Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

by Monique W. Morris

In 1933, there were 1,803 Black girls whose delinquency cases were disposed in sixty-seven courts and eight Black girls whose cases were “handled by federal authorities.”21 However, these girls were still expected to rehabilitate in separate and inferior environments that failed to support their educational development. For example, in 1936, at the New York Training School for Girls in Hudson, New York, Black girls—who were 19 percent of the girls in the facility at the time—were segregated from White female residents and forced to reside in two of the most “crowded and dilapidated of the reformatory’s ‘cottages.’”22 Jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald was once assigned to this facility for being an “ungovernable” teen.23 Here she was quarantined, tortured, and excluded from participating in the choir, as it was reserved for White girls only.