Nineteenth century criminal geography: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Pennsylvania Prison Society

Journal of Historical Geography 59 (2018) 15e26

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Journal of Historical Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg

Nineteenth century criminal geography: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Pennsylvania Prison Society Deena Varner Department of English, Purdue University, 500 Oval Drive, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 1 March 2017 Received in revised form 28 August 2017 Accepted 19 September 2017

Amy Kaplan writes of W.E.B. Du Bois's 1915 essay ‘The African Roots of War’ that ‘by grounding his inquiry in Africa, [he] exposes the way the representations of space and time have been structured by imperial maps and narratives of the world, and from this location he draws alternative maps and writes new histories’.1 But Du Bois begins drawing alternative maps and writing new histories more than fifteen years earlier in The Philadelphia Negro. With the support of the University of Pennsylvania, Du Bois moved to Philadelphia's Seventh Ward in August of 1896 to begin his survey of its black residents.2 The aim of The Philadelphia Negro was to ‘present the results of an inquiry … into the condition of the forty thousand or more people of Negro blood now living in the city of Philadelphia’, and to ‘ascertain something of the geographical distribution of this race, their occupations and daily life, their homes, their organizations, and above all, their relation to their million white fellow-citizens’.3 Du Bois organizes the social geography of Philadelphia's black Seventh Ward according to several classes: the middle and upper

E-mail address: [email protected]. A. Kaplan, Anarchy of Empire, Cambridge, 2002, 171. Du Bois's time in Philadelphia is well-documented. He was among the first African American scholars to find somewhat broad support in the American academy, and the fiscal support for The Philadelphia Negro by the University of Pennsylvania helped to legitimate Du Bois's contribution to American scholarship. During his year in Philadelphia, Du Bois worked from the College Settlement House, formerly St. Mary Street College Settlement, located at 617 St. Mary Street, and lived at the Settlement's kitchen and coffee house and library building at 701 Lombard Street. 3 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, Philadelphia, 1996 [1899], 1. 1 2

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2017.09.008 0305-7488/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

classes, the working class, the poor, and the vicious and criminal classes.4 In his assessment, space is both produced by and productive of historical processes: racism accounts, at least in part, for the segregation of African Americans into slum districts; poverty, living conditions, and the availability of work and transportation in these districts then produce their own lasting social and subjective effects. Du Bois often relies on positivist social science methods that, while providing valuable demographic information, also have ‘the tendency to treat race as a “proper object” that can be quantified, mapped and located’.5 By 1896, however, Du Bois had already developed complex insights about the cultural and subjective aspects of race and race relations in the United States, and these insights emerge in important ways in The Philadelphia Negro (Figs. 1e2). Of particular interest to the current analysis is the way Du Bois frames his social classification scheme around the phenomenon of crime, and I contend that the location of Du Bois's study is central to his treatment of crime and criminality. Philadelphia was the site of the first jails and prisons in the United States as well as prevailing discourses on penology and penal reform. The Pennsylvania Prison Society, originally the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, was formed in 1787 to address the dire conditions of the city's Walnut Street Jail and to promote the humane treatment of incarcerated people. Its members included well

4 Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, facing page 60. See Fig. 1. Recent scholarship demonstrates a deep divide between those who continue to view racial segregation in terms similar to Du Bois and those who see a marked improvement in the spatial organization of and living conditions in the inner city. E. Anderson, for example, argues that Du Bois's typology is no longer relevant, given the immense gains in social and public policy made by black Americans during the twentieth century. W.J. Wilson believes that the increased focus on positive changes in public policy during the 1990s has led to a dearth of geographical and public policy scholarship on continuing manifestations of racial oppression. Others, like D.S. Massey and N.A. Denton, demonstrate how contemporary American class structure continues to be shaped along the lines of Du Bois's typology. E. Anderson, The emerging Philadelphia African American class structure, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 568 (2000) 54e77; W.J. Wilson, The political and economic forces shaping concentrated poverty, Political Science Quarterly 123 (2008e09) 555e571; D.S. Massey and N.A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, Cambridge, 1993. 5 A. Nayak, Geography, race and emotions: social and cultural intersections, Social and Cultural Geography 12 (2011) 150.

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Fig. 1. The Seventh Ward of Philadelphia. Source: Reproduced courtesy of the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Temple University Libraries, ‘The Seventh Ward of Philadelphia: The Distribution of Negro Inhabitants throughout the Ward and their Social Condition’.

respected citizens and political thinkers, and it played a central role in shaping public discourse about crime and punishment. In this essay, I read The Philadelphia Negro alongside Du Bois's earlier and contemporary writings about the sociology of race, as well as some of the principal insights disseminated by the Pennsylvania Prison Society, to demonstrate how Du Bois offers, within the context of these discourses, a nascent alternative to normative inducements to reduce crime. Prison studies scholarship has, particularly in the last decade, emerged as an important critique of the way that capitalism has functioned systematically to segregate, disenfranchise, and otherwise oppress Americans of color. Recent scholarship has established that the black inner city experiences disproportionate policing and surveillance, and that its residents are disproportionately arrested, convicted, and incarcerated for crimes that statistical data show are committed at approximately the same rates by whites.6 As one of the primary governmental institutions with which people of color interact, ‘criminal justice “teaches” race in more subtle and complex ways than previous regimes’.7 Urban geographers have long grappled with the relationship between race, class, and residential segregation, and geography has been of central concern in recent decades to legal theorists studying racial

6 M. Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, New York, 2012. 7 A.E. Lerman and V.M. Weaver, Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control, Chicago, 2014, 24. 8 P. Jackson (Ed), Race and Racism: Essays in Social Geography, New York, 1987; J.R. Logan and B.J. Stults, Racial and ethnic separation in the neighborhoods: a first look at changes since 2000, census brief prepared for Project US2010; J.R. Logan, B.J. Stults, and R. Farley, Segregation of minorities in the metropolis: two decades of change, Demography 41 (2004) 1e22; Massey and Denton, American Apartheid; D.S. Massey, J. Rothwell, and T. Domina, The changing bases of segregation in the United States, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 626 (2009) 74e90. For prison studies research concerned with geography, in addition to Alexander, The New Jim Crow, see H.M. Osofsky, The geography of justice wormholes: dilemmas from property and criminal law, Villanova Law Review 117 (2008), LexisNexis; see the special issue of Law and Contemporary Social Issues 66 (2003) entitled ‘The political geography of race data in the criminal justice system’.

injustice.8 Recent academic literature on Du Bois has demonstrated the lasting importance of The Philadelphia Negro for understanding race as a biological, social, and epistemological category;9 the relationship between identity, race, class, and economy;10 and Du Boisian praxis for resolving social problems and promoting political participation.11 I argue that Du Bois's urban geography exposes some of the historical precedents for contemporary trends in residential segregation, mass incarceration, and other forms of spatial exploitation and marginalization, as well as how these processes shape identity. A reading of Du Bois that pays increased attention to organizations of community and everyday practices can shed additional light not only on the historical development and contemporary manifestations of ongoing structural racism, but also on alternative possibilities for responding to that oppression. Prison studies and other scholarship addressing mass incarceration often remain centered at the level of the operations of these systems, rather than at the level of how individuals and communities respond to, resist, or reshape these systems.12 Race is performed in and through space, and it is performed differently in criminal spaces, for

9 F.L.C. Jackson, Anthropological measurement: the mismeasure of African Americans, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 568 (2000) 154e171; A. Monteiro, Being an African in the world: the Du Boisian epistemology, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 568 (2000) 220e234; T. Zuberi, Deracializing social statistics: problems in the quantification of race, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 568 (2000) 172e185. 10 G.D. Jaynes, Identity and economic performance, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 568 (2000) 128e139. 11 M.B. Katz, Race, poverty, and welfare: Du Bois's legacy for policy, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 568 (2000) 111e127; L.T. Outlaw, W.E.B. Du Bois on the study of social problems, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 568 (2000) 281e297; W.J. Wilson, Rising inequality and the case for coalition politics, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 568 (2000) 78e99. 12 D. Garland (Ed), Mass Imprisonment: Its Social Causes and Consequences, Thousand Oaks, 2001; B. Western, Punishment and Inequality in America, Thousand Oaks, 2006; B. Western and C. Wildeman, The black family and mass incarceration, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 621 (2009) 221e242.

