Claims that pregnant users didn’t care about their children shifted attention away from the core issue: the fact that the government was failing to treat its neediest citizens. Washington, D.C., for example, had the resources to assist only one in ten of the city’s addicts. Just 13 percent of New York City’s drug treatment programs accepted pregnant women addicted to cocaine, while the city’s residential treatment facilities had space for only 2 percent of its heroin and cocaine addicts.
The refusal to fund drug treatment programs also helped pave the way for an unprecedented experiment in prison building. With drug markets proliferating, overdose deaths rising, and treatment centers closing, the American impulse toward harsh justice found full expression. Almost nothing was out of bounds. Legislators in Delaware contemplated bringing back the whipping post for drug sellers. Federal officials proposed they receive the death penalty.
Though whipping posts never became law, the same vengeful impulse found an outlet in extreme prison sentences. The federal government led the way with the now-infamous hundred-to-one crack-cocaine ratio, under which a person possessing just 5 grams (about 1½ teaspoons) of crack faced the same mandatory sentence as somebody possessing 500 grams (2½ cups) of powder. While racially neutral on its face, the crack/powder distinction combined with discriminatory policing and prosecution strategies to produce flagrant racial disparities in arrest and incarceration rates. Even though most crack users were white, Black people were seven times more likely to go to federal prison for crack offenses.
Prominent voices in the Black community sometimes joined in the calls for more severe penalties for drug sellers. Editors at the Los Angeles Sentinel called for drug dealers to be “tarred and feathered, burned at the stake, castrated, and any other horrendous thing which can be imagined.” Maxine Waters, then in the California state legislature, led a successful effort to increase penalties for the sale of PCP. Johnnie Cochran, Los Angeles County’s first Black assistant district attorney, said that those who sold PCP “should be dealt with swiftly, surely and in those instances where the facts warrant it—harshly.”
To be sure, African Americans who fell prey to the punitive impulse often combined their call for tougher penalties with another set of demands—they asked the government to address the underlying inequalities that led to drug use or, at a minimum, provide treatment for addicts and heavy users. Representative Rangel, for example, asked the Reagan administration for “more prosecutors, more judges, more agents, and more prisons,” yet he also pressed it to address “the Nation’s chronically underfunded treatment and prevention programs.” But the strategy of asking for both prisons and treatment proved to be a failure. Instead of both, Rangel—and the Black community—got only the prisons.
Rising levels of abuse, addiction, and drug-related violence should have been a sign that something was wrong with America. It should have led the nation to focus on the myriad ways in which 350 years of white supremacy had produced persistent Black suffering and disadvantage. It should have caused politicians to interrogate the cumulative impact of convict leasing, lynching, redlining, school segregation, and drinking water poisoned with lead. Instead of asking, “What kind of people are they that would use and sell drugs?” the nation should have been asking a question that, to this day, demands an answer: “What kind of people are we that build prisons while closing treatment centers?”
1984–1989
THE HIP-HOP GENERATION
Bakari Kitwana
I voted for the first time in a national election in 1988. Although I was eligible to vote in 1984, I felt I had no stake in U.S. presidential politics. It was not an uncommon view for young Black men in those days. But something changed for me and many others of my generation between Jesse Jackson’s run for president in 1984 and his subsequent campaign in 1988.
In 1986 seventeen-year-old Rakim of the hip-hop duo Eric B and Rakim began “dropping science” in his rhymes, taking the art form to new lyrical heights and depths. He drew inspiration from the teachings of the Five Percent Nation, whose philosophy of Black empowerment resonated with young Black leaders in the New York City region during the early 1980s.
“I found it almost divine the way the Five Percent Nation affected the evolution of hip-hop,” Rakim recalls in his memoir, Sweat the Technique: Revelations on Creativity from the Lyrical Genius. “We [were] equipped with a language and information intricate to our studies that empowered us. So it was right up our alley to want to express ourselves through rapping. We felt we had something to say that was unique to our time.”
Less than a year later, albums would follow from Eric B and Rakim, Public Enemy, and Boogie Down Productions that similarly tapped into core messages of the 1960s and ’70s—referencing book titles, honing in on aspects of Black history, and sampling speeches of Black men such as Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, Kwame Touré, and the music of James Brown. Collectively, they pioneered the subgenre that would come to be known as “conscious hip-hop,” a style of music that, along with Jesse Jackson’s campaigns for president, signaled the convergence of civil rights/Black Power–era politics with an emerging hip-hop political voice in a way that made Blackness cool for a new generation.
To be sure, Jackson’s presidential campaigns were the culmination of late 1960s and early ’70s activism that had led to the Gary, Indiana, Black Political Convention of 1972. The convention ushered in the greatest wave of Black elected officials that the country had seen since Reconstruction, including the historic election of Harold Washington as Chicago’s first Black mayor—right in Jackson’s backyard.
Part of this was the result of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. However, since Blacks won the right to vote, Black voter participation had remained at essentially the same level for three presidential election cycles until it surged to 55.8 percent during Jackson’s historic run in 1984.
A protégé of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Jackson was charismatic and bold, and gave voice to a vision that went far beyond anything U.S. presidential candidates had previously articulated. Jackson demanded the totality of freedom and inclusion that Black leaders had demanded of the United States for generations.
What Jackson advocated for the nation (“America is not a blanket but a quilt”) was also in sync with hip-hop’s own emerging philosophy (from DJ Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa to KRS-one—“peace, love, unity and having fun” and universal humanism).
The early 1980s was also marked by Louis Farrakhan’s rise to the leadership of the new Nation of Islam (NOI). In 1985 I was among a group of Black students who chartered a bus to take students to attend Farrakhan’s national coming-out in New York City when he was rebuilding the NOI in alignment with what he saw as the original vision of founder Elijah Muhammad. Many young people joined the Nation, including more college students and college graduates than at any point in its history. That October a 25,000-strong audience filled Madison Square Garden to hear a message of Black economic self-sufficiency and empowerment.