men from the North side to control poor communities of color on the East side. As policies made by elites oppressed East Austin, they fueled political placemaking. Residents responded to oppressive and unequal conditions generated by law, embedding such resistance in East Austin’s sense of place.

Within East Austin, the Chicano and Black power movements’ focus on land communicated a distinctive understanding of space among minority activist communities. Nowhere was this more evident than among the Brown Berets. The draft manifesto for the statewide organization of Berets, authored by the Austin chapter, best summarizes their official stance:

We have the right and ability to exist as [an] independent nation. We have our own culture, our language and our own geographic identity. We organize our Barrios to proclaim the right to our own soil; our own homeland.(11)

The Brown Berets saw the plight of Latino citizens as an extension of the still unresolved war for the control of territory in Texas. In this war, the Berets asserted, the police enforced colonial and capitalistic oppression. Thus, the Austin Berets adopted an anti-police state philosophy, claiming that policing was the most effective tool the current oppressive state used to keep marginalized people subjugated. That is, policing was designed to allow the rich few to “keep forceful control of the barrios.”(12) The fight against police brutality became a battle for spatial control between a wealthy White majority and an impoverished and oppressed Chicano nation that had been denied their rightful homeland and control over their own geographic communities. 

Similar ideas fueled the Black power movement. The idea of spatial occupation was crucial: “To the black community, White policemen represented nothing less than a hostile occupation army.”(13) Pamphlets found in the papers of Dr. John L. Warfield, a founder of the Austin Black Citizens’ Task Force and a pillar of Austin Black politics in the mid to late-19th century, identify the theft of land as foundational to current racial inequality: 

Historically we have been cheated of land in this country. We worked the land; we made others rich…there has been a systematic attempt to deprive black people of the little land they have owned through the years…There are some of us who assert that the total land mass and resources of this country must be administered under revolutionary black leadership in order to prevent the recurrence of racism and exploitation.(14) 

Here, racial oppression and current inequality is in large part the result of an exploitative system that steals land from Black people in order to enrich an elite class. According to the pamphlet, this could only be rectified by Black citizens winning the battle for spatial control of national land resources. The space-focused identity this philosophy generated for Black people became an organizing principle for resistance. 

The main parallel between the philosophies of the Austin Black and Chicano power movements discussed above is the understanding of racial and ethnic neighborhoods –“barrios” and “ghettos”–as links to a larger ethnonational community and potent hubs for resistance.(15) Here again, placemaking and identity worked together: as activists organized in their neighborhoods, the meanings they ascribed to those areas added to their political identity. The battle against police brutality in Austin was thus necessarily connected to a minority political identity that equates the possession and control of space with liberation.
Police brutality and protest went hand-in-hand in Austin and nearly always had spatial dimensions. In one of the most striking anti-brutality protests of the early 1970s, on October 12, 1974, a diverse group of Austinites of every race and age met at the Centro Chicano (an organizing hub and community center run by the Brown Berets) and marched to the police station. Demonstrators sat in the parking lot opposite the station, forcing a reckoning between the two different sides of the street (police and protestors).(16) This confrontation was a breathtaking metaphor for both residential segregation and the divide between the police and the people. Since the police had ignored protestors’ concerns, the protestors occupied the police’s physical domain, much like how the police occupied theirs. By using the station as a stage for protest, the protestors launched an open challenge to the White supremacist power structure by co-opting a site of oppression as a potent site of resistance and change. After making speeches, protestors decided to go speak with Austin Mayor Roy Butler at his home. This decision signifies a profound understanding of spatial dynamics.  The protestors made the connection between police and the White, affluent, and oppressive power that policing upholds by making the rhetorical and then the physical shift from the police station to the affluent mayor’s home, a symbol of the Austin establishment. Just like police brutality directly affected the homes of protestors, so too would it affect Butler’s that Saturday. After a negotiation with Butler, who was accompanied by Police Chief Miles of the APD, the demonstrators secured a win: Butler would attend the next community meeting at the Centro Chicano on the East side, an instance of the elite establishment engaging with protestors in a place controlled by East Austin activists of color.(17) 

