“The most unprotected of all human beings”: Black Girls, State Violence, and the Limits of Protection in Jim Crow Virginia

The wayward girl problem is not a race problem, but a community problem, and every home is in danger. The negro girl[,] because of previous conditions, I suppose, has no rights that any man, white or black, feels bound to respect. No indignity or crime heaped upon her offends society, and in very few cases does it offend the law; so beyond a doubt she is the most unprotected of all human beings. When we find her running the wayward girl record high, indeed, we can’t expect any more.1

On Thursday, May 25, 1911, black clubwoman and social settlement builder Janie Porter Barrett spoke these words before reformers gathered in Richmond for the third-annual Virginia Child Welfare Conference. In a state with a juvenile corrections infrastructure that was young and privately owned, Barrett presented the case for creating a segregated reformatory for delinquent colored girls. During the previous twenty years, charitable groups in Virginia had established “industrial schools” for white boys, colored boys, and white girls, with state support, leaving colored girls the only group of children who could still be incarcerated with adults as a result of juvenile misbehaviors.2 As the founding president of the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, Barrett represented a statewide network of African American women who were raising funds and seeking political support for an institution for delinquent colored girls. They recognized that the most important factors mitigating the problematic behaviors of “wayward” black girls—girls who were considered sexually precocious, who ran away from home, whose parents found them disobedient or difficult to control—were (1) their vulnerability to victimization in “every home” by “any man, black or white,” and (2) the fact that the legal system rarely held anyone, black or white, responsible for the rampant abuse “heaped upon” black girls. The only individuals to face legal repercussions for violence against black girls were the girls themselves, when they were punished for their trauma-induced misbehaviors.3 Under these conditions, the state’s tendency to disregard black girls’ age and incarcerate them with mature criminals was, for Barrett and her colleagues, a violent and destructive practice that further compounded the violence of failing to protect black girls from their assailants in the first place. To complete its turn toward reforming rather than punishing troubled adolescents, Virginia needed to extend support to a reformatory for colored girls.

In this address, Barrett emphasized the need to protect black girls from quotidian forms of interpersonal and state violence. One year later, the women in her organization, along with national networks of black women, would join together to decry a singularly spectacular act of state violence: the electrocution of seventeen-year-old Virginia Christian. Tying their cause to the case of Christian, a black girl convicted of murdering her white employer in the culmination of a turbulent and abusive working relationship, black clubwomen saw the proposed reformatory as a way to protect black girls not only from inappropriate incarceration, but also from death at the hands of the state. For them, the impending execution of seventeen-year-old Virginia Christian was the logical consequence of a criminal justice system that: (1) failed to protect black girls by holding their abusers accountable; (2) failed to consider abuse as a factor mitigating the misbehaviors of adolescent black girls; and (3) denied the significance of black girls’ age in determining appropriate legal responses to their actions. In their view, any black adolescent girl in the commonwealth could become the next Virginia Christian—a murderess, murdered by the state.

For its founding organization, the opening of the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls (VISCG) in 1915 represented a longed-for reversal of the Commonwealth of Virginia’s stance toward black girls. Rather than conflating wayward black girls with adult women—confining them to jails and prisons, at best, or condemning them to die, at worst—the state government agreed to recognize the significance of black girls’ age in dealing with their lawbreaking and misbehavior by approving a place for juvenile commitment. However, in arguing for this reformatory, the fiercest advocates for wayward black girls did not depart from the controlling logic of confinement within state custody as a solution for adolescent misbehavior. Instead, they insisted that black girls could and should be able to experience state custody without state violence.

Scholarship exploring black club women's fight for colored reformatories in the South rightly emphasizes that their founders saw these institutions as a refuge from state violence and a way of resisting the pervasive and pernicious tendency of state governments to conflate black children with adults in order to confine, extract labor from, and even inflict death upon their young bodies.4 While acknowledging the tenacity of these women in the face of white supremacy and their care for black children, this article troubles the idea that because they were founded and operated by black women, colored juvenile reformatories represented a total departure from southern state violence. The VISCG did not constitute a complete break from black girls’ exposure to mechanisms of state violence in Virginia. Rather, as the final of Virginia’s four race and sex-segregated juvenile reformatories, the VISCG was just one component of a new, age-sensitive system of incarceration that continued to facilitate state violence and enable interpersonal violence against black girls—despite the best intentions of the women who built the school.

This article begins by discussing the case of Virginia Christian, whose trial and execution catalyzed the already-existing movement to rescue black girls from Virginia’s local jails and state penitentiary. For many observers, especially organized black women, Christian’s story illustrated the deeply intertwined nature of workplace violence, white supremacy, and state retribution in the lives of ordinary workingclass black girls. Moreover, the commonwealth’s determination to execute Christian epitomized the state’s denial of childhood to black girls and dramatized the urgency of building a reformatory. Next, this article examines the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls and challenges its construction by contemporaries and scholars as a safe haven from interpersonal and state violence. The school’s founders characterized it as an educational intervention that was entirely distinct from explicitly punitive jail and penitentiary settings—a place where they could prepare troubled girls for gainful employment within the field of domestic work. The women of the Virginia State Federation saw girls’ parole placements as full-time, live-in domestic wage workers as an opportunity to assess the moral and practical lessons taught in the school. At the same time, they hoped to provide parolees with special protection—a necessary measure given their knowledge that private white homes were often sites of physical violence, psychological terrorism, and sexual predation against black female workers.

