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Quarto. 133pp., including 14 in-text maps. Original black cloth with gilt lettering to the spine and front board with ownership signature in front and rear pastedowns. Near fine with corners lightly bumped, light wear to extremities and address label on the front pastedown. An in-depth race-relations manual prepared for Chicago Park District police trainees by sociologist Joseph D. Lohman (1910-1968), under the directorship of Chief of Police Roger F. Shanahan (1892-1951). The Chicago Park District is a distinct municipal entity sharing borders with the City of Chicago. At the beginning of 1947, its jurisdiction covered 135 parks, numerous beaches, pools, and playfields, various cultural institutions, more than 205 miles of Chicago's boulevards, and more than 28 miles of Lake Michigan's shoreline. It also employed 639 police officers in a department that operated separately from, but in coorperation with, the Chicago City Police Department. The Park District's police department existed from 1934 to 1958, when it was disbanded and absorbed into the city's. By the mid-1940s, more than half of Chicago's population was foreign-born and more than 10% African-American, reflecting dramatic recent growth in Black, Mexican, Asian, and Jewish and Catholic European groups. As ethnic tensions rose with this shift in the city's demographics, Chicago's police leadership began pioneering reforms in education and accountability, including the establishment of the Human Relations Section in the city department (today known as the Civil Rights Unit) in 1942 and, under Roger Shanahan, the race relations training program in the Park District department in 1946. Joseph Lohman, then a graduate student and lecturer in sociology at the University of Chicago and Associate Director for Race Relations at the Julius Rosenwald Fund and the Supervisory Officers of the Division of Police, organized the present manual in a six-"conference" program of study, with two appendices containing race-related city and state codes and statutes, and a "Selected List of Books, Pamphlets, and Films on Human Relations." In the conferences, Lohman methodically dismantles racial myths and hierarchies, explores the backgrounds of inequality and inter-group tensions in Chicago, describes the relationships between demagoguery, authoritarianism, and racial and religious bigotry, and provides practical methods for dealing with racial and ethic tensions, including appropriate actions for police when confronted with various related scenarios, including different kinds of large crowds. The bibliography concluding the book contains more than 50 titles, mostly of works published or produced between 1940 and 1945. When Lohman died in 1968 at the age of 58, his colleague and lifelong friend, sociologist Herbert Blumer, wrote in a memorial that the present manual was "still regarded as the standard work on the topic" and reflected a wide and growing demand for his counsel and the "execution of demanding assignments," including his leadership of the 1946-1948 National Commission on Segregation, the first major study of race relations by the federal government.
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