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

Black women have never been the beneficiaries of the full rights of citizenship. This is arguably most apparent when one considers black women’s experiences within the United States criminal justice system. Historical research over the last two decades has started to fill in the details of an especially grim picture that becomes more disturbing as the historical inner workings of race, gender, violence, and the law come into focus. Leslie Patrick’s foundational essay, published in 1995, revealed how the nation’s first penitentiary, the Jail and Penitentiary House at Walnut Street, established in Philadelphia in 1790, shadowed Pennsylvania’s act for the gradual emancipation of enslaved blacks in 1780; an act that would grant freedom to those enslaved blacks born after its passage once they reached their twenties. While gaols or jails had long existed in the colonies, the embryonic nation’s carceral state was born in anticipation of black freedom. Or, put another way, as much as it was emblematic of the country’s shift away from monarchical corporal punishments, the creation of the penitentiary was also a decisive move to limit black freedom. Under the circumstances, it follows that the nation’s birthplace also spawned its first penitentiary.[1]

Therefore it is perhaps no great wonder that then, as now, African American men and women were disproportionately represented in the institution. Yet black women’s incarceration had uniquely stark contours, as Patrick explains: “Although fewer black women received prison sentences than black men, they almost always constituted a higher percentage of the black prison population than did white women in the white prison population at Walnut Street.”[2] The late Nicole Hahn Rafter noted that chivalry kept white women out of confinement, while Patrick points out that “women of African descent found guilty of committing crimes were not perceived as meeting any of the criteria that qualified them for chivalrous considerations.”[3] Further, black women’s history shows that few African American women have ever qualified for protection under the law, chivalrous or otherwise.[4]

This article, which serves as an introduction to this special issue, will: (1) explore the relationship between white supremacy, carceral violence, and black womanhood; (2) examine the symbiosis of gendered violence enacted against black women by state agents and everyday white men using the 1910 trial of Bessie Banks; and (3) discuss 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. Stylistically, this article routinely pairs historical and contemporary instances of state-sanctioned antiblack violence to better elucidate the depth of entrenchment and the breadth of the country’s systemic, brutal devaluation and exclusion of African American women.

Indeed, perceptions of black women as undeserving of protection are embedded in the nation’s founding and its early laws (such as colonial statutes and practices that did not recognize or punish the rape of black women or black girls) but are also found in the cultural fabric of American whiteness—a whiteness that is steeped in the ideologies of white supremacy. These ideologies have profoundly shaped the country’s legal system and were maintained by bigoted whites’ use of the law to disallow black citizenship and, by extension, black humanity.[5] Today the vestiges of this history are easily observed in the spate of viral videos documenting the practice of racist whites calling the police on black women for activities like napping in dorm lounges during university finals or golfing too slowly on the green.[6] Less about reporting actual crime or extralegal infractions and more about the exercise of white/state control over black female bodies, such incidents have occurred across the country whether in New Haven, Connecticut, or Saraland, Alabama, where Chikesia Clemons, a twenty-five-year-old black woman found herself violently arrested after a verbal dispute with a white server at a Waffle House in April 2018. Clemons said she objected to being charged for plastic flatware and asked for information necessary to make a complaint. Instead, the employee phoned the police. When white police officers arrived, Clemons, in short order, was grabbed, hurled to the ground, her breasts exposed in the process, and one officer threatened to break her arm. The officers would go on to charge Clemons with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Found guilty, Clemons was ordered to pay a $200 fine. She was also sentenced to ten days in prison but “the judge said he would suspend that sentence if Clemons goes on one year of informal probation.”[7] Clemons’s arrest contrasts starkly with the arrest of white suspects, even those suspected of especially heinous crimes. Recall how authorities placed the avowed racist, murderer Dylann Roof in a bulletproof vest and bought him lunch from Burger King—all after Roof had been apprehended on suspicion of having fatally gunned down nine African Americans in a church in 2015.[8] The light sentence that Nataliia Karia recently received suggests that the pattern of chivalry filtering white women out of the prison endures. Karia pleaded guilty to attempted murder after fashioning a noose with tights and hanging a toddler in her home. She also plead guilty to third-degree assault after fleeing the scene of a crash as she struck three people with her minivan after hanging the child. For these crimes Karia received a sentence of ten years of probation in July 2018.[9]

