![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
Abstract
This article examines the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls (VISCG), the state’s only reformatory for delinquent black girls, which was established by the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs in 1915. Rather than punishing them for their adolescent misbehaviors, the founding organization intended to protect troubled black girls from inappropriate incarceration with adults and other state practices of violence and negligence. The founders also intended to prepare these girls for a discriminatory labor market by providing specialized training in the domestic arts and carefully supervised domestic parole placements. A closer look at the practice of domestic parole complicates the neat distinctions between education and incarceration, protection and punishment that the women of the Virginia State Federation made in their public discourse about the school. Instead of special protection, girls committed to the VISCG from courts across the state experienced vulnerability to violence, isolation, and exploitation at the hands of white employers during domestic parole placements. This article argues that the VISCG’s practice of domestic parole, despite the best intentions of school leadership, constituted a mode of carceral violence that warrants more interrogation.
Notes
1 Virginia Conference of Charities and Corrections. Proceedings, Virginia Child Welfare Conference (Richmond: Davis Bottom, Superintendent of Public Printing, 1911), 118.
2 These schools included the Virginia Industrial School for Boys (founded by the Prison Association of Virginia in 1891); the Virginia Manual Labor School for Colored Boys (established by the Negro Reformatory Association in 1900); and the Virginia Home and Industrial School for White Girls (founded by the Richmond Associated Charities in 1910). By 1920, each group had transferred school ownership to the Commonwealth of Virginia. Paul W. Keve, The History of Corrections in Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), 149–79.
3 Twenty-first-century scholars and activists continue to observe a connection between black girls’ trauma and their encounters with the criminal and juvenile justice systems, positing a “sexual abuse-to-prison pipeline” in which black girls are criminalized as a result of their experiences of sexual violation, physical abuse, and emotional manipulation. Per Monique Morris, “more than 70 percent of girls in juvenile detention facilities have a history of trauma, and at least 60 percent have experienced rape or the threat of rape. … Other studies show that up to 90 percent of girls in detention have experienced some form of sexual, emotional or physical abuse.” Monique Morris, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools (New York: New Press, 2016), 136–37.
4 See, for instance, Vernetta D. Young, “Race and Gender in the Establishment of Juvenile Institutions: The Case of the South,” Prison Journal 74, no. 2 (1994): 244–65; Wilma Peebles-Wilkins, “Janie Porter Barrett and the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls: Community Response to the Needs of African American Children,” Child Welfare League of America 74, no. 1 (1995): 143–61; Dorothy E. Roberts, “Black Women and Child Welfare: Lessons for Modern Reform,” Florida State University Law Review 32 (2005): 957–72; Tanya Smith Brice, “Undermining Progress in Early 20th-Century North Carolina: General Attitudes towards Delinquent African American Girls,” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 35, no. 1 (2007): 131–54; Bill Muth, Thom Gehring, Margaret Puffer, Camille Mayers, Sandra Kamusikiri, and Glenda Pressley, “Janie Porter Barrett (1965–1948): Exemplary African American Correctional Educator,” Journal of Correctional Education 60, no. 1 (2009): 31–51; Tanya Smith Brice, “Faith as a Protective Factor against Social Misconception of Black Girls: A Historical Perspective.” Social Work & Christianity 38, no. 3 (2011): 315–31; Geoff Ward, The Black Child Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Vernetta D. Young and Rebecca Reviere, “Black Club Women and the Establishment of Juvenile Justice Institutions for Colored Children: A Black Feminist Approach,” Western Journal of Black Studies 39, no. 2 (2015): 102–13.
5 See Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 156–94.
6 Paul W. Keve, The History of Corrections in Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), 148.
7 LaShawn Harris, “The ‘Commonwealth of Virginia vs. Virginia Christian’: Southern Black Women, Crime & Punishment in Progressive Era Virginia,” Journal of Social History 47, no. 4 (2014): 922–42.
8 Derryn Eroll Moten, “‘A Gruesome Warning to Black Girls’: The August 16, 1912 Execution of Virginia Christian” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1997), 39, 203.
9 See Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labor after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
10 See Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920–1945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, D.C., 1910–1940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995); and Rebecca Sharpless, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
11 Harris, “The ‘Commonwealth of Virginia vs. Virginia Christian,’” 928.
12 Ibid., 931.
13 National Association of Colored Women, Minutes of the Eighth Biennial Convention of the NACW, July 23–27, 1912: 21. Records of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, 1895–1992. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.
14 Ibid., 36.
15 “Woman Dies in Electric Chair,” Alexandria (va) Gazette, August 16, 1912.
16 Chicago Evening World, August 16, 1912. Quoted in Moten, “‘A Gruesome Warning to Black Girls,’” 93.
17 Kali Nicole Gross, “African American Women, Mass Incarceration, and the Politics of Protection,” Journal of American History 102 (June 2015): 25–26.
