Policing Black Women’s and Black Girls’ Bodies in the Carceral United States

Abstract

This article, which serves as an introduction to this special issue, explores the relationship between white supremacy, carceral violence, and black womanhood and it examines the symbiosis of gendered violence enacted against black women by state agents and everyday white men using the 1910 trial of Bessie Banks. It also discusses the articles included in the special issue, calling attention to the authors’ essential contributions as well as briefly spotlighting a few areas in the historiography that would benefit from richer excavation.

Keywords:

• black girls
• black women
• carceral studies
• policing
• violence

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Keisha Blain, the African American Intellectual History Society, and Souls for the opportunity to edit such vital research. Thanks also to the contributors: Keisha Blain, Sarah Haley, LaShawn Harris, Lauren Henley, Lindsey Jones, and Phillip Sinitierre; and a thank you to Cynthia Gwynne Yaudes for her copyediting of this work and all of the articles. I must thank Cheryl D. Hicks and Nicole A. Burrowes for their critical feedback. Also, much of my scholarship and, in particular, this article’s title, owes a debt of gratitude to Hazel Carby’s pioneering work on the policing of black women in the urban sphere.

This article is dedicated to my dearly departed mother, June Maria Gross.

Notes

1 Leslie Patrick-Stamp, “Numbers That Are Not New: African Americans in the Country’s First Prison, 1790–1835,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History & Biography CXIX, no. 1–2 (January–April 1995): 96, 98–100. I used Patrick rather than Patrick-Stamp in the body of the piece because this is now what the author prefers.

2 Ibid., 103.

3 Nicole Hahn Rafter, Partial Justice: Women, Prisons, and Social Control (New York: Transaction Publishers, 1990), 155; Patrick-Stamp, “Numbers That Are Not New,” 104.

4 For historical surveys of black women’s history, see Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America (New York: Broadway, 1999); Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Perennial, Harper Collins, 2001); and Gerda Lerner, Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York: Vintage, 1992).

5 For a compact discussion of how early laws devalued black womanhood, see Kali Nicole Gross, “African American Women, Mass Incarceration and the Politics of Protection,” Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (June 2015): 25–33.

6 “A Black Yale Student was Napping, and a White Student Called the Police,” New York Times, May 9, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/nyregion/yale-black-student-nap.html (accessed October 12, 2018); “5 Black Women Were Told to Golf Faster. Then the Club Called the Police,” New York Times, April 25, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/us/black-women-golfers-york.html (accessed October 12, 2018).

7 “Chikesia Clemons Has Bruises ‘All Over’ and Is Still Shaken Up after Waffle House Arrest,” Essence Magazine, April 27, 2018, https://www.essence.com/news/chikesia-clemons-bruises-shaken-waffle-house-arrest (accessed October 12, 2018); “Chikesia Clemons Found Guilty After Violent Waffle House Arrest,” Teen Vogue, July 25, 2018, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/chikesia-clemons-found-guilty-after-violent-waffle-house-arrest (accessed October 12, 2018).

8 “Cops Bought Dylann Roof Burger King after his Calm Arrest: Report,” New York Daily News, June 23, 2015, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/dylann-roof-burger-king-cops-meal-article-1.2267615 (accessed October 12, 2018); “Dylann Roof Sentenced to Death, 1st to Get Death Penalty for Federal Hate Crimes,” January 10, 2017, https://abcnews.go.com/US/charleston-church-shooter-dylann-roof-sentenced-death/story?id=44674575 (accessed October 12, 2018).

9 “Minn. Daycare Operator Who Hung Toddler From a Noose Avoids Prison,” People, July 18, 2018, https://people.com/crime/minnesota-daycare-provider-hung-toddler-from-noose-avoids-prison/ (accessed October 12, 2018); “Daycare Owner Gets Probation for Hanging Toddler from Noose,” New York Post, July 16, 2018, https://nypost.com/2018/07/16/day-care-owner-gets-probation-for-hanging-toddler-from-noose/ (accessed October 12, 2018).

