Sabotage and the Black Girl Commons

Abstract

Racist regionalism and the disparagement of migrants compounded with gender and minor status related to age to articulate ‘negro girl’ as a category included parasitically within Philadelphia’s post-Second World War infrastructures. Shoehorned into tedious home economics courses at school and expected to augment family reproductive labor as daughters until they married and/or found work as domestics, their lifetimes were set by others for a combination of uncompensated reproductive labor and servitude. Those confined by racialized gender, age, and class, however, articulated discordant arrangements of time, space, and life course. I gather these acts in their dynamic relationship to surveillance, violence, and carcerality toward the conceptualization of sabotage and toward a corollary concept, the black girl commons. Taken together, the subjects at the center of this work reappropriated or expropriated time outside the routinized, habitual, and normalizing regimen associated with nascent constructions of teenage life course that delimited their activities to confining education, reproductive labor, or sanctioned extracurricular activity.

Keywords

Black studies commons Fordism sabotage urban youth 1950s

Introduction

For had I lived the life the State planned for me from the beginning . . . I would have lived and died in somebody else’s kitchen, on somebody else’s land and never written a word.¹ (Toni Morrison, 1986)

Racist regionalism and the disparagement of migrants compounded with gender and minor status related to age to articulate ‘negro girl’ as a category included parasitically (Sakai, 2014 [1983]) within Philadelphia’s post-Second World War infrastructures.² Not afforded the protection of whiteness, ‘boyhood’, or wealth (Beal, 2008; King, 1988) – as future normative white men/breadwinners – these subjects experienced the premature truncation of their life courses, their aspirations and trajectories bookended between families’, society’s and the state’s expectations for ‘negro girl’ and ‘negro mother’. Shoehorned into tedious home economics courses at school and expected to augment family reproductive labor as daughters until they married and/or found work as domestics, their lifetimes were set by others for a combination of uncompensated reproductive labor and servitude.

Those confined by racialized gender, age, and class, however, articulated discordant arrangements of time, space, and life course. Huewayne Watson’s (2021) research and exhibition about prolific Philadelphia artist Anna Russell-Jones’s development as a designer and artist demonstrates how Russell-Jones defied social expectation in school curricula for girls and within her own family, to pursue a path outside of its preemptive foreclosure. Some simply absconded from school for weeks in defiance of their assigned home economics course. Others stayed out well past their parents’ curfews or remained ungovernable within the prescribed rules and restrictions within their households related to caring for siblings or performing chores. Some moved slower than their foster parents wanted them to or failed to respond verbally or otherwise to commands from teachers or parents, perceived as engaging in quiet obstinance. Others ran away to stay with friends or other family for weekends or weeks. Some refused asexuality when their ages determined for officials or parents that they should be without sexual desire. Others were marked by peers or parents and inscribed by social workers as ‘too fast’ when they refused celibacy or monogamy at ages that adults held that they should be in transition from school to marriage. Some experienced what others perceived as bouts of madness that took them out of the time of others’ reality and placed them at odds with prescribed schedules of ordered becoming.

I gather these acts in their dynamic relationship to surveillance, violence, and carcerality toward the conceptualization of sabotage and toward a corollary concept, the Black girl commons. Taken together, the subjects at the center of this work reappropriated or expropriated time outside the routinized, habitual, and normalizing regimen associated with nascent constructions of teenage life course that delimited their activities to confining education, reproductive labor, or sanctioned extracurricular activity.³

While my descriptive ‘Black girl commons’ may appear to reinforce the state’s biossentialist, carceral categorization, the concept is deployed as a Black feminist analytic to interrogate racialized gender as a historical production of time and lifetime. In this work it describes an analytic pooling of the discordant times of youth as they redeployed their own visions of daily activity and time as well as those for their wider life schedules outside carceral racialized gender reinforced between homes, schools, and neighborhoods. As developed by Sarah Haley (2016) and in dynamic discussions within Black feminist urban studies analyses of policing, racialized gender, sexuality, undergrounds, and alternative temporal-spatial arrangements, (Austin, 2019; Carby, 1992; Cox, 2015; Griffin, 2021; Gross, 2024; Harris, 2016; Hartman, 2018, 2019; Hicks, 2010; Jones, 2018; Oloukoï, 2023; Simmons, 2015).

According to Sotoman (2023: 198):

[s]abotge is not about success or triumph against systematic violence and dispossession. Instead, it is about the practice of life, living, disruption, rupture, and imagined futures; it is about the development of epistemologies of justice and collectivity, contestations of the binaries produced through Western juridical doctrine and the individualizing ethos of criminal punishment.

For Haley, the Black girl commons describes the acts of sabotage and other forms of action breeching order in a ‘traversal of the “micropenality of everyday life,” querying and threatening the “relations of household and property”’ (Haley, 2016: 198).

At the most fundamental level, subjects deviating from schedules stole or were perceived as stealing time or its corollaries, in the form of currency as embodied social labor time, or space as the material fold or pocket where unceded or unsanctioned time articulated. Thus, sabotage in this essay names the acts of subversion exposing the post-Second World War industrial metropolis as a gendered racial capitalist enclosure extracting time and lifetimes through theft and perceived theft. Rather than describing a stable alternative organization of time-space (Santos, 2021; Yusoff 2024), the Black girl commons analytically aggregates ephemeral alternative temporal projects out of time with the time of governance, seeking in their discordance forms of remaindered existence engendered through ‘the profane art of making life out of scraps, fissures, and shifts of space and time’ (Tadiar, 2022: 313) and exposing state-market power’s maneuvering through policing, surveilling, ‘adjusting’, incarcerating, or otherwise taming dissonance as a central feature of Keynesian-Fordist temporal and spatial governance.