18 Per Monique Morris, “The assignment of more adultlike characteristics to the expressions of young Black girls is a form of age compression. Along this truncated age continuum, Black girls are likened more to adults than to children and are treated as if they willfully engaging in behaviors typically expected of Black women—sexual involvement, parenting or primary caregiving, workforce participation, and other adult behaviors and responsibilities.” Morris, Pushout, 34.
19 Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 918.
20 The most prominent of these institutions was the National Training School for Women and Girls, founded in 1909 by the Women’s Auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention under the leadership of Nannie Helen Burroughs. Part of the mission of this selective institution was to train black women and girls, who were confined to domestic work by employment discrimination, to “enter the labor market as skilled workers.” Traki Taylor-Webb, “‘Womanhood Glorified’: Nannie Helen Burroughs and the National Training School for Women and Girls, Inc., 1909–1961,” Journal of African American History 87 (Fall 2002): 390–402. See also Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), esp. chapter 7.
21 First Annual Report of the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, 1916 (Peake, VA: Virginia Industrial School for Girls, 1916).
22 Fourth Annual Report of the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, 1919 (Peake, VA: Virginia Industrial School for Girls, 1919).
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 See Estelle Freedman, Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America, 1830–1930 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981); Barbara M. Brenzel, Daughters of the State: A Social Portrait of the First Reform School for Girls in North America, 1856–1905 (Cambridge, MA: Havard University Press, 1983); Nicole Hahn Rafter, Partial Justice: Women in State Prisons, 1800–1935 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985); and Ruth Alexander, The “Girl Problem”: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).
27 Cheryl Hicks describes the typical structure of domestic parole from northern reformatories: “[The New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford] used a modified version of the nineteenth-century juvenile indenture system, in which young women were given domestic employment with a family, preferably in a rural area. In this environment, the wife and mother continued the institution’s training and served as a role model for parolees developing domestic skills. It was presumed that within a white middle-class household, a working-class woman would be supervised and protected from the moral dangers of urban life such as sexual exploitation and prostitution.” 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), 240.
28 Ibid., 240. Domestic parole was applied at both the New York State Prison for Women at Auburn and the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford.
29 Ibid., 241–42. Hicks found that prison administrators also facilitated employers’ quest for cheap black labor by channeling black women directly to domestic service while encouraging white women to “take advantage of their wider, and marginally better, employment options.”
30 This practice evolved out of “two simultaneous and competing concerns: the desire to protect black female migrants from urban dangers and the drive to protect urban society from criminal black women.” Prison and reformatory officials occasionally deported incarcerated immigrant women back to their countries of origin, and they “sometimes ideologically equated paroling black offenders to the South with deporting immigrants.” Ibid., 254–58.
31 Talitha LeFlouria details how the pseudoscientific doctrine of inherent black “immorality, violence and vice” provided a compelling rationale for the mass imprisonment of African Americans following the Civil War. These ideas paved the way for the gendered criminalization of black women and men through legislation that gave police broad authority to arrest African Americans for trivial offenses, delivering a steady stream of bodies to state prisons. Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 21–60.
32 See Anne Butler, “Still in Chains: Black Women in Western Prisons, 1865–1910,” Western Historical Quarterly 20 (1989): 18–35; Mary Ellen Curtin, “The ‘Human World’ of Black Women in Alabama Prisons, 1870–1900,” in Hidden Histories of Women in the New South, ed. Virginia Bernhard, Betty Brandon, Elizabeth Fox Genovese, Theda Purdue, and Elizabeth Hayes Turner (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994); LeFlouria, Chained in Silence; and T. Dionne Bailey, “‘I Beg for Your Mercy’: The Business of Black Women’s Bodies in the Carceral State, 1880s–1960s,” in Incarcerated Women: A History of Struggles, Oppression, and Resistance in American Prisons, ed. Erica Rhodes Hayden and Theresa R. Jach (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017).
33 Haley, No Mercy Here, 156–94.
34 Ibid., 189.
35 Ibid., 156–94.
36 Ibid., 160.
37 Ibid., 178, 183.
38 Eighth Annual Report of the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, 1923 (Peake: Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, 1923).
39 First Annual Report of the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, 1916.
40 Barrett referred repeatedly to her desire to award vocational certificates in her annual reports. However, the VISCG was too chronically underfunded to adequately teach girls the skills she wanted to reward. Financial woes created constant challenges, including securing full- or part-time domestic science teachers; furnishing the equipment necessary for girls to learn fine cooking or specialized sewing and laundering; and helping girls master the appliances that were becoming ubiquitous in modern, electrified homes.
41 Second Annual Report of the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, 1917 (Peake: Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, 1917). Throughout Barrett’s tenure as superintendent, the VISCG declined to specify acceptable wages for parolees. Little information exists about typical wages or about employers’ consistency in paying girls for their labor.
