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Khalil Gibran Muhammad List of Illustrations Ix THE CONDEMNATION OF BLACKNESS CONTENTS RACE, CRIME, AND THE MAKING OF MODERN URBAN AMERICA Khalil Gibran Muhammad List of Illustrations ix Introduction: The Mismea sure of Crime 1 1 Saving the Nation: The Racial Data Revolution and the Negro Problem 15 2 Writing Crime into Race: Racial Criminalization and the Dawn of Jim Crow 35 3 Incriminating Culture: The Limits of Racial Liberalism in the Progressive Era 88 4 Preventing Crime: White and Black Reformers in Philadelphia 146 5 Fighting Crime: Politics and Prejudice in the City of Brotherly Love 192 6 Policing Racism: Jim Crow Justice in the Urban North 226 Conclusion: The Conundrum of Criminality 269 Manuscript Sources 279 Notes 281 Ac know ledg ments 369 harvard university press Index 375 Cambridge, Massachusetts London, En gland 2010 vii ILLUSTRATIONS INTRODUCTION: THE MISMEA SURE OF CRIME “A Downtown ‘Morgue,’ ” c. 1890 55 This book tells an unsettling coming- of- age story. It is a biography of the idea of black criminality in the making of modern urban America. The “How Criminals Are Made,” c. 1907 102 link between race and crime is as enduring and in! uential in the twenty- “American Logic,” c. 1913 142 " rst century as it has been in the past. Violent crime rates in the nation’s biggest cities are generally understood as a re! ection of the presence and Youth of the Friends Neighborhood Guild, c. 1901 156 behavior of the black men, women, and children who live there. The U.S. prison population is larger than at any time in the history of the peniten- “The Washington Party,” c. 1901 159 tiary anywhere in the world. Nearly half of the more than two million Americans behind bars are African Americans, and an unpre ce dented Staged Charity Photo of Black Children as Pickaninnies, c. 1905 162 number of black men will likely go to prison during the course of their Handbill of the Joint Or ga ni za tion of the AEIO and LCPR, lives. These grim statistics are well known and frequently cited by white c. 1909 184 and black Americans; indeed for many they de" ne black humanity.1 In all manner of conversations about race—from debates about parenting to Pledge Card of the Association for Equalizing Industrial Opportunities, education to urban life—black crime statistics are ubiquitous.2 By the c. 1909 186 same token, white crime statistics are virtually invisible, except when used to dramatize the excessive criminality of African Americans. Although the Adella Bond Defends Herself in Philadelphia Race Riot, c. 1918 212 statistical language of black criminality often means different things to Stoned to Death by a White Mob during the Chicago Race Riot, different people, it is the glue that binds race to crime today as in the 3 c. 1919 237 past. How was the statistical link between blackness and criminality ini- Police Search African Americans for Weapons during the Chicago Race tially forged?4 Who were the central actors?5 By what means did black Riot, c. 1919 239 and white social scientists, social reformers, journalists, antiracist activ- ists, law enforcement of" cials, and politicians construct, contest, and “Puzzle: Find the ‘Keepers of the Peace,’ ” c. 1928 250 corroborate their claims regarding black criminality? How did they use “Be First to Let Him Out,” c. 1929 264 crime among blacks to articulate their vision of race relations in mod- ern urban America: what it was, what it is, and what it should be?6 How did they incorporate others’ ideas about race into their own sug- gestions about and solutions to the “Negro Problem”? How did they ix 1 THE CONDEMNATION OF BLACKNESS INTRODUCTION: THE MISMEASURE OF CRIME produce, translate, and disseminate racial knowledge about crime to position within a dominant racialized community with the power to de- others? To put it another way, between 1890 and 1940, how and why " ne those outside it. That same power, Sellin implied, could be used to did racial crime statistics become what Ted Porter calls a “strategy of break with the past— to change the future of race relations—because communication”— a subject of dialogue and debate— about blacks’ " t- crime itself was not the core issue. Rather, the problem was racial crimi- ness for modern life?7 Why did black criminality outpace, at times, many nalization: the stigmatization of crime as “black” and the masking of competitors—such as body odor, brain size, disease, and intelligence— in crime among whites as individual failure. The practice of linking crime to the national marketplace of ideas about, and “scienti" c” proofs of, black blacks, as a racial group, but not whites, he concluded, reinforced and inferiority?8 reproduced racial in e qual ity. In 1928 Thorsten Sellin, one of the nation’s most respected white so- The issue here was not whether crime was real. Instead, what struck ciologists, argued that African Americans were unfairly stigmatized by