Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910

Politics, History, and Culture

by Kali Nicole Gross

Colored Amazons is a groundbreaking historical analysis of the crimes, prosecution, and incarceration of black women in Philadelphia at the turn of the twentieth century. Kali N. Gross reconstructs black women’s crimes and their representations in popular press accounts and within the discourses of urban and penal reform. Most importantly, she considers what these crimes signified about the experiences, ambitions, and frustrations of the marginalized women who committed them. Gross argues that the perpetrators and the state jointly constructed black female crime. For some women, crime functioned as a means to attain personal and social autonomy. For the state, black female crime and its representations effectively galvanized and justified a host of urban reform initiatives that reaffirmed white, middle-class authority. Gross draws on prison records, trial transcripts, news accounts, and rare mug shot photographs. Providing an overview of Philadelphia’s black women criminals, she describes the women’s work, housing, and leisure activities and their social position in relation to the city’s native-born whites, European immigrants, and elite and middle-class African Americans. She relates how news accounts exaggerated black female crime, trading in sensationalistic portraits of threatening “colored Amazons,” and she considers criminologists’ interpretations of the women’s criminal acts, interpretations largely based on notions of hereditary criminality. Ultimately, Gross contends that the history of black female criminals is in many ways a history of the rift between the political rhetoric of democracy and the legal and social realities of those marginalized by its shortcomings.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Gender Studies, Gender, American History, Grad School, Race

260 pages, Paperback

First published June 21, 2006

About the author

Kali Nicole Gross’s award-winning books include Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910 (Duke 2006), Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America (Oxford 2016), and, co-authored with Daina Ramey Berry, A Black Women’s History of the United States (Beacon Press 2020). Her new book is Vengeance Feminism: The Power of Black Women’s Fury in Lawless Times (Seal Press, 2024).

Reviews

[Teri · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910, Kali Gross details the lives of African American women criminals in Philadelphia between 1880 and 1910. Philadelphia is the home to the first prison system in America, starting with the Walnut Street Prison (1773-1838), then opening the Eastern State Penitentiary (1829-1971), a panopticon-designed facility housed men and women. In the late 19th century and into the 20th century, Philadelphia grew exponentially as African Americans moved into the area during the great migration and immigrants settled in the area.

African American women were mostly treated no better than they were treated when they were enslaved. Many were abused and discarded, having to do what they could to survive. The abuse led to a percentage of African American women that resorted to petty crimes and thefts such as badger crimes (a type of con/extortion) and servant theft (domestic servants skimming items from their employers). Once caught, these women would be tried (maybe) and sentenced to far worse time and punishment than their white counterparts or even their male counterparts. Recidivism was high among those who would eventually be released. For some, this was their way of life; crime was their career.

Gross uses specific cases she pulled from archives of criminal records at Eastern State and humanizes each woman to help the reader understand the circumstances that led to their incarceration. Some murdered their abusers, and one, which Gross begins her book with, who kills her child. One can speculate the many reasons that Alice Clifton resorted to murdering her baby.

Gross also discusses the treatment that many of these women faced and how the media has portrayed them. She does not excuse the women’s crimes but allows the reader to understand how they may have led them to act in criminal ways and gives a glimpse into a new yet broken criminal justice system.

[Bethany Winters · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn’t put most of my assigned readings from grad school on Goodreads because I was just so busy, but I am still thinking about this book 2 years later. I see evidence of Gross’s arguments in so much of American pop culture from that era. This book totally changed the way I view crime and victimhood and is one of the best history books I’ve ever read.

[Izetta Autumn]

This book made me think about crime - and the rhetoric describing crime entirely differently. Certainly, I'm thinking about the discourse around crime in the 19th century very differently.