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Fig. 2. The Seventh Ward of Philadelphia. Source: Reproduced courtesy of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, a section of Plate E from City Atlas of Philadelphia, Wards 2e20, 29 and 31, by G.M. Hopkins, 1875.

example in the prison and in the ‘criminal underworld’, than it is in normative society. Many analyses have framed Du Bois's work according to a historical materialist perspective, and given Du Bois's later adoption of Marx, such analyses are undeniably warranted. In The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois unquestionably is concerned with modes of production and capitalist exploitation. While I do not wish to ignore these features, I highlight instead how performances of criminality by individuals and communities are a rejection of both labor exploitation and hegemonic, racist institutions and social norms. If this conclusion is somewhat antithetical to the one at which Du Bois arrives in The Philadelphia Negro, it is one that can nonetheless be inferred from his analysis. This essay is organized into six remaining sections. In the first section, I briefly review late nineteenth century views on criminality in order to demonstrate that Du Bois's study, and his views on society, culture, and subjectivity, take shape during an important historical moment in which views on human ontology, informed by prison reform discourse, were undergoing immense transformation. In the second section, I examine some of the important moments in Philadelphia's penal history and prison reform discourses and demonstrate how these are implicated in The Philadelphia Negro. In the third section, I analyze specific penal practices at issue during the late nineteenth century for what they say about how criminality was viewed as a social and subjective phenomenon that took shape in and through space. In the fourth section, I consider how Du Bois treats the urban slum as a socio-spatial phenomenon that is productive of criminality, and how this criminality emerges as a potentially radical response to exploitation and marginalization. In the fifth section, I draw on theories about the performativity of race in order to underscore the importance of racial integration in Philadelphia's prisons and criminal communities. Finally, my conclusion looks at the relationship between citizenship and incarceration or custodial status in order to suggest that criminality and criminal communities have the potential to disrupt racial and geographical boundaries as well as dominant discourses about the normative valuation of social respectability

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While the majority of scholarship and activism supports diversity and inclusion efforts, others, such as C. Cohen, have explored the more radical potential of agency and resistance, including deviance and voluntary exclusion from white sociality. For some, such as R.D.G. Kelley and J.C. Scott, this includes various forms of criminality. C. Cohen, Deviance as resistance: a new research agenda for the study of black politics, Du Bois Review 1 (2004) 27e45; R.D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, New York, 1994; J.C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven, 1985.

and integration.13

Biological, social, and spatial underpinnings of subjectivity In his apologia to the 1954 edition of his Suppression of the African Slave Trade, originally published in 1896, Du Bois writes that ‘some knowledge of Freud would have made my conclusions less pat and simple’.14 Trained in Victorian empiricism favoring rationality, Du Bois was taught to believe that ‘life [was] a series of conscious moral judgments’.15 While he would later adopt a Marxian approach to social analysis, Du Bois's apologia makes clear his regret at having failed to explore a reality comprising conscious and unconscious fantasy, aggression, and irrationality.16 The Philadelphia Negro follows Suppression in 1899, and, despite Du Bois's renewed attempt in this text to understand ‘what men “ought” to have done to avoid evil consequence’, it is a text permeated with ample evidence of, if not explicit reference to, irrationality and unconscious motivations at work in the social and cultural life of 1890s Philadelphia.17 These permeations are nowhere clearer than in Du Bois's analysis of crime. Here he references laws which illustrate the immense brutality of the punishments meted out to slaves and which are, at the same time, indicative ‘of the unruly character of many of the imported slaves’.18 Du Bois's study takes shape during a paradigm shift that would redefine the human subject according to its social, rather than biological, origins. This shift is reflected in the contradictions inherent in Du Bois's explanations of race as variously innate and socially determined. Many scholars turn to Du Bois's 1903 The Souls of Black Folk to understand his notion of double consciousness, in which AfricanAmerican subjectivity is split at the hyphen between these two terms: one must be either African or American at a given moment, and vis- a-vis the gaze of the other, the African American recognizes her internal difference. Nonetheless, consciousness is doubled, not halved, even if this doubling is often suppressed or disavowed.19 It is important to note that Du Bois first introduces this concept seven

14 W.E.B. Du Bois, Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638e1870, New York, 1954 [1896], 327. 15 Du Bois, Suppression, 327. 16 -vis C. Zwarg attempts to rehabilitate the psychoanalytic approach to race vis-a trauma theory in Du Bois's Suppression. C. Zwarg, Du Bois on trauma: psychoanalysis and the would-be black savant, Cultural Critique 51 (2002) 1e39. 17 Du Bois, Suppression, 327. 18 Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, 236. 19 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Chicago, 1903.

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years earlier in a short essay in The Atlantic Monthly, precisely as he is conducting research for The Philadelphia Negro. ‘Strivings of the Negro People’ introduces a number of important concepts that Du Bois will employ throughout the course of his life. In it, he formulates the question, ‘how does it feel to be a problem?’; posits the Negro as the ‘seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with secondsight in this American world’; and describes double consciousness, ‘this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity’.20 If Du Bois is not intimate with Freud at this time, he nonetheless posits at this early stage, as Freud does, a subjectivity that exceeds both the biological and the social. One of the most influential discourses contributing to a broad reconsideration of human ontology during the nineteenth century d a shift from the biological to the social underpinnings of human ‘nature’ d was that of prison reformers. These reformers, most notably members of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, were committed to the notion that the criminal could be rehabilitated. And if this were so, the criminal could not have an evil nature, fully unaffected by the rehabilitative efforts of Quaker ministering. If a criminal could be reformed through social means, then criminality must be caused at least in part by those same means. Early modern criminology is marked indelibly by these shifting attitudes. The near constant paradoxes of Cesare Lombroso's criminal anthropologies reflect a deep confusion about the ontological status of the human subject: every attempt to taxonomize the criminal brain, the criminal skull, the criminal physiognomy, encounters an inexplicable and disavowed meeting between the biological, the moral, and the social realms.21 Foreign to Lombroso earlier in the century was the Progressive Era social reformers' position that crime was caused in large part by poverty.22 Race and gender remain largely under the purview of biologism during the late nineteenth century, and yet, perhaps aided by the increased popularity of the reform movement, Du Bois unearths social and spatial dimensions of subjectivity that disrupt the binary between the biological and the social.23 Thus, while the discourse of prison reform is never explicit in Du Bois's analysis of The Philadelphia Negro, it is also ever present, evident in the narrative's attempt to redefine ‘the Negro problem’ as, at least in part, a socio-spatial one. Progressive era crime and punishment and Du Bois's ‘Negro crime’ If reform is constitutive of the prison system, according to

