Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York
Douglas J. Flowe
University of North Carolina Press
Illegality as a form of resistance. Flowe interrogates the meaning of crime in Jim Crow New York City, narrating the stories of men who profited in underground markets, protected themselves when law enforcement failed to, and exerted control over public, commercial, and domestic spaces through force in a city that denied their claims to citizenship and manhood. A stirring account of how working-class Black men in the early 20th century employed extralegal methods to address racial injustice.