The Black Child-Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice

by Geoff K. Ward

During the Progressive Era, a rehabilitative agenda took hold of American juvenile justice, materializing as a citizen-and-state-building project and mirroring the unequal racial politics of American democracy itself. Alongside this liberal "manufactory of citizens,” a parallel structure was a Jim Crow juvenile justice system that endured across the nation for most of the twentieth century.

 

In The Black Child Savers , the first study of the rise and fall of Jim Crow juvenile justice, Geoff Ward examines the origins and organization of this separate and unequal juvenile justice system. Ward explores how generations of “black child-savers” mobilized to challenge the threat to black youth and community interests and how this struggle grew aligned with a wider civil rights movement, eventually forcing the formal integration of American juvenile justice. Ward’s book reveals nearly a century of struggle to build a more democratic model of juvenile justice—an effort that succeeded in part, but ultimately failed to deliver black youth and community to liberal rehabilitative ideals.

 
At once an inspiring story about the shifting boundaries of race, citizenship, and democracy in America and a crucial look at the nature of racial inequality, The Black Child Savers is a stirring account of the stakes and meaning of social justice.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Teri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Geoff Ward examines the Black Child-Saver movement in his book The Black Child-Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice. Covered in two parts, Ward spends the first section of the book discussing the sociohistorical setting of the Jim Crow era and the rise of the juvenile justice system. This system created a profound disparity between white and African-American youth. Within the liberal-democratic political environment of the day, African-Americans juveniles were often considered “unsalvageable” while African-American adults were disenfranchised and powerless and a white parental state. White supremacy, convict leasing, and mob ruled lynching practices were covered with quantifiable data as supportive evidence of the disparity between whites and non-white “embryonic citizens” in the early justice systems.

The second half of the book delves into the Black Child-Saver movement and Black agency utilized to try and build a rehabilitative justice structure. Women-led clubs and African-American women activists in the Black Child-Saver movement including Mary Church Terrell and Jane Matilda Bolin helped to restructure the system and advocate for the rights of juveniles in the system. Ultimately problems and continued oppression continued through the Civil Rights era and beyond. Ward concludes with a discussion on the condition of the contemporary juvenile justice system.

This book was at times quite emotional as Ward details the brutality and squalid conditions African-American youths enduring during the Progressive Era and throughout time within the system. This is a comprehensive look at the juvenile justice system and the movement that tried to support disadvantaged youths.

[Justin Pickett · Rating 5 out of 5]

In The Black Child-Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice, Ward makes a substantial contribution to two lines of scholarship. First, he fills an important gap in the literature analyzing the development of juvenile justice in the United States. Remarkably, the seminal texts detailing the origins of American juvenile justice, such as Platt’s (1977) The Child Savers and Feld’s (1999) Bad Kids, largely neglect the racialized history of the parental state. Ward takes this issue head on. He identifies how racially exclusive conceptions of childhood resulted in different forms of social control being reserved for white and black youths. He describes the various ways in which this process limited both black youths’ access to citizen-building ideals and black communities’ influence over the administration of juvenile justice. Not least, Ward demonstrates that there is a direct connection between historical and contemporary racial disparities in juvenile justice outcomes, and argues that these disparities reflect the broader consequences of racial group power inequality.

Second, Ward’s book fills an important gap in the literature analyzing group conflict as an underlying motivation for punitive social controls. He details how southern whites mobilized against the putative black threat that emerged following the end of slavery and the ratification of the 13th and 14th amendments—namely, whites instituted black codes and convict leasing to coerce freed blacks back into servitude. In doing this, Ward describes how a particular ideological hegemony developed in the south, especially around the decades nearing the demise of slavery, to support and justify racial oppression. This belief system, or threat-oriented ideology (see Blalock, 1967: 167), constructed black youths as “rigid clay”—developmentally stagnant and incorrigible beings—and as being more animal-like than human. As important, Ward provides a strong account of how subordinate group mobilization, which is an issue that is often neglected in research on group conflict, can at times effectively counter the dominant racial group’s controlling responses to perceived threat. Specifically, he discusses a previously unidentified subordinate social movement, the black child savers, which began in the South largely as a local self-help response to Jim Crow juvenile justice and ultimately facilitated the formal integration of the juvenile justice system during the middle decades of the twentieth century. He also describes the conditions under which this movement was successful—in times of subordinate group cohesion and collective efficacy—and unsuccessful—in times characterized by a lack of subordinate leadership and resources—at countering racial oppression and discrimination. In short, Ward provides a nuanced and informative account of the minority group’s role in group conflict relationships.

[Aydan · Rating 1 out of 5]

And if I said this wasn't a history book??? What then?