“The Place is Gone!”: Policing Black Women to Redevelop Downtown Boston

Abstract

Abstract In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Boston politicians and urban managers sought to reverse the city’s postwar capital drain by luring white consumer dollars and private investment. Their recovery plan featured the Adult Entertainment District (AED), which was established to contain burgeoning sexual commerce while demonstrating the vibrancy and economic viability of the city’s downtown core. At the same time, the changing spatial dynamics of interracial sexual commerce, Black economic isolation, and discriminatory practices citywide drew increasing numbers of Black women onto downtown streets. The presence of Black women in formerly white downtown spaces ignited a powerful law-and-order narrative linking race, sex, and violence. Black women became oversignified with sexual deviance and violent criminality amid the urban crisis. The development of the AED experiment and the raced and gendered crime panic posed unique challenges and opportunities for the Boston Police Department (BPD). Like urban police departments nationwide in the early 1970s, the BPD was embroiled in a battle for its authority. But the deeper motivations of economic turnaround guiding the AED ultimately served to strengthen the BPD’s legitimacy. As the separate goals of political officials and law enforcement authorities converged—to redevelop downtown Boston, and to secure urban authority, respectively—the intensifying policing and spatial banishment of Black women in downtown Boston became central to urban recovery strategies. This history demonstrates that aggressive, racially charged morals policing was deployed to prepare the city for an influx of white capital.