Responses to black women’s attempts to access law enforcement also differ greatly from those of whites. Consider the treatment of Jacqueline Craig, a black mother in Fort Worth, Texas. Craig called police to report a white neighbor who had allegedly choked and grabbed her seven-year-old son. The officer sided with the man accused of harming the child, supposedly because the child littered, and the officer pushed Craig to the ground before arresting her and her daughter. Both women, ages 46 and 19, were charged with “resisting arrest, search, or transport and interfering with public duties.” However, footage of the episode went viral, sparked widespread outrage, and garnered so much media attention that eventually the charges against the two women were dropped and the neighbor, who received “a citation for Assault by Contact,” was convicted of misdemeanor assault in the beginning of 2018. But rather than being fired, the arresting officer was suspended for only ten days without pay.[10] What Craig and her daughter endured is a routine, albeit highly traumatic, occurrence in the lives of thousands of black women across the country, many without the benefit of videotaped evidence to corroborate accounts that conflict with the police version of events. Further, violence and the criminalization of black women has an extensive history in the United States. Census data paint a damning portrait of the ways that African American women have been disproportionately incarcerated across the country, especially between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when black women often accounted for upward of 80 percent of the women imprisoned in the South. Even in states like Pennsylvania and New York, black women were overrepresented in the criminal justice system.[11]

Yet equally important to examining that history is the need to understand that there exists a profound alliance between white citizens, law enforcement, and the American justice system; it is a mutually constitutive allegiance that privileges and maintains American whiteness, and the ideologies of white supremacy therein, in part, by policing black women’s bodies via an expansive carceral regime. I am borrowing from the pioneering work of Dylan Rodriguez and Sarah Haley here in that I am using the phrase carceral regime to refer to the broad expanse of the criminal justice system (including officers, prosecutors, judges, the court, sentencing, parole, and prisons) and its vicissitudes (such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, brutality, and corruption) that exist in the system’s varied apparatuses and yet far exceed them.[12]

Historically, law enforcement officers have visited the same kind of sexual terrorism upon black women as did white employers and everyday white men. The case of a nineteen-year-old black woman, Bessie Banks, who faced murder and manslaughter charges for the death a white man, Matthew McCabe, aged forty-six, in Philadelphia helps elucidate this point. During her trial in 1910, Banks explained that an intoxicated McCabe boarded the same streetcar that she and her date, Charlie, were riding. After the man accidentally stepped on Banks’s foot she testified:

Then he began rubbing me on my leg and hunching me. Then he said I felt good to him. He said I felt good to him and he said he could use me until I was simple. I did not say anything to him. I did not pay any attention to him whatever. So he kept this up and I got tired of it and I changed seats with Charlie.[13]

McCabe grew incensed and started yelling obscenities. He called Banks a whore and the couple “Nigger” and “boogie”; four other white men who were also on the streetcar and apparently also drunk started taunting the couple as well, singing: “Every nation has a flag but the coon” and “I would rather be a white man instead of a big, black coon.” Banks and her date exited the car only to be pursued by McCabe, who continued hurtling racist epithets and started urinating “on the street, coming right behind us, right on the pavement.”[14] The harassment continued and intensified, and Banks attempted to stop Charlie from getting into a physical altercation with McCabe. At this point, according to her testimony, McCabe called her a “damn black bitch.” Banks described a harrowing tableau: “[McCabe] struck me and knocked me into the gutter, into a puddle of dirty water. When I got up I felt the blood discharging from the lower part of my body.” The attack did not end there; with his pants unfastened McCabe yelled, “You damn black whore, I would like to ram this down your throat and choke you.”[15] The two men started fighting and during the altercation, Banks testified that it was then that Charlie must have stabbed McCabe. After the fight, with McCabe down, the two fled the scene.[16]

