The Men of Mobtown

“Malka provides a significant contribution to the history of policing in the United States, pressing readers to consider uncomfortable truths.”—Journal of Southern History

“Turns the conventional wisdom about racial policing in the United States on its head. Far from being a grotesque, late twentieth-century distortion of American political principles, race-based disparities in arrests and incarceration, according to Malka, are expressions of core liberal values and emerged alongside assumptions about African American freedom. . . . This argument is original, important, and timely.” — Journal of Social History

“A remarkable book. . . . Malka’s major achievement is to force readers to consider how today’s racial disparities in policing and incarceration are rooted not only in the last fifty years, or in Jim Crow, but in liberal attempts at Reconstruction and the abolition of slavery.”—Joshua Clark Davis, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books

“Malka’s book lays the foundation for our contemporary understanding of how African Americans became the primary victims of police abuse and mass incarceration. He uses newspapers, court records, published reports, and a host of primary sources to support his argument that white supremacy was the driving force that shaped policing and criminal justice in nineteenth-century Baltimore.”—Journal of American History

“Malka has produced a forceful history, one that resonates with contemporary concerns over racialized policing routines and a carceral system that falls most heavily on people of color.”—American Historical Review

“In this absorbing history of policing in 19th century Baltimore, Adam Malka uses a close case study to fill out our understanding of the evolution of policing, vigilantism, and property in 19th century America.” — CrimeReads

“An innovative and closely argued study of race and status in antebellum Baltimore, The Men of Mobtown seeks to recover the connection between the rise of professional policing and the perpetuation of white men’s racial power.” — Richard Bell, University of Maryland

“The Men of Mobtown tells a new and significant story of policing, one that accounts both for the rise of men in uniforms and for the role that private citizens, often constituted as mobs, played in regulating life on the streets of a teeming port city. Malka demonstrates how white supremacy and racism provided a cover and a rationalization for the acts of men who aimed to marginalize, if not wholly suppress, the ambitions and the lives of black city dwellers.” — Martha S. Jones, Johns Hopkins University

“In this provocative history of policing in nineteenth-century Baltimore, Adam Malka demonstrates that the vexed relationship between African Americans and law enforcement is nothing new. Malka persuasively demonstrates that modern policing, never mind the prison industrial complex, was built on an older tradition of white male vigilantism disproportionately directed at African Americans. Men of Mobtown provides a much-needed historical perspective on contemporary racial injustice.”—Stephen Mihm, University of Georgia