A closer look at the VISCG’s actual functioning, specifically its practice of domestic parole, complicates the neat distinctions between education, incarceration, protection, and punishment that the women of the Virginia State Federation made in their public discourse about the school. Instead of being a place where wayward black girls were wholly protected and completely spared from punishment, this article argues that the VISCG was, in fact, the entry point to a “domestic carceral sphere” wherein white employers functioned as agents of state control and black adolescent female household workers were vulnerable to violence, isolation, and exploitation.5 Because paroled girls were under the continual surveillance of white employers and lived in constant danger of abuse at their hands, the VISCG’s practice of domestic parole constituted a mode of carceral violence that warrants more interrogation.

Virginia Christian’s advocates hoped in vain that if the Commonwealth of Virginia recognized her as a girl and not a woman, she would be protected from being killed for acting in her own defense. The state’s eventual recognition of the significance of criminalized black girls’ age, as communicated by its support of a race-, sex-, and age-segregated space of state custody, did not in and of itself entail substantial protection for black girls. Instead, at the precise moment when these girls became legible to the state as girls, they became vulnerable, in new ways, to state violence.

Virginia Christian

In 1908, after centuries of carrying out its executions by hanging, the Commonwealth of Virginia modernized the death penalty by installing the electric chair at the State Penitentiary in Richmond. Prison surgeon Charles V. Carrington characterized electrocution as a “swift, sure, solemn, and awe-inspiring mode of punishment,” one that was “infinitely more humane than hanging” but still provoked enough dread and terror to be “powerfully deterrent on the criminal classes.”6 The only female convict to be executed by electric chair in Virginia— in fact, the only female convict that the state executed during the entire 20th century—was seventeen-year-old Virginia Christian. 7

Christian grew up in a working-class family in Hampton, Virginia. The third of six children, Virginia and her two older brothers worked to help support the family, including their disabled mother. Virginia’s father, Henry Christian, worked as a fisherman. Prior to becoming paralyzed, Charlotte Christian had worked in the household of a local white family, the Belotes. Virginia dropped out of school at thirteen to work for Ida Belote, despite her reputation among black Hampton residents for being “cantankerous and abusive to employees.”8 Until age sixteen, Virginia Christian worked as a laundress under the watchful eye of Ida Belote, and the relationship between the teenaged girl and the older woman conformed to a pattern which was as old as chattel slavery.

Slaveholding women in the antebellum South used systematic violence to assert authority over their female household slaves, who resisted their ill treatment in ways large and small.9 Following emancipation, as black women workers gained the ability to “live out,” labored in accord with more regular working hours, and benefitted from a greater standardization of household tasks, they and their white domestic managers continued to negotiate the terms of their working relationships through subtle and overt conflicts.10 Virginia Christian’s final interaction with Ida Belote demonstrates how workplace violence remained endemic to domestic work even in the 20th century.

During a dispute about missing jewelry on March 18, 1912, a physical altercation took place between Virginia Christian and Ida Belote. Virginia killed Ida—a crime she confessed to committing in self-defense after being assaulted by the older woman. Belote accused Christian of stealing a gold locket, and when the girl angrily denied this charge, Belote hurled a spittoon and struck her on the shoulder. Injured and infuriated, Christian swung a broomstick at Belote’s head and then stuffed a towel down the screaming woman’s throat.11 LaShawn Harris argues that, for white Virginians who saw her as a “deviant and vulgar black murderess,” neither Christian’s tender age nor her gender mattered as much as her race in determining the appropriate punishment for her crime. By ignoring evidence that confirmed her true age as sixteen, and instead highlighting her physically mature appearance, the Commonwealth of Virginia effectively negated Christian’s adolescent status, paving the way for electrocution. 12

Black and white Americans wrote letters and circulated petitions pleading with the commonwealth to consider Christian’s youth as a factor in both her crime and her punishment, and to commute her sentence from execution to life imprisonment. At their biennial convention in Christian’s hometown of Hampton in July 1912, the women of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) crafted a petition urging Governor William Hodges Mann to “commute the sentence of the seventeen-year-old girl condemned to hang.” The women argued that Christian’s “extreme youth, her lack of training, and the neglect for which she herself was not responsible” would make her electrocution “repugnant to the Christian womanhood and manhood not only of the United States but of the whole civilized world.” 13 NACW president Mary Church Terrell traveled from the gathering in Hampton to Richmond to personally beseech Governor Mann to spare Virginia Christian’s life. While he reportedly “listened with interest,” Mann nonetheless defended the court’s decision to disregard Christian’s age, reasoning that “the majority of criminals in this country are what are called youths (persons under twenty-five years of age), and that he could not show clemency on account of age of Virginia Christian.” 14

In the end, neither her lawyers’ appeal to self-defense nor her advocates’ appeal to adolescence could shield Virginia Christian from the lethal retribution of the state. On August 16, 1912, two weeks after her seventeenth birthday, Virginia went to the electric chair. Although electrocution was ostensibly more sanitized a mode of execution than hanging—less “spectacular,” according to the prison surgeon who hailed the chair’s installation in 1908—it was a painful way to die, as numerous newspaper accounts of Christian’s death demonstrated to readers across the nation.