20 W.E.B. Du Bois, Strivings of the Negro people, The Atlantic Monthly 80 (1897) 194. 21 C. Lombroso, Criminal Man, Durham, 2006 [1876]; C. Lombroso, Criminal Woman, the Normal Woman, and the Prostitute, Durham, 2004 [1893]. For more on racist biologism in nineteenth century science, see S. Somerville, Scientific racism and the emergence of the homosexual body, Journal of the History of Sexuality 5 (1994) 243e266; for more on nineteenth and twentieth century racist eugenics, heritability of criminality, and sterilization of criminals, see D. Roberts, Killing the Black Body, New York, 1997. 22 In 1904, Du Bois edited a collection of reports and conference proceedings that outlined some of these Progressive Era views on poverty, crime, and punishment. It is likely that Du Bois's interest in these topics grew and his considerations developed in the years immediately following his research in Philadelphia. W.E.B. Du Bois, Some Notes on Negro Crime, Particularly in Georgia, Atlanta, 1904. 23 A. Appiah argues that Du Bois ‘came gradually, though never completely, to assimilate the unbiological nature of races’, and explores how, throughout his career, Du Bois developed important notions of race that were variously biological, anthropological, and political. He calls Du Bois's approach to race dialectical, in that it calls for both an avowal and disavowal of race difference, depending on current political goals. A. Appiah, The uncompleted argument: Du Bois and the illusion of race, Critical Inquiry 12 (1985) 22, 25.

Michel Foucault, it is at least in part because that system is designed to formalize and codify norms that continually reinscribe brutality and exploitation, including race- and class-based prejudice.24 By the end of the nineteenth century there had been at least five sites of incarceration in Philadelphia, three of which bordered the Seventh Ward. But it is not simply the proximity of these sites to Du Bois's investigation that is worth noting. Instead, there is a formative milieu of crime and punishment in late nineteenth century Philadelphia that is reflected in Du Bois's study (Fig. 3).25 The Walnut Street Jail was built in 1773 to accommodate overcrowding at the Old Stone Jail at Third and Market Streets. Cells were dirty, designed to hold large groups of prisoners in communal areas, and focused little even on inmates' most basic physical well-being. Changes in penology during the early nineteenth century made these facilities obsolete. To the Walnut Street Jail was added a Penitentiary House, which included cells to which inmates were confined almost exclusively, as was the Quaker reformatory tradition. After Eastern Penitentiary was opened in 1829 and Moyamensing in 1835, Walnut Street was closed in 1837. In 1896, to once again accommodate overcrowding, Holmesburg Prison was opened in Northeast Philadelphia. Two news stories from 1896 illustrate the sensationalism with which the prison is taken up in the popular imagination. In July, The North American ran a story about Holmesburg prison, to be completed in November, at which time prisoners would be moved there from Eastern Penitentiary under the cover of secrecy: ‘The spectacle of a large number of prisoners being transferred from one prison to another would attract large crowds, and might excite some spectators to attempt rescues’.26 When the prison was finally completed in December of the same year, the same publication ran a much longer story narrating the events of the prisoner transfer with an air of mystery: ‘All preparations for the removal had been kept so quiet that but a few people knew what was going on. Every precaution had been taken to prevent a general jail delivery in case a riot should commence’.27 Philadelphia, beginning with the founding of the Pennsylvania Prison Society in 1787, was ‘the center of prison reform worldwide’.28 The significance of the Pennsylvania Prison Society to Philadelphia society and government is evidenced by its move in 1897, during Du Bois's tenure in Philadelphia, from its old headquarters to Independence Hall, ‘especially revered by every patriot and lover of mankind’, at Fifth and Chestnut Streets, just a few blocks from the Seventh Ward (Fig. 4).29 The Pennsylvania Prison Society has been a driving force in American penology since its inception, and its associated publication, the Journal of Prison Discipline and Philanthropy, includes minutes from board meetings,

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M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, New York, 1995 [1975]. One of the well-publicized events in Philadelphia in 1896 is the capture and execution of H.H. Holmes, widely dubbed ‘America's first serial killer’. He had been ‘swung off in Old Moyamensing’ just a few months prior to Du Bois's arrival in Philadelphia. The events leading up to his execution were widely covered in the Philadelphia press and around the country. See Holmes executed: swung off in Old Moyamensing Prison this morning, Trenton Evening Times, 7 May 1896, America's Historical Newspapers Series 6 and 7, 1741e1922; Advertisement in the Philadelphia Inquirer, no headline, with main text ‘Holmes Confesses Many Murders’, Trenton Evening Times, 11 April 1896, Early American Newspapers Series 6 and 7, 1741e1922. 26 The new county prison, The North American, 9 July 1896, Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers. 27 In new quarters, The North American, 31 December 1896, Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers. 28 N. Johnson, Prison reform in Pennsylvania, http://www.prisonsociety.org/ourhistory, last accessed 1 February 2017. 29 C. Milne, One hundred and tenth annual report of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, Journal of Prison Discipline and Philanthropy, 35/36 (1897) 7. 25

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Fig. 3. Philadelphia. Source: Reproduced courtesy of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, Noll's New Official Guide Map of Philadelphia, 1890.

editorials from board members and other interested parties, and transcripts from public addresses and conferences throughout the United States. It serves as an invaluable resource for analyzing public discourse on criminality and punishment. The Pennsylvania Prison Society's annual report of 1888 provides a lengthy commentary on the nature of criminality, which is worth quoting here at some length:

[Crime is] an abnormal condition of mankind, and that person is criminal who violates the laws of God and the just laws of man. Crime is undoubtedly a diseased condition of the moral faculties, and as the armies of physicians we see around us attest to the efforts of curing the sick, so we, in regarding crime in this light as something that can be cured and indeed eradicated, have at once a starting and an encouraging point for reformation. Experience teaches it is as easy to depart from the right, as there is a constant liability through neglect or imprudence, to

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Fig. 4. Independence Hall, 1900. Source: Reproduced courtesy of PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Philadelphia Department of Records, ‘Independence Hall e East from 6th and Chestnut Streets’.

become sick; and we know not why the two conditions of life, the physical and the spiritual, may not be affected in this way, and if so, how beautifully ‘the charity for all and the malice toward none’ take up the refrain and set in motion those powers of the stronger and more healthy, to alleviate and restore those less favored.30 Du Bois's analysis of crime and punishment in his chapter on ‘Negro Crime’ reveals some ambivalence with this worldview. When Du Bois suggests that crime is a result of race prejudice, oppression, and exploitation, and that it is a moral failing, it is because the subject of crime, and the criminal subject, is an antinomy, and this antinomy is redoubled by Du Bois, whose consideration is informed by his understanding of double consciousness. While Du Bois moralizes, frequently describing criminal activity, deviancy, and vice, including drinking and gambling, in terms of laziness and weakness of will, he also goes further: he wants to understand the conditions under which such moral failings emerge and thrive. Morality is an innate feature of the human psyche, and yet the human psyche and its moral development are historically and geographically situated. Because it is written at the same time Du Bois is writing The Philadelphia Negro, and because The Philadelphia Negro is calculated to avoid alienating the academic community with which Du Bois is

30 J.J. Lytle, One hundred and first annual report of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, Journal of Prison Discipline and Philanthropy 27 (1888) 6e7.

