Justin Randolph
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randolphjustin.bsky.social
Justin Randolph
@randolphjustin.bsky.social
260 followers 250 following 76 posts
U.S. historian | author of *Mississippi Law* | reader, eater, friend, southern

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4000-5060
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randolphjustin.bsky.social
admittedly not that plugged in but DID we know that government sites, in this case the DOJ, say this???
“Democrats have shut down the government."
November 6, 2025 at 8:26 PM
randolphjustin.bsky.social
. @uncpress.bsky.social books 40% off with code 01DAH40 including THIS ONNNNEEEEE uncpress.org/978146968948...

@joursouhist.bsky.social
November 6, 2025 at 5:58 PM
randolphjustin.bsky.social
help keep a dear friend and incredible activist connected in the face of the FCC’s deregulation of prisoners’ phone calls!

Buy a $5 raffle ticket. You might even score some beautiful earrings! forms.gle/2wKTk1fZU7S7...
October 30, 2025 at 5:28 PM
randolphjustin.bsky.social
help me celebrate today’s publication of MISSISSIPPI LAW with @uncpress.bsky.social! looking for a history of American authoritarianism? the rural South? the Black freedom struggles that made life there possible? this is your book!

$23 with code 01SOCIAL30 at checkout.

your library needs one!
the book cover for Justin Randolph’s Mississippi Law: Policing and Reform in America’s Jim Crow Countryside ADVANCE PRAISE "This powerful history of policing in the rural South reveals the origins of law enforcement as white control of Black mobility and freedom. Amidst today's calls for police reform and abolition, this book reminds us why history matters." -Fran~oise N. Hamlin, Brown University "A deeply researched and precisely observed history of police power that merits serious engagement. Connections between America's plantation past and mass incarceration are often asserted but rarely demonstrated. Here, they receive the attention they deserve." -Walter Johnson, Harvard University "Randolph has written a landmark history of Jim Crow policing and the Black freedom struggle in Mississippi. In the process, he has contributed an invaluable study of race and rural law enforcement to the field of carceral studies." -Jason Morgan Ward, Emory University "Randolph convincingly charts how local rivalries for power among white sheriffs, private citizens, police and patrolmen in Mississippi gave way to alliances against Black political, social, and economic power during the high civil rights era.Mississippi Law is an impressive work of scholarship." -Jane Dailey, University of Chicago
October 21, 2025 at 9:49 PM
randolphjustin.bsky.social
TODAY! 3pm, Athenian! hear how urban and rural histories of policing are DEEPLY connected.

#UHA2025LA
October 10, 2025 at 4:52 PM
randolphjustin.bsky.social
TOMORROW! hear how urban and rural histories of policing are DEEPLY connected. Friday, 3pm, Athenian

