In Houston, as in the rest of the American South up until the 1950s, 
the police force reflected and enforced the segregation of the larger 
society. When the nation began to change in the 1950s and 1960s, 
this guardian of the status quo had to change, too.

    In this book, Dwight D. Watson traces how the Houston Police 
Department reacted to social, political, and institutional change over 
a fifty-year period—and specifically, how it responded to and in turn 
influenced racial change.

    Using police records as well as contemporary accounts, Watson 
astutely analyzes the escalating strains between the police and 
segments of the city's black population preceding the 1967 police 
riot at Texas Southern University and the 1971 violence that 
became known as the Dowling Street Shoot-out.

    By 1977, the events surrounding the beating and drowning of 
Jose Campos Torres while in police custody encouraged Houston's 
growing Mexican American community to unite with blacks in 
seeking to curb police autonomy and brutality.

    Watson's study illuminates not only the role of a southern police 
department in racial change but also the internal dynamics of 
change in an organization designed to protect the status quo.

_________________________________________________________

DWIGHT D. WATSON is an assistant professor of history at Texas 
State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of 
Houston. He has previously worked as a correctional counselor, a 
prison grievance officer, a county probation officer, and state parole 
officer.


Number 102: Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students, 
Texas A&M University


What people are saying about this book

“Watson chronicles the social, economic, and political background 
that made the HPD the bastion of obsolete values.  He shows that 
while the rest of the city slowly and inexorably changed, partly under 
federal mandate, and partly to meet its own economic and social 
needs, the department became more intractable, until it functioned 
as an autonomous duchy, subject to no control but its own.”
—Southwestern Historical Quarterly, April 2007

". . . should be required reading for anyone interested in the gradual 
transition of a southern Jim Crow society to one with greater guarantees 
of basic civil rights for all its citizens."—Texas Books in Review, Fall 
2006

"The author places the issue of race at center stage with other social 
and political developments in Houston and shows quite well how the 
changing race relations in Houston were just as important in the 
development of the HPD as technology, the migration of blacks from 
the rural areas of Texas to the cities, and the emergence of Houston 
as a major shipping and aerospace center in the Southwest."—W. 
Marvin Dulaney, author, Black Police in America