The Alexandria Gazette’s front-page story downplayed Virginia Christian’s youth and gave no indication that she suffered physically or psychologically during the ordeal of execution. Instead, the northern Virginia newspaper depicted a grown black murderess who remained stoic and unrepentant until her last breath, facing death “sullenly” and “without emotion.” Beginning the night before, prison staff prepared the “condemned woman” for her execution. The prison minister read Bible passages to her, but she apparently resisted his “attempts to have her bare her soul.” The prison barber shaved her head, baring a small patch of scalp. When she rose the next morning, Virginia dressed in “a short skirt, slit up the left side.” Legs bared, Christian strode “unconcernedly” into the execution chamber, where the electric chair gleamed beneath electric lights. “Her face was absolutely fearless,” according to the Gazette. “She gave a quick glance at the instrument of death, more curiosity than in fear, lowered her eyes and stepped on the platform.” Three guards quickly surrounded her, one “strap[ping] the woman’s form into the chair,” another reaching through the slit of her skirt to attach an electrode to her knee, and a third, after “waiting for a moment for a farewell that did not come,” crowning her with a sponge-lined copper headpiece. The guards stepped away, and “a moment later the body stiffened and twisted, a wisp of sickening smoke floated through the leather [sic] headpiece, and Virginia Christian had paid the capital penalty. The current was kept on for two minutes. Then physicians pronounced her dead.”15

The Gazette’s editors, seeking to reassure readers of the legitimacy of Christian’s execution, depicted her final moments as calm; the girl in this account clearly accepted her well-deserved fate. The Chicago Evening World (a Socialist publication that had editorialized against the execution in prior months) told a different story about Christian’s electrocution, one which made her physical frailty and immense suffering obvious to anyone reading the report. The Evening World depicted electrocution as a cruel practice of state violence that was made crueler because the condemned prisoner was a youth.

Per the Evening World, Virginia’s “poorly nourished” young body suffered three applications of electric shock before she succumbed to death. The first time the switch was thrown, the current pulsed through Virginia’s body for one minute. However, her “spasmodic twitching” prompted the executioner to throw the switch a second time. This time Virginia writhed in agony, straining against the chair’s leather straps. She “gave vent to a loud, blood-curdling scream that soon weakened into a low moan,” and then lost consciousness. “Her hair sizzled,” the article reads, “and soon her head was a mass of flames. The stench was nauseating.” After thirty seconds, the current was shut off. However, the Evening World reported, the attending doctor “was not satisfied” with the prior two rounds of torture, even though they had cooked Virginia’s flesh and incinerated her hair. At his insistence, the executioner sent a third wave of electricity through the girl’s corpse before the “trembling men” standing inside the death chamber were permitted to remove it from the electric chair.16 As they circulated throughout and beyond the United States, these and other journalistic narratives of Christian’s last moments carried the sinister message that in the Commonwealth of Virginia any black individual—regardless of age, gender, or a motive of self-defense—who had the temerity to take a white life would be certain to die a painful death.

The execution of Virginia Christian is just one case among many in American history that demonstrates the pervasive nature of what historian Kali Gross terms “an exclusionary politics of protection”—a legal climate wherein African American women, since the colonial era, have been systematically prevented from seeking legal redress for their experiences of interand intraracial violence. Denied protection from courts or law enforcement, Gross writes, “black women seeking security or justice would have to create those circumstances for themselves, which often placed them on the receiving end of harsh sentences from the same legal system that failed them.”17 Moreover, Christian’s case demonstrates the existential stakes of what Monique Morris terms “age compression”—black girls being perceived by society, and treated by law, as though they were women.18 The legal system’s denial of childhood to black girls and its failure to protect black women were inextricably intertwined in Virginia Christian’s biography, compromising her life chances and condemning her to a violent death.

The black women who were already working to build a reformatory for colored girls in Virginia recognized the execution of Virginia Christian as the tragic result of the commonwealth’s long-standing refusal to extend legal protections to black women and its failure to recognize the child status of criminalized black adolescent girls. This event confirmed the futility of self-defense for black girls in a legal system that rarely held anyone responsible for the numerous forms of violence they endured. The women of the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs hoped that by securing an age-appropriate site for state custody of delinquent colored girls, they could protect them from the ultimate act of state violence.

Protection and Professionalization at the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls

In her work as superintendent of the Virginia Industrial School from its opening in 1915 until 1940, Janie Porter Barrett addressed the layered vulnerability of black working-class girls who had been branded with the stigma of delinquency. Barrett and her colleagues in the Virginia State Federation hoped that, rather than being forced into sex work or similarly morally repugnant endeavors because of lack of skills, inadequate education, and the racist stigma of assumed black female hypersexuality and criminality, black girls who entered the VISCG would exit with academic and vocational skills that would allow them to command a living wage in domestic work—“honest” if low-status employment. The women of the Virginia State Federation shared an “obsession with providing Black women with protection from sexual exploitation and with dignified work” which drove various groups of turn-of-the-century African American club and church women to build institutions designed to raise the status of domestic work and advocate on behalf of black working women and girls.19 For them, any effort to rescue black girls from the corrupting influence of prisons and jails would be futile without a plan to shield them from moral impoverishment and economic hardship in the long term. 20

Barrett envisioned convening a “regular public school” on the campus, which would “let the girls take up their school work where they left off and carry them through the eighth grade,” ensuring that a girl’s commitment to the reformatory would promote rather than retard her academic progress. Additionally, and crucially, she planned to offer a “thorough course in domestic science” covering “every phase of home keeping,” including “the care of poultry, vegetable and flower gardens, lawns and anything else that we find will be needed.” 21 Once girls completed such a course, Barrett envisioned awarding them credentials (“first, second, and third grade certificates according to efficiency”) that would signal their expertise to potential employers and aid them in securing fair working conditions. These certificates would “carry with them certain wages, making the minimum a living wage,” enabling girls to “get better pay from the start.” 22 In addition to formal classroom instruction in domestic matters, Barrett emphasized that girls gained practical knowledge by performing the tasks necessary to the daily functioning of the reformatory. School staff also imparted character lessons, teaching the girls that “no work is a disgrace unless poorly done” and encouraging them to be proud of their everyday accomplishments as they harvested and canned vegetables from their own gardens, sewed and laundered clothes and linens, cleaned living areas, and cared for chickens, pigs, and cows.23

The VISCG’s training of heart, hands, and head was critical to ensuring harmony within the institution, but it was also preparation for the all-important final phase of rehabilitation: parole. Rather than merely confining “wayward colored girls” on behalf of the state, the school also dispatched them to private homes to work as full-time, live-in domestic servants. Barrett’s annual reports characterized the school’s industrial program and its domestic parole system as complementary curricular elements that would ensure girls’ ability to make an honest living, and earn a living wage, after passing out of state supervision.

