Interview with Douglas J. Flowe on Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York
Interviewed by Willie Mack
African American men in early 20th-century New York City faced social and economic segregation, and a racist criminal justice system punctuated by violence by the police and white citizens. In Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York, Dr. Douglas Flowe interrogates the effects that segregation, crime, and violence had on black men, and how these men were forced to navigate the “crucible of black criminality” in Jim Crow Era New York City in order to survive.
As a graduate student interested in racial capitalism and policing in the 20th-century United States, I found Dr. Flowe’s book fascinating and extremely relevant to the long history of the black freedom struggle and the current movement for racial justice. In particular, his theoretical term the “crucible of black criminality” is poignant in understanding the ways that black men have struggled to find their place in a society built upon white male supremacy. Certainly, Dr. Flowe’s book is in conversation with other histories of black criminality and gender construction such as Khalil Muhammad’s Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making if Modern Urban America and Sarah Haley’s No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity. But Dr. Flowe distinguishes himself by placing black male criminality as central to the history of the black freedom struggle. Because of de facto Jim Crow racism in New York City, black men were forced to use extralegal means if they wished to achieve any semblance of a bourgeois lifestyle. They were relegated to social spaces that were considered undesirable by white respectable standards, they were forced to take jobs that paid little, and had to live in cramped, overcrowded, and segregated housing units. In this way, Dr. Flowe demonstrates how the construction of black masculinity and criminality were integral to social mobility and acceptance for black men. Indeed, by focusing on the ways that black men in Jim Crow era New York City pushed back against racism, he is able to link early 20th-century black male criminality to the current epidemic of mass incarceration, violent/racist policing, and economic inequality in black communities.
What motivated you to write this book?
This is a book that I’ve been imagining since I was a child. I grew up in inner city communities of New York City and Orlando, Florida and experienced a lot of the unsafety and violence that sometimes is associated with economic isolation. At the same time, I also witnessed and experienced the sort of discrimination that often drives policing in those neighborhoods. As a result, I grew up questioning how things got this way; contemplating the factors that might drive some African American men to exist outside of the law in the first place; and wanting to understand the aspects of American culture and history that criminalized an entire portion of the population. It was always clear to me that committing certain types of crimes could be a form of resistance when systemic agents seek to render one powerless, and also that that system might consider some legal behaviors to be criminal if those behaviors subverted the status quo. When I got to graduate school and noticed no one had taken on a project like this before in the field of history, I knew it was a subject I had to devote myself to.
A long-standing belief within popular culture is that Jim Crow apartheid was unique to the Southern states. But you note that “Racism may not have been encrypted into law in New York as prominently as in some Southern states, but Jim Crow was alive and well in the city.” If Jim Crow was not legally sanctioned in New York City, how did it manifest?
Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York
By Douglas J. Flowe
University of North Carolina Press, 2020
332 pages
I wouldn’t say Jim Crow was not legally sanctioned in New York City, only that it was not as bolstered by law there as it was in most Southern cities. This brings up the conversation about de facto (by custom) and de jure (by law) racism; while so much more of Southern Jim Crow and segregation was de jure, written into state legislation, in New York at the time it was much more de facto. Laws that might have protected the rights of black citizens were ignored, regularly left unenforced, or blatantly broken with no recourse. Individuals, businesses, landlords, organizations, and police departments committed crimes of humanity against them, and found legal loopholes and statutes that protected themselves.
New York state attempted to reduce racial discrimination in the decades following the Civil War, most prominently the Malby Equal Rights Act passed in 1895 promised “full and equal accommodation” to all citizens in all public amenities and businesses. However, the law was hard to enforce, and city officials had little incentive to do so. As racial sentiments hardened against waves of black migrants in the 1900s, discrimination, segregation, racial violence, and police brutality were rampant despite the largely inactive Malby law. In 1910, a group of New York reformers sought to pass the Act to Amend Domestic Relations, which was meant to outlaw future interracial marriages and annul those existing. Although the law never passed, it indicates how de facto and de jure discrimination merged. Although racism was less obviously cooked into Jim Crow law in New York, deep sentiments of racial hatred materialized in 3D for blacks in ways that mimicked their lives in the South.
