As Black leaders pushed for ‘community control of police’ 50 years ago, one activist cop was assigned to patrol an alley

Spring of 1973 was a busy season for Renault Robinson, who spoke at a conference on “Community Control of Police” and, not incidentally, walked a beat in the alley behind Chicago’s police headquarters in the South Loop.

“This is retaliation,” Robinson told a Tribune reporter about his assignment. “No one had this job before me.”

Robinson, who headed the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League, had made a stink about five off-duty cops who beat a Black man and his companion outside a bar at 56 S. Wabash Ave. Trying to escape, the man was shot in the buttocks.

A rookie cop was suspended; the other four weren’t given so much as a slap on the wrist. His protest was enough to put Robinson on bad paper with the department’s brass, as well as with some fellow officers.

They had taken a vow of silence: A cop doesn’t rat on a cop.

It was also beyond the pale to participate in a two-day meeting at the University of Illinois Circle Campus convened by the Black Panther Party, where comedian Dick Gregory recalled the sketchy cops of his youth in St. Louis:

“At 6 years old I saw the cop … standing on the corner laughing and joking with the pimps,” he said. “I’m 41 years old, and I hear white folks in America saying to Black folks, ‘Why don’t you have respect for your local police?’ “

That kind of talk was to be expected from a show-business celebrity. Or from Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist who came from Mississippi for the conference.

The Black Panthers organized the meeting to confront police brutality, and half a century later, the call for Community Control of Police looks like the ancestor of the Black Lives Matter movement.

But why would a Chicago cop attend? The one thing his supporters and detractors agreed upon was that Robinson, who died July 8, was an unusual cop.

His superiors thought a beat under the alley ‘L’ at 11th Street nicely matched the attitude he brought to the job.

“Robinson thinks he can run the department,” said 1st District Cmdr. Paul McLaughlin, “that he can get the press behind him so he doesn’t have to follow the rules.”

Robinson sampled the Black community’s image of cops early on. He was working in plainclothes when a boy, running down a West Side street, crashed into him. As Robinson picked him up, he screamed; “Let go, the pig is after me!”

“It’s OK, I’m a policeman,” Robinson said.

“I thought you was a brother!” the boy shouted in disbelief as he resumed running.

Once Robinson became president of the fledgling Afro-American Patrolmen’s League, he made headlines and was subjected to disciplinary actions in regular succession.

When he was charged with drunken driving in 1969, he said the cops tailed him all day before giving him a Breathalyzer test. It read .050. A state evidence technician testified that the threshold of intoxication was .10, the Tribune reported.

In 1970, he was suspended for disobeying an order, insubordination, incompetence, inefficiency and failure to report an anticipated absence from duty.

The next year, he was arrested while distributing leaflets in the Kensington District police station alleging discrimination against Black police officers. In 1972, he asked the feds to stop funding the CPD until the department stopped “its racial discrimination policies” in hiring, discipline and other areas. The Afro-American Patrolmen’s League was joined by the U.S. Justice Department in suing the department over discrimination.

The department’s response to Robinson’s leadership of the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League was one example of that discrimination. In 1975, Robinson told the Tribune that his annual efficiency rating dropped from 98.8 on a scale of 100 as a member of the elite vice squad during his early years on the force, to 15 by the time he was assigned to guard the alley behind police headquarters.

By then, the Tribune had produced a series examining the basis of his crusade, “Chicago’s Troubled Police.”

“Brutality is probably the most serious charge that can be levied against a police officer. It is also probably the most difficult to prove,” the Tribune wrote on May 11, 1972. “Yet the issue of police brutality is one of the key elements in the current barrage of criticism against the Chicago Police Department.”

Rep. Ralph Metcalfe, a Machine stalwart, was on the verge of breaking with Mayor Richard J. Daley on the police issue. Daley had limited tolerance for second-guessing the police, and Black politicians were expected to follow suit. But that had become problematic. Robinson’s saga resonated with African Americans, as was witnessed by a column in the Chicago Defender.

“We the people must support Rep. Metcalfe and others,” a minister wrote. “Know it my brother! Feel it my sister! Day is breaking!”

Metcalfe heard similar voices. “Not just Blacks are coming to our cause,” he said at an Urban League meeting in May 1972. “White people are seeing the indignities that Black people are suffering and they too are coming to our aid.”

The Tribune’s series revealed that police brutality wasn’t confined to Black neighborhoods. Residents of middle-class neighborhoods were also vulnerable.

Harriet Bauman was dragged out of her Rogers Park home by Sgt. Edward Flynn, who was checking out a report that her dog had bitten a process server.

As she was explaining the pet wasn’t vicious, he cuffed her and muscled her down the stairs, cursing all the while and calling her a whore. Horrified neighbors verified her story. But the Police Department’s internal affairs division stamped Bauman’s complaint unfounded. One witness said she struggled with the officer, which in addition to the officer’s denials of some of the allegations was apparently enough.

That sort of experience was just a fact of life in Bronzeville and other Black neighborhoods. The Defender ran a column of advice from the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League for people who wrote in to say they had been victims of police brutality.

“This is a typical situation that happens hundreds and hundreds of times a week to Black people,” began the response to a 1969 letter from a man who said cops had rousted him out of bed in the middle of the night, then beaten and handcuffed him.

Reports like that gave the 1,000 attendees a lot to talk about during the 1973 Control of Police Conference. Yet any payoff came in extremely slow motion.

Historical turning points aren’t reached in seminar rooms. Robinson and his superiors’ standoff continued.

The department suspended Robinson without pay. Testifying before a judge investigating cops’ racism, he was told, violated a rule against disrespecting the department. The League ran out money and had to downsize its headquarters and staff it with volunteers.

A bitter note had occasionally appeared in Robinson’s “Black Watch” column in the Chicago Defender. He lamented not only the inequities in the police force, but the toll street gangs were taking on Black Chicago:

“Is that what we are born into this world for? Is that why we go school, work, struggle, and try to raise family for? So that we, or someone else can for no apparent reason kill someone — snuff out a life — a human life?”

Then a ray of hope from federal court fell upon the cause Robinson was fighting and suffering for. Judge Prentice Marshall ruled that Robinson had suffered discrimination at the hands of the police department. It’s as plain as the egg on your face, he informed Superintendent James Conlisk:

“You have a man of Robinson’s ability and record who is an outstanding street officer through the early part of 1966, who ends up five years later waking back and forth between two posts that are twelve or fifteen feet apart in a parking lot back of central police headquarters.”

When Robinson’s suspension was revoked, he was due damages for paychecks denied him. The League announced a gala celebration at the Park Palladium Ballroom, 45th and King Drive. It was hoped the event would raise enough money to tide over the Afro-American Patrolman’s league until the city coughed up the damages awarded by Marshall.

Robinson himself wasn’t up for partying. A chronic back problem had put him in St Joseph Hospital for 10 days. The Defender reported that Robinson was still in considerable pain when discharged:

“He had no funds to pay for a longer stay and the Police Department flatly refused to cover him under its insurance plan.”

A memorial service for Robinson will be held at 11 a.m. Tuesday at St. Sabina Catholic Church, 1210 W. 78th Place, Chicago.

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