Mapping the Contours of Black Juvenile Delinquency: The Journal of Negro Education, 1945-1975

Abstract

This essay draws on media studies methodologies to map the ways in which the Journal of Negro Education (JNE) defined juvenile delinquency both as a legal and social construct and how its contributors and approached the relationship between delinquency and schooling between 1945 and 1975. Situated in the mediatized history of social science and its role in defining issues of public concern, and in historiography that attends to the criminalization of black youth, this essay contends that the shifting meanings of what delinquency symbolized in the pages of JNE and its relationship to race allow us insight into how the liberal democratic state has approached who counts as a citizen, who can be included in the future of the nation, and how schools as total institutions are related to white supremacist notions of discipline and control.