The idea of black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America, as were African Americans' own ideas about race and crime. In the heyday of "separate but equal," what else but pathology could explain black failure in the "land of opportunity?" Excessive arrest rates and overrepresentation in northern prisons were seen by many whites-liberals and conservatives, northerners and southerners-as indisputable proof of blacks' inferiority. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society.įollowing the 1890 census-the first to measure the generation of African Americans born after slavery-crime statistics, new migration and immigration trends, and symbolic references to America as the promised land of opportunity were woven into a cautionary tale about the exceptional threat black people posed to modern urban society. Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known.
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