In the next section, before analyzing sabotage in archives of capture (Fuentes, 2016), I examine the ideological and material construction of the carceral state (Gilmore, 2007) central to constructing ‘teenage’ years that, while not focused on ‘negro girls’ as its primary objects, nevertheless entangled them disproportionately in its expansion. I analyze especially how popularized criminology underwrote the state’s carceral management of social outliers. In the final section, I turn to archives primarily containing ‘negro girls’ through social worker files and engage them through the analytic of the Black girl commons and sabotage related to temporal enclosure in daily life and lifetimes. While many girls did experience incarceration and remanding to youth jails or the state reformatory system, the majority were placed under a more dispersed surveillance regime with the Juvenile Aid Bureau, which utilized police and social workers to ‘adjust’ them back into the normative becoming of racialized gender. I view these records within that dynamic between stolen time, perceived theft, and an analytic assembling through the Black girl commons.

Juvenile Delinquency and Captive Lifetime

In 1942, the Cooperating Council of Agencies Serving Negro Youth published what they termed ‘A Statement on Juvenile Delinquency Among Negroes in Philadelphia’ titled ‘What Makes Johnnie Bad?’, identifying the uptick in arrests for violence and other illicit activities as a city crisis, resulting from a problem of maladjusted ‘negro boys’ whose parents’ tutelage in southern mores combined with the loosening of morality associated with neighborhoods of concentrated recent urbanization in sociological and criminological discourses (Frazier, 2001 [1939]; Roane, 2023). Although ‘negro girls’ remained unnamed, they were shadowed in this statement through the invocation of ‘negro mothers’. This formulation of life course from unseen ‘negro girls’ to hyper-visible ‘negro mothers’ allowed state conjuring, figuration, and discursive plasticity in public discourse as the bogeywomen of federal urbanism (Collins, 1990; Jackson, 2020; Spillers, 1987). For those marked as ‘negro girls’, their youthful invisibility did not serve as protection. Formulations of youthful delinquency designed paradigmatically around boys snared them disproportionately.

In the 1950s, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, a lawyer and social worker respectively, gained a popular intellectual ascendancy in Philadelphia following the publication of their Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency (1950). The work included a compendium of ‘predictive charts’ whereby these researchers held they could prognosticate life-long crime for individuals at age six based on various demographic and social factors. Their object of concern was the formation of gangs. The Gluecks held that gangs formed as alienated boys sought social bonds outside dysfunctional homes. In their emphasis on alienation and the home, they cast gangs as a feature of ‘maladjustment’ perpetuated by the conditions of parental rearing.

The Gluecks helped to codify the teenage years as an isolatable part of childhood, serving as a point of intervention by the state. They advocated preemptive action whereby youth exhibiting any of the characteristics associated statistically with future criminality or ‘maladjustment’ would receive interventions bringing them back along the path of ‘normal’ or ‘adjusted’ becoming. The Gluecks advocated punishment including physical punishment by parents – though not to the extreme which they held helped to create criminality – and ‘rehabilitative’ surveillance and confinement by the state in various facilities for youth who were susceptible or likely to commit future criminal acts. Although they didn’t embrace full biological determinism, they did use ‘body type’ and particularly references to the stature, muscularity, and nervous and distrustful behavior of ‘isomorphic boys’ in ways that extended their accounting into partially biological deterministic frameworks familiar from earlier mainstream eugenics that by the 1950s was largely discredited. The Gluecks suggested the heritability of criminality not at the level of extensive family lineage but rather in the proximate socially determined homelife of a given child.

Although the Gluecks’ long-term research focused primarily on white ethnic boys in Boston, in the context of Philadelphia their ideas were appropriated in the context of the city’s racialized fissures at a point that they were being remade by demographic transformation. This was crosscut by the contradictory rise of formal antidiscrimination policies following activism by Sadie Tanner and others to transform the 1951 Home Rule Charter in support of civil rights which unfolded against a backdrop of the everyday bureaucratic, scholarly, and journalistic production of Blackness, conflating it with sinister forms of darkness and associating Black people with slums and servile labor (Countryman, 2006).

Critical Black sociologist Ira De Augustine Reid responded in the context of the Gluecks’ ascendency, deploying and reshaping the metrics of sociological analysis to contextualize the rising ‘problem’ of Black juvenile delinquency in the 1950s and 1960s. On 25 January 1956, the Armstrong Association, Philadelphia’s chapter of the Urban League, invited Reid to give the opening remarks for a conference the organization held to address the issue of Black children’s contact with police. Reid used his remarks to contextualize disproportionate arrests in racial inequality. He asked, ‘how long must a metropolitan community of the size and quality of Philadelphia continue to have a racially bifurcated program of child welfare? What prevents Philadelphia from having programs in this area freed from the troubles of discrimination, separation, and inadequacy?’ Reid explicitly challenged the notion of racialized youth as ‘on the verge of trouble’ or as ‘pre-delinquents’ associated with the Gluecks’ research. He highlighted the Ford Foundation awarding of $100,000 to the researchers to ‘study cures for delinquents-to-be’, denouncing their characterization of ‘presumptive delinquents’.

