“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

Editors, The Black Agenda Review
ESSAY: Currency Crisis in the West, 1965
22 Mar 2023
A 1965 article from Kwame Nkrumah’s journal The Spark highlights the role of monetary policy – and the US dollar – as an instrument of imperialism and neocolonial rule.
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
The Fabulist Arrogance of US Power
22 Mar 2023
The U.S. reserves for itself the right to commit crimes all over the world with impunity. It even passed a law giving itself the right to invade the Netherlands to rescue any US citizen or ally ever…
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
Avotcja’s Love…
22 Mar 2023
…
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Nanjala Nyabola’s Book, “Strange and Difficult Times”
22 Mar 2023
This week’s featured author is Nanjala Nyabola. Nyabola is a writer and political analyst based in Nairobi, Kenya.
Clau O'Brien Moscoso
Bloodshed, Tear Gas Bombs and Mudslides: 100 Days of Dictatorship
22 Mar 2023
Clau O'Brien Moscoso continues her dispatches from Peru in the wake of a natural disaster and the ongoing coup against President Castillo. A Spanish translation follows.