In Barrett’s first annual report, she envisioned creating a network of protection for girls who would soon be paroled to homes across the state. She hoped to draw upon the resources of the State Board of Public Welfare, the agency supervising charities for delinquent and dependent populations. She also intended to enlist members of the Virginia State Federation to help parolees stay out of trouble by finding “the right friends and companions,” and to facilitate church membership by giving each parolee a letter of introduction to a local minister.24

VISCG inmates would benefit most directly from Barrett’s plan to first provide girls with specialized training and then surround them with positive influences and ready-made community ties in their parole homes. However, she hoped this plan would also benefit nonincarcerated black women and girls who were restricted to domestic work by a discriminatory labor market. “When domestic service is placed on the same basis with other industries,” Barrett wrote, “and consideration, kindness, and protection given to those rendering this service, there will be no servant problem.”25 In the project of rehabilitating delinquent black girls at the VISCG, she also saw an opportunity to teach white employers to value domestic workers as skilled professionals, compensate them fairly, and treat them with respect.

Black Female Prisoners and the Domestic Carceral Sphere

The practice of domestic parole at the VISCG was not new or innovative. In fact, northern women’s prisons and reformatories had employed domestic parole since their 19th century origins. Reformatory and prison administrators saw parole as a final phase of rehabilitation, meant to adjust women and girls to their proper place: in the home, as a housewife or a household worker. 26 Parolees would serve as full-time, live-in wage workers under the protection, care, and instruction of benevolent white middle-class housewives—the perceived paragons of moral virtue and domestic efficiency.27

In reality, employers saw parolees merely as a source of cheap, easily exploited household labor. Nor did parolees share reformatory officials’ optimism about domestic parole. Far from satisfied with merely supervising parolees’ labors, employers also listened to their phone conversations, chaperoned their social calls, and inspected their mail. For working-class women and girls of European immigrant and white settler backgrounds, domestic parole felt “just as constraining as imprisonment.”28

The practice of domestic parole in northern settings took on additional coercive elements when applied to black women, as historian Cheryl Hicks reveals. White employers in turn-of-the-century New York, believing black women to be ideal servants but facing a “lack of supply of controllable nonincarcerated domestic workers,” wrote reformatory and prison administrators to specifically request the services of black women parolees, whom they could control through the threat of reinstitutionalization.29 After 1920, in response to swelling populations of black southern migrants in New York City, the state’s prison and reformatory officials began paroling black women to the South—forcibly returning them to the same low-wage racialized domestic labor that they originally sought to escape through migration. To Hicks, this practice of undermining black women’s attempts to improve their life chances through internal migration was clearly punitive, exposing parole’s “ostensible rehabilitative purposes” as a flimsy lie.30 Whether by placing them in the homes of white New Yorkers or banishing them through southern “deportation,” New York state officials demonstrated that their idea of successful rehabilitation—or effective punishment—for black women did not mean being conformed to a race-neutral “woman’s place” in the home as a housewife or household worker. Rather, it meant being adjusted to a black woman’s place as a wage worker in a white woman’s home.

In the postemancipation South, black female prisoners of all ages faced brutal punishment that did not even pretend toward rehabilitation. As soon as they were deprived of slave labor, southern state governments devised ways to criminalize African Americans in order to profit from black convict labor.31 Imprisoned black women and girls—alongside men and boys—were leased to private individuals and companies, tethered to the chain gangs that built up the South’s public infrastructure, and made to cook or clean for guards and fellow inmates in prison camps.32 Labor, extracted through violence, remained central to the experiences of black female prisoners in the South well into the 20th century. Forced labor also became central to parole, as the example of Georgia illustrates.

In 1908, to reduce competition with free labor, Georgia’s state legislature passed a law which abolished the leasing of convicts to private individuals and companies and instead implemented the chain gang. A second law passed during the same legislative session, Georgia’s 1908 Parole Act, conversely, instituted domestic parole in the state—a practice whereby private white families, rather than pay higher wages to non incarcerated workers, could benefit from the cheap labor of black women who had served their time on the chain gang or at hard labor on the state prison farm.33 Building upon prior analyses of the lives of enslaved, freed, and freeborn black women domestic workers in the South, historian Sarah Haley explains that with this legislation, “the white home, which had since slavery existed as a site of regulation, policing, discipline, and punishment for black women who worked as domestics, was formally incorporated into the penal sphere through the establishment of domestic carceral servitude.”34 Domestic parole, therefore, was an inherently violent proposition because it infused white employers’ long-held private power with explicit state authority, multiplying both the vulnerability and the suffering of incarcerated black domestic workers.

Black women convicts entrapped in what Haley terms the “domestic carceral sphere” lost the ability to benefit from generations’ worth of modifications to the historically violent conditions of domestic work in white households. Because they were forced to live in, parolees lost the relative freedom of movement, association, and activity that nonincarcerated black women workers had gained by dwelling in their own homes. Instead, they lived in white communities, isolated from kin, under constant surveillance, without any separate space of retreat from the complex of physical, sexual, verbal, psychological, emotional, and economic violence which black women had historically experienced as workers in white employers’ homes. While nonincarcerated domestic workers could negotiate, collect, and control their own wages, prison administrators merely suggested, rather than required, that parole employers provide a wage—and gave employers the power to regulate how a woman spent her meager earnings. Instead of measuring a worker’s efficacy based upon the well-defined hours and duties which nonincarcerated black women wage workers preferred, domestic parole relied on the arbitrary metric of “giving satisfaction,” inviting parole employers to support or dis-recommend the commutation of a woman’s prison sentence based on the perceived quality of her service. This raised the cost of unsatisfactory service from job loss to re-incarceration.35

Haley characterizes domestic parole conditions as “unbearably violent” but notes that the structure of domestic parole shaped the historical record in a way that obscures the suffering of black women parolees.36 Because their fate rested upon the “representation of satisfaction”—black women’s reported contentment with their living and working conditions and white employers’ reported satisfaction with parolees’ labor and comportment—many of these women “chose not to take any risks; they did not disclose experiences of violence or economic or sexual exploitation during parole and performed model behaviors.”37 As a result, few black female parolees created or preserved documentary evidence of their dissatisfaction with the conditions of domestic parole. However, historians such as Haley and Hicks, who examine these women’s traces in the archive, have concluded that a typical parolee most likely felt her parole home to be another kind of prison, understood her domestic labor to be forced even when it was compensated, and discerned that the white woman in charge was her warden and not her benefactor. Like the 19th-century reformatory administrators who first advocated the practice, Janie Porter Barrett publicly described domestic parole as “a test of whether the lessons we have been trying to teach in the institution have been well learned.”38 However, despite consistently emphasizing its rehabilitative potential, Barrett knew the dangers inherent within the structure of full-time, live-in domestic work for black girls and women. She hoped to mitigate these dangers by enlisting the support of sympathetic employers, community members, and state government agencies in order to provide the VISCG’s full-time, live-in domestic parolees with “carefully selected homes” where they could benefit from “a protection and care that colored girls doing domestic service seldom get.”39 Against all historical and contemporaneous evidence, Barrett believed that black girls could and should be able to engage in this specific form of racialized domestic labor without experiencing violence, and that voluntary community oversight—and, eventually, state intervention—would make this possible.

Read closely, the sparse accounts of domestic parole at the VISCG provide little support for the idea that the institution’s parolees were more protected or better cared for than nonincarcerated black girls doing domestic work in Virginia. Rather, they show that VISCG parolees encountered living and working conditions that closely resembled those faced by black female parolees elsewhere in the Jim Crow South, where the oppressive structure of full-time, live-in domestic work was strengthened—not weakened—by its adoption as a phase of state supervision.

Domestic Parole at the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls

Virginia Industrial School staff began placing girls in private homes for domestic service work two years after the school’s opening. Beginning in 1918, Barrett’s annual reports are a window into how the actual functioning of domestic parole sometimes aligned with, and more often fell short of, her initial aspirations of protection and professionalization for black girls working as domestic servants. For instance, these reports demonstrate that VISCG parolees were fundamentally vulnerable to economic exploitation.

By crafting a specialized industrial curriculum and planning to award vocational certificates, Barrett asserted that domestic service was skilled work deserving of a living wage.40 If successful, her efforts could have constituted one step toward a labor market in which employers would happily compensate black female domestic workers based upon objective, standard measures of efficacy, and not the arbitrary idea of employer satisfaction. However, beginning with the first cohort of girls placed in parole homes, Barrett compromised the goal of fair compensation by “asking,” not requiring, “people who take them to pay regular wages.” She reported that it was up to employers to “say what they will pay, with the understanding that they will pay them what they are worth when they prove satisfactory.”41 Although Barrett believed that girls’ program of training at the VISCG should merit at least a living wage, she never reported demanding even a minimum wage for parolees throughout her tenure as superintendent. With employers free to determine what wages they would pay, VISCG parolees were always vulnerable to, not protected from, economic exploitation.

For Barrett, the key to creating a successful parole placement was finding a Christian home where the woman of the house would take a sincere interest in her charge. In 1918, fourteen girls were paroled as wage workers in homes across the commonwealth. Barrett related two of their stories to illustrate the respective trajectories of successful and failed parole placements.

One girl’s parole was cut short due, in part, to the girl’s feeblemindedness and in part to her employer’s failure to provide adequate supervision. While acknowledging that “Emma, the girl who was such a complete failure, can work beautifully,” Barrett nonetheless expressed disappointment at the domestic manager’s lack of engagement with her charge. Instead of exercising the “protection and care” Barrett hoped to secure for each VISCG parolee, Mrs. F. was indifferent about Emma’s moral welfare. Because “Mrs. F. left her to select her own company” (which, Barrett noted, she was “incapable of doing” because of her perceived feeblemindedness), she “got with the wrong people and was led off.” Emma provided satisfactory domestic service but was unable to demonstrate evidence of sound morals. “In spite of Mrs. F. pleading to be allowed to keep her because she is such a good worker,” Barrett wrote, “I brought her back to the school because she is feeble minded. She cannot take care of herself and could never succeed in that place, but if carefully looked after she might succeed in another place.”42