In later addresses, Reid contextualized ‘delinquency’ within the shifting political economy of the city that drew an increasing number of mothers into the work force, but which did not provide adequate or equal access to childcare. According to Reid (1967):

All children are equal, but some more equal than others. The children for whom care must be provided while their mothers and/or guardians and/or fathers work are among the less equal. Working mothers are an accepted part of the American economy. . . . What webs are we weaving with the type and amount of daytime care available to these children and their parents?

In a 28 March 1960 address entitled ‘The Urban World Around the Young – Babylon or the New Jerusalem?’, he paralleled the racialized ‘juvenile delinquent’ with what he termed ‘the organization child’ or ‘the child who has learned to package his personality for sale to his organization parent’. Rather than simply conceding the disruptive and dismaying devolution of society as embodied in the racialized delinquent, Reid resituated the delinquent among a host of children, including the cookie cutter white executive’s child.

The Gluecks and their interlocutors, despite critical interventions by Reid, configured their object, the delinquent, with negative potential in ways that justified youth surveillance, criminalization, and incarceration as Fordism became the hegemonic mode of production and social reproduction. Covered by more than a dozen stories spanning the decade published in the Inquirer, the pair of Harvard researchers provided a template for the construction of the city’s innovative carceral infrastructures for youth. This intellectual context underwrote the expansion in the 1950s of carceral institutions in the name of rehabilitating youth and as a central feature of the rationalization of urban space through the extension of earlier city infrastructures by way of urban renewal.

Philadelphia’s Youth Study Center exemplifies the efforts of liberal reformers and other dominant urbanists to expand carceral facilities to rehabilitate youth from delinquency.⁴ Designed by J. Roy Caroll, Jr. of Caroll, Grisdale, and Allen, a Philadelphia-based architectural firm that built significant municipal buildings across the region, YSC was created to rationalize errant urban youth. Opened in the spring of 1952 originally to accommodate youth above the age of 16, the euphemized jail embodied its mission to alter youth behavior, particularly to keep youths from running away and to assure that they attended school daily while they awaited court.

The architects designed the third floor with four classrooms for boys and two for girls. In turn, each of these classrooms ‘could be opened in pairs as they were divided by moveable partitions’ into larger spaces to accommodate variable activities. The architects also included in their designs of the educational section a ‘continuous counter with a sink and cupboards for shop and craft work’, including a ‘rolling shutter’ that could conveniently hide away materials for these portions of the industrial curriculum when teachers needed the rooms for other forms of instruction. The third-floor educational portion of the facility also included a library and a ‘teacher’s room’ to better accommodate the center’s educational programming (Carroll, 1950). Further, Board of Education Superintendent Philip A. Boyer coordinated with the Detention for Children’s assistant superintendent Norbury S. Teter to provide furniture and other equipment on behalf of the city’s Board of Education. The facility’s superintendent budget covered the other ‘consumable supplies’ necessary for incarcerated education (Roy, 1950).

As the extant memo trail upward along the facility’s management hierarchy demonstrates, youth complained of hunger and cold and other indignities from the beginning of the facility’s operations. They experienced brutality at the hands of guards and in response to each other. Rather than the concentrated learning environment purported by the architectural features of the space, youth experienced it as an impoverished learning environment with more guards than staff and teachers (Teter, 1953). Infamously, by the mid-1960s the backlog of court appointments made the YSC a publicly acknowledged hell for youth remanded there for extended periods in severely overcrowded conditions and marred by rampant sexual assault.

In a 1961 article for the American Teacher Magazine, Celia Pincus and Dorothea Murray, the president and a past secretary of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers Local 3, captured the integral place of expanding carceral infrastructures in the visions for urban futurity in the postwar era. Pincus and Murray situated efforts to address the perceived growing criminality among the city’s racialized youth as part of the broader efforts to change ‘the face of the city’ through planning ‘an active port authority, a devoted housing authority, and remarkable recreational and cultural facilities’. For Pincus and Murray, the issue of juvenile delinquency was primarily a problem of the draining of the city’s financial resources. According to them, the ‘relatively small group of families’ that incubated the city’s delinquents ‘usurp[ed] the largest portion of welfare dollar . . . eat[ing] up 45 per cent of the city’s income’ while contributing ‘only 6 per cent of the real estate tax’.

In the context of the ‘growing problem’ of racialized delinquency and the general sentiment of the 1950s and 1960s that the stakes of juvenile crime were increasing in their danger, Pincus and Murray lauded Philadelphia’s ‘new approach to juvenile delinquency’ which incorporated a massive social service initiative including the Youth Conservation Services, the youth employment agency, the Youth Conservation Corps, several tactical attempts at gang control including the Project Outreach of the Family Counseling Service of the Episcopal Community Services and Operation Poplar administered by Friends’ Neighborhood Guild, and the YSC, among other projects to prevent, ‘cure’, and provide ‘after-care’ for ‘juvenile offenders’. ‘Delinquents’ were configured generically by school officials as drains and future drains, costing the city more than they or their families contributed.

The logic of rehabilitation through confinement or regular social worker visits and a more dispersed surveillance network developed in the 1950s and 1960s. It emerged between policy and popular criminology and developed material processes and infrastructures for youth surveillance, criminalization, and incarceration that underwrote the racialized public and the (white) commons. These meted out punishment through the logics of racialized gender and differentiation, with social workers used most often to punish or surveil those marked as girls and disproportionately ‘negro girls’ to bring them back into domestication, replete with all its material and figurative connotations of subservience and servitude in the daily sense and in the life trajectory. Actions meant to target ‘boys’, especially those involved in ‘gangs’, snared a significant number of girls. In their maneuvering and contestations of enclosed time and lifetimes, those marked as ‘negro girls’ figured in glimpses of an alternative arrangement of time-space along with exposing the temporal-spatial enclosure ensuring the Fordist production of public/commons.

