The Color of the Third Degree

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The book reveals the overlooked history of police torture in the Jim Crow South, highlighting how it became a tool of racial oppression as public lynchings declined. Silvan Niedermeier utilizes neglected archival sources to illustrate how white law officers coerced confessions from black suspects to maintain white supremacy. It also chronicles the resistance from black citizens and the NAACP, who sought to expose these abuses through activism and legal challenges, yet police torture persisted as a significant method of racial control well into the late twentieth century.