“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

Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Michael Sawyer’s “Black Minded”
05 Aug 2020
This book brings the indispensable voice of Malcolm X into our current political and social climate.
Katelyn Burns
NYPD “Jump Out Boys” Have Been Accosting People for Years
05 Aug 2020
When Trump’s federal cops snatched people off the street in Portland, folks cried “fascist,” but that’s an everyday occurrence in Black and brown New York.
Diane Gee
Detroit is No Portland
05 Aug 2020
It would be lunacy to send troops to Detroit, as Trump has threatened. “This is pre-emptive warfare.”
BAP National Coordinating Committee
Black August and Black Liberation: “Study, Fast, Train, Fight.”
05 Aug 2020
We owe it to our ancestors and our incarcerated comrades to escalate the struggle against the white settler state and its imperial capitalist order.
Nick Estes and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Examining the Wreckage White Supremacy and Imperialism Have Wrought
05 Aug 2020
Indigenous and African resistance and intellectual traditions provide key insights to the very nature of capitalism and how it has unfolded throughout space and time.