What’s Love Got to Do with It?

Controversies Around Restorative Justice

“Down Where the South Begins”: Black Richmond Activism before the Modern Civil Rights Movement, 1899–1930

The Spiritual Dimension of Social Justice

Resisting “Law and Order” in California: Howard Moore Jr., Angela Davis, and the Politics of Prison Radicalism

The Criminal Caste

Reviewed by: The American Civil Rights Movement, 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will by Russell Brooker David T. Ballantyne The American Civil Rights Movement, 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will. By Russell Brooker. ( Lanham, Md., and other cities: Lexington Books, 2017. Pp. xxx, 333. $100.00, ISBN 978-0-7391-7992-5.) Russell Brooker provides an accessible overview of the black freedom struggle from the Civil War to 1950. The American Civil Rights Movement, [End Page 771] 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will is a political science– influenced accompaniment to recent syntheses of the long black civil rights struggle, such as Stephen Tuck's We Ain't What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), though Brooker's account ends before African Americans made their most significant gains. His central argument concerns "people of good will"—black and white individuals who acted in African Americans' interests regardless of their motives. Black agency and pressure, not altruism, he contends, induced this conduct. The first half of his synthesis maps black activism alongside the behavior of these people of good will from 1865 to the racial nadir of the early twentieth century. The second half traces the struggle to 1950, when the southern caste system was "severely weakened" (p. xviii). The book concludes with an epilogue that reflects on connections between 1865 and 1950 and contemporary race relations. Brooker enumerates his major arguments at the outset, organizes chapters clearly, and writes in straightforward prose. He also quantifies shifting African American fortunes throughout his account, including helpful tables detailing Reconstruction-era African American college foundations, lynchings by race during "Redemption," twentieth-century black and white southern schooling data, and indices of the extent of racial segregation over time. Breaking with Tuck's nationally focused account and other scholarship examining racial unrest outside the South, Brooker portrays the civil rights struggle as a mostly southern phenomenon. His nonsouthern treatment includes shifting northern public opinion on race throughout the period, nationwide post–World War I race riots, legal decisions concerning racially restrictive covenants, and the activities of northern civil rights organizations in the South, not elsewhere. Yet while the North was a "safe haven" for African Americans in comparison with the Jim Crow South, the American civil rights struggle concerned more than destroying southern racial apartheid (p. xxi). Incorporating scholarship that examines nonsouthern civil rights struggles and that questions the nonsouthern racial consensus around the mid-twentieth century—like Thomas J. Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York, 2008)—would bring nuance to Brooker's analysis and enable him to explain with greater authority the subsequent nationwide white reaction to race that he hints at in the epilogue. Closer engagement with more recent historiography would also strengthen Brooker's discussion. First, Brooker'suse of civil rights movement to define activism between 1865 and 1950 welcomes a consideration of recent debates over the periodization of the civil rights movement—relevant works include Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past" (Journal of American History, 91 [March 2005], 1233–63) and Sundiata Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang's "The 'Long Movement' as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies" (Journal of African American History, 92 [Spring 2007], 265–88). Yet in Brooker'stelling, thisworkissimply "about the civil rights movement … before it [the term] got capitalized" (p. xii). Second, given the book's justifiable emphasis on the centrality of violence in infringing on black freedoms, recent military-focused Reconstruction scholarship [End Page 772] would offer a counterpoint to Brooker's argument on the use of force to preserve black rights. The book's later portion effectively details civil rights gains and organization through the 1940s. Though social, economic, intellectual, and political developments undoubtedly weakened Jim Crow segregation by midcentury, Brooker might have engaged with works that problematize the relationship between World War II–era and later civil rights activism, such as Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein's "Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement" (Journal...

