Aberrant Sexualities and Racialised Masculinisation: Race, Gender and the Criminalisation of African American Girls at the Illinois Training School for Girls at Geneva, 1893–1945

The inhumanely stifling and overcrowded state of Lincoln Cottage, the only residence for African American girls at the Illinois Training School for Girls at Geneva, must have compounded the devastation of sixteen-year-old Mary Ellen, who was sent there in 1928. After quarrelling with her father, Mary Ellen made the sad and fateful decision to flee her home and seek solace with thirty-eight-year-old Perry Daniels, who took advantage of her vulnerability when he invited her to his home. Daniels raped and harboured Mary in his home for six days, until her father and a police officer rescued her. Like a number of girls across the country who were sent to delinquent homes because they ran away from home, or were adjudged to be engaging in sexual acts even if they were victims, Mary was sent over fifty miles away from her home in Chicago to the Illinois Training School for Girls. After being screened for a sexually transmitted infection and quarantined to ensure she did not have an infectious disease, she was relegated to Lincoln Cottage. Even though Lincoln Cottage was built to house no more than thirty-two girls, and despite the fact that there were vacancies in other cottages, staff members packed over sixty African American girls into the residence. Administrators and staff members of this early juvenile justice institution, although guided generally by belief in the innocence and ‘rehabilitability’ of their charges, placed Mary and other African American girls at the margins of those commitments.1 Scholars have examined the origins of the juvenile justice system and the discourses that underpinned its development. Progressive reformers helped popularise the notion that children who committed crimes should be rehabilitated instead of punished. They believed that delinquents – unlike adult criminals – were impressionable and could be reformed. Reformers also propagated the idea that juvenile delinquency was caused by the vices accompanying industrialisation, as opposed to inherent defect.2