Douglas Flowe

About Fellow

Douglas Flowe is a historian, author, and public commentator whose work explores race, crime, masculinity, and urban life in the United States. He is associate professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York, winner of the Littleton-Griswold Book Prize from the American Historical Association and the American Society for Legal History. His current book, American Darkness: Black Men in New York’s Jim Crow Prisons, examines the lives of Black men in the northern prison system and the relationship between incarceration, urban space, and racial power.

Flowe’s work has appeared across scholarly, journalistic, television, and documentary media. He has served as a historian and commentator on programs including CNN Tonight, PBS’s American Experience, and the History Channel’s Prison Chronicles, and has appeared in documentaries including San Juan Hill: Manhattan’s Lost Neighborhood. He was also a cohost of National Geographic’s Ancient China from Above, Season Two, which received a Gold Telly Award. His writing and commentary have addressed Black history, policing, criminality, and mass incarceration for audiences beyond academia.

Selected Publications

• Flowe, Douglas. Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Awarded the Littleton-Griswold Book Prize from the American Historical Association (AHA) and the Association for the Study of Legal History (ASLH).
• Flowe, Douglas. “Come Home to Us Once More Again: ‘Defective’ Status and the Imprisonment of Young African American Men in Early Twentieth Century New York.” The Journal of African American History 107, no. 1 (Winter 2022): 28–53.
• Flowe, Douglas. “Drug-Mad Negroes: Cocaine and Black Migration in the Making of Drug Prohibition in Progressive Era New York City, 1880–1920.” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 20, no. 4 (October 2021): 503–22.
• Flowe, Douglas. “Fighting and Cutting and Shooting, and Carrying On: Saloons, Dives and the Black ‘Tough’ in Manhattan’s Tenderloin.” Journal of Urban History 45, no. 5 (September 2019): 925–40.
• Flowe, Douglas. “Folklore, Urban Insurrection, and the Killing of the Black Hero in the Turn of the Century South.” The Mississippi Quarterly 67, no. 4 (Fall 2014): 581–604. Awarded the Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Article Prize.