Sellin as the key variable to expose and contextualize was the ideological their criminality. His article, “The Negro Criminal: A Statistical Note,” currency of black criminality. Since the 1890s in! uential black crime ex- captured the moment when nearly four de cades of statistical research perts such as W. E. B. Du Bois, a pioneering social scientist, and Ida B. Wells, on black criminality began to be called into question.9 In the aftermath of an internationally-known antilynching activist, labored tirelessly to dera- wide- scale racial violence during the Great Migration of black southern- cialize black criminality. Although their early efforts to convince white ers to the urban North, African American researchers in the 1920s pub- academic and activist peers failed repeatedly, Sellin owed a great debt to lished a ! urry of new statistical reports of racism among police of" cers, their struggle, and ultimately their vision of racial justice. Their vision of prosecutors, and court and prison of" cials. Convinced by the weight of fairness and equality included a society in which innocent law- abiding evidence presented by these “New Negro” crime experts and crime blacks would not suffer the sins of individual black failures. They imag- " ghters— the second generation of academically trained black sociologists ined African Americans within what sociologist Orlando Patterson calls and social workers— Sellin brought their work to the attention of his white the “broader moral community” of the United States.12 Black scholars and academic peers.10 Speaking as a representative of the white majority in a activists pursued something akin to color- blind criminal justice by argu- Jim Crow nation, he exposed the “unreliability” of racial crime statistics ing that equal treatment, was the " rst step toward disentangling race and and the deeply troubling ways in which blackness and criminality shaped crime, destroying a pillar of racism, and creating a society in which blacks, racial identity and racial oppression in modern America: like their white immigrant counterparts, were included within, as Du Bois wrote, the “pale of nineteenth- century Humanity.”13 They may not We are prone to judge ourselves by our best traits and strangers have set the terms of the initial discourse, but they most certainly altered by their worst. In the case of the Negro, stranger in our midst, all it over time in unanticipated ways. Thus for Sellin and for the many beliefs prejudicial to him aid in intensifying the feeling of racial black experts marginalized within the academy (but cited in his notes), antipathy engendered by his color and his social status. The colored black criminality had become the most signi" cant and durable signi" er criminal does not as a rule enjoy the racial anonymity which cloaks of black inferiority in white people’s minds since the dawn of Jim Crow. the offenses of individuals of the white race. The press is almost During the 1930s Sellin would leverage his in! uence alongside the per sis- certain to brand him, and the more revolting his crime proves to tent efforts of black scholars and activists to break the legacy of racial be the more likely it is that his race will be advertised. In setting criminalization, to disentangle race from crime.14 the hall- mark of his color upon him, his individuality is in a sense The Condemnation of Blackness reconstructs the key moments, be- submerged, and instead of a mere thief, robber, or murderer, he ginning one generation after slavery, when new sources of statistical data becomes a representative of his race, which in its turn is made to were joined to ongoing debates about the future place of African Ameri- suffer for his sins.11 cans in modern urban America. With the publication of the 1890 census, Sellin’s “we,” linked to the notion of the Negro as a “stranger in our prison statistics for the " rst time became the basis of a national discus- midst,” marked not only his whiteness but also and more importantly, his sion about blacks as a distinct and dangerous criminal population. In the 2 3 THE CONDEMNATION OF BLACKNESS INTRODUCTION: THE MISMEASURE OF CRIME wake of the Civil War and Reconstruction, when the culture and politics the northern criminal justice system, starting in the nineteenth century, of white supremacy in the South and across the nation were being recon- has been a modernizing narrative, one in which the development of ev- stituted, African American freedom fueled far-reaching anxieties among erything from prisons to policing to juvenile justice to probation and many white Americans.15 The census marked twenty- " ve years of free- parole has turned almost exclusively on the experiences of native- born dom and was, consequently, a much-anticipated data source for assessing whites and Euro pe an immigrants.18 In this literature, it is as if black blacks’ status in a post- slavery era.
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