“Tough on Conduct:” Punitive Leadership in Urban Public Schools, A Case Study of Angry Principal Dr. Roy A. West, 1986–1991

ABSTRACT:This article examines the troubled career of Black inner-city principal Dr. Roy Alexander West from Richmond, Virginia. In conjunction with recently organized school board minutes, personal interviews, newspapers accounts, court cases, and archival collections, the article argues that Black public school administrators struggled among themselves over the use of proactive, tough-on-crime discipline during the 1980s; a time when urban schools shifted their focus from integration to educational reform. This article challenges the scholarly consensus by Hinton (2016), Sudler (2017), Simmons (2017), and Agyapong (2018) that the school-to-prison pipeline evolved into a fixed network where underfunded public schools worked hand-in-hand with police, courts, and legislators to criminalize and incarcerate Black children. The urban Black educational crisis in the 1980s should be studied by urban, African American, and education scholars because it reflects how punishing Black children became a vital part of America’s response to the poverty, crime, and de facto segregation caused by the failures of the modern Civil Rights Movement.