42 Third Annual Report of the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, 1918 (Peake: Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, 1918). The eugenic theory being developed by prominent Virginia physicians during the first decades of the 20th century held that “feeble-minded” or mentally disabled individuals were predisposed to criminality and incapable of sexual restraint, and therefore should be segregated from people of normal intelligence, sterilized, or otherwise prevented from passing down their defective traits. Barrett constantly appealed for mental tests to determine which girls should be sent to the state mental facility for the colored insane rather than the VISCG because she believed feebleminded girls like Emma to be nearly impossible to rehabilitate. For more information on the raced and gendered construction of feeblemindedness, see Gregory Michael Dorr, “Defective or Disabled? Race, Medicine, and Eugenics in Progressive Era Virginia and Alabama,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5, no. 4 (2006): 359–92.
43 Third Annual Report of the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, 1918.
44 Ibid.
45 Girls were placed in Richmond, about 12 miles southwest of the VISCG’s campus in Hanover, Virginia; Gloucester, 50 miles southeast; Roanoke, 144 miles southwest; Bremo Bluff, 51 miles west; Aldie, 88 miles south; Hewlett, 18 miles northwest; Covesville, 75 miles west; and Beaverdam, 22 miles northwest. All distances are as the crow flies.
46 Barrett’s instruction to Viola reflects what Darlene Clark Hine terms a “culture of dissemblance” among black women, which developed in response to their experiences of “rape, the threat of rape, and domestic violence” in slavery and in freedom. Hine defines black women’s practice of dissemblance as “creating the appearance of disclosure, or openness about themselves and their feelings,” while actually “[shielding] the truth of their inner lives and selves from their oppressors.” Cultivating a “secret, undisclosed persona” and protecting it from outside scrutiny was a survival tool for black women who were unable to protect their bodies from sexual violation or their collective sexual reputation from slander. The culture of dissemblance “allowed the individual Black woman to function” in her family and community and—crucially—enabled her to perform both the physical and the emotional labor required of domestic workers in white households. Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912, 915, 916.
47 Third Annual Report of the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, 1918.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia (Richmond, VA: Davis Bottom, Superintendent of Public Printing, 1920), 63–64. The Virginia Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs believed that the Commonwealth of Virginia was obligated to shoulder the responsibility of caring for girls labeled delinquent by courts and had thus always intended to transfer ownership of the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls to the state. Like the reformatories for white children and black boys, which were also founded by civic organizations, the VISCG raised the majority of its funds from donations but also received state appropriations each year prior to 1920.
52 Fifth Annual Report of the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, 1920 (Peake: Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, 1920).
53 Ibid.
54 Eleventh Annual Report of the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, 1926 (Peake: Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, 1926).
55 Fifth Annual Report of the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, 1920. Emphasis added.
56 Ibid.
57 Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
58 Seventeenth Annual Report of the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, 1932 (Peake: Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, 1932).
59 Commonwealth of Virginia, Budget, 1930–1932, for the Period of Four Months Beginning March 1 and Ending June 30, 1930, and for each Fiscal Year of the Biennium Beginning July 1, 1930, and Ending June 30, 1932, Submitted to the General Assembly of Virginia by Harry F. Byrd, Governor of Virginia, January 8, 1930 (Richmond: Virginia State Publishing Office, 1930), Virginia Government Documents Collection (Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville); Commonwealth of Virginia, Budget, 1932–1934, for each Fiscal Year of the Biennium Beginning July 1, 1932, and Ending June 30, 1934, Submitted to the General Assembly of Virginia by John Garland Pollard, Governor of Virginia, January 14, 1932 (Richmond: Virginia State Publishing Office, 1932), ibid.; Commonwealth of Virginia, Budget, 1934–1936, for each Fiscal Year of the Biennium Beginning July 1, 1934, and Ending June 30, 1936, Submitted to the General Assembly of Virginia by John Garland Pollard, Governor of Virginia, January 10, 1934 (Richmond: Virginia State Publishing Office, 1934), ibid.; Commonwealth of Virginia, Budget, 1936–1938, for each Fiscal Year of the Biennium Beginning July 1, 1936, and Ending June 30, 1938, Submitted to the General Assembly of Virginia by George C. Peery, Governor of Virginia, January 8, 1936 (Richmond: Virginia State Publishing Office, 1936), ibid.; Commonwealth of Virginia, Budget, 1938–1940, for each Fiscal Year of the Biennium Beginning July 1, 1938, and Ending June 30, 1940, Submitted to the General Assembly of Virginia by George C. Peery, Governor of Virginia, January 12, 1938 (Richmond: Virginia State Publishing Office, 1938), ibid.
60 Gross, “African American Women, Mass Incarceration, and the Politics of Protection,” 26.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Lindsey Elizabeth Jones
Lindsey Elizabeth Jones is a Presidential Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Education at Brown University. Her research interests include the histories of African American education, black women educators, and black girls’ experiences in the institutions of American life. She explored these topics in her dissertation, “‘Not a Place of Punishment’: The Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, 1915–1940,” defended at the University of Virginia in 2018.