Queering Black Girlhood at the Virginia Industrial School

This essay argues that early twentieth-century reform schools for black girls in the United States educated children in heteronormativity to restrict their possibilities for entering the social order. Delinquency for black girls in the Progressive Era was bound up with excessive sexuality and perverse kinship. I examine institutional materials from the Virginia Industrial School, a reform school for black girls established in 1915, to show how the institution had to prove its students were capable of sexual reform despite their race and thus was preoccupied with gender and sexual propriety based on white middle-class norms. Schools promised reform through heterosexualization, and the Virginia Industrial School claimed to prepare children for marriage, domesticity, and reproduction. However, this was a false promise that attempted to trap black girls in a form of indentured servitude to white middle- and upper-class families. While the school spoke with pride of students who left to get married, in reality most students aged out of the institution and became apprentices for local white families. The school deemed children's own families unfit, so a return to home and kinship was impossible. The school trained girls in gender and sexual norms to displace them from their own economic, sexual, or reproductive futures outside the institution. I consider how this carceral institution that imagined itself as a school gives us insight into how the confinement of black girls in the twenty-first century continues to make false promises to girls based on racialized sexuality.