Law Never Here: A Social History of African American Responses to Crime and Justice

On a more serious note, “Law Never Here”: A Social History of African American Responses to Crime and Justice (Greenwood, 1999) is a book that Alice Green and I - as African American criminologists - felt the need to write in response to the failure of many other books we had read to acknowledge the varied ways in which black people have responded to perceived oppression by the criminal justice system. In the book, we began with an examination of responses by African (later African-American) slaves to the dual system of justice that began to develop in the colonies (later the United States) in the 17th century. We trace the evolution of the criminal justice system from slavery through Reconstruction and into the 20th century, looking at contributions of the NAACP and other groups to the struggle for justice. We look at the roles of space and place in how African Americans have perceived and experienced the criminal justice system. The book ends in the 1990s with the riots in L.A. and the O.J. Simpson trial.