Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York by Carl Suddler (review)

This is a revelatory history of black youth (mostly males) who grew up in Harlem from the Great Depression through the 1960s. As Carl Suddler acknowledges, "Presumed Criminal is, like, many African American histories, a labor of love written by you, for you" (162). It seeks to fill the historiographic gap between sociolegal histories of juvenile courts during the Progressive Era and the burgeoning carceral studies literature about the War on Crime. The book's original and significant contributions flow from examining the history of American juvenile justice, broadly conceived, as African American history. This framing foregrounds the contributions of prominent African American cultural leaders such as James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Jackie Robinson, and Sammy Davis Jr., while historicizing the experiences of "the many youth who did not join gangs in post-war New York City" but who were "criminalized by association and forced to cope with the unjustified consequences that followed" (9). By the mid-1960s, this meant living in an occupied "police state" that legalized "stop-and-frisk" searches and surprise "no-knock" entries into private residences.

With its focus on the urban north, Presumed Criminal complements Tera Eve Agyepong's The Criminalization of Black Children, which examined the harsh treatment of black boys and girls in Chicago during the first half of the twentieth century. Whereas Agyepong's book focuses on the juvenile justice system and the institutionalization of children, Suddler devotes only one chapter to the actual justice system before turning his attention "from the courts to the streets" (10). The heart of the book includes chapters about the Harlem Uprising in 1943, the city's response to the postwar crime wave, and a wide range of anti-delinquency programs during the 1950s. The final chapter uses the case of the Harlem Six (later the Harlem Four) to examine what life was like for black youth as the War on Crime intensified during the 1960s. The afterword explores the connections between this history and the emergence of the Black Lives Matters movement in the wake of Trayvon Martin's 2012 death and the acquittal of his killer.

Writing the history of juvenile justice as African American history elucidates the role of black youth and their families as historical actors. Beginning with the first sentence of the book, "I just got mixed up some with some jerky kids," uttered by David Campanella, the fifteen-year-old son of the former baseball great Roy Campanella, Suddler highlights the voice of black youth (1). They include thirteen-year-old Vaughan Dweck, one of the more than one hundred students who attended a retrial of the Harlem Four. The Harlem Four were repeatedly tried for the 1964 murder of a Margit Sugar, a secondhand clothes dealer who was white. Dweck told the New York Times, "I can't help thinking that could be me. I'd be scared if I was up there like that" (144). The Harlem Four were incarcerated for nearly a decade before they were given the option to plead to a lesser charge and were finally freed in 1973. The other two members of the original six were released in 1974 and 1991.

Presumed Criminal is a valuable contribution to the historical literature about the condemnation of blackness that helps to explain today's implicit biases among Americans. The book, however, missed an opportunity to connect this postwar history to New York State's subsequent adoption of the nation's toughest juvenile law in the late 1970s. It would also be fascinating to explore whether there are similarities between how black youth followed the case of the Harlem Six and the attention they paid to the Central Park Five, whose case helped to launch the "super-predator" scare and spurred on the draconian policies of the 1990s that targeted African American and Latino youth.

Overall, Presumed Criminal is a haunting book that...