The Badger Game: Colored Amazons

African-American women make up about a half of the women incarcerated in the United States, and are the fastest growing population in today’s jails and prisons.

Kali N. Gross, an assistant professor of history and the director of the Africana Studies Program in the College of Arts and Sciences, knows that the problem isn’t new: its long and troubling history offers insight into the volatile mix of race and gender in American society. She has been studying the history of the crimes and imprisonment of black women in Philadelphia after the Civil War and recently published Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910 (Duke University Press, 2006).

Gross reconstructs the crimes committed by, and attributed to, black women, as well as their portrayal in the popular press and in the pamphlets and speeches of urban and penal reformers. She considers what these crimes signified about the experiences, ambitions and frustrations of these marginalized women. The perpetrators and the state, Gross argues, jointly constructed black female crime. For some women, crime functioned as a means to attain personal and social autonomy. For the state, black female crime justified a host of urban reform initiatives that reaffirmed white, middle-class authority.

Providing an overview of Philadelphia’s incarcerated black women, she also describes their work, housing and leisure activities and their social position in relation to the city’s native-born whites, European immigrants, and elite and middle-class African Americans. She relates how news accounts exaggerated black female crime, trading in sensationalistic portraits of threatening “colored Amazons,” and she considers criminologists’ interpretations of the women’s criminal acts, interpretations largely based on racist notions of hereditary criminality. Gross contends that the history of black female criminals is in many ways a history of the rift between the political rhetoric of democracy and the legal and social realities of those marginalized by its failures.

To write the history of black women criminals at the end of the 19^th century, Gross had to grapple with problematic and challenging primary sources. When black women appeared in the pages of the Philadelphia newspapers, the eroticized horror stories of “Black Amazons” on the rampage offered titillation for contemporary readers. These accounts provide Gross today with a historical record that reveals much about the racism of the courts and the press of the times, but little about the people themselves. And yet: “If they didn’t have criminal records these women wouldn’t show up at all” in the historical record, Gross says.

The historian’s work is to interpret such difficult data. Gross’s research methods involved painstaking close reading of an astonishing array of materials: Statistics, scandal rags, prison records, official trial transcripts, news accounts, and occasional mug-shots are the raw material of Gross’s research. Her work is especially persuasive because she has the statistics to demonstrate racist court practices. The numbers of black people in prison far outweighed their numbers in Philadelphia, and black women faced the most discrimination, evident in the large number of them incarcerated.

In addition to statistics, Gross says her narrative reveals the ways in which “criminal acts and courtroom and prison behavior were also expressive acts—they were texts to be read,” for a deeper understanding of the women’s motivations and their social context. “I use the criminal records and the crimes themselves as texts,” she says. “Badger theft,” as Gross reads it, “is a crime that speaks volumes about frustration and rage.” “The badger game” was a trick that an enterprising black woman might employ against a white man: she would lure him into an out-of-the-way nook with a promise of prostitution, and then rob him before the act. Most often, the shame of having solicited a black woman prevented the victim from pressing charges. If he did, he would be the butt of ridicule in court. Gross infers that many cases of this crime must therefore have gone unrecorded.

It was a dangerous game. The risk of death was always present, as it was in the lives of all black men and women of Philadelphia at that time. The crimes she describes are often shockingly violent; Gross wanted to know, “How did these women learn to be so violent?” Black Philadelphia was a place where crime was often a way for the powerless to assert some control over their lives—Gross refers to a “tropic of violence.” Black women not only reflected a violent environment, they often had to turn to violent crime to establish any agency in a racist and sexist society. But she resists turning them into romanticized rebels.

In the course of her research, Gross learned to appreciate the efforts of these black women to take some place in a society that excluded them. One accused thief wrote a letter to the court—a rare case where we have the actual words of a black woman,” says Gross—that she was “trying to enjoy the rights of my citizenship.” Many of these women were freed slaves or the children of slaves. Gross says that when she had completed her research, she “was actually shocked that there wasn’t more crime.”

While noted for its Quaker tolerance, “Philadelphia had its own brand of racism,” Gross says. She demonstrates the obvious difference in tone in two accounts of the same crime in two Philadelphia newspapers, one of which thought the assailant was black, the other white. Was the weapon, as the Inquirer reported, “a large pocket-knife,” “plunged into the back” ? Or was it a “small knife that she happened to have in her hands,” as the Times-Philadelphia reporter, who thought she was white, wrote?

She spent hours poring over crumbling newspapers, fading photographs and dry prison records but Gross recalls that her scholarly exploration of black women in prison didn’t begin in any dusty archive. “This book began behind bars,” she says, “when I team-taught a seminar to female inmates at the State Correctional Institution in Muncy, Pennsylvania in 1999,” while she was working on Ph.D. in history at the University of Pennsylvania. “I wanted to us my expertise as a historian to educate and empower these women,” but she found that was “telling uplifting tales of noble suffering and perseverance—themes that dominate much of African-American history—to women who, by those accounts, would be thought failures.”Colored Amazons was a way to tell their story. Gross is unequivocal about why she does it. “The subject of black female criminality merits much more scholarly attention—from historians and politicians too.”

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Gross has an extensive background in the study of race and crime and also in the experience of blacks in the U.S., the Caribbean, and in South America. She received a B.A. degree in Africana Studies from Cornell University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in American Civilization and History from the University of Pennsylvania and has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, some of the most notable being a Ford Postdoctoral Fellowship hosted at Princeton University, a postdoctoral fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City, and the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize, presented by the Association of Black Women Historians.