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In 1827, a twelve-year-old enslaved boy named James Guild was sentenced to death and hanged in public, becoming one of the youngest known children to be executed in the United States.
Condemned makes the bold and troubling argument that Guild’s execution was not an aberration—and that since the colonial period, in both the North and South, the development of the American criminal justice system has been built atop the punishment of Black children. A brilliantly researched history, and an elegy to lives lost or destroyed, Condemned reconstructs the stories of free, enslaved, and indentured Black children whose rights were denied in America’s courtrooms, as the our legal system evolved. Award-winning historian Crystal Lynn Sheffield, the first scholar to unearth the stories of Black children in key prison registers and court documents, illustrates how these decisions continue to echo in the present day, doing incredible harm to all American children.
With the revelatory impact of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Monique Couvson’s Pushout, Condemned restores these forgotten children from the recesses of the archives, filling in the gaps in the historical record with compassion—and granting them long-overdue exonerations. Condemned culminates in a call to action urging that real justice for all children can be achieved only by abolishing the criminal justice system as we know it.
Crystal Lynn Sheffield is an associate professor of history at the University of British Columbia and an award-winning scholar of race, gender, and childhood in early America. She is the author of Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood and her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Black Perspectives. The author lives in Vancouver.