Criminalization of Black Children

‘The Criminalization of Black Children’: A New Book on Chicago’s Juvenile System

By Melissa N. Shaw September 11, 2018 1

---

This post is part of our blog series that announces the publication of selected new books in African American History and African Diaspora Studies. The Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender, and Delinquency in Chicago’s Juvenile System, 1899, 1945 was recently published by the University of North Carolina Press. 

***

The author of The Criminalization of Black Children is Tera Eva Agyepong, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at DePaul University. She serves as the director of both the pre-law concentration and history of law minor at DePaul University. Agyepong completed her JD and PhD from the School of Law and Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University. Her research and teaching interests include African American History; Race, Gender, History and the Law; Legal History; Criminal/Juvenile Justice Systems; and Urban History. She is a scholar collaborator  with the Prison Public Memory Project on scholarship about race, gender, and the history of confinement of women and girls in New York and Illinois. Her new book The Criminalization of Black Children expands the narrative of racialized criminalization in America, revealing that these patterns became embedded in a justice system originally intended to protect children. In doing so, the book complicates our understanding of the nature of migration and what it meant to be black and living in Chicago in the early twentieth century. In addition to The Criminalization of Black Children, she has also published scholarly articles in Journal of African American History, Gender and History, and the Northwestern Journal of International Human Rights.