Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Amy Louise Wood ◽  
Natalie J. Ring
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Penal System ◽  
The South ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Jim Crow South

The introduction outlines the central themes of this collection: the problem of southern distinctiveness; the modernization of the criminal justice system and the centralization of state power; and the relationship between crime control and white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. In doing so, it offers an overview of criminal justice history in the South from the antebellum era through the rise and decline of convict leasing in the postbellum era to the development of new practices surrounding policing, incarceration, and capital punishment after 1890. It also explains the significance of this collection to the historiography on criminal justice in the South, as well as to understanding problems in our present-day penal system. Finally, the introduction summarizes each chapter in the collection.

Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
State Power ◽  
Prison Reform ◽  
Regulatory State ◽  
The North ◽  
Jim Crow South

This collection of nine original essays explores the development of a modern criminal justice system in the Jim Crow South, from the 1890s through the 1950s. It covers key transformations surrounding the practices of policing, incarceration, and capital punishment, as municipal police departments became professionalized and as authority over criminal punishment shifted from local jurisdictions to the state. The collection’s essays address the history of segregated police forces, black-on-black crime, police brutality, organized crime and government corruption, restrictions on ex-felons’ rights, convict labor, prison reform, and the introduction of the electric chair. Together, they make a case for southern distinctiveness. Criminal justice in the Jim Crow South looked quite different than it did in the North due to white southern demands for racial control, as well as white southerners’ suspicions of centralized state power and modern bureaucracies. This collection examines these relationships between white supremacy, the modernizing state, and crime control. In doing so, it provides a more nuanced portrait of the dynamic between state power and white supremacy in the South beyond a story of top-down social control. The essays reveal stories of state institutions grappling with their expanding authority, stories of political leaders and reformers anxious to render that power modern and efficient, and stories of African Americans appealing to the regulatory state in order to push back against racial injustice.

Discrepancies in Dixie: Asian Americans and the South

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jigna Desai ◽  
Khyati Y. Joshi
Keyword(s):  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
American South ◽  
The South ◽  
Recent Immigrant ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
The American South ◽  
The Relationship

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the relationship between the Asian American and the American South. The figure of the Asian American is perceived to be discrepant in and antithetical to the American South. Within the American imaginary, the Asian American as perpetual foreigner and alien is always seen as a recent immigrant, and therefore associated with contemporary times, while the South is perceived as an anachronistic and isolated region. This renders the two—the Asian American and the South—allegedly mutually exclusive and incongruous. In these imaginings, the South remains a space quintessentially American but one steeped in an antebellum era of White supremacy, anti-Black racism, and outdated isolation. In supposed contrast stands the figure of the Asian American who is associated with immigration and borders, globalization, and contemporaneity.

scholarly journals Policing Jim Crow America: Enforcers’ Agency and Structural Transformations

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Anthony Gregory
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Mob Violence ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
Historical Importance ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Jim Crow South

This is a critical historiographical essay animated by the research question of how the decisions of police and sheriffs illuminated and drove the transformation of white supremacy through different forms from emancipation to the end of Jim Crow segregation. It situates this focus amidst current methodological trends that stress structural oppression and argues that law-enforcers’ agency could illuminate discussions among historians and other scholars about the relationship between formal and informal law alongside the rise of the modern criminological state. The historical importance of enforcers is accentuated in the story told in each section—the shifting demographics of enforcement during Reconstruction; the inequalities of policing alongside lynching in the last decades of the nineteenth century; the complex interplay between policing and segregation statutes, colorblind criminal law, and mob violence in the Jim Crow South; the concurrent modernization of racialized policing nationwide; and the displacement of informal mob law and formal racial caste by a national regime of extralegal police violence, unequal patterns of incarceration and execution, and federal protections of civil liberties and civil rights.

Arab Threat and Social Control: An Exploration of the Relationship Between Ethnic Attitudes and Punitiveness Among Israeli Jews

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (5) ◽  
pp. 498-521 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christi Metcalfe ◽  
Deanna Cann
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
The United States ◽  
Punitive Attitudes ◽  
Ethnic Attitudes ◽  
Israeli Arabs ◽  
The Relationship

Numerous studies in the United States, as well as a smaller number of studies in other Westernized countries, have linked racial and ethnic attitudes to support for more punitive forms of crime control. The current study explores this relationship in Israel by assessing whether the degree to which Israeli Jews typify crime as an Israeli Arab phenomenon and/or resent Israeli Arabs is related to support for punitive criminal justice policies. The findings suggest that ethnic typification and resentment are related to general punitive attitudes, whereas ethnic apathy and resentment are related to greater support for the death penalty. Also, the relationship between ethnic typification and punitiveness is stronger among those who are less resentful.

Good Niggerhood

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alisha Gaines
Keyword(s):  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
The South ◽  
Sentimental Literature ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
Jim Crow South ◽  
A Performance

This chapter considers the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ace reporter Ray Sprigle’s four weeks traveling through the Jim Crow South “passing for black” in 1948. In the subsequent 21-part series, “I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days,” Sprigle writes how he is desperate to experience and document the most extreme aspects of Southern racism or “Dixie terror;” however, Sprigle only managed to “yessir” his way throughout the South becoming what he calls a “good nigger.” After Sprigle failed to experience the Dixie terrifying racism he needed to validate his experiment, the chapter argues that “good niggerhood,” a performance of cautious and respectable, black masculinity, undermined the integrity and ultimate goals of his project. The chapter argues that Sprigle attempted to save his failing racial expedition by parroting the language of iconic sentimental texts such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The chapter then uses James Baldwin’s trenchant critique of sentimental literature, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” to expose a cultural overinvestment in this kind of racial experiment.