engaged, ‘Strivings of the Negro people’ serves as a meaningful supplement to the former. If Du Bois chooses carefully how to approach the relationship between race prejudice and the ‘Negro problem’ in The Philadelphia Negro, here he is freer to engage in commentary, including about the discipline of sociology itself: ‘Alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and his prostitutes, the very soul of the black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair’.31 While the ‘souls of black folk’ are not explicitly the topic of The Philadelphia Negro, it appears that the soul is precisely what is at stake. Here, the Du Boisian soul is reminiscent of the Foucauldian one, which ‘exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished e and in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonized, over those who are stuck at the machine and supervised for the rest of their lives’.32 If The Souls of Black Folk, first published in 1903, narrates the soul from the vantage point of the black subject, The Philadelphia Negro engages with the soul at the level of its material relations d historical and spatial d and the power that is exercised over it. Du Bois is clear in The Philadelphia Negro that race prejudice is constituted by a system of domination, oppression, suppression, and disciplinary control. He cites several Philadelphia ordinances stemming from the eighteenth century that directly suppress freedom of expression by and organization among black residents.33 With the influx of former slaves to Philadelphia in the postbellum period, ‘complaints of petty thefts and murderous assaults on peaceable citizens now began to increase, and in numbers of cases they were traced to Negroes’.34 Du Bois suggests that the 1820s represent ‘the worst period of Negro crime ever experienced in this city’. While he does not explicitly correlate crime reduction with penology, Du Bois does not fail to mention that 1829 was the year Eastern Penitentiary was opened. His table shows that from the 1830s until the end of the 1840s, African Americans were heavily overrepresented there. Whereas in 1830 Philadelphia's African American population was 8.27%, the African American population of Eastern Penitentiary from 1829 to 1834 was 29%; the disparity grew from 1835 to 1839 when African Americans represented only 7.39% of the population of Philadelphia but 40.5% of the Eastern Penitentiary population. The situation in Moyamensing, where ‘ordinary cases of crime and misdemeanor’ were punished, was even worse: from 1836 to 1845, African Americans accounted for 48.29% of the jail population.35 A particular paradox arises here. On the one hand, ‘the problem of Negro crime in Philadelphia from 1830 to 1850 arose from the fact that less than one-fourteenth of the population was responsible for nearly a third of the serious crimes committed’. On the other hand, ‘discrimination against the Negro was much greater then than now: he was arrested for less cause and given longer sentences than whites’.36 Du Bois outlines other disparities as well: many African Americans were committed while never being brought to trial, and

31 Du Bois, Strivings, 197. This essay is cited a month later in an editorial in The Christian Recorder. The editorial lauds the essay, and draws the conclusion that ‘scores of young Negroes, after having been repulsed at the threshold of the portals of industry, have crowded into the ministry, the professions of medicine and law, or have sought to secure positions through the influence of politics, but all are beginning to see that the race cannot prosper, nor have substantial standing without its foundation is laid in the industries of the country’. Negro is excluded from prosperity's banquet table, The Christian Recorder, 23 September 1897, African American Newspapers. 32 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 28. 33 Du Bois, Philadelphia, 236. 34 Du Bois, Philadelphia, 237. 35 Du Bois, Philadelphia, 238e239. 36 Du Bois, Philadelphia, 238.

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pardons were reserved almost exclusively for whites. Despite the fact that fewer than 20% of African American arrests resulted in convictions, ‘it is undoubtedly true that the crime of Negroes in this period reached its high tide for this city’.37 What is more likely the case, and what is clear from Du Bois's tables, if not his narrative, is that what was at high tide was racial discrimination in the criminal justice system. An anonymous editorial from January 1898 in The Christian Recorder takes up such an argument more explicitly: ‘The average white writer in portraying the weaknesses of crimes of the Negro, can only do so, it appears, at the expense of consistency and veracity alike …. If all the crimes committed by white men who commit crimes were imprisoned or executed as the law directs, there would be but few left in glass houses to hurl stones at the brother in black. The race is rather conspicuous in the crime calendar it is true, but compared to the white man, he is only as the mouse to the elephant’.38 In other words, it is unlikely that blacks were committing a disproportionate number of crimes. What is more likely is that African Americans were being disproportionately arrested and punished for crimes, a phenomenon that continues to be borne out in the contemporary legal system.39 Despite his focus on spatial and historical configurations, Du Bois's failure to posit clear causal relationships leaves him without a meaningful praxis that would improve African Americans' social conditions. Du Bois does provide some explicit guidelines d what whites should do and what blacks should do d but at their core they suggest blacks should be better people and whites should stop discriminating against them. Paradoxically, discrimination for Du Bois is in large part the result of black behavior and social conditions, and black behavior and social conditions are a result of discrimination. And his guidelines, too, reinscribe the logical foundation of and justification for racism: if blacks would be better behaved, whites would have nothing against which to discriminate. Shaun Gabbidon, in two different essays, claims that Du Bois's approach to criminology remains applicable even today. In one, he focuses on Du Bois's moralistic discourse, outlining his suggestions for whites and for blacks for remedying the crime problem in African American communities.40 Gabbidon subscribes to a conservative conception of criminality (crime is bad and should be eliminated), that squares neatly with Du Bois's Progressive Era politics. In a second essay, Gabbidon discusses at more length the specific features of race prejudice which lead to the crime ‘problem’.41 In both essays, however, Gabbidon focuses on the necessity -vis moral improvement, and ignores the of crime reduction vis-a aspects of spatial justice with which Du Bois is concerned. Couched between moral imperatives, Du Bois claims that ‘crime is a phenomenon of organized social life, and is open rebellion of an individual against his social environment’.42 Here, it is disharmony with social reality and ‘new physical surroundings’, including those that pose immediate physical danger, that is the primary cause of this rebellious, potentially subversive, activity.43 Du Bois sees a

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Du Bois, Philadelphia, 239. 38 Editorial, The Christian Recorder, 6 January 1898, African American Newspapers. 39 This is the express argument of recent prison studies scholarship. Alexander, for example, demonstrates how a disproportionate number of African Americans are arrested and imprisoned for drug-related offenses despite using and selling drugs at approximately the same rate as whites. Alexander, The New Jim Crow. 40 S.L. Gabbidon, W.E.B. Du Bois: Pioneering American criminologist, Journal of Black Studies 31 (2001) 581e599. 41 S.L. Gabbidon, An argument for including W.E.B. Du Bois in criminology/criminal justice literature, Journal of Criminal Justice Education 7 (1996) 99e112. 42 Du Bois, Philadelphia, 235; Gabbidon quotes this passage from The Philadelphia Negro as well, and while he recognizes the import of Du Bois's analysis about how race prejudice is inscribed in the legal system, he does not address the possible implications of Du Bois's comment on crime-as-rebellion. 43 Du Bois, Philadelphia, 235.

