UNCONTROLLABLE BLACKNESS: AFRICAN AMERICAN MEN AND CRIMINALITY IN JIM CROW NEW YORK - JUSTICE, POWER, AND POLITICS. This item is unavailable.UNCONTROLLABLE BLACKNESS: AFRICAN AMERICAN MEN AND CRIMINALITY IN JIM CROW NEW YORK - JUSTICE, POWER, AND POLITICS

<b>Winner of the Littleton-Griswold Prize in American Law and Society from the American Historical Association</b>

In early twentieth-century New York City, Black men lived in a world that treated their very presence as suspect: excluded from steady work, hemmed in by segregation, and surveilled and punished even when they followed the law. Uncontrollable Blackness tells the stories of men who navigated this hostile city through work, violence, illicit markets, and struggles over urban space and manhood.

This award-winning and influential history follows these men into saloons, side streets, gambling dens, and rooming houses, where they found work when they could, made money where they had to, carried weapons for protection, and sometimes turned to violence. The book neither excuses nor romanticizes their crimes, but places their actions within the context of the difficult choices and circumstances of their lives.

Drawing on criminal case files, trial transcripts, personal letters, and investigative reports, this innovative study has reshaped how scholars understand the relationship between race, crime, and Black freedom. Rather than treating Black criminality simply as a social problem or the product of discriminatory institutions, Uncontrollable Blackness shows how crime itself became a crucial site where Black men negotiated race, masculinity, and power. Their stories offer an alternative history of New York City—one told from the streets, barrooms, tenements, and prisons where working-class Black men sought dignity, safety, autonomy, and control over their lives.

Douglas J. Flowe is an associate professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis.