Historian Mary Ann Curtin has observed that many scholars who have acknowledged the deeply entrenched racism of the post-Civil War structures of punishment in the South have failed to identify the extent to which racism colored common-sense understandings of the circumstances surrounding the wholesale criminalization of black communities. Even antiracist historians, she contends, do not go far enough in examining the ways in which black people were made into criminals. They point out—and this, she says, is indeed partially true—that in the aftermath of emancipation, large numbers of black
...more