You talk about the “crucible of black criminality,” can you explain that term?
The crucible of black criminality is a theoretical model I produced for the book in order to hypothesize about the forces and dynamics in American history that have created black criminality, and rendered it into a form of resistance. There are many places in the book where I mention how this also affects black women, but my focus is on black men. The model theorizes that the terrorism of enslavement, unrelenting racial violence, the denial of manhood norms to black men, everlasting economic inequality, and the collaboration of various American systems in the containment and destruction of black bodies formed a minefield that all black Americans are forced to navigate. My argument is that, given the circumstances of the crucible, African Americans have little choice but to reconsider their relationships with the law. Blacks are presented with a list of predicaments that make lawlessness a cogent decision, in some cases. This is not to romanticize crime, but to recognize the contributing factors. By understanding the stories of the men in my book, we can see revolutionary attempts to support their families, forge masculine identities, and simply live their lives, as other men did.
How does your book fit into the historiography of the creation of black gender identity/criminality in the early 20th century?
There have been a number of books that looked at the subject of black gender identity and criminality in the early 20th century — most notably books about black women such as Kali Gross’s Colored Amazons, Cheryl Hicks’s Talk With You Like a Woman, and LaShawn Harris’s Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners, among others. Uncontrollable Blackness fits into this historiography by continuing the work of understanding how a particular black intersectionality brought African Americans into conflict with the law. It also adds to this field of study by proposing a format for comprehending how elements of American history had repercussions in the time of study and in the present. However, since it is the first historical monograph to look specifically at black men and criminality, and to fully explore their concepts of masculinity and the distinct dilemmas they faced, it also creates a new sub-historiography that will hopefully influence others to take on the subject.
How does class and race figure into your argument?
To be certain, Uncontrollable Blackness is primarily about working-class black men, the chronically unemployed, and the impoverished. It was very important to me to clarify that separations existed between black laborers and a black middle class and elite living in New York. Although segregation frequently placed both populations into the same communities, the relationship between the two was often marked by tension. Monied black native New Yorkers, sometimes called Knickerbockers, now and again expressed emotions from embarrassment to contempt about common laborers and migrants, and in certain instances they participated in efforts to reeducate or reign them in. It is true that a black bourgeoisie had a part in organizational efforts to control poor blacks.
Class, in my narrative, also had a part in placing poverty-stricken blacks into poor white neighborhoods since working-class whites often could not afford to completely segregate themselves from blacks. Census records show that whites and blacks typically lived in separate buildings, however, those buildings sat side by side making it so the streets undulated with diverse populations. This fact set the stage for endless interracial drama in those communities. Economically depressed white men, many of whom hailed from Italy, Germany, and Ireland, frequently met what they considered to be the threat of black incursion with angry separatism and violence that turned up the heat on black families and individuals seeking peace in the city.
Black masculinity plays a large role in your study. In what ways do crime and masculinity engage each other and how do they inform black male identity?
Many of the men in my book explain their own criminal actions, or behaviors criminalized by others, in terms of their sense of manhood. Whether running illegal saloons, participating in the sex trade, or committing acts of robbery, they commonly understood crime as a last resort when various roadblocks prevented them from actualizing the typical hallmarks of manhood at the time. Men were expected to command public space, own property, protect themselves and their loved ones, support their families, and formulate their masculine selves through leisure activities and consumption. However, for these men, it seemed the world was against them. In public they could be beaten, harassed, arrested, or killed with impunity. Job discrimination precluded the occupation of adequate housing and consistent support of families. Slanted laws and racial rioting made protecting their loved ones uncertain. And, consistently unstable incomes and de facto segregation made legal manly leisure and consumption a pipedream.
It is at this intersection of expectations and reality that manhood and criminality collide. Black men felt the same desires and needs to do the things all other men sought to do, but faced limitations in every direction. I argue that at this crossroads some chose to break the law in order to realize their manhood. And others found themselves in lawless territory through no fault of their own.
