The Murder of Samuel Faulkner (1927)

At this location on April 24, 1927, two Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers shot and killed Samuel Faulkner, a 20-year-old unarmed Black man, in his home. The killing fueled a wave of protests against police brutality in the Central Avenue district, a neighborhood that was home to Black Angelenos owing to patterns of residential segregation. From the perspective of many residents of this diverse neighborhood, Faulkner’s homicide epitomized the police’s pattern of cruel and unlawful behavior. The killing occurred against the national background of a revival of the Klu Klux Klan and the continued scourge of lynching that was concentrated but not limited to the South.

At 9 PM on April 24, 1927, LAPD officers Maceo Bruce Sheffield and Frank Randolph burst into the home of Clara Harris—Faulkner’s sister—to conduct a liquor raid. Harris’ house sat on the same lot as her parents and brother, who resided in a separate unit just feet behind her. Awoken by the screams emanating from Harris’ house, Faulkner sprinted towards the noise, crawled through the window into his sister’s bedroom, and creaked open the door to see the commotion. Within seconds Sheffield shot Faulkner, who instantly collapsed and bled to death on the floor. Both officers claimed that Faulkner shot first, forcing Randolph to retaliate in self-defense; however, every witness disputed this story, insisting that the officer fired unprovoked.

Tragically, there was nothing unique about Faulkner’s homicide; “for years, the police generally, and Randolph and Sheffield in particular, had ‘ruthless[ly] meander[ed]…the [city’s] Black belt beating up and even killing defenseless citizens.’”[2] Over time, Black residents grew increasingly frustrated by the cruel and aggressive treatment the police doled out in their neighborhoods, and this murder of a propertied Black man served as a tipping point for them. They began to demand an end to raids and police violence under the guise of maintaining public order. The LAPD ignored these calls for change, and police brutality continued as did the swelling of L.A. prisons with Black inmates. This trend largely persists today, with police murdering Black people at three times the rate of Whites, and these killings going unaccounted for, with 98.3 percent of officers not being charged with a crime.[3]

Black Americans who migrated from the rural South to the West during the Great Migration did not expect such violence to transpire in L.A. Indeed, they had opted for the West Coast because they believed it afforded them more land, freedom, and opportunities. For the first few years, Blacks comprised less than one percent of the total California population, meaning they posed little threat to Anglo-American settlers who were fixated on expunging “Natives, ‘tramps,’ and Chinese immigrants” from their community.[4] Because White rage was momentarily focused elsewhere, influential Black writers hailed L.A. as a “racial paradise” for Black Americans.[5] Even W.E.B Du Bois wrote that Black Americans in California “[were] without a doubt the most beautifully housed group of colored people in the United States” in his August 1913 edition of The Crisis.[6] Not long after these observations, however, did the Black population in L.A. expand, stirring White suspicion and concern.

While Black Americans were initially free to choose their place of residency, “by the early 1930s, 70 percent of all Black Angelenos resided in one assembly district” because of restrictive housing and discriminatory loaning policies.[7] Along with Klu Klux Klan activity and lynching episodes that scared Black residents into limiting the majority of their lives to Central Avenue, restrictive housing covenants acted as a more formal mechanism to ensure they could not escape those neighborhoods. When a restrictive covenant existed on a property deed, “the owner was legally prohibited from selling to members of the specific minority group or groups listed in the covenant.”[8] Substantial residential racial segregation ensued, and this effect was intensified by “redlining,” or the drawing of lines onto city maps marking the ideal areas for bank investment and the sale of mortgages. Lenders were discouraged from financing properties in “risky,” redlined areas, and banks often refused to grant loans to Black prospective buyers due to fear of lowering the economic desirability score of certain neighborhoods.[9] Therefore, while L.A. served as a more hospitable environment for Black Americans than other cities, it was still riddled with violence and various forms of residential segregation. Historian Josh Sides explained, “From their perspective, [racial] integration was a threat to the moral, aesthetic, and financial character of their neighborhoods.”[10] The motivation for such racist housing policies was summarized in a flyer typed by one White L.A. supremacist named A.J. Davis: “DRAW THE COLOR LINE BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”[11] The consequence of this caged settlement was that Central Avenue became the center of all Black life. Knowing that Black L.A. was so isolated and thus invisible to the rest of the city, the LAPD subjected its residents to mass policing, raids, and arrests, “much of which was corrupt, brutal, and linked to underground economies” because they could act with impunity.[12]

