"A Situation That Has Existed for Generations": Double Age, Race, and American Juvenile Justice

Abstract

"A Situation That Has Existed for Generations":Double Age, Race, and American Juvenile Justice William S. Bush (bio) a 1939 murder case involving two African American adolescent girls garnered almost no attention outside San Antonio, Texas. The city's two daily newspapers barely reported on the facts surrounding the crime and they wrote nothing of the personal histories of the assailant or victim. Moreover, local media sometimes misreported the ages of fifteen-year-old Odessa Haywood and eighteen-year-old Carrie Lee Thompson while conspicuously highlighting their racial identity as "Negro." Some reports identified Haywood, the assailant, as sixteen; one article described Thompson, the victim, as a "woman," even though she was a high school student at the time.1 The only outlet to report in depth about them was the San Antonio Register, the city's Black-owned newspaper. The Register published detailed reports on the two girls, their families, and Haywood's May 1939 jury trial and conviction in the Bexar County Court. Their coverage of the case prompted the Register's editors to issue a dramatic call to action against "a situation that has existed for generations."2 The Register decried the court's inability to place Odessa Haywood in an age-appropriate facility, none of which admitted Black girls. The court's only available placement options were imprisonment in the county jail or unsupervised release—a recurring dilemma across the Jim Crow South and to some extent other regions in the United States.3 Neither option was acceptable to local Black leaders, who moved to protect Haywood from adult punishments while mobilizing to demand access for Black girls to juvenile detention facilities and training schools. More broadly, local Black leaders highlighted the "State's indifference" and "dereliction" in refusing to extend the ostensibly protective benefits of juvenile justice and child welfare to Black children and youth. The Haywood case revived a dormant campaign to build a statewide juvenile training school for [End Page 410] Black girls, who had been largely left out of a wave of juvenile justice reforms that had swept the state during the Progressive Era. By the time of the Haywood case, official neglect had become the defining experience of Black girls in American juvenile justice, and particularly in Texas, where a combination of law and custom invoked the application of "double age." The white "child-savers" who founded and administered juvenile justice typically excluded Black children and youth from their vision of protected childhood. Instead, Black children were viewed as too "insensate" to respond to nurture, as being fully formed "hard clay" and less amenable to rehabilitation.4 In practice, this thinking produced different results for Black boys and girls under the state's juvenile delinquency laws. In 1913, Texas adopted the sweeping Juvenile Delinquency Court Act that granted original jurisdiction to the juvenile courts over boys under age seventeen and girls under age eighteen. The law explicitly mandated racial segregation in juvenile justice.5 For Black boys from the state's urban areas, segregation meant heightened incarceration. Black boys were overrepresented in local juvenile detention facilities as well as the state's sprawling youth prison. They were confined to a racially segregated dormitory that was often overcrowded and poorly maintained. When the youth prison introduced academic and vocational schooling, it excluded Black boys altogether, subjecting them instead to agricultural labor. Texas abolished convict leasing in its adult prisons in 1912, but it continued for decades in the state's youth prisons. Much like their adult counterparts in the prisons, Black boys toiled on private farms, including some owned by state employees, in addition to farming state-owned land. White officials justified these practices by portraying Black boys as incipient adult criminals, while news reports described Black boys solely in terms of the threat they supposedly posed to public safety. For Black girls, state-mandated segregation meant they received comparatively little attention from juvenile justice authorities. Black girls charged with status or even criminal offenses typically were released back into their communities with no official supervision. Local governments in major cities such as Houston, Dallas, or Haywood's home city of San Antonio committed few resources in the form of juvenile probation...