Monday, January 6, 2025: 9:20 AM
Gramercy (Sheraton New York)
In 1943, R. H. Macy and Company advertised “mugging night stick” for women. Benjamin J Davis, communist and politician, convinced the department store to discontinue the sale of the weapon, complaining that “Daily newspapers have made the term ‘mugging’ synonymous with Negroes.” The moral panic around Black criminality emerged as partly a response to wartime increase in juvenile delinquency but also the criminalization of Black New Yorkers during the 1930s and 1940s.
The white press and police’s and public officials’ use of it maligned Black New Yorkers. While scholars have written about the Harlem rebellion of 1935, the roles of the Communist Party during the Great Depression, and more generally about Black politics during the depression, historical examinations of the criminalization of Black New Yorkers and their political responses to it have been mainly peripheral. This paper contextualizes the problem of anti-Black media and political debates about and around crime and Black criminality. As Black people demanded accountability from Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, they also challenged the white press, as a means to “deracialize” crime and expose its mythmaking.
The white press and police’s and public officials’ use of it maligned Black New Yorkers. While scholars have written about the Harlem rebellion of 1935, the roles of the Communist Party during the Great Depression, and more generally about Black politics during the depression, historical examinations of the criminalization of Black New Yorkers and their political responses to it have been mainly peripheral. This paper contextualizes the problem of anti-Black media and political debates about and around crime and Black criminality. As Black people demanded accountability from Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, they also challenged the white press, as a means to “deracialize” crime and expose its mythmaking.