Regular readers of this blog know that I have been writing about an early 20th century black woman prisoner named Laura Scott quite a bit. I haven’t written very much about her in the past few weeks as I have been waiting for some court transcripts and other documentation to arrive from California. In the meantime though, I have been reading more generally about the plight of black women prisoners in the 18th and 19th centuries.

You won’t be surprised to know that the numbers of black women prisoners were insignificant until after the Civil War. Almost immediately, existing prisons began to see an increase in the number of former black female slaves. In Illinois for example, in the 1850s, 75% of female prisoners were foreign-born and of the total over 50% were Irish immigrants. In contrast, although black women were only 2% of female prisoners in the late 1850s, they were 25% of all commitments in the five years after the Civil War. By the 1890s, black women represented 2/3 of the daily prison population in Illinois (L. Mara Dodge, 1999). Between 1890 and 1930, the proportion of black women in Ohio state prison increased from 26% to 52%, while the percentage of blacks in the total population of the state rose only from 2% to 3% in the same period. In Tennessee, over 70% of the women committed to the penitentiary in the late 19th century were black (blacks only made up 26% of Tennessee’s population).

It is not difficult to understand why this increase occurred. Once black women could no longer be exploited as slaves for their labor, it was easy to incarcerate them and find a new way to lease them out as free labor for corporations and state governments. As Nicole Hahn Rafter (1992) has written about the southern prison system:

“[It] was a form of labor exploitation as well as racial control. States used the growing pool of black convicts to increase public revenues by leasing them to private employers. Black prisoners, both men and women, were forced to participate in the convict lease system, where they faced brutal living conditions and labored long hours at backbreaking field work (p.356).”

Reflecting on the treatment of black women imprisoned in the Midwest and the North, Rafter (1992) suggests that while “racial discrimination was less overt, black women faced harsher punishments for violating the criminal law than did white women. They received higher fines and were more likely to face incarceration than were white women convicted of similar crimes (p.356).”

The stories of female prisoners in the 19th through early 20th centuries have mostly been ignored by historians and social scientists until recently. One of the reasons for this is because their numbers were small relative to male prisoners. Another reason is that these women were seen for the most part as “fallen” women whose lives were not particularly valuable.

A few scholars have begun to reclaim the lost stories of female prisoners of the 19th century. In particular, I recently read an essay by Leslie Patrick (2000) about one of the first female prisoners incarcerated at Eastern State Penitentiary. In 1831, two years after Eastern State Penitentiary was opened, four black women were sentenced to join the 83 men who were incarcerated there. One of these women was a female convict named Ann Hinson who had been convicted of manslaughter. Patrick uses the story of Ann Hinson to illuminate the contradictions that were inherent in the imprisonment of women in the early 19th century. Hinson’s incarceration at Eastern underscored the extent to which female prisoners were neglected in early Penitentiaries. There is hardly any mention of her in official prison documents. What we know about her time at Eastern mostly comes from documentation from an inquiry into some scandals that occurred at the prison during her incarceration there.

Ann Hinson (#100) was sentenced to Eastern for manslaughter and received a two year sentence. Records indicate that she and the other three women who were the first to be incarcerated at Eastern were engaged in cooking and/or washing clothes as part of their daily work. Records and first-hand testimony indicate that Ann Hinson was basically allowed to freely roam through the prison; she was not confined to her cell. She seemed to have become friendly with the underkeeper’s wife, Mrs. Blundin, who had been hired by the prison board to keep an eye on the very small number of women incarcerated at Eastern. Ann Hinson is said to have curried special favors from her and the two of them were accused of having sexual relations with several male prisoners. It is difficult to ascertain whether this portrait of the two women as depraved and immoral is the truth or a figment of the prejudices of the male authors of various reports about the scandals at Eastern Penitentiary. William Griffith, who worked in the shoemaking department, described some of the activities that occurred inside the prison:

“Mrs. Blundin gave a dance party inside the walls. It happened on a night that I was on duty till 10 o’clock. Mr. Wood came up and told me that if I wished to go down and see how they were coming on in the front part of the building, he would spell me awhile — I went down — I found at least thirty persons there, male and female, they were dancing to the music of the violin — a black woman played the violin for them, not an inmate at the Penitentiary — a black woman by the name of Anne, think [sic] No. 100, a convict, was present when I first went down. She appeared to be sitting looking on — dressed in a calico dress with a turban about her head. There was pretty plenty drinking going on — some of the females I found pretty well intoxicated — I saw them drink (Patrick, 2000, p.369).”