Sabotage and the Black Girl Commons in the 1950s

Helen and Ruth

The minutiae of the ‘face sheet’ Mr. J. Reznick used to initiate the file at the Juvenile Aid Bureau for Helen makes evident the dynamics of discourses of delinquency, their activation through ‘preventative’ action, and the production of racialized gender in a direct relationship to the construction of age and becoming in 1950s Philadelphia. Where the form provides space to write in ‘Boy’s Name’, Reznick crossed out ‘Boy’s’ and superscripted ‘Girls [sic]’. He marked Helen under race as ‘negro’. Over the name of Helen’s mother, Sarah, the worker parenthetically inserted ‘not married’, although she was in fact widowed, as subsequent notes made clear. While girls were not the primary targets of Glueck-style intervention, ‘negro girls’ were nevertheless often the objects of intervention and state action in Philadelphia as rehabilitation-centered carceral processes came to occupy a central function in the postwar city.

While ‘Negro mother’ was taken up in discussions about boys and gangs marking ‘irregular’, ‘queer’, or ‘pathological’ homes as generating antisocial behavior as a truism buttressed by the 1950s, here we also see it deployed to configure ‘negro girl’ through an accounting of ‘maladjustment’ and the processes of ‘adjustment’. In the life of the form, Helen came to be represented as ‘girl’ superscripted over the primary association of delinquent with ‘boy’ and as future ‘queer hybrid breadwinner / unpaid reproductive laborer’ through the superimposition of ‘unmarried’ overwriting her mother.

Fifteen years old, Helen lived with her mother Sarah and her older sister Ruth on Baring Street in Powelton when she had her intake interview on 4 May 1953. Although Sarah had come for an appointment originally intended to discuss her elder daughter Ruth, she used the session to ask Reznick for help with Helen, who she noted ‘will not cooperate’. Sarah suggested that part of the trouble she experienced with Ruth, and subsequently with Helen, was related to the precarious economic situation that she found herself in following her husband’s death five years before. As she noted, she could only barely afford to keep herself and the girls together on the piecemeal work she was able to secure as a domestic laborer.

Helen’s primary transgressions were her defiance of her curfew as well as her refusal to attend school. Helen did not deny skipping school. She justified the decision, disclosing that she did not enjoy school at Sulzberger following her transfer out of Shaw, which Reznick noted was ‘because of her behavior’. Helen was candid about why she missed curfew. She told Reznick that she stayed out late because she was involved sexually and romantically with a 19-year-old boy named Steve Williams. Reznick’s response sought to render Helen’s sexual and romantic activity as dangerous, emphasizing that she ‘was unready in every way for a relationship of the nature [sic]’. Reznick took hope in the ways that ‘the youngster sobered up and took a most active part in the discussion’. According to him, Helen agreed to ‘keep earlier hours and be in the house by 7:00 p.m. when her mother returns from work’ and to ‘attend school daily’. According to Reznick, she also agreed to ‘have nothing further to do with the Williams boy’ and to ‘return for follow up visits’.

The terms of agency worker inscriptions demonstrating his ability to intervene map the temporal-spatial enclosure between school and home. Helen’s movements registered as intentional misappropriations of time outside the schedule of daily routine or out of the prescribed life course from school to marriage and domestic labor intended for poor ‘negro girls’. On 5 May, Reznick transferred the case to another case worker, Mrs. Chance; on 3 June 1953, Helen attended without her mother, although Sarah did call to ensure Helen had arrived. Helen candidly noted that she had not attended school. She excused herself by saying she had suffered a sore throat and disclosed that she did not have appropriate shoes. Mrs. Chance placed the onus of responsibility for missing attendance – especially in relation to not having appropriate shoes – on Helen herself in a telling formulation: ‘She knew that she could have gone to the counselor but had not done so.’

Helen also continued to lament her transfer from Shaw to her new caseworker, explaining ‘that she didn’t like Sulzberger because she was homesick for Shaw’. Chance responded to this ‘homesickness’ for another school by telling Helen that ‘it was useless to yearn for that sort of good time’. Chance threatened that if Helen did not attend her new school, she ‘would either be placed or sent to a disciplinary school’, which Helen admitted she would not like. The back and forth between Chance and Helen reveal these contests over time in the registers of its daily expenditure in compulsory education and home life.

While Chance noted that Helen was ‘an intelligent girl which fact is obvious from holding a conversation with her’, she found a physical path toward ‘understanding’ her maladjustment. Mrs. Chance described Helen as ‘greatly overweight’. Rather than seeing her own engagements with Helen’s weight as part of the antagonism, the caseworker underscored how this condition of being ‘greatly overweight’ made Helen ‘self-conscious’ and made ‘her wish she could do something about it’. The agency policewoman, Mrs. Ketcham, stepped in to recommend to Helen the ‘nearest Health Clinic where she could get help for her problem’. Reznick had also described Helen as ‘a very large girl who appears older than her mother’. While in the Gluecks’ assessment of boys they most often associated ‘isomorphic’ stature in boys with criminality, when social workers did intakes for those designated as girls, descriptions of size, especially ‘large’ or ‘overweight’, often signified a similar function in characterizing girls’ objectionable behavior as part of their physique or social responses to it. Delinquency could be profiled combining social, economic, and physical characteristics against the backdrop of normative racialized gender becoming a central features of social work casefiles.

