“Permanently Unfit”: The Mid-Century Condemnation of Black Youth and the Origins of Police in Chicago’s Schools

This paper will explain how several influential trends in 1940s-1950s Chicago helped create justifications for permanent police presence in schools. In the mid-century era, educational scholars, observers of juvenile delinquency, and police reformers all aimed their sights at pathologizing Black youth. Many education scholars posed the same question as urban schools saw their populations rise: What to do with the “non-learners” in schools? In a mid-century version of colorblind racism, scholars deemed Black children “hard to reach” and “culturally deprived,” or even “permanently unfit for responsible life in adult society.” Many of these educational scholars were proponents of desegregation, while simultaneously arguing for tracking and removal of these “non-learner” students. Meanwhile, society underwent a collective hand-wringing over the perceived rise in juvenile delinquency. Most white stakeholders came to the same prescription for juvenile delinquency: The carceral state needed to turn more of its attention towards youth. The Chicago Police Department created a specific juvenile division of police in 1949. Thus, a solid foundation for the policing of Black students was built - educational justification for removal from schools combined with criminalization and overpolicing of Black youth in the community. By the 1960s, when Black activists organized protests against school segregation and the Chicago Teachers Union began demanding police protection for teachers, a solid philosophical foundation for policing Black youth in their schools already existed. In Chicago, racially liberal whites argued for integration to help Black students assimilate to white culture, while simultaneously proclaiming large numbers of Black youth to be ensnared in a tangle of pathology. Thus, this paper will make an important intervention: The policing of Black Chicagoans in their schools had its origins not just in the racial tensions between students as racial demographics rapidly shifted in mid-century, but also among racial liberals who called for integration.