Doc Chat Fifty-One: Policing Gender, Race, and Sexuality in 20th-Century New York City (and in the Archives)

By Julie Golia, Associate Director, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books and Charles J. Liebman Curator of Manuscripts
June 1, 2022
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

On April 7, 2022, Doc Chatters read between the lines of one 1929 arrest record to explore the intersection of gender, race, sexuality, and policing.

Handwritten chart of arrests and sentencing in Harlem, 1929

Committee of Fourteen Records; NYPL Digital Collections, Image ID: 57474725.

weekly series from NYPL's Center for Research in the Humanities, Doc Chat pairs an NYPL curator or specialist and a scholar to discuss evocative digitized items from the Library's collections and brainstorm innovative ways of teaching with them. In Episode Fifty-One, NYPL curator Julie Golia and historian Emily Brooks discussed archival records documenting the 1929 arrest and sentencing records of women in Harlem produced by the Committee of Fourteen, a citizen-run anti-vice association. Golia and Brooks explored the history of policing and criminalizing women of color, working-class women, and young women, and revealed how documents produced by the carceral state can be read in ways that affirm the humanity of those they sought to criminalize.

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Below are some handy links to materials and sources suggested in the episode

Episode Fifty-One: Primary Sources

Harlem,” 1929, Police Cards, Card Files, Series V. Investigations, Committee of Fourteen Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division. New York Public Library Digital Collections. 

Explore the finding aid for the Committee of Fourteen Records. 

Researchers may also be interested in the Committee of Fifteen Records (see the finding aid). The Committee of Fifteen was a similar citizen's committee that operated earlier than the Committee of Fourteen did. Significant portions of that collection have been digitized and can be explored on NYPL Digital Collections.

Episode Fifty-One: Readings and Resources

Elizabeth Clement, Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900-1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 

Douglas J. Flowe, Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). 

Jennifer Fronc, New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era (University of Chicago Press, 2009). 

LaShawn Harris, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy (University of Illinois Press, 2016). 

LaShawn Harris, “‘Women and Girls in Jeopardy by His False Testimony: Charles Dancy, Urban Policing, and Black Women in New York City during the 1920s,” Journal of Urban History Vol. 44, No. 3 (May 2018), 457-475 (article accessible onsite at NYPL).

Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (W.W. Norton & Company, 2019).

Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk With You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice and Reform in New York, 1890-1930 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

Marilynn S. Johnson, Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City (Beacon Press, 2003). 

Shannon King, Whose Harlem is This, Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism in the New Negro Era (New York University Press, 2015).

More Doc Chats in Fall 2022!

Doc Chat has wrapped its Spring 2022 season.  You can catch up on past episodes and explore helpful resources on the Doc Chat Channel of the NYPL blog. We'll kick off another lively and thought-provoking season this fall. Make sure you don't miss an episode by signing up for NYPL's Research newsletter.