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history and tradition of crime dating to the earliest ‘disorder’ among slaves. While he fails to say so directly, crime here might be seen as a potentially revolutionary act. And crime, as an act of organization, is inherently spatial: African Americans not only face oppression, exploitation, and inequality in the physical environment; they are also relegated and respond to very specific geographical locations, like slums and prisons, that produce forms of oppression, exploitation, and spatial inequality. The separate system of punishment and criminal communities This view of spaces as productive of oppression and exploitation is mirrored in prison reform discourse of the period. One of the most notable debates among prison reformers, for example, was the value of the so-called separate system. The Pennsylvania Prison Society was an originator and major champion of this system, realized at Eastern Penitentiary, in which inmates were confined almost entirely to their cells. It believed that criminality d as a subjective and identificatory function d was adopted in the process of forming a community with other criminals. Thus, if prisoners had access only to their families, to the prison chaplain and other prison employees, and putatively good members of society, like Pennsylvania Prison Society volunteers, their chances of adopting a criminal identity, and continuing in a criminal lifestyle, would be reduced. Opponents of the separate system likened it to solitary confinement and saw it as cruel and unusual, but the society was adamant that its model was not intended as punishment: ‘we insist … that there shall be a Prison Society wherever there is a Separate System, and that that Society shall have a selected number of competent visitors who will visit the prisoners individually in their cells and see that no injustice is practiced, that the common rights of humanity are maintained, that the heart-yearning of the prisoner for good company is supplied, and that spiritual needs are not neglected’.44 Pennsylvania's separate system was, in the Society's estimation, less like solitary confinement and more like a secluded reprieve d both from the demands of life and the temptations of evil.45 Criminality during the Progressive Era was a moral failing, but it was also, according to the society, a social failing. In that view, the most common type of criminal is bred by his environment. [He] is quite a normal person. He differs little from the ordinary person. He may or may not be a little predisposed to crime. Under favorable circumstances he would develop into a good citizen, under unfavorable circumstances he develops into a criminal. It is, then, [this] occasional criminal in whose behalf we should erect our barriers. He is made, not born, and we should try to prevent the making of it. It is right here, now, society must put its barriers. It must make the way to crime hard, disagreeable, and the way to virtue easy.46 For the occasional criminal, then, whose environment was the cause of his criminal behavior, the separate system provided, according to the Pennsylvania Prison Society, a model environment, one that allows him access to volunteers, upstanding members of society, and places him in a physically comfortable environment

44 A.H. Love, The essentials of the separate system, Journal of Prison Discipline and Philanthropy 35/36 (1897) 14. 45 Eastern Penitentiary had what was commonly referred to as a Park Avenue section of the prison, in which prisoners with means lived in cells that looked much more like posh parlors than prison cells. Al Capone occupied one of these cells while serving a sentence there. 46 Chaplain J.H. Albert, Barriers against crime, quoted in National Prison Congress at Denver, Colorado, Journal of Prison Discipline and Philanthropy 35/36 (1897) 56.

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Fig. 5. Hooded prisoner to prevent recognition by other inmates. Source: Reproduced courtesy of the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, Philadelphia, ‘Hooded Inmate’.

with soothing amenities (Fig. 5). Richard Vaux, one-time mayor of Philadelphia and a member of the Pennsylvania State House of Representatives, was long interested in penology and a member of the Pennsylvania Prison Society. He was oft cited by the Journal of Prison Discipline and Philanthropy,47 and was president of the Board of Inspectors for the State Penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania (Eastern Penitentiary) in 1875. The Board of Inspectors' report of that year favors the separate system since ‘any system of convict-punishment which associates convicts during punishment is likely to operate to the injury of convicts and the community, and no system of convict punishment by associate labor is necessarily profit-making, or can be made so, under a

47

See Chapter VII, Italy: notice of Mr. Vaux's report, Journal of Prison Discipline and Philanthropy 12 (1873) 84e88; Crime cause, Journal of Prison Discipline and Philanthropy 19 (1880) 88e93. 48 Forty-sixth annual report of the inspectors of the Eastern State Penitentiary of Pennsylvania for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania to the Senate and House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for the year 1875, Philadelphia, 1876, 11.

comprehensive view of its injurious influences’.48 These concerns reflect a popular understanding about how criminality is shaped by the environment and might be reduced by way of organizing spaces and environments differently, and they also demonstrate how exploitation of convict labor was built into the earliest modern prison systems. This constitutive exploitation is framed as its own kind of criminality, perpetrated by the state, which serves to maintain an environment in which rehabilitation is impossible. Gabbidon's outline of Du Bois's suggestions for blacks and for whites implicitly highlights the ways in which those suggestions focus on black crime and the creation of justice by whites. In other words, there are reasons or even justifications for African American crime, but for Gabbidon and in Gabbidon's reading of Du Bois, crime is an uncontested and inevitable outcome of certain historical processes, an outcome that leaves little room for the creation of social justice by African Americans. For example, African Americans should be working towards ‘uplift’ in the form of ‘improved’ morality d thriftiness, class responsibility, home training, accepting employment over crime, improving temperament, and so on d while whites are responsible for ending race discrimination and creating fair laws, courts, and other institutions.49 The question that must be asked of this reading is the extent to which African Americans exercise agency, especially in relation to creating just spaces and disrupting a racially oppressive and exploitative social structure. Black Philadelphians in the 1890s are certainly the objects of race prejudice and spatial inequality but they also exercise choice. For Du Bois, the putatively better classes choose to live in proximity to other African Americans, including those who were living in and around the Seventh Ward, even though it is possible for them to move to neighborhoods that would provide a wealth of superior services, living quarters, and so on. The Seventh Ward is the historical and traditional center of black life in Philadelphia: ‘To a race socially ostracized it means far more to move to remote parts of a city, than to those who will in any part of the city easily form congenial acquaintances and new ties. The Negro who ventures away from the mass of his people and their organized life, finds himself alone, shunned and taunted, stared at and made uncomfortable …. [He] remains far from friends and the concentered life of the church, and feels in all its bitterness what it means to be a social outcast’.50 While Du Bois's analysis often focuses more on the limitations placed on choice, this observation aligns with more recent studies that provide nuanced accounts of how and why African Americans exercise freedom and agency in choosing how and where to live. Mary Patillo-McCoy's important work focuses on the Groveland neighborhood of Chicago's South Side, where a large black population historically has made inroads to middle-class life.51 Her ethnographies problematize the notion of middle-class homogeneity by underscoring the differences in geographical patterns between white and black middle classes. Many black middle-class individuals and families are inclined to remain geographically close to historically black communities. Patillo-McCoy's work foregrounds how choices made by middle-class African Americans to remain in proximity to traditionally black neighborhoods, including those in the inner city, is a form of socio-spatial organization that complicates deterministic narratives about the powerlessness of African Americans in the face of systemic racism.

49 Gabbidon, W.E.B. Du Bois: Pioneering American criminologist, 591e592. B.M. Wilson also suggests that Du Bois's early analyses blame white ignorance for problems in race relations, and therefore call for the solution of white education. B.M. Wilson, Critically understanding race-connected practices: a reading of W.E.B Du Bois and Richard Wright, The Professional Geographer 54 (2002) 32. 50 Du Bois, Philadelphia, 296e7. 51 M. Patillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class, Chicago, 1999.

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History, tradition, and availability of and access to black cultures play important roles in influencing how and where black middleclass Chicagoans live. Poverty constrains decision making about where to live, but upwardly mobile African Americans, ones PatilloMcCoy notes may have more in common economically and socially with middle-class white folks, continue to live in and around predominantly black neighborhoods. In other words, while culture remains largely segregated along the color line, this is due at least in part to a conscious or non-conscious effort on the part of African Americans to keep intact black cultural forms and ways of life.52 It is not just these putatively better classes either in Du Bois's study that choose to live in the Seventh Ward. Because it ‘is in the center of the city’ and ‘near the center of … social life’ people of all kinds ‘crowd in here in great numbers’.53 However, African Americans are at the same time compelled ‘to crowd into the center of the city’ in order to be near to the places where they are allowed to work d those mostly urban and low-income places of employment like hotels and laundries.54 Because of this crowding in, to whatever extent it is a result of choice or constraint, living situations ultimately become untenable: ‘money-getting landlords’ develop tenement-style housing, in which ‘small, poorly lighted and poorly ventilated’ rooms are given over to prostitutes and criminals.55 Du Bois's view that black Philadelphians are only relegated to slums is undermined by his own and more recent observations about black residential patterns and in fact provides an opportunity to engage with the way agency manifests even under restrictive conditions. Criminal geography of slums Marcus Anthony Hunter sees The Philadelphia Negro as part of ‘a long-standing dialogue and debate regarding urban Black enclaves, spatial inequality, and urban racial relations’.56 He claims that Du Bois's project posits urban space as historically constituted, particularly by conflict, but that it also provides insights about urban spatial organization. Du Bois's overarching questions seem to be precisely the ones asked by contemporary critical geographers: ‘Where do the poor and working class people go; where are their spaces; what is their lived experience of place in the brave new world of the new world economic order?’57 Among Du Bois's answers to these questions is that African Americans are relegated to slum districts, which are productive of criminality. Many twentieth century sociologists and geographers have taken for granted that the so-called urban ghetto is the