Law enforcement officers arrested Banks roughly a week later. Questioned by the head of the detectives in a small room alone, Banks testified that when the detective shut the door she got nervous and started crying. During the interrogation, he cursed at her and told her if she confessed, even though she said she did not commit the crime, he would write it up as self-defense. Banks also stated that, “they taken [sic] me in this big room there and stood me up in front of those men that had those masks on. That frightened me too, because I had never seen anything like that before.”[17] The men in the room, wearing lead-colored masks, looked Banks all over.[18] Under duress, Banks signed a confession taking blame for the crime. Yet Banks feared not just for her own safety and bodily integrity. Officers also led Banks to believe that if she did not confess, they would go after Charlie for murder. She explained: “I was only frightened and I thought they had Charlie all the time and he was going to be hung.”[19] Considering the use of foul language, bodily threat, and the sinister parading of Banks before a room of masked white men, there are significant parallels between the treatment Banks received from McCabe and that of the Philadelphia detectives who interrogated her. McCabe’s attack on Banks gestures toward the symbiotic nature of gendered antiblack violence as enacted by individual white men and the carceral regime in the sense that McCabe knew he could sexually terrorize Banks because the carceral regime almost exclusively protects and serves white patriarchy. Likewise, Philadelphia detectives could coerce Banks in violent, gendered ways especially because she was a black woman accused of taking the life of a white man.

But whereas there appears to be an implicit threat of rape during Banks’s time in custody, history provides ample evidence of even more explicit assaults. As an example, Hattie McCray, a fourteen-year-old black girl, was murdered by an offduty police officer who attempted to sexually assault her in New Orleans in 1930.[20] In 1949 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sought justice for Gertrude Perkins, a black woman raped by two white police officers in Montgomery, Alabama, where, among the local black community, the entire police force had a “reputation for physical and sexual violence.”[21] The cases here are not incidental but rather highlight a historical pattern of sexual violence against black women by police officers. Moreover, such crimes are not confined to history, as the 2014 case against now-convicted serial rapist and ex–Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw reveals. Holtzclaw used his position to target predominantly poor and vulnerable black women and girls for rape and other forms of sexual coercion. During his trial, thirteen black women testified against him—the youngest victim being seventeen and the oldest in her late fifties.[22] Yet despite DNA evidence and the women’s brave testimony, Holtzclaw was convicted on only 18 of the 36 charges. Still, that there was a conviction at all is significant given how little attention the case garnered; even the seating of an all-white jury for the case barely registered in major press outlets. The latter factor is a sad comment on black women’s vulnerability to sexual violence in the United States. National media did not cover the case until Holtzclaw was convicted, and even then coverage was less about the sexual violation of black women by a member of law enforcement and more astonishment that someone would actually be punished for it.[23] These are just a few examples of the legacies of racist, gendered violence and their centrality in policing.

Banks’s case serves as an especially demonstrative treatise on the vicissitudes of historical carcerality. Though she would be acquitted of all charges, no doubt a welcomed outcome for her and her attorney, that Banks faced charges at all is dubious, never mind that law enforcement officers terrorized her into making a false confession. Moreover, the entire event could have so easily gone another way—a young black woman, who was just trying to enjoy herself on a date, might have been convicted and imprisoned for decades or worse because a white man felt entitled to her body. The circumstances and the disposition of Banks’s case helps unmask both the systemic and arbitrary tyranny of the carceral regime.[24]

This collection of articles aims to provide a sharper lens to peer into that vast network. At the same time, the works resist prioritizing extreme instances of carceral violence, such as those instances that result in loss of life (though such cases are explored), to instead map the broad arc of carceral violence and the gravity of its varied applications. To that end, the authors move from examining the confinement of black girls to mapping domestic carcerality to the police killing of a black woman in the 1980s to the death of a black woman in custody in the early 21st century. In terms of periodization, the pieces start at the dawn of the 20th century and end in the present, regionally touching on the North and the South.

