Abstract:
Beginning in 1914, the New York Police Department began to crack down on those deemed to be "pretending to predict the future" in New York City. Chief among these lawbreakers were the American Roma who had called New York City home for a generation. Over the course of the next 50 years, the NYPD used heavy-handed and often extra-legal measures to target "Gypsies" in the city itself. Interestingly, the task force charged with tracking down and arresting these "Gypsies" was primarily the Women's Bureau of the NYPD. Police women and their male counterparts increasingly used surveillance of American Romani homes, businesses, and neighborhoods to target women who could potentially be fortune-tellers, often relying on alleged victims to both identify and harass individuals without evidence. But far from simply being a method of targeting one racialized group, the NYPD used its experiences and lessons learned with American Romani women to target other women of color deemed to be in violation of a myriad of Progressive Era laws aimed at curbing disorder and maintaining gender norms and proper female work practices. This chapter focuses particularly on the role of law enforcement, the justice system, and the often opaque rule of law to show how American Romani people were targeted as potential threats to the fragile social and racial order in the lead-up to World War II.

Dalen Wakeley-Smith is an Assistant Professor of History at Washington University in Saint Louis and a scholar of race and ethnicity in the United States in the 20th century. Wakeley-Smith is currently working on his first manuscript, which focuses on American Romani history in New York City and examines the intertwined histories of Romani people and other racialized groups as they navigated social, legal, and cultural changes in the mid-twentieth century. Wakeley-Smith is of Romani descent and works closely with the Romanian Roma community in New York City. Together with his American Romani friend Michael Ciuraru, Wakeley-Smith runs a small non-profit organization called Rom Sam Yehk in Queens, NYC, which aims to increase awareness and understanding of American Romani history and current issues in the United States through educational projects and partnerships with Romani non-profit organizations around the world. Wakeley-Smith was most recently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and has published in CEU's Critical Romani Studies and has a forthcoming article in the fall issue of the Journal of American Ethnic History.