Description
Mary Booth was fourteen years old when a Virginia court sentenced her to death for murdering Clara Gray, the wife of her employer, and Travis Jones, a farm manager, in 1882. Thirty years later, Virginia Christian, also a young African American woman employed in domestic service, was convicted of murdering her white employer, Ida Belote. Appeals from family members, jurors, and community leaders convinced the governor to commute Booth's sentence to life in prison. Similar pleas on behalf of Christian, however, failed. Despite having recently passed a new juvenile justice law and in defiance of protests by national civil rights organizations, the state of Virginia electrocuted seventeen-year-old Christian on August 16, 1912. Why did Booth avoid execution while Christian, sentenced under a new legal regime that promised greater protections for juveniles, suffer electrocution? What can their stories, and those of other children who passed through Virginia's state penitentiary between the end of the Civil War and the state's adoption of a juvenile court system in 1921, reveal about the relationship between the state's efforts to protect children and the hollowing out of meaningful citizenship for many Virginians? By reconstructing these two prominent cases and contextualizing them within a broader history of child incarceration this project provides key insights into the pathways children traveled to prison, community responses to child convictions, and authorities' consideration of youth in sentencing. Ultimately the project seeks to determine why, across a period of radical political change, black children remained distinctly vulnerable to incarceration and state violence.
