Gateway to Justice: The Juvenile Court and Progressive Child Welfare in a Southern City (Studies in the Legal History of the South Ser.)

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Description

The Juvenile Court of Memphis, founded in 1910, directed delinquent and dependent children into a lot of private charitable organizations and public correctional facilities. Drawing on the court’s case files and other primary sources, Jennifer Trost explains the complex interactions between parents, children, and welfare officials in the urban South.

Trost adds a personal dimension to her study by specializing in the people who appeared before the court-and not only on the legal specifics of their cases. Directed for thirty years by the charismatic and well-known chief pass judgement on Camille Kelley, the court used to be at once a traditional house of justice, a social products and services provider, an agent of state keep an eye on, and a community-based mediator. Because the court saw girls and boys, blacks and whites, native Memphians and newly arrived residents with rural backgrounds, Trost is in a position to make subtle points about differences in these clients’ experiences with the court.

Those differences, she shows, were defined by the mix of Progressive and traditional attitudes that the involved parties held toward issues of class, race, and gender. Trost’s insights are all of the more valuable because the Memphis court had a large African American clientele. In addition, the court’s jurisdiction extended beyond children engaged in criminal or another way unacceptable conduct to include those who suffered from neglect, abuse, or poverty.

A work of legal history animated by questions more commonly posed by social historians, Gateway to Justice will engage anyone interested in how the early welfare state shaped, and used to be shaped by, tensions between public standards and private practices of parenting, sexuality, and race relations.

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