These activities seemed to be happening with the full knowledge and consent of the prison warden. They provide an interesting window into an aspect of prison life in the early 19th century. It does seem clear from the available information that Ann Hinson had an unusual amount of “relative freedom” during her incarceration at Eastern. This seems to have derived from her interesting relationship with the prison matron, Mrs. Blundin. If you will recall from a previous post, some white women prisoners at San Quentin in the early 20th century made some similar claims of favoritism for black female prisoners by a prison matron there. I find these contentions endlessly fascinating and it makes me wish that more had been written about the conditions of incarceration for women in prisoners in general but particularly black women in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

I am reading another biography of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. This is the third one that I will have read and I continue to learn new things. If you live in Chicago and work on issues of criminal justice, then you should be required to become an expert on the life and work of Wells-Barnett.

I have long wondered why the Negro Fellowship League (NFL) hasn’t received more scholarly attention. The NFL was founded in 1908 by Ida B. Wells and a group of her Bible study class students. Wells built the organization into a reading room and social center which moved into a rented space in 1910. She received seed money for the move and to establish early programming from Mrs. Victor Lawson (wife of the owner of the Chicago Daily News). Wells biographer Mia Bay (2009) describes the activities of the NFL reading room in her book “To Tell the Truth Freely:”

“Staffed by one employee and a roster of volunteers, the NFL’s reading room was open from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m, and housed a ‘selected library of history, biography, fiction and race literature especially.’ It offered visitors a place to read, study, write letters, and pursue a’ quiet game of checkers, dominoes or other games that would not interfere with those who wished to read.’ Nonalcoholic refreshments were available…Visitors were also encouraged to attend weekly lectures by a variety of prominent speakers, ranging from white reformers such as Jane Addams and Mary White Ovington to black intellectuals such as William Monroe Trotter, Garland Penn, and the historian Carter G. Woodson. Free and open to the public, these events attracted local people as well as league members (p.285).”

The NFL was much more than just a reading room and social center though. It began to offer lodging to young men who had just migrated to Chicago; visitors could rent a bed for 50 cents a night. They offered food to those who needed it and helped people to find employment. In just its first year of operation, the employment bureau placed 115 men in jobs (Bay, p.286).

However, for me, the most interesting aspect of the NFL was its work to support prisoners and to protect black men in particular from injustice. This focus seemed most important to Ida B. Wells. She and her husband worked through the NFL to represent many young black men who were falsely accused of crimes and also to secure the release of convicted individuals.

While reading a local newspaper, Wells-Barnett’s attention was captured by the story of Chicken Joe Campbell. Campbell was already incarcerated at Joliet Prison when, in 1915, the warden’s wife was killed in a fire. He was accused of murdering her.

The warden, Edmund M. Allen had been appointed by the Governor of Illinois in 1913. He had very progressive views (especially for the time) about how to treat prisoners. “There is some good in every man…and there exists some influence which will appeal to his heart and reason (cited in Giddings, 2009, p.549).” Allen had instituted an “honor system” at the Prison that allowed inmates to be rewarded with privileges and better job assignments for good behavior. Joe Campbell had through his good behavior been elevated to the status of “trusty” and was assigned as a personal servant to the wife of the warden, Odette. Campbell was scheduled to appear before a parole board in a little more than a week when a fire broke out in the second-floor bedroom of the warden’s house. (Incidentally, Mrs. Allen had apparently agreed to testify in support of Campbell at his upcoming parole hearing). Paula Giddings explains what happened next in her authoritative biography “Ida: A Sword Among Lions (2008):”

“When prison guards and convicts from the volunteer fire department rushed to the residence, they found the lifeless body of Mrs. Allen. A later investigation found that alcohol had been spread over the bedding and that Mrs. Allen’s skull had been fractured. The coroner concluded that she had been knocked unconscious before succumbing to smoke inhalation and the flames. The Allen’s physician, who also had access to the warden’s living quarters and was himself a convict in the prison for killing his wife, claimed that Odette Allen had also been strangled and sexually assaulted — thought he had not made a thorough examination and no secretions were analyzed (p.549).”

Joseph Campbell was arrested for the crime right away. Ida B. Wells read about his plight when the Chicago papers reported that Campbell had been “confined to solitary in complete darkness for fifty hours on bread and water (Bay, p. 292).” After 40 hours of being subjected to questioning, Campbell ‘confessed’ to the crime. Wells was appalled by this barbaric treatment and wrote an outraged letter and appeal to local papers. “Is this justice? Is this humanity? Can we stand to see a dog treated in such a fashion without protest?” she wrote. She didn’t stop there. She sent her husband, Ferdinand, to represent Campbell because she felt that the “prominent people” in Chicago weren’t supporting him. Ferdinand was told by prison officials that Campbell already had an attorney (it turned out that this was not true). Persisting Ida wrote a letter to Campbell himself and went to see him at the prison. She came away convinced of his innocence. When she returned to Chicago, she found a letter that Campbell had sent in response to her original letter to him. It was subsequently published in local and national papers and proclaimed his innocence of the charges against him:

Ida and Ferdinand threw themselves into the defense of Joseph Campbell. Ida tirelessly raised funds while Ferdinand defended him in court. Despite Ferdinand’s best efforts, Joseph Campbell was found guilty and sentenced to death in April 1916. Ida and her husband supported Campbell through three appeals. After the final appeal, Campbell’s sentence was commuted by the Governor from death to life in prison in large part due to the pressure that the Barnetts kept up in this case. Campbell died in Joliet prison in 1950, nineteen years after Ida herself had passed.

On days when I am feeling run down and exhausted from working to dismantle this criminal injustice system, I think of Ida B. Wells. Wells was able to secure individual contributions and some grant funding for the first couple of years of the NFL’s existence but then had to sustain the organization from 1913 until 1916 with her $150 dollar monthly salary from her work as a probation officer. Due to a lack of funding, the NFL had to close its doors in 1920. Some of the reasons that she could not secure funds for her work were because many considered it to be radical and also because she refused to cow-tow for wealthy philanthropists. As someone who has to struggle every single day to sustain a grassroots organization, I can understand the frustrations that Wells must have felt. I am in no way comparing myself to Wells-Barnett (because that would be preposterous) but I do know what it is like to work for “free” and to also have to basically subsidize my activism with my own funds. I know many other friends who are doing the same.

What I respect most about Ida is her integrity and her uncompromising dedication to supporting the most marginalized people “by any means necessary.” I take pride in the fact that I get to live and work in a city where she made her mark and left such an important (yet still hidden) legacy. Here’s hoping that some enterprising scholar is hard at work uncovering more about the work of the NFL.

Note: For those interested in prison photography, Richard Lawson has curated some images created by Joliet prison inmates from 1890 to 1930. This period overlaps with part of the years that Joseph Campbell was incarcerated there and that Ida B. Wells-Barnett would have been visiting prisoners.

Over the weekend, the New York Times published an essay by Brent Staples titled “Young, Black, Male, and Stalked by Bias.” The piece has made the rounds on social media. Below are some of the relevant words for me:

Young black men know that in far too many settings they will be seen not as individuals, but as the “other,” and given no benefit of the doubt. By the time they have grown into adult bodies — even though they are still children — they are well versed in the experience of being treated as criminals until proved otherwise by cops who stop and search them and eyed warily by nighttime pedestrians who cower on the sidewalks.

Society’s message to black boys — “we fear you and view you as dangerous” — is constantly reinforced. Boys who are seduced by this version of themselves end up on a fast track to prison and to the graveyard. But even those who keep their distance from this deadly idea are at risk of losing their lives to it. The death of Trayvon Martin vividly underscores that danger.

I write, think, and act consistently against the systematic and systemic oppression of young people of color. I think that it is important though that we listen to and elevate the voices of these young people as they narrate their own experiences for us. As part of a terrific volunteer-led and run project called Chain Reaction, young people are doing exactly this as they recount their encounters with the police. Storytelling is only the first step of this project but it is important. Listen to Anthony as he describes his encounter with the police. Listen and then figure out what you can do to interrupt this type of oppression in your community.

Yes, yes, I already know what you are thinking…

You are thinking: “What is it with this woman and her obsession with James Baldwin?” Well, I won’t give you the one million reasons why Baldwin is awesome. I’ll save that for another post. I will only say that Baldwin was and remains incredibly relevant to understanding America. That should be a good enough reason for my near constant citing of his work. He was one of a kind. Think about it: “Who is our Baldwin today?” It’s a rhetorical question.

Because I am working on something about Harlem community members’ resistance to police violence (set to be released on May 7th), I have been immersed in reading about the neighborhood. Today, I am moved to write about a long-forgotten incident that took place in 1964: the case of the Harlem six.

Baldwin writes about the case in an article titled “A Report from Occupied Territory” that was published in the Nation magazine in 1966. The article opens with these paragraphs:

On April 17, 1964, in Harlem, New York City, a young salesman, father of two, left a customer’s apartment and went into the streets. There was a great commotion in the streets, which, especially since it was a spring day, involved many people, including running, frightened, little boys. They were running from the police. Other people, in windows, left their windows, in terror of the police because the police had their guns out, and were aiming the guns at the roofs. Then the salesman noticed that two of the policemen were beating up a kid: “So I spoke up and asked them, ‘why are you beating him like that?’ Police jump up and start swinging on me. He put the gun on me and said, ‘get over there.’ I said, ‘what for?’ ”

An unwise question. Three of the policemen beat up the salesman in the streets. Then they took the young salesman, whose hands had been handcuffed behind his back, along with four others, much younger than the salesman, who were handcuffed in the same way, to the police station.

The incident that Baldwin writes about took place two years before he published his essay in the Nation and came to be known as the “Little Fruit Stand Riot.” The young salesman that Baldwin quotes in his piece was Frank Stafford, a 31 year old door-to-door salesman, who was arrested and brutally assaulted by police when he and a 47 year old Puerto Rican seaman named Fecundo Acion came to the aid of three black teens charged by the cops with overturning a fruit cart owned by Edward DeLuca. A young man named Wallace Baker also witnessed the incident and jumped in to assist a young man who was being beaten by police; Baker found himself assaulted and arrested too.

Several days after this incident, a white couple who owned a second hand store in Harlem was attacked. Frank and Margit Sugar were both stabbed several times. Mrs. Sugar died from her wounds while her husband would be saved by doctors at Harlem Hospital. Within just a few hours, the police had rounded up several young people who they had identified as having been at the scene of the “Little Fruit Stand Riot” that had taken place days earlier. Included in the group were: Wallace Baker (who had been a witness to the “fruit stand” incident) and a few of his teenage friends – Daniel Hamm, William Craig, Ronald Felder, Walter Thomas, and Robert Rice. Police also brought in Robert Baron, a former prisoner who lived in the community.

The NAACP declined to take on the case, even though it seemed clear from the beginning that the young men were in the process of being railroaded, so a local attorney named Conrad Lynn tried to assemble a defense team to handle the trials of the young men. William Kunstler, who would later become famous for defending Black Panther Party members and Attica prisoners, volunteered to represent the young men at trial. However, the young men were instead assigned public defenders. This fact would prove very important later.

The trial for the young men who would come to be known as the Harlem Six began in March 1965. Harlem was a community that was still roiling from the aftermath of the 1964 riots. It was against this backdrop that the young men were being tried. A black reporter at the New York Times falsely claimed that the six young men had “sworn a blood oath to murder white people.” The Harlem Six then became known to the wider community as the “Blood Brothers.” They were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

William Epton, who I have previously written about, helped found the Harlem Defense Council, which took the lead in the struggle to free the Harlem Six. The Defense Council raised money and tried to keep the case in the news.

Three years after the young men were convicted, Lynn, Kunstler and others mounted an appeal and were thrilled when the convictions were reversed and new trials ordered. However, Lynn and his associates were again not permitted to represent the young men at their new trials. Two of the six were tried separately and found guilty again. The other four went on trial in February 1971. The trial ended with a deadlocked jury so the judge declared a mistrial. Another trial also ended with a deadlock. Bail was set at $75,000 for each defendant. They could not afford to post this amount and had by this time already spent 8 years in prison. In the end, all of the young men were released from prison after having lost years of their lives unjustly locked behind bars. James Baldwin, Ossie Davis, and many others had played a role in helping to ultimately free the Harlem Six.

For those who want to learn more about this case, you can read Truman Nelson’s article published in Ramparts Magazine in 1965 titled “Torture of Mothers.”

Baldwin always wrote with passion and moral clarity. For me the power of his work is that it always seemed as if he had a deep investment in what he was writing about or commenting on. Below, for example, he explains his interest in the case of the Harlem Six:

This means that I also know, in my own flesh, and know, which is worse, in the scars borne by many of those dearest to me, the thunder and fire of the billy club, the paralyzing shock of spittle in the face, and I know what it is to find oneself blinded, on one’s hands and knees, at the bottom of the flight of steps down which one has just been hurled. I know something else: these young men have been in jail for two years now. Even if the attempts being put forth to free them should succeed, what has happened to them in these two years? People are destroyed very easily. Where is the civilization and where, indeed, is the morality which can afford to destroy so many?

As Baldwin writes about the tactics that law enforcement deployed against black people in Harlem, I dare you not to find echoes in our current situation:

But the police are afraid of everything in Harlem and they are especially afraid of the roofs, which they consider to be guerrilla outposts. This means that the citizens of Harlem who, as we have seen, can come to grief at any hour in the streets, and who are not safe at their windows, are forbidden the very air. They are safe only in their houses—or were, until the city passed the No Knock, Stop and Frisk laws, which permit a policeman to enter one’s home without knocking and to stop anyone on the streets, at will, at any hour, and search him. Harlem believes, and I certainly agree, that these laws are directed against Negroes.

There is nothing else to add. If you’ve never read, Baldwin’s “A Report from Occupied Territory,” what are you waiting for? Do it today, do it now.

Who But The Lord?
By Langston Hughes

I looked and I saw
That man they call the law.
He was coming
Down the street at me!
I had visions in my head
Of being laid out cold and dead,
Or else murdered
By the third degree.

I said, O, Lord, if you can,
Save me from that man!
Don’t let him make a pulp out of me!
But the Lord he was not quick.
The law raised up his stick
And beat the living hell
Out of me!

Now, I do not understand
Why God don’t protect a man
From police brutality.

Being poor and black,
I’ve no weapon to strike back
So who but the Lord
Can protect me?

Below are some inchoate thoughts from me…

Some people spend their spare time reading “The Hunger Games.” I spend mine reading about the history of lynching. Potato/Potato. A couple of weeks ago, a reader reached out to me to ask why so many people were analogizing the killing of Trayvon Martin to a lynching (in particular to the lynching of Emmett Till). I haven’t had time to respond to the e-mail so I thought I would try to do so in this post.

I personally don’t see the killing of Trayvon Martin as perfectly analogous to lynching. Lynching is a historically specific form of racial terrorism as I see it. Usually it involved mob violence. However I do understand the temptation to return to the concept of lynching when thinking of the killing of unarmed black people. There has been a historical debasement of black bodies in the United States. We have always been considered killable and disposable. In the late 19th century, a remark was attributed to a Southern police chief who suggested that there were three types of homicides: “If a nigger kills a white man, that’s murder. If a white man kills a nigger, that’s justifiable homicide. If a nigger kills a nigger, that’s one less nigger (Berg, 2011, p.116).”

The devaluing of black life is baked into the cultural cake of America, so to speak. I recently read an excellent book by Manfred Berg titled “Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America.” In the book, Berg makes a convincing case that: “The slave codes singled out blacks for extremely cruel punishment, thus marking black bodies as innately inferior (p.11).” Folks, it is impossible to understand our modern criminal legal system without probing its origins in Colonial America. Berg argues that: “Colonial slavery set clear patterns for future racial violence in America (p.11).” Unfortunately, since it has been proven that American students’ most disliked subject is “history,” we seem doomed to operate as though everything old is new again.

Berg provides several examples of black lynchings for perceived and real slights. For example, when a young black person named Sandy Reeves dropped a five cent piece which was picked up by his employer’s 3 year old daughter, he snatched the coin out of her hands. He should probably have thought twice because the little girl ran crying to her parents telling them that Reeves had harmed her. The parents assumed that Sandy had sexually assaulted their daughter; he was lynched the next night. Apparently Sandy Reeves’ story was not an isolated case.

Black people who were lynched were usually first tortured and then once they were dead, their bodies were often mutilated. Sometimes the lynchers would drop the dead black person’s remains on the doorsteps of other blacks in the community as a warning that they too could meet this fate. This is a period in American history (from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century) that many people think they understand and yet have never actually studied.

I have several friends who are healers and they often talk about the fact that as black people we are dealing with ancestral traumas that are actually unexpressed. I think that there is something to this. Every time we hear of a young unarmed black person meeting with a violent and brutal death, something in our collective historical memories must be triggered.

So while I don’t believe that Trayvon Martin was lynched, I do appreciate the efforts that people have made to try to place his killing into some sort of historical context. Often we treat these incidents as though they are simply individual tragedies. The truth is that Trayvon Martin’s killing is unfortunately not exceptional rather it is part of a long line of injustices. This means that we should not mainly be focused on seeking individual redress (which is unfortunately where the preponderance of the efforts have understandably been focused). Trayvon Martin falls within a history of unarmed black people who have been victimized by racist terror in this country.

Modern day racial profiling is a form of violence that engenders constant vigilance in its victims and makes us afraid and uneasy. It keeps the idea at the forefront of our minds that we are potential targets and can always be objects of unlimited (and unaccountable) violence.

Finally, it always seems in America that punishment is in the service of the dominant culture’s interests. Recall the words of the anonymous Southern chief that I quoted above:

“If a nigger kills a white man, that’s murder. If a white man kills a nigger, that’s justifiable homicide. If a nigger kills a nigger, that’s one less nigger (Berg, 2011, p.116).”

Do we feel that this sentiment applies in 2012? If yes, then the legacy of lynching remains alive in 21st century America even if Trayvon Martin wasn’t a victim of this type of extra-legal violence. What matters is that we still have a culture in this country that sanctions the violation of black bodies often with impunity.

I’ve written in the past about the issue of false confessions. Well the good folks at the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth have released an interesting paper (PDF) titled “Convenients Scapegoats: Juvenile Confessions and Exculpatory DNA in Cook County, IL.” Read it to learn about the role that false confessions played in the Englewood Four and Dixmoor Five cases.

I wanted to revisit the idea of false confessions today because of a new documentary that is out. Scenes of a Crime is described as follows:

“[The film] explores a nearly 10-hour interrogation that culminates in a disputed confession, and an intense, high-profile child murder trial in New York state. Police video-recordings allow directors Blue Hadaegh and Grover Babcock to unravel the complicated psychological dynamic between detectives and their suspect during a long interrogation. Detectives, prosecutors, witnesses, jurors and the suspect himself offer conflicting accounts of exactly what happened in this mysterious and disturbing true-crime documentary.”

“Scenes of a Crime” Trailer from New Box on Vimeo.

I haven’t had a chance to see the film yet but I will look for it when it comes to Chicago.

George Zimmerman does not exist in a vacuum. It seems important for me to restate this fact at this time.

As I predicted would happen, we have now entered the CSI or Law & Order phase of the Trayvon Martin killing. We are being subjected to a trial by media with reports by Nancy Grace about grand jury testimony, DNA evidence, and whether they will move the venue of any possible future trial. Unfortunately Law & Order Trayvon Martin won’t have a quick nor I predict satisfying ending for the public, the vast majority of whom will soon move on. After all, reality television can only hold the public’s attention (those who are even paying attention in the first place) for so long before people start to change the channel to watch something else.

Ultimately what will be lost in all of this is the memory of Trayvon Martin. However this episode will once again underscore the fact that most people do not actually care about antiblack violence in America. This is as it has always been; nothing new to see here. By virtue of our blackness, we are always perceived as disposable (even more so in the 21st century now that our labor is superfluous to the functioning of capitalism) and as “suspect.”

Larvester Gaither (2000) writes that the “adjective ‘suspicious’ expresses the historical and fundamental status of Africans in American society and partly explains American ambivalence toward the question of black victimization (p.192).” In other words, as Kanye West might say: “America does not care about black people.” It certainly does not care about black pain.

There is something more too. Our citizenship as black people is never taken for granted. It is consistently under assault. Black people are in a perpetual struggle in America not to be disenfranchised. For example, currently the right is pushing new voter ID laws across the country which are specifically intended to suppress black votes. People have called Arizona’s SB1070 the “papers please” law. It’s an apt characterization. However it should be pointed out that black people in America (including our current President) have been and continue to be asked to produce “our papers” regularly and usually there is no “please” attached to the demand.

In the 18th century, slave patterollers were empowered to demand documentation from any black person they came across as proof that they were actually “free.” W. Marvin Dulaney writes about slave patrols in his book Black Police in America (1996):

“By the middle of the eighteenth century, every southern colony had a slave patrol. Although in some communities all white males were required to serve some time as patterollers, their ranks were usually filled with poor whites. The patrols were authorized to stop, search, whip, maim, and even kill any African slave caught off the plantation without a pass, engaged in illegal activities, or running away. The patterollers policed specific geographic areas in southern communities called “beats.” Paramilitary in nature, the slave patrol often cooperated with the militia in the southern colonies to prevent and suppress slave insurrections. To facilitate the rapid mobilization of the patrol and to ensure that every white man supported its activities in emergencies, colonial governments granted all whites the authority to detain, whip, and even kill slaves suspected of illegal activities or conspiracies. The colonial slave patrol exercised awesome powers which were often abused [emphasis mine] (p.2).”

Does this sound eerily familiar? If not, it should. I repeat: George Zimmerman does not exist in a historical vacuum. He felt it perfectly within his rights to demand to know what Trayvon was doing in his gated community. [Please don’t mention the fact that Zimmerman is half Peruvian to me as a way to suggest that he cannot be an adherent of white supremacist ideology. We all swim in and internalize the toxic soup of American racism on a daily basis.] Political scientist Robert Gooding-Williams, writing in the New York Times, makes an explicit connection between Zimmerman and slave patterollers:

If it seems a stretch, finally, to paint Zimmerman in the image of the slave catchers of yesteryear, recall that he himself invited the comparison when, while stalking the African-American teenager against the advice of a 911 dispatcher, he complained, using an expletive to refer to Trayvon, that they “always get away.”

Fast forward to 2012, our President is asked to produce his papers on an almost daily basis, when stopped for driving while black we are asked for our licenses and registration, standing on the street corner minding our business we are told to show identification, and walking back from the store with ice tea and Skittles in hand we are questioned about where we are going and asked to prove that we belong in this particular neighborhood. It is within this context of blacks as ‘perpetually criminally suspect’ that George Zimmerman felt empowered to act as an antiblack vigilante. He had historical precedent on his side and he must have known this.

I’m hard at work today planning an upcoming exhibition about the history of black captivity/incarceration in the U.S. As part of my research for the exhibition, I came across this article (PDF) written by social reformer and social scientist Florence Kelley in 1914. She writes about the plight of a “4 year old burglar” in Memphis Juvenile Court. Read this if you want to better understand how disproportionate treatment for black children in the legal system is historical and endemic.

May 8, Gainer _______, 10 Tin Cup Alley, 4 1/2 burglary, larceny, prowling 2:50 a.m., police, probation to Sanderlin.

Today is Billie Holiday’s birthday and I am currently working on a project about her. I hope to be done with it by the end of this year.

I have always been interested in Lady Day. It began with watching Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues when I was probably around 11 years old.

At the time, I think that I was mostly just fascinated by Diana Ross: her beauty, elegance, and those amazing clothes. I hadn’t seen a black woman like her on television before. Anyway, it turned out that my parents had records by Billie Holiday and I began to listen to them religiously. I don’t know why I found her voice so compelling. I had definitely not lived the type of harrowing childhood that she had. We had nothing in common except for our femaleness and our blackness.

The story of Lady Day is familiar to many. Eleanora Harris Fagan was 9 years old when she first came into conflict with the law. She was brought before the juvenile court for being truant and for “being without proper care and guardianship.” She was committed for a year at the House of Good Shepherd for Colored Girls, a Catholic reform school. Incidentally, I am currently doing some research on this reform school and will have more to share about it soon.

She was released on parole in October 1925. She was then raped by a neighbor at 11 years old and returned to House of Good Shepherd under “protective custody” as a “state witness” in December 1926. A couple of months later she was released from the reform school after a lawyer intervened by using the grounds of habeas corpus.

In May 1929, Billie is arrested along with her mother and several other women during a night raid of a brothel in Harlem run by a woman named Florence Williams. She is tried and found guilty of vagrancy by a judge named Jean Hortense Norris (who was well-known for giving very harsh sentences to young offenders). She is 14 years old and sent to Welfare Island (now called Roosevelt Island) first and then to a workhouse.

In May 1947, Billie Holiday was arrested for narcotics use in her apartment in New York City. She was tried, pled guilty, and was sentenced to serve time at the Alderson Federal Prison Camp. She was released from prison for good behavior in March 1948. However, Lady Day would continue to be persecuted by law enforcement and others after her release. She gave an interview to Ebony Magazine in 1949 and spoke of this:

“I came out expecting to be allowed to go to work and to start with a clean state…But the police have been particularly vindictive, hounding, heckling and harassing me beyond endurance…These people have dogged my footsteps from New York to San Francisco…They have allowed me no peace. Wherever I go, they track me down and ask me nasty questions about the company I keep and my habits…

Recently the New York Police Department refused to issue me a Cabaret Performer’s Licence. The pretext used was my prison record…although many other nightclub employees with police records are licensed and working.

I have been caught in the crossfire of narcotic agents and drug peddlers and it’s been wicked…One of the narcotic agents seemed determined to make me the means of securing promotion. The peddlers made vile threats to me in an effort to make me a customer again.

Source: With Billie – A New Look At the Unforgettable Lady Day by Julia Blackburn (p.198).

I have been reading Billie Holiday’s FBI file for the past few weeks. It underscores that there was a “war on drugs” against people of color for decades before it was officially declared by Richard Nixon in 1971. It has been eye-opening and reinforces my belief that state violence against people of color is and has always been destructive. Julia Blackburn (2005) writes about her persecution at the hands of the state: “It is true that after her release from prison, Billie was constantly being brought before the courts of law on one pretext or another, and several people who worked with her attested to the fact that the police and other government agents were always at her shows — heckling, threatening, raiding her dressing room, making embarrassing enquiries at her hotel and spreading rumors at the clubs where she was booked to sing (p.199).”

I look forward to sharing the fruits of my Billie Holiday project with all of you in 2013. In the meantime, Happy Birthday Lady Day!