When Chance asked about the status of her relationship with Steve, Helen said that she ‘had taken Mr. Reznick’s advice and was no longer seeing her boyfriend’. Chance confronted Helen with lying when she and Ketcham noticed that Helen ‘was wearing a dime store wedding and engagement ring on her left [hand]’. Chance’s probing embarrassed Helen into admitting that Steve had given them to her. Chance noted that she would follow up in her next interview about ‘Helen’s relationship with this boy and boys in general’.

On 6 July 1953, policewoman Ketcham spoke with Helen’s mother, who conveyed that Helen had begun to work for her Uncle Stephan on S. 15th Street, ‘taking care of children’. Sarah noted that when not at work for her uncle, Helen was home from Saturday night to Monday morning. Sarah confirmed that the caseworkers had ‘done wonders’ with Helen, underscoring that she was working and that she always let her mother know where she was. Following this phone discussion, Chance closed Helen’s file, marking it as ‘Adjustment sustained (good adjustment)’ – ‘good adjustment’ here in the interface between parental desire and the state for the strict regulation of time and its deployment to ‘useful’ modes of social reproduction as domestic.

The stakes of the contest Helen waged for her own time were revealed in the reversal from her ‘good adjustment’ to a new series of meetings in the fall of 1953. Sarah brought Helen back for an appointment that she requested on 21 October 1953, this time with the caseworker Mrs. Morrill. Following her summer work caring for her uncle’s children near the naval yards, Helen had lapsed from the promising regularity to which she had seemed to grow accustomed. Although she left home before her mother daily, Helen had been skipping school. Sarah, who was concerned about the costs of truancy-related fines as well as the gaps in her accounted for time, suggested that Helen’s concern for her weight and her inability to procure clothes that fit were the likely cause for her truancy. Sarah also revealed that Helen had been sick with tonsilitis and, despite two recent flare-ups, the family had not been able to afford a tonsillectomy.

Helen’s activities with boys also continued to concern her mother. Although she no longer saw Steve, Sarah suggested that Helen had a few boyfriends who she did not know by name. According to Sarah, ‘there was one older boy interested in Helen’, but he admitted to Sarah that Helen was ‘too fast’. Related to the frequency of unsanctioned time with ‘boyfriends’, Helen stayed out well past her agreed upon 7pm curfew, often staying out past midnight or 1am, according to her mother. While Helen and her mother had struck a compromise, with Sarah allowing Helen and her sister Ruth to entertain the company of ‘mostly boys’ on Friday evenings where they laughed and played the radio under her supervision, Sarah noted that their landlady had prohibited the family from playing the radio or having guests.

Policewoman Ketcham threatened to charge Helen formally with truancy for her continued refusal to attend school. This caused Helen to weep openly in the agency office. Eventually, Ketcham and Morrill agreed to ‘give Helen a second chance’ because her crying generated their sympathy. Helen again began attending school and the case was again closed on 25 November 1953, after Sarah had phoned to cancel their 4 November appointment and after Morrill had contacted the school counselor at Sulzberger to confirm that Helen had attended regularly.⁵

Helen’s truancy, her breaking of curfew, and her ‘too fast’ sexual experience illustrate the ways that those marked as ‘negro girls’ in these social worker archives sabotaged the temporal and spatial ordering of their lives in two registers. Foremost, Helen sabotaged time, stealing it and congealing it through truancy and curfew absconding. Helen’s actions and her mother’s and the shifting caseworkers’ attempts to discipline her, including their resolve that she was ‘adjusted’ when she engaged in a limited and restrictive schedule related to domestic reproduction in her uncle’s home, implicitly under his patriarchal authority, expose the infrastructure of Keynesian-Fordism’s carceral production of ‘negro girlhood’ as a compounding temporal enclosure of daily time and lifetime.⁶

The fugitive movement and temporary exiting from the routinized path of racialized gendered becoming as it began to crystallize in the postwar era was not romantically external to the state’s bureaucratic negation and the overall economy of social-spatial anti-value. The agency file folders that form the archive evidence that the state accumulated more authority through their attempt to contain action outside or against order and ordered becoming. I do not claim that my writing overwrites the historical generation of anti-value through a simple reversal in the meaning derived from these actions. However, I do engage this excess of fugitive becoming as the fleeting generation of potential exceeding a horizon of becoming as present perpetrator or victim, future redundancy, poorly compensated laborer, or as the harbinger or generator of pathological urban futures. In the context of the mid-20th century Keynesian-Fordist economy, the excess or fugitive remainder opened a quickly dissipating and unrecoverable horizon of possibility through lines of flight outside the household-school-carceral continuum and beyond its logics codifying racialized and gendered youth in poverty, violence, surveillance, and sequestration.

Sabotage here takes a diminutive form. There is no simple conflation of sabotage and liberation, nor is their a grand map of an alternative commons. I must assume that Helen, as precocious as she was, understood to some degree that pregnancy, death, or misery were a part of the horizon of acknowledged consequences without assuming, despite her youth, her automatic simplicity or naivete. That is not to say that youth don’t possess outlooks that might be cognized as ‘irrational’. Rather than recounting the dangers, I am distinguishing the demands relayed by youth, their parents, and agents of the state on the temporal-spatial organization of the city.

Helen’s older sister Ruth was originally brought into contact with the agency because of a fight she was arrested for in 1949. She was marked as ‘Adjusted’ by the caseworker after her first intake interview but found herself back in sessions in March 1953 after she was arrested for truancy and her mother fined $12.50 by the magistrates’ court. Ruth noted that she didn’t attend school because she did not like the home economics course to which she was assigned. Nevertheless, Ruth agreed at that time to return to school to avoid further trouble and was a month later released from the social worker meetings. Ruth’s disparaging of a school curriculum assigned by virtue of her race and gender through a theft or reclamation of her time exposed the school’s function in this context as enclosure, helping to generate and naturalize the racialized and gendering calibration of domesticity and uncompensated social reproduction.

Yvonne

Yvonne was a defiant girl in a world where various figures of authority, including her parents and representatives of the state, sought to impose forms of spatial and social restriction aligned with mid-20th-century visions of proper familial and urban governance. Although Yvonne performed well in school, her parents, and especially her father Thomas, sought to restrict her extracurricular time to reproductive labor, aiding her mother in house chores and babysitting. Yvonne, however, rejected the limitations placed on her for remaining in her parents’ home and she refused at ages nine and ten to engage in uncompensated labor assisting in reproducing her household.

Yvonne initiated defiance by running away from her parents to her grandmother Corrine’s house, according to her mother June, with the encouragement of her grandmother. For Yvonne her grandmother’s home represented a familiar space, where she had spent a few of her earlier years as her parents had built their finances to purchase their home (US Census, 1950). Yvonne found that returning to stay with her grandmother allowed her to live outside the pinch of acute want that defined the limits of her father’s ‘family wage’. With her grandmother, she had her own space, and her activities decentered care or concern for her younger siblings, allowing her to cultivate her desires for youthful becoming outside caretaking responsibility. Corinne was willing to spare enough sugar for her to experiment with baking pies for church functions. She also supported her intellectual and elocutionary precociousness, encouraging her to make public presentations at the Elks Temple, a Black social club, for which Yvonne garnered named recognition in the Philadelphia Tribune.

Yvonne’s willfulness and rebelliousness grew worrisome for her parents when she took money from her father’s wallet to travel to the beaches at Wildwood and Atlantic City in New Jersey and later New York City, unaccompanied by an adult. Her father was furious about her excursions and its tax on his limited wages. In response, he took her to the city’s YSC, turning to the state to help resolve what he considered his daughter’s dangerous wanderlust and disobedience, and attempting to use one of the city’s newly constructed carceral facilities to discipline his daughter through a kind of scared-straight confinement. Although the YSC did not accept her, as it was designed primarily for youth awaiting court dates, these actions nevertheless brought Yvonne and her entire family under the scrutiny of the state through social service appointments.

The attempt to remand their daughter to the YSC is part of a complex response to the particular vulnerability facing those marked as ‘negro girls’ in the context of mid-20th-century Philadelphia, given the available options open to working-class Black families and the state’s and reformers’ role in channeling fears for their children’s safety through police, jails, reformatory schools, prisons, social workers, and other processes and facilities reproducing surveillance and containment. Available records from 1949 of the city’s Pennypack House – the notorious children’s unit inside the city’s adult jail – underscore the vulnerability, especially to sexual violence, faced by the city’s youth. In the Pennypack House, the city processed young victims of sexual violence in addition to confining the girls marked as incorrigible or as runaways. Within and outside their homes, those noted as ‘negro girls’ experienced the sexual predation of others.⁷ The attempts by Yvonne’s family to discipline their daughter unfolded in a context in which she and others – with no identifiable connections to an adult figure of protection in the street and in transit, and often under the authority of parental and other figures within their living spaces and homes – often experienced alarming levels of violation.

Beyond an assessment of Yvonne as naïve, childish, selfish, or dangerously precocious, her actions in stealing money – embodied labor time – and absconding from reproductive labor drew to a head the contradictions and limitations of racialized gendered enclosure of youth. There is no longer evidence of what Yvonne envisioned for her failed trips to New York and New Jersey. Perhaps she had heard radio commercials or elders talking about these places, and wanderlust drew her to see them for herself. Perhaps it was an intent to escape her family in a more permanent sense, finding in these distant places the idea of another life for herself. Maybe she enjoyed antagonizing her parents as a direct rejoinder to their insistence about her scheduled time at school and home to care for her younger siblings. Yvonne might be read as selfish, inflicting harm on her siblings as much as on her parents. This is in part the nature of sabotage in its quotidian deployment: its untidiness or un-resolvability with certain forms of collective wellbeing. These actions nevertheless expose at once the family as class, racial, patriarchal, and age-based enclosures from the vantage of a youth negotiating the expectations of racialized gender and minor age as ‘eldest daughter’.

Priscilla

On 26 September 1956, Priscilla ran away from her mother’s home on W. Norris Street in North Philadelphia, leaving her young baby in her mother’s care. As the days went by with no word from Priscilla, her mother Lucille began to worry about her daughter’s safety. Just before 2 October 1956, Lucille called police to report Priscilla missing. Before interviewing her or her mother, Priscilla’s caseworker Noone phoned various agencies to procure information about the family. When Noone and policewoman Fawthorp interviewed Lucille on 15 January 1957 during their intake session for Priscilla, Lucille noted that at this point she regretted involving the police in her daughter’s case since it brought her to what she considered unnecessary sessions since the issue with Priscilla’s disapperance had been resolved. Noone reinforced her preconceived notion of Lucille garnered from contacts at the DPA. As Noone described it, Lucille ‘was vague about the number in her family, [and] how she supported them’, noting only that she ‘did domestic work occasionally’. Noone only parenthetically included Lucille’s mention of her chronic sickness.

