Constructing the Black Juvenile Delinquent: African American Girls at the Industrial State School for Girls at Geneva, 1899–1940

When the number of African American girls in the juvenile justice system skyrocketed during the 1990s, scholars cited the demise of the ‘Rehabilitative Ideal’ and media’s “new” portrayals of young black women as unfeminine, masculine gangsters as the reason for this punitive turn. Journalists fed the public’s increasing fear of inner-city youth with stories of girls who violated traditional gender norms by joining gangs, carrying guns, fighting, and engaging in other stereotypically masculine behaviors. An examination of the experiences of African American girls at the Illinois Industrial School for Girls at Geneva between 1896 and 1935 revealed that the practice of constructing black girls as violent, masculine delinquents was not “new,” however. Social scientists and staff members at Geneva revealed their white supremacist and heteropatriarchal logic by the ways in which they masculinized black girls by excluding them from notions of femininity, racialized their sexuality by blaming them for interracial lesbian relationships, and segregated them from other girls in the institution. Although the experiences of African American girls at Geneva are rendered unique because their race, gender, and age intersected to create a unique construction of delinquency, their experiences were consistent with the experiences of other black children during the ‘Rehabilitative Era’.  When one views the contemporary punitive juvenile justice system—which is disproportionately filled with children of color—alongside the historical experiences of black children during the ‘Rehabilitative Era’, the continuities between the past and present reveal the reality that the ‘Rehabilitative Ideal’ was never intended to apply to black children. In addition to contributing to knowledge about black children’s experiences in the early juvenile justice system, the paper contributes to our understanding of urban black life in the North during the Jim Crow Era.