2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This roundtable explores African American women and biased justice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Kali Gross’s comments will examine racialized and gendered police brutality as well as instances of witness intimidation in the urban north.  She aims to consider how the violence black women endured in police custody relates to the kinds of violence that dogged African American women in both black and white communities in Philadelphia.  She will also serve as the panel’s moderator. LaShawn Harris’s comments will concentrate on how troubling partnerships between the New York City Police Department and criminal informants during the mid-1920s adversely impacted urban African American women’s daily lives. Harris is particularly concerned with the ways that urban surveillance operations disrupted women’s efforts to earn a living, participate in city amusements, and maintain their households. Cheryl Hicks will explore the historical and contemporary implications of New York’s 1900 race riot.  She will focus on the ways in which black working women’s defense of their civil and human rights put them at odds with the state, white society, the black elite, and black working men. Talitha LeFlouria will discuss the ways in which the “twin infamies” of imprisonment and anti-black gendered violence has affected the lives of black women, past and present. Beginning in the post-emancipation south, she will trace the seeds of black female incarceration to show why its roots and the silence surrounding it remain stronger than ever.