Restorative Justice: Some Facts and History

With Intent?The Malicious Consequences of Prison Damien M. Sojoyner (bio) Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press, 2012. Sara Wakefield and Christopher Wildeman’s Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Jane A. Siegel’s Disrupted Childhoods: Children of Women in Prison. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011. The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, Children of the Prison Boom by Sara Wakefield and Christopher Wildeman, and Disrupted Childhoods by Jane A. Siegel are representative of a burgeoning focus within the academy on the deleterious effects of prisons. Given the differing disciplinary and methodological trajectories of these three texts, it is important to first map out the general terrain of the study of prisons. In plotting out the development of these works, such background is crucial in order to establish common ground in which to read the books as a part of a field of inquiry. The past twenty years have borne witness to the emergence of critical work that addresses the problematics and key issues related to the prison system(s) in the United States. Prison as an object of study has become a key fixture within both the academy and planning efforts by communal organizations across the country. While not always in dialogue with each other, the coalescence of these two entities was marked by the 1998 Critical Resistance (CR) conference held on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. The collective impetus of the conference took on the spirit of two of the central figures within CR—Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis. Similar to their own life’s work as scholars and activists, the conference spanned across both disciplinary boundaries and the gulf between universities and the communities they reside within. In the wake of the 1998 conference, several key texts such as Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) and Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag (2007) have set forth analytical and practical models to understand the complex dynamics of both prison development and, importantly, efforts to counter [End Page 299] the violence that prisons continue to inflict upon communities across the country. In addition to the development of the aforementioned critical texts, key organizations such as Incite! formed in the wake of the CR conference. Incite! directly addressed the crosscutting issues of gender, sex, race, and class with respect to violence enacted upon women of color. Incite!’s analytic gaze was particularly focused upon connections between prisons and the production of violence. One of Incite!’s founding members Beth E. Richie, whose text Compelled to Crime (1995) was instrumental in changing the academic discourse with respect to black women, became an important voice in making the connections between prison and violence against black women. Both Richie’s earlier and most recent work, Arrested Justice (2012), have set forth a new paradigm to understand the complexity of the prison system and provided needed nuance with respect to gender and sexuality. It is within this context that the three texts, The New Jim Crow, Children of the Prison Boom, and Disrupted Childhoods, are situated. Ranging in methodological backgrounds, each of the texts offers a unique perspective into the vast impact that prisons have in the United States. When read collectively, the three works provide a disturbing snapshot of the rapid devastation imposed upon black people in particular as a result of prison expansion and related public policy. Alexander’s work is primarily situated within the field of legal studies. Culling the recent historical (post–civil rights) and contemporary legal record, Alexander asserts that because of the formation of a racially motivated criminal justice system, black people have been permanently affixed into a subaltern caste. She writes, “The current system of control permanently locks a huge percentage of the African American community out of the mainstream society and economy. The system operates through our criminal justice institutions, but it functions more like a caste system than a system of crime control” (13). Alexander’s evidence overwhelmingly rests upon data that connects the “new Jim Crow” to masculinity. Alexander states, “In major cities wracked...

Reviewed by: Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippiby Robert Hunt Ferguson Ansley L. Quiros Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi. By Robert Hunt Ferguson. Politics and Culture in the Twentieth-Century South. ( Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 211. $56.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5179-7.) Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippitells the story of Delta Cooperative Farm and its related effort, Providence Farm: interracial, Christian, socialist [End Page 733]farming communities founded in Mississippi in the 1930s. "[I]mplausible" as these communities may have been, existing as they did "smack-dab" in the rural Jim Crow South, Robert Hunt Ferguson maintains that they were "much more than nearly forgotten curiosities" (p. 1). Rather, the existence of Delta Cooperative and Providence Farms reveals that the rural poor were long engaged in labor and civil rights activism, complicating the traditional narrative. In telling this story, Remaking the Rural Southcontributes to the history of American intentional communities, American labor history, American religious history, and the history of the long civil rights movement. Founded in 1936, Delta Cooperative Farm brought together black and white sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta in a communitarian vision for economic justice. The farm's founders rooted their bold experiment in the traditions of American socialism and in Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian realism, joining "southern dreamers" in testing imaginative solutions for the besetting problems facing a South reeling from the Great Depression and choked by Jim Crow (p. 12). At Delta Cooperative and Providence Farms, dozens of black and white sharecroppers labored alongside one another, built homes, formed relationships, attended Christian worship services, and even hosted social events, though these remained segregated. Volunteers came and worked, as prominent Americans such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and William Alexander Percy praised the farms' egalitarian vision. But the endeavor was constrained from the outset. Poor soil and torrential rains made farming difficult. Residents faced near constant hostility from neighbors. Divisions also existed within the farms, particularly over race and power. Problematically, the founding of the interracial Delta Cooperative Farm was decidedly not interracial, illustrating, in Ferguson's words, "the contradictions implicit" in the project (p. 43). The white founders retained decision-making power, leading, as early as 1936, to black residents holding an "'indignation meeting'" (p. 71). In 1938 Providence Farm was founded nearby in an effort to transition residents into a fresh start. Though Providence was more democratic and focused on black self-help, old issues lingered. Moreover, the leveling effects of the Great Depression had dissipated (p. 92). As Ferguson argues, the 1930s presented "a moment of imagined possibility when heady ideas … were put into practice" (p. 2). That moment proved short-lived. Delta Cooperative Farm disbanded in 1942, and Providence Farm followed in 1956, fewer than twenty years after its founding. Ferguson claims "that to focus on strict interpretations of success and failure is to miss the point entirely," suggesting that the larger significance is in the fact that "the farms existed at all" (p. 15). While certainly the existence of the farms is remarkable, their failure is actually quite significant. Understanding why Delta Cooperative and Providence Farms failed when other radical communities endured can offer insight into the limits and possibilities of southern activism. For instance, it seems that racial paternalism doomed the farms from the start. In perpetuating segregation, in sidelining black voices, and in keeping power with white men, the project lacked the political, social, and theological power the civil rights movement later harnessed. When black residents did assert their interests in the later years of Providence Farm, they pursued voter registration, public health initiatives, [End Page 734]and education, experiencing success and "empowerment" (p. 4). The lesson is clear: work for collective change in the South must center marginalized voices. In this point, Remaking the Rural South, though a story of one narrow effort, brings an important historical case to bear on the still pressing questions of racial and economic justice in the U.S. South. Readers should take heed in case another moment...