The articles also show how antiblack police violence (one facet of carceral violence) is fundamentally characteristic of how the nation relates to black women and black girls. Specifically, the legal system, and its intrinsic biases, disciplines and punishes black women and black girls in a manner that ultimately elevates and codifies white supremacy and white heteropatriarchy.[25] As much as possible, the research presented also unearths the tactics that black women and black girls used to resist state violence in the justice system; and the work considers how black reformers and the greater black community were, at times, complicit in upholding negative views about poor and working-class black women’s and black girls’ morality through attitudes that sometimes came perilously close to validating bigoted notions of inherent black female criminality.

Even as the majority of the articles concentrate on the past, the troubling timelessness of these issues are undeniable. Lindsey Elizabeth Jones begins her work on the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls with Janie Porter Barrett’s 1911 observation that as far as black girls were concerned: “No indignity or crime heaped upon her offends society, and in very few cases does it offend the law” (p. 14). Though the black clubwoman’s sentiments are over a century old, Barrett’s words nonetheless resonate with recent studies showing that black girls are not only disproportionately the victims of violence and sexual assault but that, instead of being protected and supported, they are actually criminalized. A 2015 report noted that sexually trafficked black girls are routinely arrested and charged with prostitution.[26] Further, as Monique Morris explains, though often eclipsed by discussions about the plight of black boys, “Black girls are also directly impacted by criminalizing policies and practices that render them vulnerable to abuse, exploitation, dehumanization, and under the worst circumstances, death.”[27]

The long history behind these trends becomes visible as Jones traces the pending execution of a seventeen-year-old black girl accused of killing her white employer as well as the origins of the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, including its roots in the work of black clubwomen hoping to help protect black girls. Through Jones’s work the problematic contours of protection through confinement—even if initially undertaken by those with good intentions—becomes painfully apparent. Lauren N. Henley’s work on an industrial school in North Carolina between 1919 and 1939, the Efland Home, offers further evidence of this unfortunate paradox at the same time that it sketches how the state’s unwillingness to support institutions aiming to protect black girls, even in the barest sense, further imperiled already vulnerable children. Henley writes, “Just twelve years after the reformatory opened, many state officials opined that a young black woman would be better off in a local jail than at Efland Home” (p. 39). Charting shifts away from rehabilitative aims to more corporal forms of punishment, Henley’s article also offers furtive proof of black girls’ resistance, as many absconded to escape the abuse. Without romanticizing or oversimplifying black women’s and black girls’ actions, Jones’s and Henley’s articles, respectively, offer a rare view of early juvenile confinement.[28]

Whereas Jones’s and Henley’s pieces spotlight how concern about black girls’ purported moral turpitude was policed by segments of the black community as well as the state, Sarah Haley’s article, “Care Cage: Black Women, Political Symbolism, and 1970s Prison Crisis,” effectively operates as an important conduit. The article connects to the decades before its time period and acts as a kind of dark mirror foreshadowing mass incarceration, the behemoth that had yet to come. Haley’s work lays bare the “carceral continuum that ensnares black women in a violent, gendered regime—a regime that produces structures of black female subordination reminiscent of antebellum modes of dominance under the guise of white benevolence and American racial progress” (pp. 58–59). Beginning with the gendered captivity of Mary Prince Fitzpatrick, a black woman who had been imprisoned in Georgia and released during the day to work as a caretaker for Jimmy Carter’s young daughter when he served as governor, Haley’s article displays the vastness of domestic carcerality. Fitzpatrick briefly became the object of national media attention surrounding Carter’s presidential inauguration in 1977, as he capitalized on the image of a criminalized yet domesticated black woman—a symbol he used to reify white male authority and control. Further, as Haley argues, Carter aimed to “individualize social problems and their solutions as activists argued for structural accountability” (p. 60).