#UHA2025LA
October 9, 2025 at 2:37 PM
randolphjustin.bsky.social
obligatory unboxing photos of *Mississippi Law* author copies from @uncpress.bsky.social! and check out the GENEROUS blurbs from Jane Dailey, Françoise Hamlin, Walter Johnson, and Jason Ward. they put a smile on my face. uncpress.org/978146968948...
October 5, 2025 at 8:32 PM
randolphjustin.bsky.social
Ooh. Maybe this one??
August 30, 2025 at 10:12 PM
randolphjustin.bsky.social
*Mississippi Law* is two months away! Don’t believe me? Just look at these proofs! Table of contents too.
August 22, 2025 at 4:25 PM
randolphjustin.bsky.social
I couldn't know how relevant Benjamin Weber's great book *American Purgatory* would be when I reviewed it last fall. looking for American dreams of third-country deportation? that history's here, with much more. read my review, "Empire's Black Sites," in @shgape.bsky.social doi.org/10.1017/S153...
In American Purgatory, Benjamin Weber studies the tangled roots of U.S. empire and imprisonment. He does so with case-based precision and narrative force. Historians have needed a text to distill and reframe the now common claim about the continuum between the American prosecution of race wars on its frontiers and crime wars at home. Interdisciplinary scholars like Joy James, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Nikhil Pal Singh, and Stuart Schrader have analyzed this relationship, while more traditional social and political historians such as Alfred W. McCoy and Ronald K. Edgerton have singled out the Philippine-American War as a laboratory for progressive governance. Weber broadens our historical frame with the transhistorical tools of Native, Black, and carceral studies. U.S. dominion required prisons, he argues. Its campaigns of benign conquest entailed places of legal and social experimentation, literal spaces where the rules could be suspended and revolt purged. Prisons offered“a network of historical and contemporary black sites” that developed alongside and through U.S. imperial practice (1). Weber calls this continuum“prison imperialism,” or the way that U.S.“policy makers sought to govern the world through the codification and regulation of crime” (xi). He links historic processes, such as Native removal, counterinsurgent policing of colonial spaces, New South convict labor, and the incarceration of revolutionary figures who dared imagine sovereignty outside of the U.S. government. These are colonial practices, Weber insists, that unfolded between the American mainland and its global sphere of influence. American“prison imperialism relied on the continual production of in-between spaces of perpetual limbo,” he writes.“In a word, purgatory” (35). Though usually focused on a particular place or prison, each of Weber’s seven chapters explores the circuits and interfaces that trouble binaries like foreign/domestic or past/present. His narrative technique challenges conventional historicist attempts at stating significance for other historians while opening new pathways for future scholars. The next three chapters revolve around American rule through transportation and forced labor. Chapter two focuses on the debate over American penal colonies, a forgotten question of the founding era that resurfaced during the Gilded Age. Weber uses abandoned penal transportation schemes to link older politics of colonizing African Americans with the purchase of Alaska, which some Americans hoped would become a penal colony. Chapter three focuses on the use of far-flung prisons to wage the Philippine-American War. Weber shows that America’s counterinsurgent campaign against Filipinos, which began in early 1899, stemmed from a planned uprising by anticolonial Katipunan forces in Bilibid Prison. In the years that followed, U.S. authorities built a network of jails and prisons in the Philippines, using them to exile would-be revolutionaries and allocate forced labor to build infrastructure. Chapter four takes readers to the Panama Canal Zone. Weber describes a colonial space where the federal government, as opposed to a southern state, used the Thirteenth Amendment’s convict clause to enslave Black workers for infrastruc- ture development, such as the highway to Empire, in Panama, which opened in 1910. When American authorities were not exploiting racialized labor, they were scheming to deport unruly laborers and depopulate areas coveted for plantations.
July 14, 2025 at 2:43 PM
randolphjustin.bsky.social
bizarrely credulous interpretation of George Wallace in NYT. he didn’t “object” to LBJ federalizing troops in Selma? does objection require physically blocking the NG as in Tusc.? saying “I object”? segregationists were calling it “financial interposition” for goodness sake.
June 18, 2025 at 2:51 AM
randolphjustin.bsky.social
a long history of National Guard fighting Americans who protect themselves from American racial authoritarianism: from my @joursouhist.bsky.social essay on the birth of the Jim Crow NG in Mississippi, muse.jhu.edu/pub/285/arti...
Black Alliancemen had built political capacity for months, developing a cooperative store, giving public speeches, and marching in armed military formation when threatened by white elites. When the white state troops arrived in Leflore County on the night of September 1, 1889, they took a steamboat to Minter City and immediately arrested forty Black people. Though the sheriff reported that he dismissed the militia soon after they arrived, armed white bands continued to roam the countryside for Black Alliancemen. “The negroes had broken up into small squads and had taken to the cane-brakes,” the sheriff wrote. “Some of them were overtaken, and resisting arrest, were killed.” Other survivors reported that Black deaths numbered one hundred, that white mobs had invaded homes and murdered noncombatant Black women and children. Per his official report, the militia commander “saw no armed band of negroes” but was alarmed by “numbers of men…who have, and intend to take the law into their own.. Racial conflict on Kemper County’s roads demanded the militia. As tensions ran high on December 24, two wagoners, one white and one Black, met on a narrow road outside Wahalak. The Black farmer refused to yield the right of way. Upon reaching town, the white farmer raised a mob to reassert racial hierarchy. White vigilantes shot into and burned Black homes. Black residents defended themselves and exchanged fire with the white mob, killing some while also taking casualties. As word of the open conflict spread into the countryside, Black reinforcements arrived, dug trenches around Wahalak, and threatened to burn the town. At this point, white residents convinced local officials to telegram Vardaman for National Guard companies from surrounding towns. “We are called upon to send military…to Wahalak for protection of White people,” wired the mayor. “Kindly take action at once.”
June 9, 2025 at 6:19 PM
randolphjustin.bsky.social
am I seeing this right? does ProQuest Ebook Central now have an AI that UNPROMPTED can "show key takeaway from this chapter" and "show concepts discussed this chapter"?!?
May 22, 2025 at 7:06 PM
randolphjustin.bsky.social
the BEST of mail days - congrats to Garrett and honestly to us all for this gift
cover of Garrett Felber’s biography of Martin Sostre, “A continuous struggle”
May 7, 2025 at 11:50 PM
randolphjustin.bsky.social
hey #OAH @oah.org attendees! stop by a great panel TODAY, The Freedom Struggle in the Rural South, 12:45 to 2:15p.m.
April 3, 2025 at 1:52 PM
randolphjustin.bsky.social
in my first official act on bsky, I report that the Illinois State Lottery has a ticket just for police memorials. wouldn't know by looking at it! (www.illinoislottery.com/giving-back/...)
an image of the Wild Cherry Doubler lottery ticket, with red cherries falling
September 29, 2023 at 7:34 PM