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This chapter provides an account of this paradoxical and tragic reformulation of racial oppression and domination in the post-civil rights period. Formal integration reconfigured black youth opportunity and community influence in American juvenile justice, but it failed to institutionalize racially democratic control. Instead, subsequent cultural and institutional changes related to a more general late-twentieth-century retraction of the liberal welfare state drained the progressive utility of integration, reducing black youth and community incorporation to more symbolic forms of inclusion. In contemporary juvenile justice, the “accountability movement” reconfigured the social contractual terms of juvenile justice and the organization of decision-making in juvenile justice in ways that undermined the potential for racially democratic control.

This book brings together findings from the author's years spent pondering the questions related to black adults' experience and how they have shaped the development of American juvenile justice, and the legacies or lessons today of this racial history. It details the sociohistorical origins and organization of Jim Crow juvenile justice as well as the social movement by generations of black Americans to replace the white supremacist parental state with an idealized racial structure of democratic social control. The anticipated racially democratic juvenile justice system was thought to provide for equal black youth opportunity and black adult representation or authority in the administration of liberal rehabilitative ideals, enlisting the supposed manufactory of citizens in the production of a racially inclusive liberal democracy. Over a century after the birth of Jim Crow juvenile justice, this book offers a detailed account of this peculiar institution and how it collided with black freedom dreams to spawn a long movement on behalf of that entity W. E. B. DuBois called “the immortal child,” in a veiled reference to group fate. This book argues that this racial history of juvenile justice helps fill the research gaps in the historical literature and challenges much of what has been established as general institutional history.

Owing to the cultural and political link between child development and social welfare, juvenile social control became a concern for various, often competing constituencies interested in shaping the nation. That link was central to the republican idealism of early American juvenile justice, the development of Jim Crow juvenile justice, and the nearly century-long struggle to advance racial democracy within and through juvenile social control. This chapter examines the background of the juvenile rehabilitative ideal and its roots in American liberal-democratic idealism. Mainstream concerns with shaping and molding wayward, neglected, and criminal youths were explicitly linked to unease over the well-being of civil society and the fate of liberal democracy. This setting is vital to understanding why juvenile justice became an early and enduring feature in the struggle over the relation between race and American democracy.

In the Progressive Era South, Reconstruction gave way to the rise of white supremacist redemption, subjecting black youths and communities to more explicitly neglectful, exploitative, and violent forms of Jim Crow juvenile justice. North and South, growing juvenile court communities embraced the racial project of white citizen and state building, prioritizing white youth opportunity and community interests in their pursuit of rehabilitative ideals. The institutionalization of separate and unequal juvenile justice throughout the United States, not a new multiracial democracy, was the Progressive Era legacy of juvenile justice reform in the African American experience. This chapter examines how Progressive Era black youths and communities experienced the emergence of the juvenile court, an encounter dramatized by mass black migration to urban centers where modern juvenile courts emerged.

This chapter examines the changing racial politics of juvenile justice in the postintegration period (1954–70) to assess whether the main agenda was realized. It compares and contrasts developments in the American South, where opposition to racial integration still raged, with the unique black urban metropolis of Harlem, where black child-saving attained its most robust expression, to gauge the variable impact of court-ordered integration. In the 1950s and 1960s, sporadic signs appeared of increasing liberal experimentation with racialized social control, especially where earlier progress in establishing equal protection and representation enabled the development of a more cooperative, multiracial parental state. This chapter also shows that, despite important signs of progress early in the civil rights era, integrated juvenile justice systems ultimately showed strain and buckled under the weight of somewhat unreasonable expectations that they would institutionalize racial justice.