10 “Chikesia Clemons Has Bruises ‘All Over’ And Is Still Shaken Up After Waffle House Arrest.” Dylann Roof fatally gunned down nine African Americans in a church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015. He was arrested without a beating and even protected by law enforcement officers. See “Cops Bought Dylann Roof Burger King after Calm Arrest.” For Craig’s arrest, see “Fort Worth Police Investigate Arrest of Women Caught on Video,” December 23, 2017, CNN; and “Fort Worth Police Drop Charges on Mom, Daughter in Facebook Live Arrest,” January 27, 2017, CNN.

11 For racial violence, see Kidada E. Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2012). For U.S. census data on race, gender, and crime see Rafter, Partial Justice, 141–43. On carceral violence against black women in the South, see Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016) and Talitha LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). For examples in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, see Kali Nicole Gross, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). For data specifically from the Philadelphia Detective Force, see Annual Report of the Chief of Police: City of Philadelphia for the 1885 (Philadelphia: Dunlap & Clarke, Printers, 1886) 28; Annual Reports of the Director of the Department of Public Safety and the Superintendent of the Bureau of Police, Year Ending December 31, 1895 (Philadelphia: Dunlap Printing Co., 1896), 94; and Annual Reports of the Director of the Department of Public Safety and the Superintendent of the Bureau of Police, Year Ending in December 31, 1905 (Philadelphia: Dunlap Printing Co., 1906), 102. For data that include arrests by the Philadelphia police force for years 1912, 1913, 1914, and 1915, see Annual Report for the Bureau of Police of the City of Philadelphia, For the Year Ending December 31, 1915 (Philadelphia: City of Philadelphia, 1916), 53. For studies that investigate these issues in New York, see Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk with You like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); and LaShawn Harris, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016). For more contemporary studies, see Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence against Black Women and Women of Color (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017); and Beth Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2012). Hazel Carby’s groundbreaking article traces and frames how projected notions of black female sexual deviance in the late 19th century constituted a series of moral panics that ultimately bolstered criminalizing rhetoric. See Hazel Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry, 18, no. 4 (Summer 1992): 738–55.

12 Dylan Rodriguez writes that the range and parameters of the United States prison regime encompasses “both the conventional definition of ‘dominion’ as a discrete territory controlled by a ruling order or state, and its etymological relationship to the Latin word dominium, a concept that posits ‘absolute dominion in tangible things,’” See Dylan Rodriguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 41–44. Haley applies and clarifies this when she writes “At the core of this conception of the prison as regime is the understanding that it generates a ‘technology of domination that exceeds the narrow boundaries of that very same juridical-carceral structure.’” See Haley, No Mercy Here, 9.

13 For an explanation of the indictments for murder and manslaughter, see Commonwealth vs. Bessie Elizabeth Minor Banks, case nos. 307–308, August 1910 Sessions files, Quarter Sessions Court Records, RG 21.5: Philadelphia County, Affidavit for Council Fee & Expenses, Filed January 9, 1911, David Phillips (Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia, PA). See also Bills of Indictment, ibid.; MURDER., True Bill, August 8, 1910, ibid.; 1st Count—Voluntary Manslaughter., 2nd Count—Voluntary Manslaughter., 3rd Count—Involuntary Manslaughter., 4th Count—Involuntary Manslaughter, True Bill, August 8, 1910, ibid. For the testimony, see Commonwealth v. Bessie Elizabeth Minor Banks, January 6, 1911, no. 307, August 1910 Sessions files, Quarter Sessions Court records, RG 21.5: Notes of Testimony 1877–1915. For Banks’s age, see ibid., 128. For the quotation, see ibid., 131–32. For McCabe’s age, see ibid., 54.

14 Ibid., 132. For the testimony about the urination, see ibid., 134.

15 Ibid., 135.

16 Ibid., 138–39.

17 Ibid., 147.

18 Ibid., 74–79.

19 Ibid., 152. Most likely Banks meant that she feared Charlie would be hanged after receiving a death sentence, rather than a literal lynching. Still, the tactics used in Banks’s interrogation fit into a larger pattern of coercion used by local authorities, for more examples see Kali Nicole Gross, “Exploring Crime and Violence in Early-Twentieth-Century Black Women’s History,” in Contesting Archives: Historians Develop Methodologies for Finding Women in the Sources, ed. Nupur Chaudhuri, Sherry Katz, and Betsy Perry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 59–61.

