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On October 17, 1882, Mary Booth, a fourteen-year-old African American girl, arrived at the Virginia State Penitentiary to serve a life sentence after being wrongfully convicted of murder. Working from a fragmented and fragmentary archival record, this article reconstructs the tortuous path Booth traveled through Virginia's courts and prisons. Her story sheds light on how African American children were transformed into new carceral subjects in the wake of emancipation. It also provides insight into the varied strategies black Virginians employed in their efforts to extract meaningful, if inadequate, gains in access to justice under the Readjuster Party. Ultimately, locating Booth's story within the larger history of children's incarceration offers insight into why Virginia's late-nineteenth-century juvenile justice reforms entrenched, rather than diminished, racial disparities for young citizens accused of crimes.
On November 17, 1882, an official at the Virginia State Penitentiary recorded the arrival of a new prisoner: Mary Booth, age fourteen, not quite five feet tall, with dark ginger skin and a small scar on her forehead. Even confined to a single line of the convict register, the extraordinary upheaval of her short life is vivid.1 The entry reveals that in a span of less than five years Mary Booth had been a free child, a convicted murderer, the youngest girl ever sentenced to hang in the state of Virginia, a child inmate, and ultimately, a free woman.2 Born in 1868, the same year the United States ratified the Fourteenth Amendment and her home state of Virginia crafted a new constitution, Booth was unequivocally both free and a citizen.3 Because she was an African American girl, her rights as a citizen were qualified, yet they nevertheless conveyed a promise of equal protection before the law. Fourteen years later, however, when she was incarcerated in Virginia's state penitentiary, Booth lost the most elemental features of her freedom. This article examines why Booth's life took this extraordinary course and what that course reveals about how age, gender, and race shaped children's experiences of citizenship in post-Civil War Virginia.
Telling Mary Booth's story is a fraught enterprise. She is the heart of the narrative but virtually silent in the archival records.4 What's more, her tale is at once anomalous and unsurprising; female children sentenced to death were...