In Faulkner’s trial, the officers claimed that the young man fired the first shot, wounding Randolph and forcing him to retaliate. When the other police agents arrived at the scene, they found a gun next to Faulkner’s body, thus confirming Randolph and Sheffield’s tale. The police also discovered bags of morphine stashed in the house, making Harris “not just a liquor purveyor but a narcotics dealer.”[13] However, fearing death penalty for a crime he did not commit, Randolph later revealed that he and his partner fabricated all of these details. In fact, Sheffield had arrived at Harris’s home inebriated and, after seeing Faulkner, began aimlessly firing, mistakenly hitting Randolph. When the other LAPD officers arrived on site, Sheffield conspired with them to say they found a gun near Faulkner’s corpse and to plant drugs in the home. The jury met to discuss the newfound damning evidence and finally delivered their verdict hours later: not guilty. Having been fully exonerated, Sheffield was then promoted to lieutenant sergeant by the police chief. As Historian Kelly Lytle-Hernández woefully concluded, “Central Avenue remained the vortex of…police corruption in the City of Angels.”[14]

The outcome of the Faulkner case reveals three tragic elements of American society. First, though the Black community demonstrated tremendous agency by ensuring this case went to trial, the court system was an imperfect tool to combat racism because of the biases held by the jury. In other words, even when provided with clear, incriminating evidence against a White man, the jurors still protected him over an innocent, propertied Black man. Second, the fact that Faulkner’s murder is not more present in the public’s memory is perhaps one of the reasons why police brutality is still so prominent across America. At the time of the incident, the homicide was well known within the Black community, resulting in protests and a court hearing, but the details were largely confined to South Central due to its geographic insulation. Finally, Faulkner’s assassination reveals how deeply embedded the racial caste system is in America. For a drunken White police officer to forcefully enter a private residence, kill one of its inhabitants, and plant evidence, as well as believe he could get away with it, demonstrates his conviction that the justice system was skewed in his favor. The jury affirmed Sheffield when they delivered their verdict. The technological revolution somewhat balanced the scales, however, by placing a cellphone in everyone’s pocket. This change made it so that no community was fully isolated anymore, and thus the police could no longer conceal their egregious actions. The filming and posting of the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, which led to large-scale, multi-racial protests, is an example of this development and suggests a possible turning point in terms of racial justice.

Du Bois, William E. “Colored California.” The Crisis, August 1913. https://modjourn.org/issue/bdr518203/.

Flamming, Douglas. Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America. London: University of California Press, 2005.

Lytle Hernández, Kelly. City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

“Police Violence Map.” Mapping Police Violence. Last modified January 26, 2021. https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/.

“Raid on Private Home Brings Fatal Assault.” California Eagle, April 29, 1927. https://www.newspapers.com/image/693151497/.

Scott, Allan J. and Edward W. Soja. The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century. London: University of California Press, 1996.

Sides, Josh. L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present. London: University of California Press, 2003.

Silva, Catherine. “Racial Restrictive Covenants History.” Segregated Seattle. The Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project. Accessed March 2, 2021. https://depts.washington.edu/civilr/covenants_report.htm#:~:text=The%20Civic%20Unity%20Committee%2C%20in,their%20property%20to%20specified%20groups.

[1] “Raid on Private Home Brings Fatal Assault,” California Eagle, April 29, 1927, https://www.newspapers.com/image/693151497/.

[2] Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 158.

[3] “Police Violence Map,” Mapping Police Violence, last modified January 26, 2021, https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/.

[4] Lytle-Hernández, City of Inmates, 161.

[5] Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (London: University of California Press, 2003), 11.

[6] William E. DuBois, “Colored California,” The Crisis, August 1913, https://modjourn.org/issue/bdr518203/. 

[7] Allan J. Scott and Edward W. Soja. The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (London: University of California Press, 1996), 343.

[8] Catherine Silva, “Racial Restrictive Covenants History,” Segregated Seattle, The Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, accessed March 2, 2021, https://depts.washington.edu/civilr/covenants_report.htm#:~:text=The%20Civic%20Unity%20Committee%2C%20in,their%20property%20to%20specified%20groups.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Sides, L.A. City Limits, 96.

[11] Douglas Flamming, Bound for Freedom (London: University of California Press, 2005), 81.

[12] Lytle-Hernández, City of Inmates, 167.

[13] Ibid., 180.

[14] Ibid., 182.