Barrett’s plan for parole was “not to allow any girl whom we send out to live an immoral life. If she is not self-respecting she must come back until she can learn to be.” Knowing the standards of the institution, Barret reported, parolees “try very hard to be respectable, and if they get help and protection in the home to which they go they will not fail.” For these black girls, many of whom had landed in courts due to community disapproval of their adolescent rebellion and sexual exploration, sexual propriety was central to successful rehabilitation. Emma’s story illustrated the principle that employers in parole homes, if they were not careful to guide and to guard the girls in their charge, would contribute to their moral downfall. Claiming the girls were far from inherently prone to vice, Barrett asserted that “I do not believe there are any people in the world more anxious to be respectable than colored girls and when they are given the right standards and are helped they will make good.”43 To be true partners in the work of reform, white parole employers needed to view black girls as potentially respectable and not incurably morally deficient; only then could they give parolees help and protection rather than merely taking advantage of their poorly compensated labor.

While Barrett used the story of Emma and Mrs. F. to demonstrate the dire moral consequences of an employer’s inattentiveness, she used the story of a second girl placed in an exemplary parole home to illustrate the beneficial impact that an engaged domestic manager could have on a wayward girl’s life. In this story, Mrs. G.—across the chasm of racial and class difference—felt a deep responsibility to actively care for, instruct, and protect Viola rather than merely benefit from her labor. This ideal parole home was an extension of the VISCG, reinforcing the lessons in thrift, morality, and even literacy, that Barrett’s staff had begun at the school. However, an alternative reading of this story surfaces evidence of the inherently carceral—rather than rehabilitative—nature of domestic parole and demonstrates that engaged supervision was not equivalent to true protection for VISCG parolees.

Viola had never met Mrs. G. before, but Mrs. Barrett, reasonably confident that the woman’s application portended a good parole home, approved her to be Viola’s parole employer. Viola journeyed to Mrs. G’s home and met the woman and her family. After a lifetime residing in one of Virginia’s segregated African American communities, and a year or more spent with scores of black girls and the black women who cared for them, Viola was now the sole African American member of a white household.

While her physical labors pleased Mrs. G., Viola immediately failed to perform the emotional labor that was just as essential to her assignment as a domestic servant. Instead of displaying unambiguous contentment with her work, her lodgings, her wages, and the family she served, Viola was visibly morose. This is where Barrett begins the girl’s story—with a letter from Mrs. G. stating that “‘Viola does her work very well indeed, but she cries so much of the time. I think she misses the girls at the school and is lonely.’”44

Barrett, if she ever learned it, never disclosed the reason for Viola’s frequent crying. However, one can speculate. Loneliness might indeed have been the answer. Viola had been doubly uprooted: first, from her family of origin when she was committed to the VISCG, and then from the reformatory itself. The ensuing feeling—and reality—of isolation from familiar people and landmarks might have proven too much for the girl to bear.

Another, related, possibility might have been fear. How was Viola to know that Mrs. G., let alone Mr. G., would not take her presence in the home as an opportunity to harm her? Might the woman of the house hit her, or curse her, or make her work from dawn until dusk with no rest or insufficient pay? Might the man of the house see her as sexual prey—an easy target for sly glances, lewd comments, covert fondling or other forms of sexual harassment or assault? Viola had doubtless heard black women at home talk about how dangerous live-in domestic work could be for the help. And she would have been old enough, in 1912, to hear grown relatives whisper about the fate of a black girl named Virginia Christian who dared to retaliate against an abusive white domestic manager. If Viola cried because of actual mistreatment rather than the mere psychological strain of hypervigilance, her tears were surely multiplied by her awareness that she would certainly suffer—maybe even die—if she lifted her voice or her hands in her own defense.

In 1918, the fourteen girls paroled from the school to work for wages were placed in eight different localities, each one an average of 58 miles from the VISCG as the crow flies.45 Because VISCG staff were stretched thin, Barrett relied on correspondence to monitor parolees. When Viola’s apparent misery became too much for her employer, Mrs. G. wrote to Mrs. Barrett to ask for help. This help came in the form of a missive reminding Viola that she was responsible not only for household chores but also for household morale. “I wrote to Viola immediately,” Barrett reported, “telling her that I was so sorry that she was detracting from her good work by not being happy, and to tell me why she cried so I could help her.” Barrett instructed Viola to conceal her inner experience of sadness from the white family, advising her to “brace up for the sake of the dear little children; that it was her duty to help make them happy.” Barrett never stated the girl’s age, but Viola’s status as a servant in the household meant that, unlike the other minor children present who were objects of emotional care, she was expected to contort her face into a cheerful—or at least stoic—mask for the benefit of the ones she served.46 The girl apparently underwent “a rapid and permanent change,” which Barrett attributed to Mrs. G.’s kindness and Mrs. G. attributed to Barrett’s encouraging words. Whatever the real reason, following Barrett’s letter, Viola never again allowed Mrs. G. to see her cry.47

“When Viola came to us,” Barrett reminisced, “she had never been to school and could neither read nor write. When she left she could read in the second reader and could write, but could do very little spelling.” As Barrett learned through her ongoing correspondence with Mrs. G. and Viola, the girl continued literacy lessons under Mrs. G’s tutelage: “She never has misspelled a word in her letters to me, however. Mrs. G. spells her words for her and she is learning rapidly to spell them for herself for she says, ‘I don’t like to ask Mrs. G. to spell the same word for me twice.’” Barrett saw this gesture as evidence of Mrs. G.’s kindness, but it also betrays a level of dependence that intensified Viola’s vulnerability to exploitation and mistreatment in her parole home. Anticipating difficulties with adjusting to their new lives, Barrett instructed the girls to “write very fully about the things that seem hard to them” so that she could advise or intervene.48 However, as a poor speller who read on a second-grade level, Viola would have found it difficult to write to Barrett, or read the older woman’s letters, without the aid of Mrs. G. How, then, would she have been able to give a truthful and unmediated written account of her own treatment within the household—whether good or ill? Viola’s reliance on Mrs. G.’s help to compose (and, likely, to mail) letters magnified the isolation and vulnerability inherent to her experience of domestic parole. Viola’s academic deficiencies, which were no fault of her own, also limited the archival representation of her life and labor in this white family’s home. Viola’s own impressions and responses are conspicuously absent from what Barrett chose to report about the girl’s daily life with Mrs. G.