This chapter examines the nineteenth-century foundations of Jim Crow juvenile justice, including the racialized applications of common law protections, the racial politics of houses of refuge, and the often horrific ordeals of black youths in the antebellum South. This illustrates how white racial group prerogatives and privileges shaped the administration of these earliest institutional reforms. Throughout the United States, these racialized denials of protection under the law and of democratic participation undermined black youth and community claims to opportunity or representation in the emerging juvenile justice system. Ultimately, this new institution of racialized social control, the white-dominated parental state, was organized to underdevelop black citizens deemed delinquent and black civil society generally and, thus, to maintain the boundaries of a white democracy. For that reason, turn-of-the-century black civic leaders organized to improve the life chances of black youths, and prospects for racial equality in American democracy, through juvenile justice reform.

This chapter focuses on the societal mechanisms and implications of Jim Crow juvenile justice. This sociological interpretation helps account for the formation and endurance of this peculiar institution while also providing a context for the oppositional racial project it inspired—the black child-saving movement. The basic argument here is that Jim Crow juvenile justice was a racially oppressive social system that grew and flourished amid the racial group power imbalance created by denials of black representation. Black Americans showed tremendous concern for black youth protection, in the interest of youth and community welfare, yet white domination of the public sphere led to monopolization of child-welfare resources and authority. Thus, Jim Crow juvenile justice was defined by a dynamic of underdevelopment, a systematic attempt to deny black youth (and, therefore, community) development, or self-realization, through the racially selective provision of parental state resources. In the urban North, this oppression typically manifested as institutionalized neglect or subtle exploitation, while the oppression of black youths and communities in the South often took more explicit, violent, and politically expressive forms.

The second wave of black child-saving initiatives was a duality of structure and agency rooted within and shaping a changing racial terrain. This chapter emphasizes the evolution of a distinct sense of self and society among black women and men after World War I, especially in the urban North. This played a role in the changing outlook and organization of black child-saving initiatives. A new self-concept and social consciousness blended gender, race, and class identities to shape more assertive, professional, and eclectic icons of the modern race man and woman. These identities intermixed notions such as the modern woman, the New Negro, and the race expert. This catalyzed, divided, and, eventually, isolated black civic leaders and organizations. This chapter also focuses on the resources mobilized during the second wave. Vanguard efforts had relied almost exclusively on the social networks and resources of black clubwomen's associations. The more robust organizational and resource base of the growing civil rights establishment supported the new leadership of black professional race experts.

Black opposition to Jim Crow juvenile justice systems went through waves of social action by the black child-saving movement. The movement's phases are distinguished by historical period as well as by variations in black social status, oppositional politics, and social movement resources. This chapter covers the first wave of reform, which commenced in the late nineteenth century and peaked in the 1920s. This chapter surveys its logic and organization, including its background, ideology, and the way in which the resources of early reformers shaped and limited their collective efficacy and societal impact. Pragmatic and conservative strategies, extremely limited political capital, and a reliance on private resources moderated their advances. Yet this early effort to “uplift the race” through self-help set the stage for future civil rights challenges and the eventual legal demise of Jim Crow juvenile justice.

This chapter analyzes the foundational principles of the American juvenile justice system. It examines how the court was created by child savers primarily to divert all juvenile offenders from the criminal justice system and to speed up the Americanization process for the “foreign” children, who were the vast majority of the court's early clientele. Concerns about Americanization, however, gradually diminished after Congress's passage of the Johnson–Reed Immigration Act of 1924, which limited immigration to 150,000 annually, established quotas for the number of “new immigrants” from southern and eastern Europe, and banned entirely the entrance into the country of persons who were ineligible for citizenship. This provision, in effect, banned Asians—half the world's population—from coming to America.

This chapter considers the overrepresentation of disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities in the courtrooms and detention cells of American juvenile justice. Throughout the world, the poor and disadvantaged get caught up in the machinery of social control in numbers far greater than their share of the population. In the United States, the long shadow of racism adds another important dimension of concern about young people who are already at a serious disadvantage. The handicaps imposed on the youth by arrest, detention, adjudication, and incarceration fall disproportionately on males from disadvantaged minority groups. In this regard, reducing the hazards of juvenile court processing may be a better approach to protecting minority youth than reducing the proportion of juvenile court cases with minority defendants.