Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York (Justice, Power, and Politics)

Winner of the Littleton-Griswold Prize in American Law and Society from the American Historical AssociationIn early twentieth-century New York City, Black men moved through a world that treated their very presence as suspect: excluded from steady work, hemmed in by segregation, and surveilled and punished even when they followed the law. Uncontrollable Blackness asks what "crime" and "violence" meant to men whose everyday conduct was already criminalized.Douglas J. Flowe follows these men into barrooms, side-streets, back apartments, and underground markets. He finds them making money however they could when legitimate work was inadequate or unavailable; carrying weapons when they understood no one else would defend them; seizing control of barrooms, corners, and neighborhoods in a city that denied their right to urban space and challenged their claims to manhood; and seeking normative modes of masculinity in ways that resisted constant emasculation. Reformers and civic leaders claimed to uplift them, but instead tightened the web of surveillance and restriction that sometimes made illegality a rational, or possibly even principled, response to Jim Crow.Drawing on criminal case files, trial transcripts, personal letters, and investigative reports, Flowe reconstructs the texture of their lives and the ideas behind their choices, in their own words. The book offers a new way to see the Black freedom struggle — not only in courtrooms and protests, but in the everyday, extralegal acts by which working-class Black men insisted on dignity, safety, and manhood in a hostile city. Read more