TY - JOUR
AU1 - Balto, Simon
AB - On a steamy August night in 1900, Arthur Harris, a Black migrant from Virginia to New York, stabbed a White plainclothes police officer named Robert Thorpe to death in the Tenderloin district on Manhattan’s West Side. Harris was defending his common-law wife May Enoch from Thorpe, who had approached Enoch as she stood outside a saloon waiting for Harris and, presumably, believed her to be a sex worker. Because Thorpe was in plainclothes, Harris had no idea who he was but understood him to be assaulting his partner. In the scuffle that ensued as Harris sought to protect his wife, both Harris and Thorpe were injured. Thorpe died the next day. Harris fled to Washington, DC, where he was arrested shortly thereafter. The death of Robert Thorpe ignited one of the most infamous incidents of collectivized violence in the history of New York City. Seeking vengeance against any and all African Americans, White New Yorkers tore through the Tenderloin, beating Black citizens at random and terrorizing the Black community. In several days of racist rioting that saw at least two people killed and countless others injured, in a tale that is functionally a stand-in for the whole of policing racial violence historically in the United States, New York’s police actively colluded with the violent mobs and refused to protect Black people, choosing instead to arrest them in breathtaking disproportion. But what of Arthur Harris, who was found guilty of second-degree murder, sentenced to a life of hard labor at Sing Sing, and quietly died in prison in 1908? How can we understand his life circumstances, context, and what led him to kill a man—the first crime on his record, and one for which he would ultimately die? How can we make legible the lives and crimes of men like him? These are the questions that animate Douglas J Flowe’s important book Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Criminality in Jim Crow New York. In it, Flowe explores what he terms ‘the crucible of black criminality’—one in which aspects of the American past are understood to be ‘criminogenic, all bearing the potential to thrust blacks into circumstances where lawlessness and resistant behaviors fulfilled entrenched human needs and aspirations’ (17). As he shows, Black men in Jim Crow–era New York lived a life constrained. They were constrained in what types of work they could secure, almost all of which (in the licit economy, at least) paid poorly; in where they could live and what type of housing they could find and afford; in their intimate relationships, including the fact that intimacy with White women invited danger both legal and extralegal; in how they moved about the city, subject as they often were to randomized violence by White New Yorkers in moments of heightened racial antipathy, as well as to surveillance and violence by police officers. Such constraint would be difficult for anyone, but it was doubly so for a generation new to New York in the late 1800s and early 1900s—people who migrated there with hopes and expectations for greater freedom from the violence and restrictions of the growing apparatuses of Southern apartheid. While deeply attentive to the often-harrowing circumstances Black women found themselves in, Flowe’s book explores what the ‘crucible’ meant specifically for Black men as Black men. Deftly weaving analyses of gender and masculinity into a history of urbanity, race, and carcerality, he invites us to consider the ways in which actions deemed criminal were the product of an urban environment that robbed Black men of the ability to earn adequately and equitably, to protect and provide for their loved ones in ways that accorded with manly expectations, and, ultimately, to feel a fully realized manhood. Against such a backdrop, actions such as theft and larceny, and even crimes of violence (many of which did, admittedly, sometimes do grievous harm) can be understood as efforts to (re)claim a manhood denied. This is an important reframing. Flowe is asking a critical, complex question: what happens when we see criminalized actions by men hemmed into such circumstances as not just criminal, but as resistive to a repressive social context? When, for instance, a Black man’s earning opportunities boiled down to either the ‘inhumane, fruitless labor’ of the racist and poverty-perpetuating formal labor market, or work in an underground economy that was volatile and dangerous but also contained more possibilities, was a decision to choose the latter not an act of resistance to Jim Crow New York’s racist social and economic constraints? (47). And is this not especially the case when we place the choice in conversation with gendered expectations of masculinity, wherein they may have felt ‘emasculated by a public renunciation of their roles as breadwinners’ when the formal labor market denied them the ability to perform the manly duty of providing for their families? (50). What of Black men whose precarious housing situations and desires for sociality and leisure often led to their occupation of public spaces such as the stoops, sidewalks, and alleyways of the dense and racially mixed neighborhoods in which they lived, despite hostile White neighbors often not wanting them to and police relentlessly criminalizing their doing so? What about Black men who retaliated with violence when racist White police officers needlessly encroached upon their affairs (as Arthur Harris, among others, did), especially given the common knowledge that those same police would not do the same to White New Yorkers and did not care about Black safety, coupled with endemic police violence against and harassment of Black New Yorkers? Uncontrollable Blackness also wades into the ways that this history came to bear upon the intimate relationships between Black men and women. With deep empathy and sensitivity, Flowe explores how the twinned influences of toxic patriarchal norms and the emasculatory constraints of Jim Crow New York sometimes led Black men not only to commit what he terms ‘patriarchal crimes’—robbing or killing for financial gain, for instance, so as to provide financially for a female partner—but also sometimes led them to hurt those closest to them (128). Flowe, rightly and responsibly, carefully notes that abusive Black partnerships were the exception rather than the rule, and that such abuse was never condonable. Nevertheless, he offers us the chance to consider how the criminogenic dimensions of the ‘crucible’ could extend into the home: financially frustrated men growing resentful of their female partners for securing wage-earning work (laboring opportunities for Black women were more plentiful, if not more profitable), and trying to restrict them from doing so; men who grew physically abusive toward partners who stayed out too late or drank too much, leaving them suspicious, feeling slighted sexually and robbed of their manhood; men who grew vicious toward partners who criticized them for their inability to perform the manly duty of providing financially. Uncontrollable Blackness offers us important new insights into legality, illegality, and the making (one wants to say the social construction) of both in American history. The pathbreaking work of scholars like Cheryl Hicks and Kali Gross has provided historians with critical lenses through which to explore the intersections of gender and the United States’ assorted carceral apparatuses—in particular Black women’s experiences with those apparatuses, and this is the scholarship with which Flowe’s is perhaps deepest in conversation. His work asks us to consider the ways that social norms surrounding masculinity and patriarchy, coupled with the structural and particularized racisms that hindered Black men’s ability to fully grasp the perquisites of either, could sometimes be criminogenic. There in the ‘crucible of black criminality’ that was Jim Crow New York, Black men entered a social world that forced uniquely difficult choices upon them as Black men and Black men. And when some of them took paths divergent from the expected norm as a result, a society already predisposed to condemn them for their blackness (to paraphrase Khalil Muhammad’s now-famous phrasing), they were condemned once more—often to prison, death, or in the case of Arthur Harris, both. An extraordinary, important, and deeply humane book, Uncontrollable Blackness is a fine model for scholars hoping to make legible the hidden lives of the Black working poor in the Jim Crow North, and of the ways legality, illegality, and racism indelibly shaped their lives and experiences. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Douglas J. Flowe, Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York
JF - American Journal of Legal History
DO - 10.1093/ajlh/njac006
DA - 2022-03-25
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/douglas-j-flowe-uncontrollable-blackness-african-american-men-and-AScUf9BsA8
SP - 129
EP - 132
VL - 62
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -