The Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender, and Delinquency in Chicago’s Juvenile Justice System, 1899-1945

This essay analyzes inequality and the construction of childhood in the early US juvenile justice system. Although the juvenile justice movement’s best intentions focused on protecting children from neglect and the criminal justice system, historians have argued that protective juvenile justice was unequal and ephemeral. I critically summarize three histories of juvenile justice: Anthony Platt’sThe Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency(1969),Geoff Ward’s The Black Child-Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice(2012), and Tera Agyepong’sThe Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender, and Delinquency in Chicago’s Juvenile Justice System, 1899–1945(2018). I argue that the common thread in these studies is the construction of poor and black youth as unchildlike. Because the juvenile court arose in a context where not all youth were considered children, it never treated all youth as innocent or in need of protection.

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Tera Eva Agyepong, The Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender, and Delinquency in Chicago’s Juvenile Justice System, 1899–1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. 196. $24.95 (paper).

The Journal of African American History ◽

10.1086/703941 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 104 (3) ◽

pp. 502-504

Author(s):

Kaitlyn Muchnok

Keyword(s):

North Carolina ◽

Juvenile Justice ◽

Justice System ◽

Juvenile Justice System ◽

Black Children ◽

University Of North Carolina ◽

Chapel Hill

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Race-ing Innocence

Criminalization of Black Children ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469636443.003.0002 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 7-37

Author(s):

Tera Eva Agyepong

Keyword(s):

Child Welfare ◽

Juvenile Justice ◽

Justice System ◽

Juvenile Justice System ◽

Juvenile Court ◽

Black Children ◽

Immigrant Children ◽

Cook County ◽

Public And Private ◽

The Great Migration

This chapter elucidates the community milieu in which the nascent juvenile justice system operated. Racialized notions of childhood, Progressive uplift, and the politics of child welfare primed black children to be marked as delinquents even before they formally stepped foot inside Cook County Juvenile Court. The vast majority of public and private agencies for poor, abused, neglected, or abandoned children excluded black children because of their race, even as they readily accepted white and European immigrant children. This dearth of institutional resources for black children was exacerbated by the Great Migration. Chicago’s black community adapted to these realities by doing their own “child-saving” and inserting themselves into a juvenile justice system that began to play a defining role in shaping the trajectory of many black children’s lives.

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