But while accountability remained elusive, the uses of black women’s criminalized bodies endured. In “Beyond the Shooting: Eleanor Gray Bumpurs, Identity Erasure, and Family Activism against Police Violence,” LaShawn Harris resurrects the 1984 police killing of a sixty-six-year-old African American woman who lived in the Bronx, New York. Eleanor Bumpurs, who battled mental illness, was armed with a butcher knife when authorities entered her home seeking to evict her. She met a violent end when Officer Stephen Sullivan fired two shotgun rounds—one striking her in the chest and the other severing fingers from her right hand. The case became emblematic of police violence against black women and the black community as activists across the country decried the shooting. But Harris retrieves Bumpurs’s personal history, which has largely been “buried under a sea of anti-police brutality placards, lost in the chants of ‘Black Lives Matter,’ trapped in historical inaccuracies, and visually confined to a somber-looking 1980s newspaper photograph” (p. 89). Through Harris’s work Bumpurs moves from politicized martyr to a complex figure: an impoverished black woman who witnessed firsthand racist terrorism in the South, a woman who had become enmeshed in the South’s legal system during the 1940s before migrating North, and a woman who struggled and worked hard to raise her children. The bond between them is especially visible in the work her daughter, Mary Bumpurs, undertook fighting to obtain justice in the aftermath of her mother’s death.

Mary’s fight for justice, however, exists on a continuum of black women’s mobilization against antiblack state violence. Keisha N. Blain’s article focuses on black women’s political organizing against racist police brutality in the 1980s. By exploring the tireless work of Mary Bumpurs and Veronica Perry, whose teenage son was murdered by plainclothes police officers in 1985, Blain shows how both women drew on political messages from the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s to forward a nuanced, radical political ideology that “not only addressed police violence in the 1980s but also drew a link between the activities of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and the New York Police Department (NYPD) to emphasize the historical legacies of racist violence in the United States and the role law enforcement played in maintaining it” (p. 111). Blain also explores how African American women built on the legacies of everyday activists such as Emmett Till’s mother Mamie Till to effectively weaponize motherhood and close familial bonds. Their efforts aimed to counter the dehumanizing practices of the state—practices including killing loved ones and denigrating their memories in a bid to mask police brutality. Blain’s research situates black women’s social protests in New York as an important site for historical and contemporary studies of black political activity.

The final article is an examination of the afterlife of Sandra Bland and aesthetic insurgency—a concept that Phillip Luke Sinitiere uses to refer to “creative expressions that respond directly to forms of political, social, and economic injustice” (p. 124). His work blends historical and cultural analysis to explore how the arts are a form of resistance to police violence against black women. Specifically, Sinitiere maps the rich artistic production resulting from the rage, sadness, and activism surrounding Bland’s shocking death. Bland was found hanging dead in a Texas jail cell after a white officer beat and arrested her during a traffic stop over Bland allegedly failing to signal a lane change in 2015.[29] Using an expansive theoretical framework that employs work from scholars such as Robin D. G. Kelley, Saidiya Hartman, and Christina Sharpe, Sinitiere argues that blending black feminist thought with black expressive culture affirms black “humanity in a society built on and blanketed with anti-blackness”; it further shows how radical black art and “aesthetic insurgency bear historical and contemporary witness to Sandra Bland’s afterlife” (p. 142). Taken together, these articles broaden historical studies of black women’s and girls’ experiences in the carceral United States and point to the need for more work to be done; certainly with respect to queer and non–gender conforming subjects but also temporally between 1940 and 1970 and regionally to better represent the Midwest, West Coast, and parts of the Southwest.[30]

This special issue also surfaces a key point of engagement: the abuses and disproportionate representation of black women in the nation’s carceral regime is not a malfunction of the criminal justice system nor is it remotely an objective representation of black female criminality. Rather, it is an ugly reminder that the U.S. carceral regime is functioning largely as it was intended, both with respect to proscribing black civil liberties and the ways it traffics in black female bodies. This facet of the inner workings of criminal justice should continue to inform future historical scholarship as well as contemporary studies, as it can help disrupt and combat the dehumanizing technologies of carceral violence against black women and black girls.

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.