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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.

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.

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.

Globalism is associated with the movement of jobs and industry from one country to another, and from 1955 to the present, hundreds of thousands of industrial sector jobs were shifted from the United States to various countries across the globe. In theory, globalization works when new jobs become available to replace the old. This chapter describes what happened to inner-city black communities and their youth when promised replacement jobs never materialized. The absence of a mainstream economic presence in the ghetto has given rise to a thriving underground economy anchored by the drug trade. While the trade itself can be analyzed from a rational, business perspective, the violence and community chaos linked to the trade plays havoc with black child and youth development. The chapter reviews how clinical psychologists and psychiatrists have taken the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — once solely associated with psychological reactions to wars outside the United States — and applied it to the emotional states of inner-city black children and youth who have experienced, witnessed, or possess firsthand knowledge about the violence and chaos linked to the underground economy. In addition, the history of the social struggles of white ethnic groups in the United States is revisited, as a way of gaining insight into what worked to effectuate social mobility for white groups trapped in poverty at earlier points in U.S. history.

This chapter elucidates the community milieu in which the nascent juvenile justice system operated. Racialized notions of childhood, Progressive uplift, and the politics of child welfare primed black children to be marked as delinquents even before they formally stepped foot inside Cook County Juvenile Court. The vast majority of public and private agencies for poor, abused, neglected, or abandoned children excluded black children because of their race, even as they readily accepted white and European immigrant children. This dearth of institutional resources for black children was exacerbated by the Great Migration. Chicago’s black community adapted to these realities by doing their own “child-saving” and inserting themselves into a juvenile justice system that began to play a defining role in shaping the trajectory of many black children’s lives.

The demise of the Colored Orphan Asylum at Riverdale was a sad event in the history of an institution that dated to 1836. The founders and early managers were mainly women who sought to do God's will by caring for abused and forsaken black children. They took on this mammoth effort at a time when African Americans were shunned by society. Oppressive laws prohibited much of their daily contact with their fellow white residents unless they were in a subordinate position. The white women, many of whom personally abhorred the horrors of slavery and who wished to do God's will by feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, did so at the risk of “unsexing” themselves in the eyes of their less Christian contemporaries. Men and women of means such as John Jacob Astor, R. H. Macy, Theodore Roosevelt Sr., William Jay, Anna Jay, Caroline Stokes, and many others contributed generously to the betterment of the orphan black child.

This chapter discusses the way the juvenile court and its ancillary institutions—the Juvenile Detention Canter, Chicago Parental School, and Institute for Juvenile Research—handled black children’s cases. It also delineates the impact the disproportionate number of black children in juvenile court and an artificial inflation of the number of delinquent black children had on the evolution of juvenile justice law. The sympathetic public sentiment that made the Progressive juvenile justice movement viable had begun to wane by the 1930s. As a result, juvenile justice laws began to be more punitive, and the rehabilitative ideal began to be dismantled.

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.

This chapter elaborates the author's approach on Paley's practice as a white teacher of children of color, of black children in particular, through the three books that focus on the subject. The book White Teacher [(1979) 2000] centers on self-examination and the chapter observes the significance of this book on Paley's personal development and in the white teacher studies movement. Paley's second investigation into race in the classroom cedes center stage to community members in her book Kwanzaa and Me: A Teacher's Story (1995). The five-year-old Reeny tells the story in Paley's third work, The Girl with the Brown Crayon (1997). The chapter finds that in all these three books, Paley evolved as a fair teacher of children of color in the context of the many complex issues that accompany her efforts to recognize race and ethnic differences in the classroom.

This chapter focuses on the activities that were funded, supported, and developed by the partnerships which focused on four target groups chosen for detailed study by the National Evaluation of the Children's Fund (NECF): disabled children, black and minority ethnic children, gypsies/travellers, and refugees and asylum-seeking children. It highlights the similarities and differences between partnerships in working with the target groups and their families, and the impacts that were achieved. The chapter reviews the way the strategies were implemented and the impacts they had in the short to medium term, and assesses the robustness of the approaches adopted in the context of the aims of the NECF. The theories-of-change approach adopted by the evaluation is used to explore how local interpretation of national guidance was enacted in practice and thus how preventative policy was implemented.

This chapter attempts to map the geography of Jim Crow New Orleans, where black children learned the difference between “white” and “colored.” It looks into how black children mapped the world around them to understand the politics of segregation, and how these maps helped them learn how color and power related to their lives and assisted them in developing their sense of self in relationship to their place in the city. These mental maps are “multi-layered” and “fragmented” scales of New Orleans. They reflect children's own experiences, their cognitive development, and their growing sense of the world. With regards to the segregation, mental maps provided “imaginative order” to black girls' worlds and helped them form a growing “awareness of racialized space.” This was important to African American children, as they had to constantly learn and relearn the proper space and deportment of “colored” citizens.

