“[A] brilliant work that
tells us how directly the past has formed us.”—Darryl Pinckney,
The New York Review of Books
Lynch
mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black southern criminals that
defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the
role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in
American society.
Following
the 1890 census, the first to measure the generation of African
Americans born after slavery, crime statistics, new migration and
immigration trends, and symbolic references to America as the
promised land of opportunity were woven into a cautionary tale about
the exceptional threat black people posed to modern urban society.
Excessive arrest rates and overrepresentation in northern prisons
were seen by many whites—liberals and conservatives, northerners
and southerners—as indisputable proof of blacks’ inferiority. In
the heyday of “separate but equal,” what else but pathology could
explain black failure in the “land of opportunity”?
The
idea of black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban
America, as were African Americans’ own ideas about race and crime.
Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people
as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to
working-class whites and European immigrants, Khalil Gibran Muhammad
reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and
social policies