This essay examines the theory of individual agency that propels the central thesis in Kenneth Mack's Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer (2012)—namely, that an important yet understudied means by which African American civil rights lawyers changed conceptions of race through their work was through their very performance of the professional role of lawyer. Mack shows that this performance was inevitably fraught with tension and contradiction because African American lawyers were called upon to act both as exemplary representatives of their race and as performers of a professional role that traditionally had been reserved for whites only. Mack focuses especially on the tensions of this role in courtrooms, where African American lawyers were necessarily called upon to act as the equals of white judges, opposing counsel, and witnesses. Mack's thesis, focused on the contradictions and tensions embodied in the performance of a racially loaded identity, reflects the influence of postmodern identity performance theory as articulated by Judith Butler and others. Mack and others belong to a new generation of civil rights history scholars who are asking new questions about contested identities related to race, gender, sexuality, and class. This essay offers an evaluation of this new direction for civil rights scholarship, focusing especially on its implicit normative orientation and what it contributes to the decade‐old debate over how to conceive of agency in social movement scholarship.

The Evolution of Identity Politics

Much of the sociological research on Black communities focuses on deficiencies while ignoring assets. Consequently, we do not know much about how Black communities—among the most historically disadvantaged of all racial and ethnic minority communities in the U.S—remain resilient in the face of assaults—both figuratively and literally—on their bodies and indigenous institutions, such as the family, the Black church, and schools. My research addresses this gap in the literature by focusing on a historical community-based model that was successful during some of the most overt manifestations of racism during the twentieth century—the Jim Crow era. Jim Crow laws enacted from the 1880s to 1960s were intended to marginalize certain groups of society and privilege others (Litwack, 1998). The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was monumental in empowering Blacks during the Civil Rights Era, to combat the academic, social, and political exclusion produced by Jim Crow (Irons, 2002). Through the creation of Freedom Schools in 1964, Black youth were able to challenge and find legislative victories by using this model of mentoring (McAdam, 1988). Over half a century later, many contend that mass incarceration and the educational achievement gap, alone, constitute a “new” era of Jim Crow (Alexander, 2010). This research examined the way in which the Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools and the mentoring programs that utilize similar models to SNCC’s 1964 Freedom Schools capacitate the youth to overcome a system, which is structured to alienate them from participating in it (Green, 2014). Through ethnographic study and qualitative approaches, I draw theoretical insight from the theory of community cultural wealth to counter the dominant narrative of a deficit ideology within these communities (Yosso, 2005). In light of the current social climate, and the contention that a present-day Civil Rights Movement is underway, this research is not only timely in the public sphere, but also in the academic world as contemporary theories are much needed to extend the knowledge base.

