Early black officer broke local racial barrier

Surrounded by family photographs at his East Cedar Street home, Bedford County Commissioner John Brown, a former Shelbyville police officer, recounts the days when black officers were not allowed to arrest white people.
(T-G Photo by Clint Confehr)

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That changed here nearly 37 years ago this month during what, otherwise, was a modest arrest.

"I'll never forget the night we were going to arrest a white man," Brown said while seated in his living room one evening last week. "It was on East Lane Street. He was drunk and staggering all over the street."

Brown spoke up because February is African American History Month, but his account of the arrest reflects circumstances of a different time that harks back to the likes of Prohibition during the Roaring '20s and blue laws that also attempted to control spirits.

"He'd just come out of a liquor store," Brown recalled of the man he arrested. "The town was dry, but we had bootleggers all over.

"I carried him to City Hall. I said, 'You're under arrest,' and he said, 'You can't arrest no white man.'

"He called me the N-word all the way there and, when I got him there, he said, 'You can't lock me up!'

"I told him, 'If you put me behind the bars, I'll be the n-----, but if I put you behind the bars, you'll be the n-----,' and I put him in the cell and turned the key and said, 'How are you, n-----?'

"That broke the ice," said Brown, explaining, "The word n----- is not by the color of your skin. It's by your character."

Brown was hired by the Shelbyville Police Department in 1970. After the man's arrest, things were different, and Brown could deliver on the directive he understood from Mayor H.V. Griffin.

"Mayor Griffin wanted Shelbyville to operate on the basis of; 'If you break the law, then you need to go to jail,'" Brown said. "He was the one who hired me."

Brown was the third African-American to be hired as a police officer in Shelbyville. The first was John Tune. The second was G.J. Jordan. They told Brown about having been instructed not to arrest white people. They'd been hired 3-4 years before Brown who, he said, was empowered by Griffin to arrest anyone who broke the law.

There was cooperation among officers on the force at the time, although there were different opinions on various topics.

We always worked together, black and white," Brown said. "Thank God there was nothing that we couldn't sit down and talk about to resolve problems."

Having been told that a black man couldn't arrest a white person here in Bedford County, Brown replied, "Oh yes we can. We can do it."

As for Jordan and Tune, and the question of ability versus permission, he said, "They had to believe it if they wanted their jobs."

Brown ran for sheriff in 1972 against B.H. Sanders. While he lost, he's since become a county commissioner and he's been on the panel for years. Brown was the first black man to run for sheriff in Bedford County and he's currently a member of the Bedford County Commission's Law Enforcement Committee to which the sheriff reports every month.

Now 72, Brown can look back on the years when he was employed three ways at the same time.

His extraordinary schedule had him on patrol 4 p.m.-midnight, according to a 35-year-old story written by Glenn (Bo) Melson for the Shelbyville Times-Gazette. After his police shift, Brown then worked a shift at Eaton Corp. He'd sleep after that shift ended at 7 a.m., and later prepare for the next day.

Brown has continued his third profession, a ministry as a preacher he began in the early 1970s at Christiana, he recalled at his East Cedar Street home where he and his wife, Dorothy, raised four children.

Police patrol was different for a black officer before Brown and Jordan were hired. Tune walked the beat, Brown said. He had to hold suspects before they could be transported by patrol cruiser to jail or City Hall. There was no patrol car provided for Tune.

"We've come a long way, but we have a ways to go," Brown said in a refrain frequently heard when people are asked about progress in race relations.

"And we must be prepared if a job opens up," he said of advancement for African-Americans, or really anybody in a career. "We must be qualified."

Brown closed the interview with a question of his own. How do you decide whether to hire a black person or another person if they're equally qualified? His answer: It depends on whose application was submitted first.

Brown was president of the Shelbyville Branch of the NAACP from 1960-1980.