This chapter examines the activities of the Black Student Leadership Network (BSLN) from 1991 to 1996. It first describes the BSLN's parent organizations, the Black Community Crusade for Children (BCCC) and the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), and looks at the BSLN's leadership development and popular education programs. The BSLN represented an extensive effort on the part of post–Civil Rights student and youth activists to develop a federated youth formation that could address poverty, racism, and public health crises in low-income black communities. Through its Ella Baker Child Policy Training Institute (EBCPTI) and Advanced Service and Advocacy Workshops (ASAWs), the BSLN trained over six hundred black students and youth in direct action organizing, social movement building, voter education, child advocacy, and teaching methodology and developed freedom schools in dozens of urban and rural jurisdictions.

This chapter extends the discussion of the actions of the Black Student Leadership Network (BSLN) by highlighting the group's activities from 1993 to 1996. It specifically analyzes three organizing initiatives, the first of which is the Summer Freedom School program. Freedom schools, or alternative educational institutions for poor children, were utilized as pedagogical tools of protest for promoting children to challenge inequality. The second organizing initiative is the campaign against gun violence, a problem which became rampant during the 1990s. Together with the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) and the Black Community Crusade for Children (BCCC), the BSLN developed a strategy to reduce gun violence among youth, while connecting this effort to ameliorative juvenile justice policies. They lobbied for harsher prison sentences, putting more police officers on the street, and the death penalty for juveniles. The last initiative examined are the organizing activities in three regions: New York Metro, North and South Carolina, and California.

This chapter analyzes representations of black girlhood in early-twentieth-century conduct books written by African Americans by focusing on several selections from Floyd's Flowers: Or, Duty and Beauty for Colored Children. First published in 1905, Floyd's Flowers is an instructional manual for black children written by educator and activist Silas X. Floyd and illustrated by artist and educator John Henry Adams. It explores Floyd's ideas about the purpose of education for black girls, how girls should behave in public, and the roles parents should be preparing girls for at the turn of the twentieth century. This chapter first considers the discourse of conduct books before turning to Floyd's example of how black girls could contribute to racial progress through proper education, along with his ideals of beauty. It also highlights the ways black women differed from black men in imagining girlhood after emancipation, especially regarding black girls' duty to the race, to their families, and to themselves.

The adoption of a social-exclusion perspective by New Labour in its early years of government reflected the aspirations for social change of a new government following long years of Conservative rule. This chapter considers the contested nature of the concept of social exclusion. Using the framework of social exclusion adopted in the National Evaluation of the Children's Fund (NECF), it examines evidence about the circumstances of four groups of disadvantaged children and young people: disabled children, black and minority ethnic children, gypsies/travellers, and refugees and asylum-seeking children. The chapter also discusses broader evidence about child welfare and well being in the United Kingdom. This provides the context within which NECF partnerships were seeking to develop new ways of ensuring child well being and inclusion.

This chapter examines how National Evaluation of the Children's Fund (NECF) partnerships sought to identify, define, and target specific groups of children and young people that they considered most at risk of social exclusion and thus priorities for action. It also considers ways in which selected partnerships approached the four groups chosen for detailed study by the NECF: disabled children, black and minority ethnic children, gypsies/travellers, and refugees and asylum-seeking children. The chapter then discusses the NECF's approaches to commissioning services and shows that the notion of ‘targeting’ is both technically and politically complex and highlights the contested nature of both prevention and social exclusion.

This book explores race and the politics of youth in Oakland at the turn of the twenty-first century, with particular emphasis on the debates among parents, community and youth activists, politicians, and policy makers about the city's responses to dangerous and endangered youth. Drawing on the author's ethnographic fieldwork and historical research conducted in 1998–2001 and in 2003–2009, the book examines fears of and fears for black boys and the urgent dilemmas of black parents and activists as they sought to secure safe passage to adulthood for black children, along with the more complex intersections of race, class, and gender that characterized Oakland politics. This introduction discusses neoliberal governance and how neoliberal policies have created new crises of care for children and deep inequalities in childhood, how changing state policies have reconfigured the boundaries between childhood and adulthood, and how Oakland's geography of inequality shaped the politics of youth in the city. It also provides an overview of the chapters in the book.

The media had a far-ranging influence on the play of both white and African American South Louisiana children during the period 1967 to 2011. The movies, television, music videos, break dancing, radio, and specific performers like Prince and Michael Jackson electrified school children and gave them new fuel for play. MTV, VH1, and BET all hit the television screen in the early 80s and impacted the young. Black video artists provided African American youth with a sense of “this is us!” and video messages entered play, dance routines, cheerleading, and classroom behavior. Michael Jackson influenced children’s dance and play from 1969 on. His songs inspired all. The media continue to inspire and influence play as television sets proliferate and children watch and imitate even more.

Chapter five continues this emphasis upon personal relationships by offering hypotheses about why apparently single women might request bondage. It explores cases where enslavement petitions submitted on behalf of black women were (or may have been) related to issues of interracial intimate relationships, especially when free women of color petitioned for their own enslavement and also that of their free black children. While some free black women were cajoled into enslavement by white men, others believed their best hope in life was to remain where they were as slaves and were prepared to sacrifice their free status for themselves and that of their children. The chapter also considers more broadly the extent to which issues of expulsion and enslavement highlight ties along the line of gender across black and white lives, among black and white women.