52 M.A. Hunter, too, illustrates the importance of highlighting African Americans' agency in relation to urban living. Others argue that an exclusive focus on agency by oppressed groups, particularly in relation to self-segregation, renders invisible the constraints placed on that agency. M.A. Hunter, Black Citymakers: How The Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America, Oxford, 2013; M.A. Hunter, A bridge over troubled urban waters: W.E.B. Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro and the ecological conundrum, Du Bois Review 10 (2013) 219e233; D. Phillips, Parallel lives? Challenging discourses of British Muslim segregation, Environment and Planning D 24 (2006) 25e40. 53 Du Bois, Philadelphia, 290. 54 Du Bois, Philadelphia, 296. 55 Du Bois, Philadelphia, 294. 56 Hunter, A bridge over troubled urban waters, 11. 57 S. Sassen, On concentration and centrality in the global city, in P.L. Knox and P.J. Taylor (Eds), World Cities in a World System, Cambridge, 1995, 63; also cited in K. Aoki, Space invaders: critical geography, the ‘third world’ in international law and critical race theory, Villanova Law Review 45 (2000), LexisNexis. 58 See, for example, P.A. Jargowsky, Poverty and Place: Ghettos, Barrios, and the American City, New York, 1998; K.L. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870e1930, Champaign, 1978; B. O'Flaherty and R. Sethi, The racial geography of street vice, Journal of Urban Economics 67 (2010) 270e286; L. Wacquant, The body, the ghetto and the penal state, Qualitative Sociology 32 (2009) 101e129; L. Wacquant, Ghettos and anti-ghettos: an anatomy of the new urban poverty, Thesis Eleven 94 (2008) 113e118; L. Wacquant, Urban desolation and symbolic denigration in the hyperghetto, Social Psychology Quarterly 20 (2010) 1e5.

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contemporary Negro problem par excellence, albeit often in different language, a belief which continues to be reflected in contemporary American political discourse.58 While these academics often underscore that racism and structural inequalities are the cause of urban ghettos, ghettos nonetheless remain a problem to be solved. Poststructuralist geographies, however, have focused on the relationship between race, identity, and urban geography without resorting to reductive conclusions about the moral impoverishment of the so-called ghetto.59 Particularly since the 1980s, urban geographers have developed accounts of race as a discursive product that emerges in spaces that are, also, subject to multiple and contested meanings.60 Contemporary scholars of race across disciplines have demonstrated that the ubiquitous black urban ghetto is a myth that should, and can, be dispelled; in its place, they record the richness of black experience and community.61 A 1970s analysis of northern black urban enclaves during the late nineteenth century suggests that growing populations and increased visibility of African Americans ‘exacerbated long existing attitudes of racial hostility, particularly in this era of rising nationalistic and racial tensions, and blacks encountered steadily deteriorating social and economic conditions, in which they were proportionately over-represented’.62 Suburbanization also takes shape in Philadelphia during the last decades of the nineteenth century, although traditional geographies often failed to account for the specifically racial dimensions of Philadelphia's emerging suburban class.63 More recent scholarship demonstrates that African Americans reshaped the geographical boundaries of that city and its suburbs, moving in ever greater numbers farther to the west, south, and north between 1890 and 1910.64 African Americans have shaped both their cities and their institutions, and black cultural forms flourish in the cities and their suburbs, despite frequent references to the poverty and impoverishment of black life.65 For Hunter, The Philadelphia Negro is a starting point for considering how African Americans have shaped urban history and geography throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.66 Bobby M. Wilson also directly engages Du Bois's geographical imagination, particularly in Du Bois's later work, namely after he had adopted a more Marxian approach to history and sociology.67 He demonstrates that effective geography is always aware of history, and that race is continually being constructed and

59 See J.W. Crampton and S. Eldon (Eds), Space, Knowledge, and Power: Foucault and Geography, London, 2007; S. Holloway, Identity, contingency, and the urban geography of race, Cultural Geography 1 (2000) 197e208; S.J. Smith, The Politics of ‘Race’ and Residence: Citizenship, Segregation, and White Supremacy in Britain, Cambridge, 1989. 60 M.L. Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, London, 1990; M. Keith, Race, Riots and Policing: Lore and Disorder in a Multi-Racist Society, Los Angeles, 1993; Nayak, Geography, race and emotions, 548e562. 61 Patillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences; R.W. Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It: Building Black Community in Detroit, 1915e1945, Bloomington, 1992; L. Walker and B.C. Wilson, Black Eden: The Idlewild Community, East Lansing, 2002. Similarly, R.W. Gilmore asserts that making race the focus of geographical analyses, including historical geographical analyses, denaturalizes race while allowing not only for a more nuanced view of the relationships between power, racism, and space, but also of lived lives and social conditions within these matrices. R.W. Gilmore, Fatal couplings of power and difference: notes on racism and geography, The Professional Geographer 54 (2002) 22. 62 P.A. Groves and E.K. Muller, The evolution of black residential areas in late nineteenth-century cities, Journal of Historical Geography 1 (1975) 171. 63 See G.R. Hovinen, Suburbanization in greater Philadelphia, 1880e1941, Journal of Historical Geography 11 (1985) 174e195. 64 Hunter, Black Citymakers, 37e38. 65 K.J. Gray, Social change for social betterment: African Americans in nineteenthcentury Philadelphia, Journal of African American Studies 18 (2014) 432e456. 66 Hunter, Black Citymakers. 67 Wilson, Critically understanding race-connected practices, 31e41.

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reconstructed across time and place.68 He contends that ‘a reading of Du Bois … suggests that race-connected practices should be understood not only in their proper historical context, but also in their appropriate geographical context’.69 Du Bois believes that ‘a complete study must not confine itself to a group, but must specially notice the environment; the physical environment of a city, sections and houses, the far mightier social environment d the surrounding world of custom, wish, whim, and thought which envelops this group and powerfully influences its social development’.70 Du Bois points out that ‘the Negro question’ is to many a question solely of the ‘slum districts’, but, he argues, ‘a slum is not a simple fact’. In order to understand the slum, center of ‘loafers, idlers and prostitutes’ d in other words, criminality and vice d one must understand both the history and the geography of a much greater network of relations.71 Because of race prejudice, African Americans are locked out of labor unions and other forms of employment as well as denied access to housing and other resources. The African American worker makes less money, commutes a farther distance to his place of employment, and is more likely to need supplemental income, which he sometimes earns by taking in boarders. He not only spends less time at home taking part in family and leisure activities, but he also shares the geographical space of his home d smaller than the home of his white counterpart d with additional persons. Thus, geography is not simply a reflection of economic conditions but functions to produce its own effects. Roger Lane claims that Du Bois is the originator of ‘an old tradition [that] approached the black experience in terms of its problems or areas of social concern, notably criminal behavior and family structure’.72 While this tradition is certainly much older than Du Bois, it is true that ‘the Negro problem’ is for Du Bois largely one of social ‘abnormality’. It is also one, however, that he sets out to contextualize in terms of discrimination and exploitation. Lane rightly suggests that ‘poverty and discrimination are vague cover words that explain no unique experience, no concrete historical process or condition’.73 He likewise claims that while contributing to criminality they cannot explain it. While Lane's complex and detailed history of these specific conditions provides a useful corrective to the overly broad conceptualization of ‘discrimination’, Du Bois's analysis, too, while often couched in the discourse of social problems, cites specific examples of exploitation and discrimination that are grounded in space and place, offering an immediacy of experience that is often absent in strictly historical accounts. Criminality is built into the geographical environment sketched by Du Bois. Prostitutes, gamblers, and other criminals pile into the Seventh Ward, but they are not alone. The ‘slum districts’, whose epicenter in the Seventh Ward is at the intersection of Seventh and Lombard Streets, extend to the Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Wards.74 Seventh and Lombard is also the historical center of black immigration to Philadelphia, meaning that history, geography, and crime are inextricably bound together in such a way that each is the cause and consequence of the other.75 Du Bois attempts to grapple with black crime by placing its burden on what he would later call ‘the