While Mrs. F., in her prejudice-fueled indifference, allowed Emma to drift into morally questionable behavior, Barrett praised Mrs. G.’s involvement in the details of Viola’s life. Mrs. G. sometimes included Viola in her own children’s story hour or Bible memorization lessons. She “took a personal interest in Viola’s clothing,” teaching her “how to freshen faded garments by dyeing them.” Nor did Mrs. G. conflate pride in cultivating a “neat and genteel” appearance with materialism or conspicuous consumption; instead, she taught Viola “how to spend her money so that she could live within her means and save something each month.” Mrs. G. allowed Viola some social freedoms, including giving her “an afternoon to herself” to receive callers and permitting her to seek the occasional entertainment outside of the house. Barrett admired Mrs. G.’s consideration for Viola’s social needs, but also praised the woman’s vigilance, noting that she “makes it her business to know that [Viola] is not in bad company and reminds her that the people with whom she is thrown often have different standards from her own and that she must not at any time lower hers.” Barrett was impressed by the fact that Mrs. G., rather than expecting or allowing Viola to conduct herself in a less-than-respectable manner because of her race, “holds Viola up to her own standards of honor and it braces her as nothing else could.” 49

For Barrett, who asserted that “the whole secret of Mrs. G.’s success is human kindness,” Mrs. G.’s attention to every aspect of Viola’s life showed that she was an exemplary white woman who could set aside incorrect notions of black girls’ inherent moral depravity and hold them instead to “her own standards of honor.”50 How, though, might Viola have experienced Mrs. G.’s intense scrutiny of her appearance, comportment, financial decision making, movements, activities, and associations? Did this feel like “human kindness” to Viola, or did the adolescent chafe against the temporal, sartorial, behavioral, financial, and relational constraints upon which the adults in charge of her life had agreed? Did Mrs. G. enforce her standards with rewards or with threats? Did Viola worry that willful or unwitting offenses would cause her to be sent back to the VISCG—or might she have seen re-commitment to the reformatory as a welcome development? In this didactic story, Barrett allowed little room for the possibility of these alternative impressions of Mrs. G.’s behavior. Instead, she emphasized the satisfaction Viola gave as a worker and Mrs. G.’s success in winning the girl’s affection and loyalty through “human kindness.”

Whether real or fictionalized, this depiction of the ideal parole employer illustrates the nearly maternal care and protection that Barrett hoped all domestic managers would provide to VISCG parolees. However, even this idealized story shows that surveillance, isolation, control, and the potential for abuses of all kinds, were as fundamental to domestic parole in this historical instance as in others which scholars have previously explored. Despite the optimism which initially characterized her public writing about parole, Barrett’s proposed network of voluntary parole supervisors is evidence that she was not entirely confident that white women would consent to being held accountable to her standards of protection and care. After several years of conducting parole placements, Barrett appears to have decided that only government intervention would suffice to protect black girls from the dangers which were inherent—not incidental—to full-time, live-in domestic work in white households. Beginning with the institution’s transfer to state ownership in 1920, Barrett articulated the need for a dedicated parole officer to provide protection for the VISCG’s student-inmates. She repeatedly voiced how the lack of a parole officer compounded the real and potential harms that girls faced on domestic parole, and laid responsibility for their welfare at the feet of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Opportunities and Limitations Under State Ownership

In 1920, when Virginia’s General Assembly passed legislation barring the Commonwealth from subsidizing privately held reformatories as it had done for twenty years, the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs conveyed ownership of the Virginia Industrial School to the Commonwealth.51 The clubwomen saw this as a victory: while Barrett continued to lead the school’s day-today operations, the state took on unprecedented financial and practical responsibility for the care of wayward black girls. Her annual reports reflect this increased responsibility on the part of the state in that Barrett directly petitioned lawmakers, between 1920 and 1940, for resources to hire a parole officer.

In her 1920 annual report, Barrett argued that “the rapidly increasing number of girls on parole makes the need for a parole officer imperative.” During the year in question, she reported that “twenty-eight girls have been paroled into twentyone counties,” making it impossible for VISCG staff to investigate each parole home, let alone visit each girl after placement. This meant that unsupervised employers were unaccountable for their treatment of parolees and could neglect or abuse them with impunity. Barrett departed from her usual reticence to highlight how girls’ vulnerability to indignities and assaults had been enabled and exacerbated by the lack of a parole officer. She also, more characteristically, whispered a hint that parole supervision would not only improve parolees’ quality of life, but also prevent needless death.52

During the 1920 reporting year, some parole employers, believing that “anything is good enough for the one who serves in the home,” apparently failed to provide attractive, safe, and comfortable accommodations for parolees.53 When Barrett reflected upon her early challenges with parole employers, she recalled that “many of the ladies could not see why a girl of sixteen or seventeen years could not sleep over the garage or in a house out in the yard alone” or “why she should be expected to give a girl sheets.”54 This callous and inhospitable treatment undermined Barrett’s rehabilitative goals for parole. Without a full-time parole officer, the VISCG could neither consistently identify appropriate parole homes nor hold employers accountable for maintaining Barrett’s standards of protection and care.

