Overview

In the late nineteenth century, progressive reformers recoiled at the prospect of the justice system punishing children as adults. Advocating that children's inherent innocence warranted fundamentally different treatment, reformers founded the nation's first juvenile court in Chicago in 1899. Yet amidst an influx of new African American arrivals to the city during the Great Migration, notions of inherent childhood innocence and juvenile justice were circumscribed by race. In documenting how blackness became a marker of criminality that overrode the potential protections the status of """"child"""" could have bestowed, Tera Eva Agyepong shows the entanglements between race and the state's transition to a more punitive form of juvenile justice. This important study expands the narrative of racialized criminalization in America, revealing that these patterns became embedded in a justice system originally intended to protect children. In doing so, Agyepong also complicates our understanding of the nature of migration and what it meant to be black and living in Chicago in the early twentieth century.

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9781469636443

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Provides a case study on race in Chicago's juvenile justice system throughout the first half of the twentieth century. . . . Highlights the particular vulnerabilities that young African Americans face in a legal system supposedly designed to protect children's innocence.--Journal of African American History

Brings significant insights to the fields of juvenile justice, childhood studies, and African American history.--American Historical Review Provides a case study on race in Chicago's juvenile justice system throughout the first half of the twentieth century. . . . Highlights the particular vulnerabilities that young African Americans face in a legal system supposedly designed to protect children's innocence.--Journal of African American History

Author Information

Tera Eva Agyepong is assistant professor of history at DePaul University.

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