“The law recognizes racial instinct”: Tucker v. Blease and the Black–White Paradigm in the Jim Crow South

2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 471-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Wertheimer ◽  
Jessica Bradshaw ◽  
Allyson Cobb ◽  
Harper Addison ◽  
E. Dudley Colhoun ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Public School ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
State Law ◽  
The South ◽  
Best Interest ◽  
The Law ◽  
Jim Crow South

On January 24, 1913, the trustees of the Dalcho School, a segregated, all-white public school in Dillon County, South Carolina, summarily dismissed Dudley, Eugene, and Herbert Kirby, ages ten, twelve, and fourteen, respectively. According to testimony offered in a subsequent hearing, the boys had “always properly behaved,” were “good pupils,” and “never …exercise[d] any bad influence in school.” Moreover, the boys’ overwhelmingly white ancestry, in the words of the South Carolina Supreme Court, technically “entitled [them] to be classified as white,” according to state law. Nevertheless, because local whites believed that the Kirbys were “not of pure Caucasian blood,” and that therefore their removal was in the segregated school's best interest, the court, in Tucker v. Blease (1914), upheld their expulsion.

scholarly journals Carson McCullers and Lillian Smith : The Intersections of Gender and Race in the Jim Crow South

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 119
Author(s):  
Constante González Groba
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Southern Women ◽  
Carson Mccullers ◽  
Racial Categorization ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Lillian Smith ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
Jim Crow South

Carson McCullers and Lillian Smith openly rejected a false conception of loyalty to fantasies like southern tradition or white supremacy, a loyalty that veiled a persistent lack of self-analysis. They exposed the cracks in the South’s pretended “unity” and homogeneity and criticized the self-destructive resistance to acknowledge that, as a socially constructed category, race is linked to relations of power and anticipated the instability of racial categorization that would be underscored by historical and scientific research later in their century. These two southern women writers opposed the insistence of their culture on racial purity as vehemently as its demands for rigid sexual definition and its suppression of any deviant form of sexuality. The characters in their fiction are victims of a dichotomic culture that resists the acknowledgement that black and white have always been as inextricably linked as male and female. In Killers of the Dream and Strange Fruit, Lillian Smith showed the interactions of racial and sexual segregation, which she saw as parallel emblems of the South’s cultural schizophrenia. She was one of the first to detect the psychosexual damage inflicted on southern women by the racial discourse, and established a most interesting parallel between the segregated parts of the female body and the segregated spaces of any southern locality. Like any system of differentiation, segregation shapes those it privileges as well as those it oppresses. Excluded from the white parameters of virtue and even from the condition of womanhood, the black woman’s body became the sexual prey of the white man who could not demand sexual satisfaction from his “pure” wife. The culture of segregation privileged the white woman but it also made her powerless; the very conventions which “protected” her deprived her of contact with physicality and locked her into bodilessness.

Justice-System Monitoring Technologies and Victim Welfare

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Paterson
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Control Culture ◽  
Repeat Victimization ◽  
Essential Components ◽  
Monitoring Technologies ◽  
Transformative Impact ◽  
And Control ◽  
The Relationship

The evolution of criminal justice technologies is inextricably linked to the emergence of new modes of electronic and digital governance that have become essential components of a surveillance and crime control culture continually seeking out novel responses to actual and perceived threats. The slow emergence of these technologies in the second part of the 20th century was often theorized through a discourse of order and control that has subsequently evolved in the 21st century to emphasize the protective potential of technologies oriented toward the interests of victims. The potential of criminal justice technologies to improve public safety and address issues of repeat victimization has now been subjected to significant scrutiny from scholars across the globe. While it would be conceptually inaccurate to split offenders and victims into two discrete groups, there has been an increase in analytical focus upon the intersections between victims of crime and technology within the context of criminal justice processes that had traditionally been oriented toward offenders. A more sophisticated understanding of the psychological and behavioral potential of criminal justice technologies has emerged that has permanently adjusted the landscape of crime and disorder management and has had a transformative impact upon the relationship between victims, technology, and criminal justice. Yet, at the same time, the integration of digital technologies into the crime control and criminal justice infrastructure still is at an early stage in its evolution, with future trends and patterns uncertain.

Lethal State

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Kotch
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mandatory Sentencing ◽  
Racial Hierarchies ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Essential Insight ◽  
Orderly State

For years, American states have tinkered with the machinery of death, seeking to align capital punishment with evolving social standards and public will. Against this backdrop, North Carolina had long stood out as a prolific executioner with harsh mandatory sentencing statutes. But as the state sought to remake its image as modern and business-progressive in the early twentieth century, the question of execution preoccupied lawmakers, reformers, and state boosters alike. In this book, Seth Kotch recounts the history of the death penalty, including lynching, in North Carolina from its colonial origins to the present. He tracks the attempts to reform and sanitize the administration of death in a state as dedicated to its image as it was to rigid racial hierarchies. Through this lens, Lethal State helps explain not only Americans' deep and growing uncertainty about the death penalty but also their commitment to it. Kotch argues that Jim Crow justice continued to reign in the guise of a modernizing, orderly state and offers essential insight into the relationship between race, violence, and power in North Carolina. The history of capital punishment in North Carolina, as in other states wrestling with similar issues, emerges as one of state-building through lethal punishment.

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