| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Kali N. Gross. Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910. (Politics, History, and Culture.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 260. $21.95.
Kali N. Gross examines the history of black women's criminality in Philadelphia from 1880 to 1910 from a "bottom up" perspective. Here she is interested not only in how black women negotiated the criminal justice system but also in how they subverted marginal employment and forms of discrimination to their advantage. In particular, Gross relies upon the records of Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia's main prison facility, and newspaper accounts of court proceedings. These archival sources reveal both discriminatory practices of the court and press, as well as black women's agency in often exploiting their employers and sexual partners.	1
Chapter one discusses Pennsylvania's early legal history, beginning with the case of Alice Clifton, a black woman accused of murdering her "illegitimate" biracial child in 1787. Based on this singular case, Gross argues that slavery "shaped broader notions of race, gender, and sexuality" (p. 14). Far more persuasive is her use of statistics to demonstrate racist court practices. For example, black crime constituted three percent of all crime in Pennsylvania by 1800 and slightly over nine percent by 1864. Yet these percentages far exceeded the percentage of the state's black population. Black women faced the most discrimination, evident in the large number of them incarcerated.	. . .

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