Saloons, bars, and places of leisure play prominent roles in your book. Why is space so important?
Urbanists over the past few decades have fully assessed how urban space comes alive through the prism of the people who use it. For instance, Elsa Barkely Brown and Gregg Kimball, in their writing on 19th-century black Richmond, Virginia, argued that occupying streetscapes through actions like leisure, business, parades, and protest formulated the meaning of avenues, corners, and entire neighborhoods in communal consciousness, and altered the cognitive maps of cities for participants and observers. Many scholars have similarly argued that urban space exists as much in imagination and culture as it does in physical form, and have begun to quantify the impact of this psychological realm on the lived experiences of people.
In my book, I use this understanding of space in a variety of ways. For example, in one chapter I employ it to apprehend the effect of racial violence and police brutality on the way black New Yorkers imagined the city, its threatening and safe zones, and its limits and possibilities. In another chapter, this spatial model helps me to assess black saloons as important physical and cognitive dimensions for the cultivation of black masculine tropes; one that black men frequently closed to white men in order to maintain their power and prevent police incursions. And, in another chapter, I conceptualize the domestic realm as a space that black men struggled to control, and explore how their lack of control in the broader city had implications in that private crusade. Ultimately, social and cultural histories like Uncontrollable Blackness benefit from deep engagements with the significance of “place,” and how those places are used by people.
You mention that most of the men in this study did not keep personal papers or records. Can you talk a little about the “struggle of the archives”? How did the lack of personal voices affect your narrative, if it did at all?
Coming into this project with the goal of capturing the perspectives of working-class men it was daunting to realize how infrequently their voices appear in the historical record. It took a lot of ingenuity and creativity to uncover their angle on the world they lived in. Luckily, I discovered transcripts of trials where defendants, witnesses, and victims spoke at length about their lives and circumstances, and parole and probation documents that included personal reports, interviews, and letters to and from officers.
Some of the men’s prison documents at the New York State archives provided personal information, but many of them were slim on the sort of details I needed. When it came to men, prison personnel emphasized training them for work and getting them hired once paroled, and, as a result, focused less on creating personal relationships, gathering information about their lives, and reforming them individually. Accordingly, they did not gather private correspondence and biographical particulars on men in large volume, as they did with women. Women’s prison files, on the other hand, were flooded with personal information, letters to and from husbands, painstaking parole communications, and exhaustive accounts of their lives before and after incarceration; a reflection of the weighty, and more intrusive, priorities parole boards had for the rehabilitation of women inmates. Once I came to understand this difference, I plumbed the depths of the women’s case files in search of information about the men in their lives, and unearthed a treasure trove containing the voices of black men.
How do you see the stories and events of your book resonating beyond the Jim Crow era? Is this something that continues to influence society today?
The entire purpose of writing this book was to think about the present and future through the prism of the past. My theoretical model, the crucible of black criminality, is meant to not only describe the rationale for lawlessness among black men in the early 20th century, but to recognize the weight of those factors today. Black men are still disproportionately living in economically isolated communities that set them up for imprisonment more than any other demographic, and they are still forced into circumstances, by systems outside of their control, where illegality might seem like a way out. Popular thought and culture still criminalize black men, question black masculinity, and regard black crime as if it is disconnected from history and structural inequality.
In my epilogue I write: “There is a monster in America’s past and present; one that swallows black men whole on the streets, in popular culture, in police custody, and in prisons. This book confronts that beast with an uncomfortable truth – the maze-like crucible of American racism and violence has produced black criminality.” (194) Uncontrollable Blackness defines this legacy and makes it very clear that problems we see today have roots in the early Jim Crow period.
Douglas J. Flowe is a professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis. His research is primarily concerned with themes of criminality, illicit leisure, and masculinity, and understanding how they converge with issues of race, class, and space in American cities.
Willie Mack is a PhD student at SUNY-Stony Brook and an associate editor for Gotham. His research interests include 20th century U.S. history, race, capitalism, and carceral studies.