Slavery to Bravery

Hood works diligently as a member of the American Evaluation Association and the Research Focus on Black Education Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association to influence evaluation and research.

Hood was inspired by W.E.B. Dubois and Fredrick Douglass (especially his famous quote: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.”) His career was influenced by evaluators Leander Boykin, Ernest House, Reid E. Jackson, and Robert Stake. He acknowledges James D. Anderson, Terry Denny, Henry Frierson, Gordon Hoke, and Frederick Rodgers as personal intellectual influences.

Hood was selected as a Fellow of the American Council on Education (2001-2002), is in the Leo High School Hall of Fame (Chicago), and is a member of Omega Psi Phi fraternity.

As soon as slavery was abolished, the locus of control and labor of former slaves moved to the criminal justice system. Before the Civil War, blacks were overrepresented in prisons everywhere except the South; in the South, slavery was the preferred means of controlling black people rather than imprisonment. After the Civil War, the Jim Crow laws made newly freed blacks vulnerable to incarceration for minor offenses. Consequently, the black imprisonment rate rose dramatically in Southern states. Throughout the country, virtually all women held in reformatories (intended to be more benevolent and therapeutic institutions) were white. By contrast, the population of women held in custodial institutions (known for their degrading conditions) or prison camps was overwhelmingly black.

Sociologist Loïc Wacquant (2000) contends that not one but several “peculiar institutions” have successively operated to define, confine, and control African Americans in the history of the United States after the abolition of slavery. The first historic form of oppression for Africans was chattel slavery. Slavery was the backbone of the Southern economy (and arguably, the American economy), sustained by the plantation. This created the matrix of racial division from the colonial era to the Civil War.

The second “peculiar institution,” the Jim Crow system, legally enforced discrimination and segregation. Jim Crow anchored the predominantly agrarian society of the South for a full century, from the close of Reconstruction to the civil rights revolution. Thus, while slavery had been abolished, the enslavement of the “freed” men and women continued through legislation that impeded their ability to enjoy the full benefits of citizenship in America.

America's third “peculiar institution” for containing the descendants of slaves in the Northern industrial metropolis is the ghetto. The Great ...