20 LaKisha Simmons, Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 93–103.

21 Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage Books, 2011) 63–66. For the quotation, see ibid., 66. Crystal Feimster’s work also documents similar historical instances of violence against black women. See Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

22 “The 13 Women Who Accused a Cop of Sexual Assault, in Their Own Words,” December 9, 2015, Buzzfeed, https://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/daniel-holtzclaw-women-in-their-ow?utm_term=.ecE1qZPP2#.kj9y0mjjo (accessed October 12, 2018).

23 “#DanielHoltzclaw Split Verdict Is a Travesty and Dangerous,” Huffington Post, December 11, 2015, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/kali-nicole-gross/danielholtzclaw-split-verdict-is-a-travesty-and-dangerous_b_8788064.html?platform=hootsuite (accessed October 12, 2018).

24 In addition to convincing evidence that her date stabbed McCable, Banks’s testimony about McCabe’s behavior was corroborated by a number of doctors and attendants at the Women’s Homeopathic Hospital, where McCabe was treated for his injuries. Specifically, they testified that when McCabe arrived he was very intoxicated, loud, boisterous, and extremely “profane.” See Commonwealth v. Bessie Elizabeth Minor Banks, January 6, 1911, no. 307, August 1910 Sessions files, Quarter Sessions Court records, RG 21.5: Notes of Testimony 1877–1915, 24–34. See also the recalled testimony of Matilda Cunningham, ibid., 42–44.

25 I am borrowing from Michel Foucault here in the sense that I see discipline and punishment not only as a response to crime, regardless of whether aimed at the body or one’s moral compass, but also as a means of delineating power and social hierarchies. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Translation by Alan Sheridan, Reprint (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).

26 Human Rights Project for Girls, Georgetown Law Center for Poverty and Inequality, and the Ms. Foundation for Women,“The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline: The Girls’ Story,” http://rights4girls.org/wp-content/uploads/r4g/2015/02/2015_COP_sexual-abuse_layout_web-1.pdf (accessed October 12, 2018).

27 Monique Morris, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls (New York: The New Press, 2016), 2.

28 These articles contribute to a growing field on black girls in history. See, for example, LaKisha Simmons’s pathbreaking study of black girlhood in segregated New Orleans, Crescent City Girls, and Nazeera Wright’s insightful, critical literary examination, Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016). Marcia Chatelain’s work also explores the historical experiences of black girls. See Marcia Chatelain, South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); also see Tera Agyepong, The Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender, and Delinquency in Chicago’s Juvenile Justice System, 1899–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

29 “What We’ve Learned from Sandra Bland’s Death, Two Years Later,” Houston Chronicle, July 13, 2017, https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Two-years-later-Sandra-Bland-s-suicide-still-11287622.php (accessed October 12, 2018).

30 See, for some examples of relevant works, Mary E. Odem’s research, which includes girls in Alameda and Los Angeles Counties in California, see Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Anne Butler, Gendered Justice in the American West (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Cynthia Blair, I’ve Got to Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Heather Ann Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History, 97, no. 3 (December 2010): 703–34; and the collection of important essays edited by Heather Ann Thompson and Donna Murch in the “Special Section: Urban America and the Carceral State,” Journal of Urban History, 41, no. 5 (2015); Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017); Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of the North Carolina, 2017); Erica Rhodes Hayden and Theresa R. Jach, editors, Incarcerated Women: A History of Struggles, Oppression, and Resistance in American Prisons (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017); C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Radical History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); and Joey L. Mogul, Andrea Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kali Nicole Gross

Kali Nicole Gross is the Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History in the Department of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her research concentrates on black women’s experiences in the United States criminal justice system between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Additionally, her writing frequently explores how legacies of race, gender, and justice currently shape mass incarceration. Her publications include A Black Women’s History of the United States (co-authored with Daina Ramey Berry; Beacon Press, 2020), Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910 (Duke University Press, 2006). She has also served as co-guest editor with Cheryl D. Hicks for the special issue “Gendering the Carceral State: African American Women, History, and Criminal Justice” for the Journal of African American History (2015), and contributed to the special issue “Historians and the Carceral State” for the Journal of American History (2015).