Blackness as delinquency.

• Author: Butler, Cheryl Nelson
• Position: Introduction through III. Blackness as Delinquency A. "Degenerates from Birth", p. 1335-1368

ABSTRACT

This is one of the first law review article to analyze both the role of "blackness" in shaping the first juvenile court and the black community's response to the court's jurisprudence. This Article breaks new ground on two fronts. First, it considers the first juvenile court's treatment of black youth within the context of the heightened racial oppression immediately following the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Second, this Article recovers the lost story of the black women's club movement's response to race issues within the juvenile court movement. In doing so, this Article reconsiders the history of the national black women's club movement within a new framework--that of black women as advocates f or juvenile and criminal justice reform. Furthermore, a major issue that these child savers faced remains one that scholars of the juvenile court's early history have not fully explored: race.

Thus, this Article makes two main arguments. First, from its inception, the juvenile court perpetuated existing racial stereotypes about blackness and delinquency and enforced societal notions of race, gender and class stratification. Second, the National Association of Colored Women ("NA CW") responded by placing criminal and juvenile justice issues as a major component of its civil rights agenda. From 1899 to 1930, the NACW's efforts to challenge stereotypes about black delinquency impacted the development of the juvenile court system and its jurisprudence. NACW's particular interest in juvenile justice sheds new light on how black female activists shaped the national discourse on race and crime and formulated their own strategies for juvenile justice reform.

INTRODUCTION

When Ida B. Wells arrived in Chicago in 1893, her international campaign to end lynching in the United States (1) had already set the wheels of the national black women's club movement in motion. (2) Wells electrified crowds on the international lecture circuit, vividly depicting lynching as such "cold-blooded savagery" that "[n]one of the hideous murders by butchers of Nero to make a Roman holiday exceeded these burnings alive of black human beings." (3) Wells opined:

[Lynching] is appalling, not only because of the lives it takes, the rank cruelty and outrage to the victims, but because of the prejudice it fosters and the stain it places against the good name of a weak race. The Afro-American is not a bestial race. (4) As the above quote indicates, Wells saw lynching as the ritualized stereotyping of black people as dangerous, uncivilized criminals. Carried out with impunity by private actors, lynching reflected the pervasiveness of racial oppression during the Progressive Era. (5) When Wells settled in (6) she Chicago to marry fellow human rights advocate Ferdinand Barnett, was also ready to create another national movement for social justice. In addition to the lynching, Wells grew concerned about a related issue: the juvenile court movement. (7)

This last point is not well-known. Though Wells's campaign against lynching is legend, few historians have recovered Wells's advocacy for black youth before juvenile courts and their offshoot, boys' courts; a significant omission given its centrality to Wells's commitment to criminal justice issues. A national cadre of women reformers--self-proclaimed "child savers"--shaped the jurisprudence and policies of the first juvenile courts. (8) Black women joined them. Even though black women like Ida B. Wells were involved in challenging the court's policies and procedures with respect to black youth, their efforts have been underestimated by scholars. (9) A major issue that these child savers faced remains one that scholars of the juvenile court system's early history have not fully explored: race.

This Article fills several gaps in the legal scholarship concerning the American juvenile court system. As part of a new wave in scholarship, this Article reconsiders the role of race in the early juvenile court system (10) and offers new and distinct insights from current literature. This Article is one of the first to analyze the role of race and blackness in the development jurisprudence, policies, and procedures of the nation's first juvenile court and the way in which the establishment of that court influenced a national agenda for juvenile justice by black female child savers. (11) While the literature examining the racial disparities within the modem day juvenile court is robust, (12) few scholars have examined the origins of the first court's treatment of black youth at its inception. (13) Second, this Article recovers the lost story of the black women's club movement's response to the juvenile court and the unique nature and meaning of the movement for black women reformers. (14) In doing so, this Article considers the history of the national black women's club movement within a new framework--the role of black women in juvenile justice and criminal justice reform work. Unearthing the contributions of black women to the juvenile court movement sheds light on the black community's perceptions of crime and delinquency. (15)

