White Women Forced to Live in Negro Dives

This chapter examines the subject of white slavery, interracial sex, and manhood through the 1906 abduction trial of Roosevelt Sharp, an African American man who was arrested for kidnapping white women. It argues that this trial and other accusations of white slavery indicated a contest between white and black men on the conceptual terrain of white women’s bodies, one that signified an attempt by white men to retain racial power.

Epilogue

This epilogue brings all of the concepts explored in each chapter to bear on contemporary issues of police violence, mass incarceration, and economic isolation in African American communities in the twenty first century. It makes it very clear that considering this history, it is possible to understand crime in ailing, segregated, and over-policed black communities as a form of protest, in many instances.

Sex, Blood, Guns, and Gambling

Chapter 2 explores the meaning of public commercial spaces to African American men, with special attention to how saloons, bars, and pool halls bolstered their sense of manhood. Those spaces gave them refuge from the broader public world, connected them to a prosperous legal and illegal economy, and provided a number of services unavailable elsewhere. It also gave them a novel sense of control over a realm of leisure whether as a proprietor or a customer. However, as the chapter makes clear, saloons provided opportunities for others to criminalize them, or for them to participate in criminal enterprises.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the main concepts of the book, its largest arguments, and the theories of historical study and criminology that they are imbedded in. It also lays out all of the archival materials used to make these arguments, and what methodologies are used regarding those documents. Finally, it introduces the theoretical framework called “the crucible of black criminality” which makes an assertion about how a number of historical factors have created the circumstances where crime among African Americans can sometimes be understood as resistance.

Been Here Long Enough

Chapter 5 looks at the imprisonment of black men, the horrors of internment, its impact on their families, and the systems of injustice they had to navigate in order to free themselves. It also considers what “freedom” meant to them, and how they conceptualized their own rehabilitation. It ultimately argues that black men, in many cases, depended upon relationships with black women, and patriarchal, male-centered, domestic living situations with dutiful wives in order to reimagine their own lives and identities after time behind bars.

No Sunshine in the City

Chapter 1 addresses the ways Jim Crow social and economic customs and policing impacted the way African Americans used public space. By looking at work and housing discrimination and the fact that white and black working-class New Yorkers often lived close together, the chapter argues that public space was precarious, conflicts ignited frequently, and blacks needed to be inventive to survive. The chapter also charts how blacks protested, and sometimes fought back, against hostile neighbors, unfair policing, and police brutality.

To Let Her Know That She Did Me Wrong

Chapter 4 explains how black men might have sought to establish the rights of patriarchy and common concepts of masculinity through the prism of intimate relationships with black women. It explores the belief that black “racial destiny” relied upon strong patriarchal households and domestically focused housewives, and how some working-class black men may have used illegal acts and possibly violence in order to create such households. It also argues that this was ultimately a response to a broader public and economic world that denied them right to realize these ambitions through legitimate means.