Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York, by Douglas J. Flowe

Abstract

Set in New York City during the decades that spanned the turn of the twentieth century, Douglas J. Flowe’s study of gender, sexuality, race, sex, class and African Americans takes readers on a familiar intellectual journey while also revealing new and fascinating vistas. Scholars of the Progressive Era will revisit well-known historical scenes, such as private and public attempts to bring order and control to the complex, disruptive and disturbing social and economic trends—fiscal panics, bank failures, disease outbreaks, unchecked poverty, rampant crime, unravelling morals, dissolving families, unplanned expanding metropolises—that shaped industrial capitalist civilisation in the United States from the 1870s through the 1920s. While an earlier generation of historians, such as Gail Bederman and Glenda Gilmore, have revised Robert Wiebe’s classic formulation of American Progressivism’s ‘search for order’ to include the powerful ways in which race and gender influenced the era’s politics and culture, Flowe has widened further the aperture through which we can see these decades’ significance. His work includes the multi-dimensional uses of race, masculinity and crime developed by fin de siècle politicians, moralists, gangsters and entrepreneurs. This book produces new, fascinating tableaux of Progressive Era histories of crime and criminality as inextricably tied to histories of urban racial segregation, Black masculinity, sex and sexuality, and violent competitions and confrontations over space, commerce, individual agency and community autonomy.