This Article makes two new arguments about the nature and meaning of the black club movement's role in the Progressive Era's juvenile court movement. First, from its inception, the juvenile court perpetuated existing racial stereotypes about blackness and delinquency and enforced societal notions of race and class stratification. Second, the National Association of Colored Women ("NACW") responded by making criminal and juvenile justice issues a major component of its civil rights agenda. (16) From 1899 to 1930, the NACW's efforts to challenge stereotypes about black delinquency impacted the development of the juvenile court system and its jurisprudence.

In contrast to the scholarly accounts suggesting that black women reformers played a limited or mostly conservative role in juvenile justice reform, (17) this Article suggests that NACW advanced an ambitious two-pronged strategy to save black youth from racial discrimination within the juvenile court system. First, black women adopted a progressive and daring integrationist strategy--advocating that the juvenile court system apply its child-saving ideals to protect black children. Second, black women implemented a cautiously conservative self-help strategy within the black community to prevent delinquency. Through this two-pronged strategy, black female activists shaped the national discourse on race and crime and formulated their own unique strategies for juvenile justice reform.

This story proceeds in five parts. Part I places the founding of the NACW (1896) and establishment of the nation's first juvenile court, the Cook County Juvenile Court in Illinois (1898), in the historical context of the Progressive Era's heightened racial oppression against black people. Part I argues that the founding of NACW marked the emergence of one of the first national organizations dedicated to child-saving and civil rights. Part I further argues that NACW's work within the national child saving movement took on a unique meaning in light of the "separate but equal" doctrine set forth in the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision Plessy v. Ferguson. (18)

Part II argues that the first juvenile court never applied its child-saving ideals equally to all children. Instead, the first juvenile court undermined its own ideals by perpetuating social stratifications and oppression based on race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Part III argues that these biases proved particularly disastrous for black youth and their families because, in effect, the juvenile court equated blackness with delinquency itself. Part IV argues that, in response, black clubwomen in Illinois implemented several reform campaigns to counter four prevailing racial stereotypes about black juvenile delinquency: (1) the lynching stereotype; (2)the Jezebel stereotype; (3) the delinquent black mother stereotype; and (4) the delinquent black community stereotype. Part V concludes with insights for modem community-based juvenile justice reform.

1. CALL TO ACTION: BLACK WOMEN AS CHILD SAVERS

   1. The National Black Club Movement

      The Progressive Era marked a major entree of women into the public sphere, where they transformed law and society, and dynamic black women like Ida B. Wells did not sit by idly. Ida B. Wells urged black women to organize and protest the use of racial stereotyping to sanction legal oppression of black people. (19) Heightened racial tensions during the Progressive Era summoned black women into action to develop several legal reform campaigns in the United States. The founding of NACW represented the inclusion of black women as a major voice in black civil rights and social reform advocacy. A major part of their agenda was, in their words, to "defend their name." (20) Arguably, "defending their name" meant countering the racial stereotyping of black people as criminals and challenging laws that codified these stereotypes.

      After attending a town hall meeting in which Ida B. Wells called upon black women to organize clubs to protest lynching, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin--wife of the first black judge in Massachusetts--founded the African American New Era Club. (21) Equally inspired by Wells, black women in New York City established the Woman's Loyal Union in 1892 to focus on "the defense of the oppressed" and to raise funds for civil rights test cases in the South. (22) One year later, Wells herself founded the Ida B. Wells Club--Chicago's first black woman's club. (23)

      In addition to lynching (and the related stereotyping of black men as rapists), the stereotyping of black women as prostitutes was another impetus for organizing NACW. (24) In 1895, the Missouri Press Association published an open letter from its president, James W. Jacks, stating: "the Negroes of this country are wholly devoid of morality; the women are prostitutes and are...