“Respectable” Black Women Fought Mass Incarceration | Black Agenda Report

“Respectable” Black Women Fought Mass Incarceration

Black Agenda Radio with Nellie Bailey and Glen Ford

02 Mar 2020

🖨️ Print Article

Back in the days when 90 percent of southern prison inmates were Black, socially conservative Black clubwomen fought for prison reform, believing that “putting Black women in jail was hurting the Black community,” said Nikki Brown, professor of history at the University of New Orleans. The National Association of Colored Women, who practiced what we today call “respectability” politics, played a key role in creating alternatives to incarceration, said Brown, who authored an article titled, “Keeping Black Motherhood Out of Prison: Prison Reform and Woman-Saving in the Progressive Era.”

Mass Black Incarceration

More Stories

Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
Hooey-hooey—Boss Tweet gotta GO!
15 Jul 2020
Hooey-hooey—he gotta go— Hooey-hooey—he gotta go!
Tunde Osazua
AFRICOM and the Guise of Terrorism
15 Jul 2020
If AFRICOM’s mission is to fight terrorism, then why have terror attacks increased five-fold since the US began its military occupation of the continent?
Paul Street
Shelter in Race-Class Place
15 Jul 2020
Black Americans are told to shelter in savagely unequal places where the necessities of life are scarce and Covid-19 is most lethal.
Jahan Choudhry BAR Comments Editor
Letters from Our Readers
15 Jul 2020
This week you had the Democratic Party, Libertarianism, and Native American relations with African Americans on your minds.
Jade Bentil
BAR Book Forum: “Black Study and Abolition”
15 Jul 2020
The books in focus explore the ways an anti-black world tries to interdict the possibilities of Black life, and how Black people resist and overcome such assaults.