68 B.M. Wilson, America's Johannesburg: Industrialization and Racial Transformation in Birmingham, Lanham, 2000; B.M. Wilson, Race and Place in Birmingham: The Civil Rights and Neighborhood Movements, Lanham, 2000. 69 Wilson, Critically understanding race-connected practices, 32. 70 Du Bois, Philadelphia, 5. 71 Du Bois, Philadelphia, 6. 72 R. Lane, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860e1900, Cambridge, 1986, 5. 73 Lane, Roots of Violence, 4. 74 Du Bois, Philadelphia, 309. 75 Du Bois, Philadelphia, 305.

submerged tenth’. This underclass is the most impoverished, most oppressed, supposedly least conscious portion of the population. Part of Du Bois's reckoning with this population includes his desire to make the broader African American population more palatable to white sociologists and white society. In effect, he contends, this lesser form of culture is but a small portion of the general population while the rest of African Americans are a decent and law abiding bunch. In this way, he often casts off the ‘criminal class’ as aberrant and irrelevant. Du Bois often ascribes criminality to low moral character and believes that ‘vices’ like gambling and drinking are morally suspect if not criminal; in other words, he subscribes in this way to the view that the supposedly necessary social fabric, sustained by strict norms, is threatened by subversive or transgressive behaviors. Implied in this view of sociality, however, are hints of an emerging possibility of crime as cultural resistance, what Richard Wright would later see as, in Kevin Gaines's words, an ‘imaginative response to … subordination’.76 The color line, crime, and the performance of race Lane posits that there were more lynchings in the 1890s than at any period in the past, and many in Philadelphia were related to miscegenation, a phenomenon that was frequently highlighted in local newspapers.77 It is certainly worth noting that these charges leveled against black men were often, and perhaps more often than not, false. The charge was indeed so grave that few would contest the lynching of the accused. Miscegenation was, in this way, frequently little more than a rhetorical device used to gain public support for the murder of innocent men. The rate at which lynchings occurred in Philadelphia in the 1890s, however, is perhaps also indicative of the growing number of African Americans in the city and a backlash against racial integration.78 Tellingly, the criminal underworld was among the least segregated population in Philadelphia, and likely the United States: neither Eastern Penitentiary nor Moyamensing were segregated by race, and ‘gamblers and other criminals crossed the color line more easily than most’.79 In this regard, criminality might be seen both as an expression of rebellion against oppression and subordination and as a kind of performance that protests racial segregation and discrimination. Briefly, Judith Butler's theory of performativity suggests that identity, and particularly gender and sexual identity, is not a fixed or innate quality but rather that the performance of identities brings those identities into existence.80 While performativity has its political limits, many scholars have viewed it as a useful tool for considering the social and cultural meanings and political implications of constructed racial identities.81 Geographers have utilized the theory of performativity to examine how racial identities are enacted, produced, and negotiated in space- and place-specific

76

K. Gaines, African Americans in Ghana, Chapel Hill, 2006, 54. Lane, Roots of Violence, 28. 78 See Groves and Muller, The evolution of black residential areas in late nineteenth-century cities, 169e191. 79 Lane, Roots of Violence, 17, 31. 80 J. Butler, Gender Trouble, New York, 2006 [1990]. 81 N. Ehlers, ‘Black is’ and ‘black ain't’: performative revisions of racial ‘crisis’, Culture, Theory, and Critique 47 (2006) 149e163; L.F. Miron and J.X. Inda, Race as a kind of speech act, Cultural Studies: A Research Annual 5 (2000) 85e107; C. Rotternberg, Passing: race, identification, and desire, Criticism 45 (2003) 435e452. 77

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ways.82 In particular, there has been a focus on the ways that performativity is related to embodiment and affect, and how these nonrepresentational ways of being and knowing more adequately reflect lived experiences and communities.83 Wendy S. Shaw's observation of a Sidney, Australia neighborhood and ‘the splitting of space along a street that borders a stigmatized, and racialized, community, demonstrated how temporary, spatially located alliances of whiteness form’.84 Racial identities and alliances are enacted and embedded in urban geographies; Du Bois's criminal underworld might be seen in this regard as failing to perform race according to dominant social and spatial imperatives (like segregation and prejudice) that serve to delineate race and ethnicity. For Michael Denning, the mode of production ‘classes, races, genders, and nationalizes us’. The resulting class, race, and gender formations provide a useful way of ‘[breaking] down the sense that we need to decide whether the real cause, the most fundamental identity, is class, gender, or race’.85 If criminality is sometimes more than a set of behaviors, if it is, at least sometimes, a category of identity, then a criminal class might equally be seen as a formation that emerges from and responds to modes of production and exploitation, as well as spatial and social organization more broadly. Indeed, twentieth century scholarship has increasingly taken up the criminalization and mass incarceration of black men as a state strategy for developing a surplus labor pool after the collapse of major manufacturing sectors in the 1970s.86 Michelle Alexander's use of the term ‘criminalblackman’ d ‘black males in urban ghettos [who] are treated as current or future criminals’ d is a way of expressing how this strategy has had just such a racing, classing, and gendering effect.87 Criminality precedes the era of mass incarceration, but mass incarceration works to concretize criminality as a class and category of identity. As Amy E. Lerman and Vesla M. Weaver note, ‘the carceral state has not only accentuated social divisions based on prior divisions by race, class, and gender; it has also created a new division, a cleavage of durable political marginalization’.88 Crime is a socio-spatial phenomenon that resists easy interpellation into existing frameworks for resistance and social justice. Criminality signals a break from normative expectations about work and social behavior, including, as evidenced in Du Bois, deeply held cultural beliefs about and performances of race. The criminal moves differently through, and responds differently to, sites of oppression and exploitation. And it is for this reason that criminal transgression is so threatening. For Du Bois, the transgressive black subject threatens the possibility of African American inclusion into

82 D. Houston and L. Pulido, The work of performativity: staging social justice at the University of Southern California, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20 (2000) 401e424; C. Nash, Performativity in practice: some recent work in cultural geography, Progress in Human Geography 24 (2000) 653e664; W.S. Shaw, Decolonizing geographies of whiteness, Antipode 38 (2006) 851e869; J.A. Tyner, Narrating interracial relations and the negotiation of public spaces, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20 (2002) 441e458. 83 Nayak, Geography, race and emotions, 548e562; Nash, Performativity in practice, 655. 84 Shaw, Decolonizing geographies, 865. Shaw mentions in passing that The Philadelphia Negro was one of several works to have anticipated critical race studies in geography, but her argument centers on an observation she makes in Sidney, Australia regarding a historically aboriginal neighborhood. She is concerned largely with the exclusion of indigenous populations. 85 M. Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, London, 2004, 152. 86 Alexander, New Jim Crow, 162. 87 For more on the stigma of criminal convictions and how it can shape identity, see D. Pager, The mark of a criminal record, American Journal of Sociology 108 (2003) 937e975. 88 Lerman and Weaver, Arresting Citizenship, 22.