On March 13, 1956, ninety-nine members of the United States Congress promulgated the Declaration of Constitutional Principles, popularly known as the Southern Manifesto. Reprinted here, the Southern Manifesto formally stated opposition to the landmark United State Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, and the emergent civil rights movement. This statement allowed the white South to prevent Brown's immediate full-scale implementation and, for nearly two decades, set the slothful timetable and glacial pace of public school desegregation. The Southern Manifesto also provided the Southern Congressional Delegation with the means to stymie federal voting rights legislation, so that the dismantling of Jim Crow could be managed largely on white southern terms. In the wake of the Brown decision that declared public school segregation unconstitutional, seminal events in the early stages of the civil rights movement--like the Emmett Till lynching, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the Autherine Lucy riots at the University of Alabama brought the struggle for black freedom to national attention. Orchestrated by United States Senator Richard Brevard Russell Jr. of Georgia, the Southern Congressional Delegation in general, and the United States Senate's Southern Caucus in particular, fought vigorously and successfully to counter the initial successes of civil rights workers and maintain Jim Crow. The South's defense of white supremacy culminated with this most notorious statement of opposition to desegregation. The Southern Manifesto: Massive Resistance and the Fight to Preserve Segregation narrates this single worst episode of racial demagoguery in modern American political history and considers the statement's impact upon both the struggle for black freedom and the larger racial dynamics of postwar America.

Early histories of the civil rights movement that appeared prior to the 1980s were primarily biographies of Martin Luther King, Jr. Collectively, these works helped to create the familiar “Montgomery to Memphis” narrative framework for understanding the history of the civil rights movement in the United States. This narrative begins with King's rise to leadership during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, and ends with his 1968 assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. Since the 1980s, a number of studies examining the civil rights movement at local and state levels have questioned the usefulness and accuracy of the King-centric Montgomery to Memphis narrative as the sole way of understanding the civil rights movement. These studies have made it clear that civil rights struggles already existed in many of the communities where King and the organization of which he was president, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), ran civil rights campaigns in the 1960s. Moreover, those struggles continued long after King and the SCLC had left those communities. Civil rights activism also thrived in many places that King and the SCLC never visited. As a result of these local and state studies, historians have increasingly framed the civil rights movement within the context of a much longer, ongoing struggle for black freedom and equality, unfolding throughout the twentieth century at local, state and national levels. More recently, a number of books have sought to place the civil rights movement within the larger context of international relations. As we approach the 50th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott next year, the event that launched King's movement leadership, it seems an appropriate point to return to the existing literature on King and to assess what has already been done, as well as to point to the gaps that still need to be filled, in what remains important field of study.

In 1954, the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education opinion relied on social science research to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson’s separate but equal doctrine. Since Brown, social science research has been considered by the Court in cases involving equal protection challenges to grand jury selection, death penalty sentences, and affirmative action. In 2016, Justice Sotomayor cited an influential piece of social science research, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, in her powerful Utah v. Strieff dissent. Sotomayor contended that the Court’s holding overlooked the unequal racial impact of suspicionless stops. Though the defendant in Strieff was white, Sotomayor emphasized that “it is no secret that people of color are disproportionate victims of this type of scrutiny,” and mentioned The New Jim Crow in support of her conclusions about the role race plays in suspicionless stops. The New Jim Crow, published in 2010, has sold over 750,000 copies. It describes how the criminal justice system disproportionately targets and incarcerates black men. The book has inspired a popular movement to end mass incarceration and the racial caste system mass incarceration has created. In addition to its appearance in Strieff, The New Jim Crow was cited in United States v. Nesbeth, a well-publicized 2016 sentencing order from the Eastern District of New York in which the court imposed probation instead of the incarceration recommended by the federal sentencing guidelines. The New Jim Crow has also been cited to explain the unfair collateral consequences faced by those convicted of drug crimes, as well as convictions’ disproportionate racial impact. This essay is the first to study The New Jim Crow’s equal protection potential. The New Jim Crow’s presence in federal decisions is reminiscent of the Supreme Court’s citation to social science research in Brown v. Board of Education. This essay considers whether The New Jim Crow sits alongside canonical works of social science research considered by the Supreme Court in cases like Brown. It examines how The New Jim Crow is sometimes cited by the federal courts in passing, as a nod to a work that has infiltrated popular culture, but not always as evidence that influences case outcomes. Noting its appearance in Judge Scheindlin’s orders finding that the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk encouraged unconstitutional racial profiling, it questions whether The New Jim Crow could successfully support equal protection claims. It concludes that citations to The New Jim Crow represent soft law, albeit soft law with hard law potential.