NPR's Farai Chideya talks with author Kali Nicole Gross about her new book Colored Amazons, which describes the experience of black women in Philadelphia's criminal justice system in the decades after Reconstruction. Gross is a history professor and the director of Africana Studies at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
ED GORDON, host: The new book Colored Amazons describes the experience of black women in Philadelphia's criminal justice system in the decades after Reconstruction. Author Kali Nicole Gross uses prison records, trial transcripts, and new accounts to look at how black female criminals dealt with the racism of that city's courts and prisons. Gross is a history professor and the director of Africana studies at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She spoke with NPR's Farai Chideya.</s>FARAI CHIDEYA reporting: Let's talk about some of the women you explore your book. Alice Clifton, who was she and what was she charged with?</s>Professor KALI NICOLE GROSS (History, Director of Africana Studies, Drexel University): Alice Clifton was an enslaved black woman in Pennsylvania. She was 17 years old, and she worked as a servant in a household for a white family - the Bartholomews - who were Philadelphia shopkeepers. And in 1787, she was arrested for killing her quote/unquote bastard child. Her crime was infanticide.</s>Professor KALI NICOLE GROSS (History, Director of Africana Studies, Drexel University): What happened is during the delivery, she kept feigning that she was only ill, that she wasn't pregnant. The woman of the house, Mary Bartholomew, would check in on here periodically, but it was in between visits that Alice Clifton actually delivers her daughter.</s>Professor KALI NICOLE GROSS (History, Director of Africana Studies, Drexel University): The family comes back to Clifton. After the delivery, she's getting up, getting dressed, saying that she feels much better. And they can't figure out what's happened, where this child is. So they search the house and they find the infant's body stuffed in a trunk in one of the family's rooms.</s>Professor KALI NICOLE GROSS (History, Director of Africana Studies, Drexel University): So they call the - you know, inquest is done and brought in. And they initially thought that the child had died from suffocation because of the position of the head on the fetus. And it's only, you know, hours afterward that, you know, during the course of the inquest and the inquiry that they realize that the child's neck had been slashed - that it had a cut some four inches long and almost an inch thick.</s>Professor KALI NICOLE GROSS (History, Director of Africana Studies, Drexel University): So she goes on trial for murder. And it's interesting, because even though Alice Clifton is an enslaved black woman at this point, in the past she would've been subject to the separate Negro courts. But in 1780, Pennsylvania had passed a gradual abolition act. So they actually freed any enslaved blacks born after 1780. But this act of gradual abolition didn't do anything for folks like Alice Clifton except allow them to be tried in the regular courts. They would still remain enslaved, but they would be tried as if they were free because the 1780 Act had also gotten rid of the separate Negro courts.</s>CHIDEYA: So it was kind of the worst of both worlds.</s>Professor KALI NICOLE GROSS (History, Director of Africana Studies, Drexel University): It is the worst of both worlds in many respects. And also, I really chose that case to open up the book with, because I felt like it did this great job of highlighting the sort of confinement and the parameters of black womanhood during the time period. You know, it's almost like, you know, too high to get over, too low to get under. You're not free, but we will try you as a free person.</s>CHIDEYA: So what does this story say to you about the nature of black female criminality at this point, during America's evolution? And how does it have relevance now?</s>Professor KALI NICOLE GROSS (History, Director of Africana Studies, Drexel University): Well, one of the things that I argue in the book and what I think that the case starts to highlight is that black female crime is constructed jointly by both the perpetrators and the state. So that black women are - because of the bias and the bigotry of the period - they're socially, economically, politically disenfranchised in almost every way.</s>Professor KALI NICOLE GROSS (History, Director of Africana Studies, Drexel University): So that in order for them to attain even a minimal quality of life, law-breaking or doing and acting in ways that are outside of the law are often some of the only avenues that they have to exert any sort of autonomy.</s>Professor KALI NICOLE GROSS (History, Director of Africana Studies, Drexel University): But at the same time, it's also in some respects constructed by the state in the terms of the way that the laws and the early legislation sort of legally wrought the parameters that left an Alice Clifton no choice for freedom, except, you know, over the corpse of her, you know, illegitimate child, essentially.</s>CHIDEYA: I guess where I would end with this - because your book has some many facets - is you have a whole chapter called Deviant By Design: Race, Degeneracy and the Science of Penology. And you have a quote from a book - the Science of Penology, written in 1893 - that says, the possible criminal must be caught and rendered harmless before he can act. The constant reinforcement and recruiting of the criminal class must be checked at its source.</s>CHIDEYA: Now that's kind of an equivalent of preemptive war against crime. What did that do to black women who were arrested, tried, convicted, back in the turn of the last century, and what is it doing now?</s>Professor KALI NICOLE GROSS (History, Director of Africana Studies, Drexel University): One of the things that they start to seize upon is this idea of an occasional and a habitual criminal. Right? That there are a certain class of criminals who fall into crime for a variety of reasons in that they can be saved and redeemed through, you know, rehabilitation and reintegrate into society.</s>Professor KALI NICOLE GROSS (History, Director of Africana Studies, Drexel University): Then there was this idea that they were habitual criminals. These are people who were biologically deficient and prone to criminal activity. And the ways that they define habitual criminality were along the very sort of biased biological ideas about criminal heredity.</s>Professor KALI NICOLE GROSS (History, Director of Africana Studies, Drexel University): So basically, habitual criminal identified those characteristics that were the antithesis of white middle class hegemony for the time period. So this has huge implications for black women because it essentially renders almost criminals on sight. It's almost like an early form of racial profiling.</s>Professor KALI NICOLE GROSS (History, Director of Africana Studies, Drexel University): But I think for black women today, there still is a type of profile or a hopelessness about what can be done with folks once they have committed crimes. That we don't view these people as folks who have made a mistake and can be helped and can be brought back into the fold.</s>CHIDEYA: Professor Gross, thank you so much.</s>Professor KALI NICOLE GROSS (History, Director of Africana Studies, Drexel University): Thank you.</s>ED GORDON, host: That was Kali Nicole Gross speaking with NPR's Farai Chideya about Gross's new book, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910. Gross is a history professor and the director of Africana studies at Drexel University in Philadelphia.</s>ED GORDON, host: That's our program for today. Thanks for joining us. To listen to the show, visit npr.org. And if you'd like to give us a comment, call 202-408-3330. NEWS AND NOTES was created by NPR News and the African-American Public Radio Consortium.</s>ED GORDON, host: I'm Ed Gordon. This is NEWS AND NOTES.