As a counter to Lucille’s indifference about the previous instance of Priscilla running away, following her return Noone underscored its seriousness, emphasizing the potential dangers she might have faced while she was unaccounted for as a ‘girl’. This provoked Lucille further, who ‘interspersed quotations from the Bible to justify her rearing’ of Priscilla and her other children.

According to Noone, Priscilla ‘spoke freely about running away’, attributing her time spent at a friend’s house as part of her concern for her own safety. She recalled that ‘a gang – the Whalers’ were after her to join. She justified her running away by pointing out that the girls in the Whalers wanted to impress her into their collective activity of ‘shop lifting’ and stealing ‘purses from ladies’. Priscilla’s ability to flee to the safety of a friend’s home to avoid becoming associated with the street gang or its activities underscores the primary sociality of the Black girl commons in lateral relations like friendship. It shows these relationships as providing pockets of time and space that create windows of safety not provided directly by parents and only visible to social workers as disobedience.

Noone crosschecked and, in the notes, denied this explanation, underscoring that in the police report Priscilla had ‘said she had run away because she had a fight with a girl over swiping articles of clothing’. Priscilla affirmed that she had withheld information about the Whalers from police because she was afraid of the members. Priscilla said she was planning to pursue work to augment her brother’s current care for her baby by working potentially at Mercy-Douglas as a ‘tray girl’.

Priscilla’s mother got ‘extremely angry’ at the end of the session when it was suggested that she would have to return. She came two hours late, begrudgingly, to the second appointment and reported that Priscilla was employed at the Graduate Hospital and that she had agreed to meet at the agency. Priscilla did not show up. When they contacted the Graduate Hospital the next day after the failed appointment, other staff reported to policewoman Fawthorp that Priscilla had left with two men and a girl on 4 February. Priscilla didn’t return until 14 February. When the officer and social worker continued to try and push Lucille to attend another appointment, she handed the phone to her pastor, the lead of St. Stephen’s Baptist Church, who suggested that the girl was fine and might be better served by his council. When asked why he and Lucille were not taking Priscilla’s running away more seriously, the pastor answered that he understood, as he had once been a teenager, summing up her actions as ‘just feeling her oats’.

Eventually, on 21 March 1957, Noone closed Priscilla’s case, marking it not as ‘adjusted’ but rather adjudicating it as a ‘lack of parental cooperation’.⁸ Priscilla’s disappearance exposed the differences and mutual entanglements of communal and state expectations of normal becoming, even as she flaunted both.

Yvonne

On Saturday, 26 May 1954, a 16-year-old, also named Yvonne, grew anxious and began pacing her parents’ home restlessly. On the previous day school officials had phoned Yvonne’s mother, Elizabeth, to tell her of an intense visit the girl had paid to the counselor’s office, seeking working papers. Hoping to mitigate what she perceived as the girl’s growing anxiety, which she supposed in part stemmed from her intensive study and the seriousness with which she approached her education, Elizabeth suggested that Yvonne invite a few friends over for a party with food and music at their family home.

After the party ended, Yvonne accompanied her uncle to drop off some of the other teenagers who had come over for the festivities. As they were passing through Center City, Yvonne jumped suddenly from the vehicle at a stop light, ‘insisting that she would go into a club to hear a band leader’ playing in the vicinity. Although her uncle and mother attempted to coax Yvonne back into the car, she refused.

Disturbed by her inability to control what she considered erratic behavior, Elizabeth called the police to help her assist in regaining control. Far from calming Yvonne, the police arrested her on charges of disorderly conduct and took her to the YSC, from which she was immediately sent to Moyamensing Prison near Tenth and Reed. Despite Yvonne’s otherwise stellar school record and lack of previous contact with police, officers investigated her ‘episode’ as ‘a possible narcotic addiction’, ignoring their own physician’s assessment. On the following day police took Yvonne to the city’s medical examination facility at 27th and Arch Streets. Although the physician suggested that Yvonne had experienced a ‘psychotic episode’, there were no beds available at Philadelphia General Hospital, so she was sent to Pennypack House. To her parents’ dismay, Yvonne spent nearly a week in the facility, a distressing experience considering the conditions of the facility in the 1950s and the reality that she would not receive assistance with her mental health. Recognizing the potential further harm confinement would likely inflict on Yvonne, the family physician, the medical director of the city’s Board of Education, and the physician who had done her original intake worked on her family’s behalf to move her to Philadelphia General’s Psych Ward.

Yvonne remained institutionalized there for more than ten days after her initial arrest. Case worker notes suggest that school and the demands of her schooling and the pressures of familial economic insecurity, pressing her to work, erupted as a bout of what others could only describe as a madness or psychosis and which police sought to contain through discourses of ‘narcotic abuse’ despite contrary evidence.

Yvonne’s case underscores how madness operates in a complex geometry with Blackness and racialized gender (Bruce, 2021; Pickens, 2019). Madness here is not sabotage in any conventional sense. Rather, it names a set of actions or states which are held to break with daily rhythm or scheduled orderly becoming through some level of socially perceived psychological disintegration. The manifestation of Yvonne’s crisis drew out the limited capacities of communal resources for workable resolve or reintegration. The police met this through the families’ request for help by deploying carceral fungibility (Haley, 2016; Spillers, 1987) that rendered Yvonne’s crisis into criminalized drug abuse, remanding her to jail, despite clear counterevidence. Following Yvonne’s parents’ leveraging through their family physician to get her released from Pennypack House, the workable solution after jail included an extended stay in a locked public psych ward in a context in which general therapeutics in the 1950s included restraint, compulsory, imprecise medication and electroshock therapy.

