In his 1965 memoir Manchild in the Promised Land, the former Harlem gang member Claude Brown recounted the day he appeared in Domestic Relations Court. In 1948 Brown had been caught robbing a store on 147th Street. The presiding justice that January day was Polier's colleague Jane Bolin. Not quite eleven years old, young Claude had heard of her. Regularly featured in the black press, Judge Bolin was a well-known African American role model. A force for antiracism in the 1940s, she was a member of the NAACP's Board of Directors and a tireless advocate for women, children, and Harlem.

Claude Brown remembered Jane Bolin differently. He recalled that as a child he did not see this extraordinary woman as his advocate, but as his adversary. “From the minute I laid on eyes on the mean queen, I knew she wasn't going to send me home, and she didn't.” Bolin sent Brown to a private reform school in the Catskill Mountains, the Wiltwyck School for Boys. Bolin did not conceive of her decision as punitive. Brown experienced it as a form of punishment. She had deprived him of his freedom, taking him away from his family, his gang, and his neighborhood. Seeking a reason why the court would punish him in this way, ten-year-old Claude attributed his fate to Bolin's disposition. She was not a “softhearted judge,” but a “mean old colored lady.” Claude the author recalls regarding Bolin as a bully who “wanted to show the people there how bad she was” by restricting the freedom of others—including his.

Brown's account reveals that the liberal struggle for racial equality was often a story of increased government interference in the lives of African Americans. To assert that social-justice movements could result in less freedom from government authority might seem counterintuitive. Such a claim would not seem as controversial to historians of other ostensibly humanitarian efforts. Since the 1990s, scholars have generally come to accept that “a story of humanitarian intervention is also a story of domination.” To promote the just distribution of a service or resource, state authorities have often developed more intensive power relations with neglected populations.