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In the immediate aftermath of the Korean War, African American soldiers’ families became a significant pool of adoptive families for Korean black children. Although child welfare officials had considered military families less than ideal adopters, black soldiers’ families enjoyed economic and social benefits that set them apart from many African American non-military families interested in adopting. A soldier’s affiliation with the military allowed some to conform to the gender conventions that appealed to child welfare officials. While a military salary could be meager, soldiers’ access to benefits like base housing and the Post Exchange made it possible for some to function as primary breadwinners and their wives to devote themselves to caregiving. Child welfare officials with organizations including International Social Service devised efforts to increase adoptions of Korean black children by African American soldiers’ families, and especially the families stationed in Japan. These efforts evolved as US military and political officials, Korean political officials, and representatives of sectarian and nonsectarian aid agencies, attempted to devise strategies to care for Korea’s mixed-race children.

Many of the African American non-military families that adopted Korean black children did not conform to the gender and race conventions that child welfare officials desired in adoptive families. Often, these families included wives that worked, and would continue to work, outside of their homes even after they adopted a Korean black child. A number of these adoptive families were also interracial couples or they lived in interracial neighborhoods. Adoptive families that included interracial couples and working wives forced some social workers and child welfare officials to reframe these family patterns as ideal for Korean black children. The reforms that some social workers made to increase adoptions of Korean black children by African American and interracial couples also informed their responses to the small number of white families that adopted Korean black children. Agencies affiliated with International Social Service frequently emphasized the international political implications of Korean transnational adoptions because they understood transracial and transnational adoptions to be liberal and antiracist endeavors. However, many of the African American and interracial families that pursued transnational adoptions did not base their adoptions on political motives. Instead, they imagined a kinship with Korean black children because of the racism the encountered in Korea.

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 employs intersectionality as a critical lens to interrogate the ways that race, gender, class, and sexuality impact black adolescents' experiences of child sexual exploitation (CSE). In particular, the exploration is anchored in an intersectional analysis to extend understandings of the nuanced ways in which race-constructed otherness is experienced by young black people affected by sexual exploitation. It first briefly sketches the key messages from the literature on CSE and black children. The chapter next provides an overview of the intersectionality theoretical framework. Finally, it uses a case study, from the Serious Case Review (SCR) of child R, a 15-year-old black girl in the looked-after system, as an exemplar. From there, it presents ways that an intersectional lens can offer some analytical tools to gain a deeper insight into the challenges for black youths at risk of abusive and exploitative relationships. The chapter concludes with some discussion of the implications for a child-focused approach.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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 complicates popular visions of the model Korean adoptee. It begins by examining how the Immigration and Naturalization Service monitored which Korean children were fit for entry, and sought to assure that they would not become charges of the state once they arrived. Hiring the International Social Service to manage the placement of Korean children, the INS transferred its responsibility to adoptive parents, a move that laid bare the interconnectedness of state and private entities. The chapter also shows how Harry Holt found ways to circumvent the red tape. His crusade to bring Korean GI babies to the United States necessitated their racial management, since existing domestic adoption policies precluded the crossing of black-white lines. What resulted ranged from state agencies denying African American couples’ adoption applications to South Korean prejudice against mixed-race children, particularly those “mixed with black.” The chapter closes with a look at the model construction of full-Korean adoptees in popular media as a way to reveal how making Korean children Christian, well-behaved, and assimilable was not happenstance, but rather a transnational process that began in US-administered orphanages in South Korea and was later overseen in the United States.

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 explores how power and privilege based on race, gender, economics, and disability shape the narrative of what is in the “best interest of the child” in the intimate sphere of family making through transracial adoption. The author, JaeRan Kim, provides an overview of the history of transracial and transnational adoption that includes programs such as the orphan trains, Indian boarding schools, and adoption through foster care and their impact on immigrant, Indigenous, Black, and transnational children. Various ways that communities of color resisted the racism inherent in foster care and adoption systems in each historical era are also discussed. After examining ways transracial adoptees navigate and negotiate their identities when their right to know and belong to their racial and ethnic communities is weighed against adoptive parents’ desires to adopt across racial and ethnic lines, Kim offers a framework of transracial adoption justice that centers race, power, and the experiences and needs of transracial adoptees.

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 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.

Chapter 2 explores Jim Crow-era New Orleans in The Little Foxes. Bette Davis plays Regina, the grasping white matriarch who allows her husband to die rather than to suffer financial stasis. The actress embellished her character’s facial pallor against the wishes of director William Wyler. Davis’s Kabuki persona evoked the white supremacist regime afoot in the film’s Redemption-era setting. Two brief all-Black cast scenes illuminate the film’s political context. The first depicts the workings of Regina’s family cotton business. Hiding underneath the factory loading dock, a Black child snatches tufts of cotton as they float past. The Black foreman screams at the boy, who dashes out from the platform, runs off screen, and then rushes back to grab the dropped bag of pilfered cotton. The second encounter features Regina’s servants, interrupted from dinner by a band of Black children. Showcasing Delores Hurlic (see also Chapter 3), this unsung child star conveys a menacing quality as she demands that the African American housekeeper distribute to her fellow waifs leftovers from Regina’s “high-toned” party for a visiting northern industrialist. The scene exposes white phantasmagoria about so-called “contented” Black lives at the turn of the century.