135th Street and Lenox v. Rastus Jones

Abstract The cultural developments of American modernism coincided with the social development of a white racial identity, fusing a multi-ethnic population through the common understanding that its members were “not Black.” In New York City, the concurrent development of Black culture amid the Harlem Renaissance complicated this process by popularizing positive depictions of Blackness as a racial identity and cultural standard. White cultural production engaged a range of strategies (including the use of Jim Crow imagery) to depict and reinforce negative Black stereotypes and further relied on social institutions to enforce both literal and symbolic boundaries between whiteness and Blackness. As the primary enforcer of physical and social boundaries within the city, the New York Police Department (NYPD) established in 1930 a professional magazine, Spring 3100, which it subsequently relied upon to reinforce racial boundaries within its institutional culture. This institutional culture, in turn, emerged in enforcement strategies and departmental policies that tied Black racial identity to criminality, establishing a set of criminal stereotypes that eventually superseded broader ideas of Black racial inferiority. The stereotype of Black criminality, and its enforcement through criminal justice system actors like the NYPD, became a key strategy for maintaining white racial privilege in NYC and beyond, throughout the modernist era and those that followed.