Protests often became confrontational, with demonstrators consciously inserting themselves into the heavily policed domains of (White, affluent) power. Often, though, the police invaded East Austin spaces. For years, the East Austin community protested the Austin Boat Club’s drag boat races at Town Lake. The influx of spectators into East Austin increased noise levels and created significant disruptions for residents. Many residents also worried that the disruption could contribute to low property values and allow predatory developers to buy out residents, yet another example of how activism in the 1970s was framed as a battle over land and control.(18) In 1977, when protestors blocked the entrances to the race and refused to leave the streets, the police arrested demonstrators, who reported multiple incidents of police violence. These protests over the usage of community resources and access to this urban space signify the community’s effort to reclaim and restrict the spaces in which they lived.(19) In 1978, at a meeting between police and community members representing various activist organizations, Mexican-American citizens asked for fewer police officers (and officers chosen specifically for their sensitivity to Mexican-American concerns) and the presence of the police chief, Frank Dyson, at the races. Community members claimed that these provisions would allow demonstrators to “police themselves,” thus subjecting them to less control and consequently increased safety in the areas where they demonstrated.(20) 

Anti-brutality protest came directly from the community in East Austin, an area which itself became a symbol of resistance as an oppressed, poor community of color. Outside of physical protest, citizens made policy demands to address the prevalence of police brutality in their community. Their demands emphasized the community’s desire for greater say in policing policies including input in hiring and firing decisions to remove racist and dangerous officers and improved training programs to ensure safety and justice. Protestors demanded that several officers who had committed murder or other brutality be fired. (The police department had not imposed appropriate consequences on these officers or, in many cases, any consequences at all.) When police officers murdered Gril Couch and Vincent Trujillo in 1979, the community protested the fact that “nothing [was] done about it.” There is evidence that protestors tried to prevent violence in part by demanding known bigots be removed from the force. Calls for removal of the Austin Chief of Police also persisted throughout the decade and across the service of multiple successive chiefs. Activists alleged that the Police Association’s influence over the selection of police chiefs prevented reform from happening and demanded that the chief be elected, which would make the head of policing in Austin answerable to the people rather than to the powerful Police Association.(21) Electing the chief of police presented a viable solution because there is a spatially specific aspect to the democratic process—the principles of democracy enable a whole area to exert control over themselves; this is what the Berets advocated for in their demands for an elected police chief.

Throughout the 1970s, one of the major battles fought over police brutality was that of community control, defined as “the idea that local residents should exercise power over services like the police, infrastructure, and schools.”(22) There are explicit and subtle nods to community control throughout resistance to police brutality in Austin. Since the spatial-political-racial identity discussed in a previous section is rooted in the control of one’s own land, advocacy involving this identity naturally flowed into support for community control: community control is spatial control. The Austin Brown Berets called for a statewide commitment to community control in 1980, defining the concept as having “control of our land, resources, and institutions.”(23) The fight over policing policy in 1970s Austin emphasized installing mechanisms that would allow citizens, particularly citizens of color, greater input into policing practices and the power to hold police accountable. Activists made several proposals of this sort, but the institutionalization of police oversight forced activists to negotiate policing in White-controlled spaces allied with police interests, curtailing genuine community control—a consequence that continues to this day.(24)

Part of community control is oversight, and the Brown Berets were a leading force in petitioning Austin City Council for the establishment of an oversight entity. One of the early iterations of a proposal for a review board appears in a Beret letter to City Council in July 1974 (by which time police had killed a shocking five Chicano citizens from East Austin since 1970), which asked for “an independent, investigatory body to handle alleged cases of police brutality” and listed several Mexican-American organizations supporting the proposal. At the time, the City had proposed using the Civil Service Commission to investigate brutality cases, a suggestion that community activists wholeheartedly rejected, instead demanding independent oversight.(25)

Even before listing demands, the 1974 letter takes on a spatial overtone by claiming that the “Demands [were] submitted by the Brown Berets on behalf of the Community.”(26) The Community is an active spatial entity, a living and breathing embodiment of the intersection of social positionality and a consciousness of place. In one of the most overt requests for community control in the document, the Berets asked that officers police the areas where they lived.(27) This is significant because it exemplifies how place and community could have been used to positively influence policing by increasing the personal connection and contextual understanding between the police and the areas they patrol; had these demands succeeded, neighborhood identities could have become a tool for better policing practices.