Patricia and Lorraine

In early February 1956 the manager of Woolworth’s department store at 52nd Street and Market Street observed Lorraine place an 89 cent four-pack of women’s underwear under her coat. Lorraine was at the store with her older sister, Patricia. The manager charged that Patricia had orchestrated Lorraine’s shoplifting, though Patricia denied any prior knowledge of her younger sister’s actions. The manager called the police as well as Patricia’s and Lorrain’s mother Grace. Since neither of the girls had ever faced trouble with police, officials reprimanded and released Patricia and Lorraine to Grace without charging them.

In October 1956, another store attendant caught Patricia attempting to leave the store with a $1.98 pair of boys’ pants without paying. Grace had sent Patricia to find out the price of a coat that had caught their attention as they passed the store’s windows and which she hoped to purchase from the money she gave the girl for the coat, as well as for a pair of pants for her young son. Attempting to help her cash-strapped mother, Patricia took the pants. While the first incident had led only to a reprimand, the second incident led police to arrest Patricia, eventually requiring the girl and her family to attend sessions with a social worker, seeking on behalf of the city agency to ‘adjust’ her – a euphemism for surveillance, as we have seen – and, if necessary, the violent subduing through arrest that together acted to constrain what these officials deemed unreasonable or mad enactments of defiance – for us, the sabotage of temporal-spatial order.

Patricia, like many of the girls captured in the archive of city social workers’ notes, was a precocious child with a roving imagination about who she was and what she could do in a confining situation delimited by the economic and social precarity prescribed by racialized patriarchal reproduction. Patricia had of her own initiative decided to attend the prestigious William Penn School, which she thought would give her the opportunity to meet other children outside of her neighborhood, despite its distance from home. In addition to her regular courses, Patricia became actively involved in her school’s drama department. Through the space of the stage and its potential for her becoming, the possibility of a self-directed life captured Patricia’s attention. On two occasions Patricia missed a scheduled appointment with her social worker, instead attending rehearsals that she considered more pertinent to her life than the routine check-ins with social workers and their probing questions.

The agency sought to indict Patricia’s father for his lack of work or support for the family, as well as alcohol use and physical and verbal abuse, as the primary causes of Patricia’s actions. Patricia and her siblings did cite fear of their father, a man who had used abusive language and physical violence toward them and their mother. As Patricia noted to the social worker, her mother had resisted her fear of her husband by responding in kind with his threats and physical assault. But even this had not withered the children’s trepidation around a man who, according to Patricia, drank and belted out commands from his chair in their home. The father’s despondency and abuse cannot be easily disentangled from the contradictions between socially sanctioned fatherhood in the idealized breadwinner/nuclear form and the lack of remunerative work, compounded by what was likely post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from his Second World War service. Friction to order generated by youth marked as ‘negro girls’, in this case shoplifting for provisions for her younger siblings, exposed forms of economic and social violence enforced by racialized gender in labor markets compounded by the violence of war and the confining life schedule. An elementary solidarity with her siblings and her mother superseded the law of commodity, property, or patriarchal authority.

Conclusions

The Black girl commons here has taken in the choreography (Cox, 2015) of the individual and rudimentary collective formations that we glimpse within state archives of surveillance and containment. My reading here of the Black girl commons is as an aggregate of largely foiled acts of temporal sabotage breeching order and fleetingly expressing alternative horizons of quotidian and long-term becoming. My assessment and drawing together of these formulations as a Black girl commons raises them from latency in the archive as friction to the temporal enclosure through racialized gender. These acts expose the Keynesian-Fordist iteration of the public and the (white) commons as centrally dependent on carceral institutions and the broader temporal and spatial enclosure and parasitic containment of its outsiders, as well as the crosscutting and sometimes mutually reinforcing visions of communal and state-backed normativity and normal life course. Sabotage represents a dynamic blend of tactics that do not cohere in the affirmation of a stable material counterpoint. Nevertheless, the choreography of the Black girl commons taken together analytically suggests the collective appetite for openings in time and space for self-expression, the longing for sites to materialize self-designed paths and lifetime trajectories outside communal and state prescriptions, a desire for safety and peace, the articulation of sites away from school work, reproductive labor, or waged work to exist or to pursue precociousness, and a dynamic penchant for familial and social camaraderie coming through as these youth are helped by friends or resort to theft for siblings. This choreography also generated what might be viewed as self-destructive activity through dangerous wanderlust or sexual activity with possible negative consequences, further delimiting the horizon of becoming in the near future or for a lifetime. Sabotage opened fleeting temporal-spatial excess, the precondition of any attempted otherwise (Crawley, 2018).

Footnotes

ORCID iD

J.T. Roane

This article is part of the Theory, Culture & Society special issue on ‘The Politics of the Commons’, edited by Tiziana Terranova and Jeremy Gilbert.

Notes

J.T. Roane is author of the award-winning book Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (NYU, 2023). He is Assisstant Professor of Africana Studies and Geography at Rutgers University where he also co-directs the Black Ecologies Lab. Roane currently serves on the board of ‘Just Harvest’, an Indigenous and Black led food and environmental justice organization in Virginia’s Tidewater.

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