CITIES COLLABORATIVE: PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS: 2020 IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE SERIES: DOUGLAS FLOWE, Washington University St. Louis, “Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York”

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Early twentieth-century African American men in northern urban centers like New York faced economic isolation, segregation, a biased criminal justice system, and overt racial attacks by police and citizens. In his talk, Douglas J. Flowe interrogates the meaning of crime and violence in the lives of these men, whose lawful conduct itself was often surveilled and criminalized, by focusing on what their actions and behaviors represented to them. He narrates the stories of men who sought profits in underground markets, protected themselves when law enforcement failed to do so, and exerted control over public, commercial, and domestic spaces through force in a city that denied their claims to citizenship and manhood. Flowe furthermore traces how the features of urban Jim Crow and the efforts of civic and progressive leaders to restrict their autonomy ultimately produced the circumstances under which illegality became a form of resistance.

Douglas Flowe is assistant professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis. His first book, Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York analyzes black crime within the prism of masculine identity, migration, the varied uses of urban public space, and racialized supervision. He is currently working on a second book, tentatively entitled “Shadows and Sunlight: Race, Power, and Protest in America’s Mid-Century Carceral State, 1920-1959.” His work has been published in the Journal of Urban History, Journal of African American History, and others, and he been a commentator on police violence and mass incarceration in various news outlets, including CNN Tonight with Don Lemon. He serves on the board of the Urban History Association.