The city had a different course of action in mind: using or establishing city entities that would work with citizens to review policing (as opposed to independent entities controlled by the community). Again, activists responded by demanding independent oversight, claiming that this was the only way there could be a true check on police power. A later proposal, circulated in 1979 by the East Austin Minority Coalition in the wake of the murders of Gril Couch and Vincent Trujillo by police (reproduced in Figure 2), echoes this sentiment:

It is a fact that the East Austin Minority Coalition OPPOSES the Minority Liaison Position created by Chief Dyson because we know it is the Police Association's and Chief Dyson’s way of detouring the community from a truly effective method of stopping police brutality.

The review board that the East Austin Minority Coalition leaflet called for would have consisted of elected members from the communities affected by brutality, i.e. “Chicano and Black citizens of the brutalized communities.”(28) Giving thirteen democratically-elected individuals broad power to investigate, subpoena, and change policing policy in the communities that they live in and were elected by was a bona fide example of  anti-brutality activists’ efforts to reclaim institutional power over their spaces by establishing community control over police oversight.(29) Of course, police and city officials did not accede to these demands, instead proposing largely “toothless” solutions.(30) The police department established a Police Advisory Council, on which eleven Mexican-American members served in 1976.(31) Similarly to the Minority Liaison Position, the advisory board skirted the issue of brutality, instead stating that its goals were to garner community input on crime prevention, department effectiveness, and community relations. In fact, at the board’s August 24, 1976 session, the oft-protested police chief Frank Dyson clarified that the “council would not become involved with individual complaints,” which were to be given to Dyson to investigate.(32) (This was not very promising, since activists had charged Dyson with being in the pocket of the anti-reform Police Association.)(33) Demands for an independent review board persisted into the 1980s with little success.(34)

The regulation of policing was not just an issue of community control; the internal structure of regulatory bodies reflected racial-spatial hierarchies. The Minority Liaison Position and the Police Advisory Board were both police-controlled entities that forced activists to, instead of exercising control and oversight on their own communities’ terms, step into White-dominated spaces and offer feedback from positions that were not imbued with any real power, thus reproducing very the White police officer-citizen of color power imbalance being protested. In essence, by controlling the institutions through which activists of color would have been able to voice resistance to brutality, the White APD powers policed the effectiveness and content of the change that anti-brutality activists hoped to achieve by working through institutional channels. 

Spatial analysis of resistance to police brutality reveals striking truths. First, the identities of activists resisting brutality came about from Black and Chicano nationalist understandings of homeland, control, and nationalism as well as East Austin’s low sociopolitical position. Second, demonstration was deeply connected to location and geographies of privilege. Third, policy proposals designed to give community control of police oversight to minorities in East Austin were denied in favor of ineffective institutions in which activists could be controlled through White-dominated institutional space. These revelations not only provide clarification on the history of resistance to police brutality in Austin but also empower contemporary protest relying on spatial-racial identity, place, and the demand for community control over police. This paper does not address all the gaps in the literature about police brutality in Austin in this period. However, by making an initial foray into the spatiality of Austin’s anti-brutality movement, this project opens a conversation that will serve as a foundation for future research, with a view to uplifting histories of resistance and enabling contemporary activists, Austinites, and scholars to locate themselves on Austin’s unique map of oppression, identity, and protest and continue the fight for change.

Notes

1. ANNIE, “Police Brutality in East Austin,” The Rag, October 14, 1974, 3.

2. Martha Norkunas, “Narrating the Racialization of Space in Austin, Texas and Nashville, Tennessee,” Colloquia Humanistica (2015): 12.

3. Edward Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 71.

4. Madeleine Fink, “Everyday Anthropology: Space vs. Place,”  The Cultural Courier, February 22, 2019, https://theculturalcourier.home.blog/2019/02/22/everyday-anthropology-space-vs-place/.