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broader American social and political life through respectability and dissemblance.89 While it is undeniable that crime harms the communities in which it takes place, the assertion that crime is only harmful tends to eliminate the possibility of seeing in it a means of subversion or resistance to social and spatial oppression.90 Instead, crime, and particularly property crime, offers a rejection both of the exploitation constitutive of the capitalist economy and of dominant, white social norms and institutions. Criminality must be seen, at least in part, as an agentic response to exploitation and marginalization, and not simply as a reaction to poverty. Excluded from social, political, and economic life, women, poor people, and people of color have always worked outside of the legitimate economy and refused the normative expectations under capitalism of working and saving.91 In fact, in contrast to dominant views about how exploited and marginalized groups are reactive in the face of hegemonic power, this paradigm suggests something quite the opposite: specific forms of hegemonic power emerge and converge on these formations in the form of harsh sentencing and mass incarceration once they begin, as they do in the 1970s, to disrupt on a large scale the smooth functioning of the broader economy.92

Conclusions: criminality, incarceration, and citizenship In their study of the relationship between citizenship and criminal justice, Lerman and Weaver coin the term custodial citizen to describe the vast number of individuals whose lives have been shaped by the criminal justice system even when they may not have been convicted of a crime. Custodial citizens comprise those ‘who are stopped and questioned by police but never arrested, those who are arrested but never formally adjudicated, and those who are adjudicated and ultimately found to be innocent of criminal wrongdoing’.93 By rightly decoupling criminality from custodial citizenship, at the same time recognizing that they often overlap, Lerman and Weaver illustrate how the criminal justice system serves to exclude from full social and civic participation a broad swath of the population, largely comprising people of color. However, in so doing, they also to some extent avoid the question of how citizenship should be conferred upon or practiced by ‘real’ criminal offenders. Lerman and Weaver's ‘criminal class’, which is ‘carefully distinguished’ from the custodial citizen, might be seen, like Du Bois's own ‘vicious and criminal classes’, as a kind of boundary delimiting the social body from what is outside of it.

89 For more on cultures of dissemblance, see D.C. Hine, Rape and the inner lives of black women in the middle west, Signs 14 (1989) 912e920. 90 For more on subversive or ‘heretical’ geographies, see T. Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression, Minneapolis, 1996. 91 For a recent discussion of how waged labor is a normative expectation under, rather than a structural requirement for, capitalism, see K. Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, Durham, 2011. 92 M. Rose contends that ‘practices of resistance have no definitive features in and of themselves but are defined through their oppositional relationship to power’. His provides a useful corrective to theories of resistance which take for granted a stable system of power to which forms of resistance respond. He contends that most theories of resistance position that resistance as reactive. In contrast, he posits that systems themselves are performative. Rose's analysis is noteworthy for its critique of resistance theory, especially in cases where it is unclear whether the ideology or system under discussion is actually as hegemonic as it might seem at first glance. Racial ideologies were deeply held in nineteenth century Philadelphia, but it is also possible to view criminality here not just as a response to hegemonic, racist discourse but also as what Rose calls a ‘creative [form] of social practice’ that actually precedes and shapes those and related discourses. M. Rose, The seductions of resistance: power, politics, and a performative style of systems, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20 (2002) 387, 389. 93 Lerman and Weaver, Arresting Citizenship, 35.

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The exclusion of criminal classes from citizenship discourse more generally is a kind of reflection of their geographical exclusion from normative spaces and relegation to prisons and slums. As Lerman and Weaver note, political science and political theory have been slow to take up the question of how criminal justice and mass incarceration shape political participation and subjectivity. Their findings demonstrate that custodial citizens may choose to withdraw from formal, and sometimes informal, political participation because, for them, policing, surveillance, and juridical punishment are what constitute politics and governance. For custodial citizens, the threat inherent to entering public life and discourse supersedes the potential benefits associated with such participation.94 In other words, those who are socially excluded or marginalized may opt, in one way or another, to perpetuate that exclusion, particularly in the realm of formal political activity. Du Bois's study demonstrates that these recent phenomena are rooted in a long tradition of criminalization and imprisonment of those who are considered undesirable or external to the social body. The dominant view of crime is that it is a social problem that should be reduced or eliminated. By distancing themselves somewhat from criminality proper, Lerman and Weaver, among others, may fail to recognize how crime might be a political response to marginalization or exclusion. My reading of The Philadelphia Negro begins with the assumption that dominant views about sociality broadly speaking, and thus about crime which transgress it, are derived from cis-gendered, able-bodied, white men. Black sexuality studies and antisocial queer theory have done much to dispel the myth that the social is inherently good.95 In The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois is a champion of the inclusion of African Americans into broader American social and political life. But he is at the same time a harsh critic of that social and political life. The tension that emerges between the demand for inclusion into the social world and the demand for substantive structural change to that same social world permeates this text. For Du Bois, criminality was not an acceptable response to social problems, but his frequent disavowal of the criminal classes is undermined in his analysis of the criminal justice system and his spatial analysis of Philadelphia's slum districts. Du Bois not only leaves room to contest his own social classification scheme,

94

Lerman and Weaver, Arresting Citizenship, 10. L. Bersani, Homos, Cambridge, 1995; E.R. Edwards, Sex after the black normal, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 26 (2015) 141e167; J. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, Durham, 2011; L.H. Stallings, Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures, Champaign, 2015; H.S. Williams, Conjuring Black Funk: Notes on Culture, Sexuality, and Spirituality, volume 1, New York, 2007. 96 Gaines, African Americans in Ghana, 54. 95

particularly in light of the way that African American Philadelphians were disproportionately incarcerated; he also demonstrates that environment breeds crime and that criminality thrives among impoverishment and modes of disenfranchisement. Du Bois stops short of considering how crime might be not simply a reaction but an ‘imaginative response’ to these modes of disenfranchisement.96 But criminality, particularly insofar as it radically disrupts a shared sense of identity and belonging, has the potential to challenge the way we think about race, place, and social and political worlds. I have examined how Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro treats the complicated relationship between space, race, and criminality, and how discourses of crime and punishment contemporary to it are reflected therein. Du Bois's conclusions are necessarily limited: By focusing on the power exerted over African Americans, he sometimes fails to recognize instances of African American agency. By assuming that race prejudice is based on (white) rationality, he sometimes fails to recognize the value of black transgression (of the law but also of dominant social norms or mores). However, Du Bois's empirical data, and their context in space and place, paint a more complicated picture. Race is performed by way of spatial organization, for example, through the establishment and maintenance of racially homogenous neighborhoods and communities. But race is performed differently across different spaces, including those typically associated with criminality, such as the prison. These spaces offer alternatives to dominant constructions of race and alternative ways of responding to the hegemonic institutions that support them.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Bill V. Mullen for his careful and caring feedback on early drafts of this manuscript, Mitchell Terpstra for being a tireless reader and supporter of my work, and the editors of and three anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Historical Geography, all of whose critiques were central to the reworking of the manuscript. I would also like to thank Stephen Volan for his ideas about adapting some of the illustrations, as well as Justin Seipel and Davin Huston for their comments on those adaptations.