Barrett found that, beyond insulting the girls by failing to provide appropriate living quarters, some employers had crossed the line into physical assault. “We must do something,” she wrote, “to have the people taking these girls understand more fully that our Board of Managers insists that they be kindly treated. Slapping a girl and striking her on the head are out of the question. This kind of treatment, aside from being absolutely wrong, can do no good and will create a condition that will be most difficult to handle.” Barrett found abuse especially obnoxious because employers were in no way obligated to keep girls who failed to meet their standards, however arbitrary or capricious. With barely concealed exasperation, she stated for clarity’s sake that “anyone having a girl is given the right to bring her back to the school whenever she ceases to give satisfaction, so there is no need of doing anything rash.”55

Far from enjoying “a protection and care that colored girls doing domestic service seldom get,” VISCG parolees had apparently experienced a range of hostile behaviors at employers’ hands, from neglect of basic comfort and safety to physical assault—and these were just the circumstances that Barrett dared to mention in print. What she declined to record, except in a statistical table on school population, was that three girls had in fact died while on parole during the 1920 reporting year.56 With the VISCG newly under state ownership, Barrett challenged lawmakers to intervene in this life-and-death situation. Funding a dedicated parole officer was a simple solution whereby the state government could mitigate the perennial and potentially fatal hazards of domestic parole for black girls whose care and rehabilitation was now a public responsibility.

In its first budget request as a state-owned institution, the VISCG’s interracial board of managers asked for a total of $26,650 to cover personnel costs for the 1922–1924 biennium. Unlike Barrett’s annual reports, this budget submission did not explicitly mention a parole officer, but rather requested funds for “workers,” broadly construed. The managers might have believed that having more or better compensated staff members would enable VISCG workers, or Barrett herself, to investigate and visit parole homes. The governor recommended an appropriation of $10,100 per year for a total of $20,200 for the biennium. The Virginia General Assembly complied, awarding the VISCG $6,450 less than school officials had determined the institution needed to provide care for both institutionalized and paroled girls.57 As the VISCG’s board of managers learned to ask for less money in its next four biennial budget requests, the gap between desired total personnel funding and actual appropriations shrank.

VISCG annual reports indicate that the hardships of the Great Depression were exacerbated by the lack of a parole officer. When employers were unable to pay the (already small) agreed-upon wages, Barrett had to “permit the girls to accept much less than they are worth.” Furthermore, Barrett received reports that some girls, in order to support family members, were engaging in sex work to supplement their earnings from “honest” endeavors.58 This is likely why, beginning with the 1930–1932 biennial budget, the VISCG board of managers specifically requested funding for a parole officer. Between 1930 and 1940, the VISCG requested between $600 and $1,200 per year to fund a parole officer. Each biennium, the governor recommended an appropriation of $0, and the General Assembly complied. By contrast, the board of the Virginia Home and Industrial School for [White] Girls requested funding for a parole officer each biennium between 1922 and 1940 (typically at $900 per year) and was fully funded each time.59 Lawmakers repeatedly showed their unwillingness to protect black girls from the moral and material hazards they faced on parole.

Conclusion

The VISCG was born out of organized black women’s insistence that black girls, “the most unprotected of all human beings,” should be able to experience state custody without state violence, particularly in the forms of age-inappropriate incarceration and execution. The VISCG certainly shielded many black girls from the violence of age-inappropriate incarceration, and possibly diverted some from paths that might have led to capital punishment. However, the visionaries of the Virginia State Federation, along with lawmakers, built this new space of age-, race-, and sex-segregated state custody upon the same centuries-old foundation underlying the entire U.S. legal system: exclusionary protection.60 The Commonwealth of Virginia, by supporting the VISCG, endorsed the idea that criminalized black girls’ age should be a factor in determining the state’s response to their misbehaviors, but the Commonwealth did not grant black girls the same protections that white girls enjoyed. In Virginia, safety from violence was not a public good to which black girls could lay legitimate claim.

After conveying the VISCG to the commonwealth in 1920, Barrett and her colleagues argued that the state could and should protect its inmates from workplace violence during domestic parole. This demand rested upon the assumption that, because of the VISCG’s new public status, state officials would willingly scrutinize the inner workings of white households in order to ensure that employers treated parolees fairly. However, domestic parole was not structured to permit state governments to assert authority over white employers. Instead, through the system of domestic parole, state governments invested white employers with explicit state authority over parolees.

Despite evidence that girls faced abuse and even death on parole, state lawmakers refused to interfere with the status quo of employer–employee relationships in private white households by providing funds for a parole officer at the VISCG. The women of the Virginia State Federation had faith that the VISCG’s transfer to state ownership would secure for delinquent black girls unprecedented levels of protection against interpersonal and state violence. Instead, with each funding cycle, lawmakers reenacted the same variety of state violence that Barrett critiqued in her 1911 argument for a colored girls’ reformatory: the legal system’s persistent failure to prevent, or hold any person responsible for, violence against black girls. Lawmakers enshrined the privacy and autonomy of white employers at the cost of black girls’ safety and wellbeing, undermining the protective motives that had inspired the VISCG’s founders and demonstrating that there would be no state custody for black girls in Virginia without state violence.