Southern Mercy: Empire and American Civilization in Juvenile Reform, 1890–1944 by Annette Louise Bickford (review)

In Southern Mercy, Annette Louise Bickford makes a compelling case that Progressive-Era juvenile reform institutions in North Carolina fostered and maintained white supremacy under the guise of compassion. Show trials, policy initiatives, budgetary expenditures, and state-sponsored intervention into the lives of poor white and black families demonstrated to the North that the South could act in civilized ways despite a record of lynching and mob violence. Through publicity about the founding of institutions like the State Industrial School at Samarcand for white girls and the Morrison Training School for black boys, white North Carolinians flaunted their generosity and law-abiding ways to a Northern elite suspicious of white Southerners' fitness for the white supremacist project of building empire.

Employing robust postmodern theory, Bickford analyzes four juvenile reformatories founded between 1891 and 1923. She shows how proclamations of mercy in the context of Southern modernity shaped liberal humanism through the racial- and gender-inflected policies of the criminal justice system. In addition to the Samarcand and Morrison facilities, the Stonewall Jackson Manual Training and Industrial School for white boys and the State Training School for Negro Girls at Efland provide a context for examining the local-level dynamics of state-sponsored disciplinary practices. For example, Bickford explains how the state's decision to provide a refuge for black boys from the threats of lynch mobs drew public attention to compassionate justice while obscuring inadequate funding, widespread violence, and abject neglect at the hands of those tasked with saving children of African descent. A record of abuse fronted by a veneer of propriety served the political interests of the white reformers.

Replete with ethnographic and historical detail, the anecdotes at the heart of Southern Mercy fill the narrative with pathos and tragedy. Despite a public show of mercy, twelve of the sixteen girls who set fire to buildings in which they had experienced prolonged mistreatment and injurious harm ultimately spent their teen years incarcerated. One Morrison Training School ward died at the hands of fellow residents after they beat him for attempting to run away. An adult supervisor watched the beating and staged a drowning accident to cover up the murder. Many residents of the Samarcand institution received involuntary hysterectomies during their stay, a procedure inspired by eugenics and part of a larger initiative to control the residents' minds and bodies.

But the author is far more interested in applying the theories of Michel Foucault than in evoking pity through poignant stories. The text is chockablock with Foucauldian quotations, theories, and references. While many of these insights serve her argument well, the sheer plentitude of textual references to the French postmodernist at times proves distracting. A more judicious sprinkling of his theory would have made for a more balanced and well-seasoned text.

Bickford is at her best when parsing the contradictory impulses of the white and black reformers engaged in juvenile reform. For example, the efforts of African American progressive Charlotte Hawkins Brown to found and sustain a reform facility for black girls appear both heroic and conflicted. On the one hand, Brown pushed back hard against the assumption that black girls were invisible and unworthy of state support. On the other, she colluded with white bourgeois reformers' conviction that black women and girls were promiscuous and ultimately unfit for motherhood. In the process, the goal of reformulating "Southern womanhood" to include black and white representations of femininity remained elusive (119).

The ultimate goal of Southern Mercy is to critique contemporary criminal justice practices. As the author declares at the onset, her book is "directed more at the present than the past" (23). She concludes by excoriating modern criminal justice practices, calling for radical rather than gradualist action, and enjoining her readers to "think about the past in different ways" as a first step toward contemporary reform (200).

In this trenchant critique of the contemporary criminal...