Contested Commitment: Policing Black Female Juvenile Delinquency at Efland Home, 1919–1939

Abstract

The North Carolina Industrial School for Negro Girls was established in 1925 by the local branch of the National Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs. Also known as Efland Home, this institution, like others across the South, was designed to rehabilitate young black women “destined for pregnancy, prostitution, or prison.” The quasi-private reformatory negotiated its relationship with the state, receiving inconsistent and nominal funding for roughly a decade. By the mid-to-late 1930s, Efland Home functioned as a penal institution as the ideals of its clubwomen founders crumbled under financial and logistical pressures. State-sanctioned investigations and inquiries wrought mixed messages concerning the utility of the reformatory. During the last five years of its existence, Efland Home became a contested site of policing as matrons, superintendents, and others replaced rehabilitative ideologies with violence and (corporeal) punishment. To express their discontent, young women sentenced to the institution ran away in larger numbers and with greater frequency during these years, encountering local authorities in the process. The young women’s experiences thus reveal complex negotiations regarding the power of black clubwomen and the state to regulate black female adolescents’ behaviors.