In The Condemnation of Blackness, Khalil Gibran Muhammad charts how American ideas about race and crime became closely linked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tracing the contexts for the work of influential Progressive Era social scientists who used crime statistics to posit an association between African Americans and criminality, Muhammad skillfully analyzes the limitations and contradictions of white and black scholars and reformers who asserted an intrinsic connection between blacks and crime. Muhammad's analysis is useful because it establishes the Progressive Era intellectual lineage of remarkably durable, often pernicious, and relatively unexamined ideas linking blacks and crime in both American academic discourse and in American popular culture.

Muhammad persuasively argues that the racial crime discourse was a product of how white and black reformers and scholars apprehended but ultimately failed to fully confront the structural inequities of northern urbanization, particularly the segmentation of African American migrants from the South into dilapidated housing stock and onto the lowest rungs of labor markets. More so than was the case for immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, blacks themselves were blamed for the poor social conditions in which they found themselves in northern cities. Supported by “scientific” proof (statistics compiled from the dubious data generated by mass arrests of African Americans by racially conscious northern police departments), generations of white scholars, journalists, and politicians, abetted by African American reformers and scholars who trod carefully in search of allies in the white community, constructed and reconstructed a discourse of black criminality. It rationalized the perpetuation of racial disparities, which were expanding in the northern metropolis through the racial segregation of urban space, white flight, and the departure of jobs and wealth from the urban core.

A large proportion of the book consists of an intellectual history of the race and crime linkage. Muhammad perceptively analyzes Frederick L. Hoffman's highly influential Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (1896), “the first book-length study to include a nationwide analysis of black crime statistics” (35). Muhammad argues that Hoffman, a German immigrant and actuary for Prudential Insurance in Newark, New Jersey, had been acculturated during eight years of residence in the American South, where he absorbed southern white racial ideas concerning the alleged black propensity for criminality, supposedly the result of innate physical differences between the races. African American scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Monroe Work disputed Hoffman's arguments for innate black criminality but were unable to persuade white scholars to fully consider the role of environmental factors such as industrialization and urbanization in shaping conditions and class differences within the black community. The attempt to court the expectations of white scholars led Du Bois and others to concede the cultural inferiority of lower-class African Americans and the social problem of their involvement in crime. While white scholars writing in the early twentieth century such as Frances Kellor and Franz Boas rejected arguments for essential racial differences based on heredity, Muhammad shows that they effectively “erased the color line and replaced it with a culture line” (111). Kellor, Boas, and others suggested that inferior traits, such as an inclination toward criminal behavior, were basic products of African American culture.

For their part, settlement house leaders, most prominently Jane Addams, acknowledged the structural inequities faced by blacks in northern cities but were more interested in energetically addressing the social problems experienced by southern and eastern European immigrants. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Chicago School of Social Work, particularly through the work of African American sociologist Charles S. Johnson, supplanted cultural explanations for black crime in the 1920s and 1930s with academic analyses focusing on the role of structural inequities in American society in perpetuating poverty, delinquency, and crime. However public discourse took a different path than academic discourse. From 1930, Uniform Crime Reports, reputed to be the nation's first comprehensive and standardized crime data system, dominated public discussion of race and crime. Uniform Crime Reports, tabulated from data generated through racially biased policing (including significant racial disparities in arrests and third-degree cases), lent the further support of “reliable” statistics to an already strong association in the white popular mind between African Americans and criminality (266).

Muhammad complements his longitudinal intellectual history with several chapters on the social history of Philadelphia in the first decades of the twentieth century. In Philadelphia, as in other northern cities, the purging of crime from white areas by Progressive Era anti-vice campaigns resulted in the concentration of criminal activities in black neighborhoods. The resistance of African Americans in the face of white violence and ghetto formation was creatively interpreted among whites as a manifestation of “black criminality” (221).

Muhammad's book performs a highly beneficial function by illuminating the embryonic years of ideological developments that undergirded decades of American racial formation. The book is deeply researched in primary and secondary sources and will be of use to all interested in the history of race and African Americans in the United States, as well as those interested in Progressive Era intellectual and social history. One aspect of the study is somewhat less persuasive. Muhammad's reticence about “the reality” as compared to “the discourses” of black crime (283n7) is understandable given the serial misuse of crime data for racial purposes that he richly and persuasively chronicles. However, more substantive engagement with the history of black crime in the South and in the urban North would have strengthened his argument about the historical roots of ideas positing black crime as a signifier of essential racial difference rather than as an index of structural disadvantage. Regardless, this is a minor quibble concerning a book that deserves a wide reading.