The author argues that during the second half of the 20th century, the issue of race had two distinct and contradictory influences on juvenile justice policy in particular and on criminal justice policy in general. The thesis of this article is that during the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court imposed national legal and quality norms on the Southern States that still adhered to a "separate but equal" Jim Crow legal regime. The social-structural changes that began several decades earlier motivated the Supreme Court to reassess criminal and juvenile justice practices in response to concerns about racial discrimination and civil rights. The migration of Blacks from the rural South to the industrial North and West increased the urbanization of Blacks and placed the issues of racial equality and civil rights on the national political agenda. The Warren Court's school desegregation, criminal procedure, and juvenile justice "due process" decisions reflected a broader shift in constitutional jurisprudence in protecting individual rights, notably the civil rights of racial minorities. The second period of juvenile justice policy changes emerged in response to the formalization of juvenile court procedures in 1967 and culminated in the "get tough" legislation of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Conservative Republican politicians pursued a "southern strategy," exploited "crime" and "welfare" as code words for race, and advocated "get tough" policies that ultimately influenced juvenile and criminal justice policies throughout the Nation. The politicization of crime policies peaked in the early 1990s when increases in Black youth homicide rates provided further political incentive to "get tough" on youth crime by modifying juvenile courts' transfer and sentencing laws. 569 notes