The Black Child-Savers by Geoff K. Ward

Author:Geoff K. Ward [Ward, Geoff K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, History, United States, 20th Century
ISBN: 9780226873190
Google: YR56i1CFwTEC
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-06-29T05:38:52+00:00

SEVEN

The Early Spoils of Integration

In the first two decades after Brown v. Board of Education (1955–75), there were slow and only slight advances in institutionalizing racial equality in American juvenile justice. Scattered signs of more racially democratic relations made brief appearances. Liberal reformers thought that the sociolegal framework of integration would produce racial justice through a new bundle of rights and resources. Their hope was that formally equal protection of black youths and recognition of black authority would counter the oppression and domination characteristic of Jim Crow juvenile justice. The aftermath of these reforms thus provides insight into the impact of the black child-saving movement on the modern era of racialized juvenile social control.

An ongoing and intensified struggle over civil rights law and its enforcement occurred during the decades following Brown. “Massive resistance” to integration limited progress in institutionalizing racial justice in American society.1 In the urban and rural South, black communities remained severely marginalized—socially, economically, and politically. In Northern urban contexts, recognition increased for black youths and communities in juvenile justice. There, the second wave of black child-saving established social norms, networks, and institutions that were more capable of supporting a new racial praxis of juvenile justice.2 Oppression and domination persisted, but there were also unique signs of advances in black youth and community recognition relative to the cultural ethos and institutional resource base of the liberal rehabilitative ideal.

This chapter examines developments in postintegration juvenile justice to assess progress in institutionalizing racial justice. In the early period of integration, a racially democratic system of social control began to take shape but, ultimately, failed to materialize. At best, progress toward racial democratization of liberal rehabilitative ideals reached a plateau. It was an unfinished revolution in the relation between race and American democracy, set in the changing terrain of juvenile social control. By the end of the 1970s, the cultural and institutional foundations of this democratic experiment in juvenile justice were eroding and under attack. Three overlapping factors undermined racially democratic reform: persistent mainstream commitments to separate and unequal juvenile justice, the decline of black collective efficacy in the wake of formal inclusion, and the retraction of entitlements to liberal rehabilitative ideals.

Race and Reconstruction in the Civil Rights–Era South

Civil rights reforms of the 1950s and 1960s, such as court-ordered integration and the Civil Rights Act (1965), promised to eliminate the significance of race in juvenile justice. Beyond that, they proposed to redistribute racial group rights and recognition in juvenile court communities, changing the balance of power in racialized social control.3 The liberal black child-saving movement idealized this formal inclusion as a legal and bureaucratic arrangement of racial justice. The movement meant to rewire race relations within the basic cultural and institutional framework of traditional American juvenile justice. Civil rights reforms, they believed, would create a basic structure of racial equality that benefited black and American civil society alike.4 Greater legal protection of black youths and the presence of black authorities would co-opt white control over juvenile justice administration, steering citizen-building ideals and resources toward nonwhite communities.

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