The Condemnation of Blackness

Part 3 is largely committed to the relationship between Black criminality, racial violence, and the color lines that existed in crime prevention and policing in the urban North of 20th century America. In Chapters 5 and 6, Muhammad investigates how systemic racism and Black criminality set off a wave of racial violence that swept through the United States in the early 20th century. Worse still, systemic racism also influenced the crime fighting resources, aid, and protection (or lack thereof) that was afforded to Black communities who were in dire need of support during this wave of racial violence.

Part 3 also emphasizes how Black intellectuals and community leaders became increasingly militant in response to this color line and rising racial violence. The book’s final chapters thus mark an important shift in Black American consciousness. Muhammad reflects on the ideological and methodological evolutions that Black researchers had undergone from the 1890s to 1940, pointing to the 1920s as a key moment in history where the tides of Black criminality, race research, and resistance against systemic inequality began to turn forever.

By 1911, Black criminality had been etched in the American public consciousness. Part 3 illustrates how this ideology arguing for Black inferiority and propensity for crime dictated race relations of the early 20th century on both a systemic and personal scale. In terms of the systemic ramifications of Black criminality, state leaders took a page from racial liberals’ books and agreed with their assessments that Black Americans needed to be self-sufficient in fixing the vices inherent to their communities.

As a result, Black criminality encouraged a color line in Northern cities’ allocations of crime fighting aid. Mayors, governors, and public agencies were more likely to devote their funds, resources, and programs to helping fight crime in white and immigrant communities and neglect Black communities. Even when Black crime fighters attempted to take the battle into their own hands, this systemic color line hindered their work. As Muhammad observes, “In a context where crime fighting had become the mantra of the city’s new reform mayor, whites looked after their own. The problem for black crime fighters was that saving their own meant working largely without the active support of the police, major city institutions, and influential politicians” (198).

A key example of the color line that existed within Northern cities’ crime fighting efforts is that of James Stemons. While Black intellectuals like Stemons fought racist ideas of Black criminality, they agreed that crime rates in Black communities were high. Indeed, race reformers actively sought solutions to crime in Black neighborhoods in the mission of improving the overall quality of life in their communities.

However, despite all their lectures on Black self-sufficiency, those in power refused to fund any efforts for Black community leaders to achieve this sufficiency. Stemons, for example, established his League for Civic and Political Reform (LCPR) with the goal of self-policing Black neighborhoods to rid the streets of crime, vice, and violence. Notably, Stemons had an idea to work with the Philadelphia power structure, partnering with Mayor Blankenburg to facilitate a relationship between Black community leaders and public officials to work on crime fighting solutions. This effort failed when the Mayor allegedly stole this idea and used it to form his Vice Commission, which was used only in immigrant and white neighborhoods.

Stemons’s work in the LCPR was thus a direct response to systemic failures to support Black communities, representing Black efforts to take matters into their own hands. However, the LCPR also came to represent the crime fighting color line in the early 20th century urban North. While Philadelphia flaunted the Vice Commission as a successful crime fighting campaign, the city was simultaneously withholding funds from Stemons’s LCPR. Mayor Blankenburg’s refusal to support Stemons effectively divided crime fighting efforts along racial lines.

Fighting crime in Black neighborhoods was thus a losing battle from the start, made so not by any biological or cultural inferiority amongst Black Americans, but because of a discriminatory system that halted all efforts to lower crime rates in these neighborhoods. Black crime fighters were threats to the American system because high crime rates in Black neighborhoods reinforced arguments of Black inferiority, which was the foundation for the nation’s white supremacist power structure. Subsequently, Stemons and his peers found themselves in a frustrating battle with a system that lectured them on self-sufficiency while simultaneously withholding the resources Black communities needed to become self-sufficient.

A recurrent topic throughout Part 3 is the spike of racial violence in early-20th century cities. This speaks to how Black Americans encountered racism on a personal scale in addition to the systemic racism expressed through the color line. Chapter 5 describes repeated cases of Black individuals being targeted and harassed by their white neighbors and police in the early 1910s. The chapter also details the riots that occurred from 1917-1919 where Black Americans suffered home invasions, group beatings, and near-lynchings by violent white mobs. Notably, the police often colluded with these white mobs to encourage—or even take part in—the violence.

After a decade of racial crimes, race researchers of the 1920s were pressed to explain what exactly was occurring in America to cause such chaos. Many scholars—both white and Black—attributed the breakout of racial violence to the Great Migration. These researchers “rationalized violence against black communities in part by blaming black southern migrants for their bad habits—for being culturally backward and thus overrepresented in the crime statistics” (232). However, a more militant generation of Black intellectuals were rising at this time as well. They refused to engage with such arguments and, standing at the cusp of a new, modern decade, were looking for new explanations.

The race research of the 1890s was characterized by white supremacist scholars writing crime into race; the early 1900s saw racial liberals writing crime into culture. Muhammad argues that the 1920s witnessed the rise of Black intellectuals that were entirely independent from white narratives, now seeking to write crime into class. These researchers interpreted the Black community’s high crime rates as a direct result of a lack of economic opportunity, poor living situations, and discriminatory policing. This era of race discourse saw Black intellectuals aggressively attacking the structural inequalities that were built into the foundations of the United States. Muhammad argues that while researchers such as Du Bois, Wells, Ovington, and Addams had asserted similar environmental explanations in the past, such an acute focus on systemic oppression “had never become the dominant argument among most liberals, black or white” (229). Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, this would change.

One of the most influential researchers in this regard was sociologist Henderson H. Donald. His statistical methodology and groundbreaking thesis effectively changed how crime statistics were read through the rest of the 20th century. Studying the policing, arrests, and prisons of Northern cities such as Pittsburgh and Cleveland, Donald observed that white police officers were discriminatory in how they observed, treated, and arrested Black civilians. He found that the Black “crime waves” blamed on southern migrants and used by white mobs to justify racial violence could be attributed to racist policing.

In Cleveland, for instance, the Black jail population went from 13% in 1916, up to 87% in 1917, back down to 60% in 1918. Incidentally, these stark rises in Black incarceration rates occurred during the exact same years that American cities witnessed recurring race riots, suggesting there was indeed a connection between stereotypes of Black criminality, racial violence by hostile whites, and discriminatory policing that punished the victims of this violence. Donald argued that the whole of the American policing system was discriminatory towards its Black citizens, meaning that Black crime rates were not a Black issue, but a policing issue. Muhammad articulates precisely how meaningful this thesis was for Black intellectuals, race researchers, and antiracist activists:

Donald’s approach to statistics signaled a new trend. He shifted focus away from southern migrants as self-evident proof of criminality […] and instead turned the statistics on their head and stripped them of their prima facie value. Going forward, excessive crime rates among blacks in the race-relations literature of the postwar period represented a policing problem instead of a crime problem” (235).

Donald’s research represented a full-circle moment for Black intellectuals and race research. The birthplace of Black criminality lied in the racial statistics with white supremacist researchers of the 1890s like Stemmons and Hoffman. In a poetic turn of fate, it was a Black man using that same statistical methodology against his oppressors to deliver the deathblow to racial statistics, and subsequently changed the narrative surrounding Black criminality forever.