“If you want police, we will have them”: Anti-Black Student Discipline in Southern Schools and the Rise of a New Carceral Logic, 1961-1975

Abstract

This paper examines the southern influence and litigation around carceral logic in public education, as evident in the racialized disciplinary codes and police presence in schools that led to the criminalization of youth during desegregation through the 1960s and into the 1970s. Southern school districts and state legislators worked in tandem with law enforcement to increase discipline and surveillance in newly desegregated spaces, changed laws to swiftly prosecute and remove youth from schools, and increasingly targeted youth with harsh disciplinary policies grounded in racist assumptions categorizing Black students as inherently violent. This form of disciplinary power and control presaged federal legislation including the Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965 and the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974, and shaped the foundations of today’s anti-Black school discipline policies and police presence in schools. This article explicates how southern schools contributed to a burgeoning carceral logic that shared commonalities across the nation but at the same time were distinct from other regions.