5. Jene Shepherd, “Looking Back to Look Forward: The 1928 Master Plan,” United Way Austin, March 30, 2021, https://www.unitedwayaustin.org/looking-back-to-look-forward-the-1928-master-plan/.

6. “Racial Terror and Reconstruction: A State Snapshot,” in Reconstruction in America: Racial Violence after the Civil War, 1865-1876,  Equal Justice Initiative. https://eji.org/report/reconstruction-in-america/; Monica Muñoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018); Julissa Arce, “It’s Long Past Time We Recognized All the Latinos Killed at the Hands of Police,” Time, July 21, 2020, https://time.com/5869568/latinos-police-violence/.

7. Brent Campney, “The Most Turbulent and Traumatic Years in Recent Mexican-American History: Police Violence and the Civil Rights Struggle in 1970s Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 122, no. 1 (2018), 34. 

8. Austin History Center, “The Black Citizens’ Task Force” [Facebook post], February 15, 2020, https://www.face book.com/AustinHistoryCenter/posts/the-black-citizens-task-force-bctf-was-a-grassroots-political-organization-found/3589452604430223/; Abstract, Activism and the Brown Berets of Austin Project Recordings and Digital Images, Austin History Center, Austin, TX, https://txarchives.org/aushc/finding_aids/00702.xml.

9. Nikki Jones et. al. “‘Other than the Projects, You Stay Professional’: ‘Colorblind’ Cops and the Enactment of Spatial Racism in Routine Policing,” City & Community 22, no. 1 (2023): 3.

10. S. Kelly, “Police,” The Rag, December 13, 1971, 3.

11. Draft Brown Beret Manifesto, January 1980, Box 1, Folder 1, David Montejano Papers, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX.

12. Draft Brown Beret Manifesto, January 1980, Box 1, Folder 1, David Montejano Papers, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX.

13. Hawkins and Thomas, “White Policing of Black Populations,” 65.

14. Control, Conflict, and Change, Box 8, Folder 1, John Warfield Papers, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX.

15. Draft Brown Beret Manifesto, David Montejano Papers; Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party, John Warfield Papers.

16. ANNIE, “Police Brutality in East Austin,” 2019.

17. ANNIE, “Police Brutality in East Austin,” 2019.

18. Michael Barnes, “Video Explains Austin’s Heated 1970s Protests Against Drag Boat Racing,” Austin-American Statesman, last modified September 25, 2018, https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2017/06/06/video -explains-austins-heated-1970s-protests-against-drag-boat-racing/10094710007/.

19. Mike Cox and Guillermo Garcia, “Protest at Boat Races,” April 23, 1978, Austin-American Statesman Archive, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

20. Ronald Powell, “Lawmen, Chicanos, or both?” June 2, 1978, Austin-American Statesman Archive, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

21. It Is a Fact Leaflet, Box 1, Folder 7, David Montejano Papers, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX.

22. K. Sabeel Rahman and Jocelyn Simonson, “The Institutional Design of Community Control,” California Law Review 108 (2020): 679.

23. Draft Brown Beret Manifesto, David Montejano Papers.

24. Matt Largey, “Thousands Rally In Austin for Economic Justice and an End to Police Violence,” KUT 90.5, June 8, 2020, https://www.kut.org/austin/2020-06-08/thousands-rally-in-austin-for-economic-justice-and-an-end-to- police-violence.

25. Letter to City Councilmen, July 11, 1974, Box 1, Folder 7, David Montejano Papers, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX.

26. Letter to City Councilmen, David Montejano Papers.

27. Letter to City Councilmen, David Montejano Papers.

28. Letter to City Councilmen, David Montejano Papers.

29. It Is a Fact Leaflet, David Montejano Papers.

30. It Is a Fact Leaflet, David Montejano Papers.

31. List of Advisory Council Members, September 9, 1967, Box 8, Police Advisory Council Folder, Martha Cotera Papers, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX; Police Advisory Council Minutes, August 24, 1976, Box 8, Police Advisory Council Folder, Martha Cotera Papers, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX.

32. Police Advisory Council Minutes, Martha Cotera Papers.

33. It Is a Fact Leaflet, David Montejano Papers.

34. Draft Brown Beret Manifesto, David Montejano Papers.