The hearings also set in motion a breakup between African American voters and the Republican Party that had been looming since the 1960s. Calling it the “Clarence Thomas Effect,” Harvard sociologist Lawrence Bobo suggests that 1992 was the last real moment when African Americans chose racial allegiance over ideology and party. Once Thomas’s judicial opinions proved to be as conservative as he had suggested they would be during the hearings, or more so, it became hard for any Black Republican (a notable exception was future secretary of state Colin Powell), much less one running for office, to have significant African American support again.
By 2008, 95 percent of African American voters were voting Democratic in presidential elections. And statewide races didn’t look different. Reflecting on his own theory twenty years later, Bobo wrote to me in an email, “One can easily amass a lot of evidence to support [this theory]. A variety of Black republicans who have run for statewide elections don’t typically get large and loyal Black following.”
In 2018 Anita Hill opened a Times op-ed with “There is no way to redo 1991, but there are ways to do better.” Two days after Christine Blasey Ford came forward with her allegation that Supreme Court justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they both were teenagers, Hill was trying to prevent her history from repeating itself: in her 1991 case, senators had prevented other women from testifying, like Angela Wright, whom Thomas had also allegedly harassed while he was her supervisor. But history did repeat itself. On September 27, Ford appeared alone to testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee, in a navy skirt suit reminiscent of Hill’s, despite the fact that other women were also willing to testify against Kavanaugh.
The next week a full-page ad with sixteen hundred names, in a tiny font, appeared in the Sunday Times stating, “We believe Anita Hill. We also believe Christine Blasey Ford.” This time the signatories were all men, of various races, who were taking up the charge given to them by Black women almost thirty years earlier. They could not redo 1991, but they did better.
1994–1999
THE CRIME BILL
Angela Y. Davis
On September 13, 1994, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. Ironically, this day marked the twenty-third anniversary of the violent suppression of the Attica Prison rebellion in 1971. On the fifth day of the uprising, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered a force made up of 550 New York state police troopers and some two hundred sheriff’s deputies, along with National Guard helicopters, to retake the prison. According to historian Heather Ann Thompson,
Ultimately, the human cost of the retaking was staggeringly high: 128 men were shot—some of them multiple times. Less than half an hour after the retaking had commenced, nine hostages were dead and at least one additional hostage was close to death. Twenty-nine prisoners had been fatally shot. Many of the deaths in D Yard—both hostages and prisoners—were caused by the scatter of buckshot, and still others resulted from the devastating impact of unjacketed bullets.
The use of unjacketed bullets, banned by the Geneva Conventions, and wide-arc buckshot was undoubtedly designed to produce as many casualties as possible. The New York commissioner of corrections, Russell Oswald, remarked, “I think I have some feeling now of how Truman must have felt when he decided to drop the A-bomb.”
Twenty-three years later, the passage of the Crime Bill—although not as explosively violent, and unfolding over the course of many years rather than in the minutes-long catastrophe created by official gunmen on the grounds of Attica Prison—would cause immense devastation in Black, Brown, and poor communities. The Crime Bill became widely recognized as a major accelerator of what came to be known as mass incarceration. On the occasion of signing the bill, Bill Clinton remarked:
Today the bickering stops, the era of excuses is over, the law-abiding citizens of this country have made their voices heard. Never again should Washington put politics and party above law and order….Gangs and drugs have taken over our streets and undermined our schools. Every day we read about somebody else who has literally gotten away with murder.
These remarks reflect the expansive reach of the discourse on law and order, which since the 1970s tended to conflate “crime” with civil rights protests in the South and with the widespread turmoil generated by racism in the North. The moral panic produced by this discourse increasingly meant that the “law and order” slogan served as a proxy for more explicit calls to suppress Black movements and ultimately also to criminalize indiscriminately broad swaths of the Black population.
By 1994, the deindustrialization of the U.S. economy, produced by global economic shifts, was having a deleterious impact on working-class Black communities. The massive loss of jobs in the manufacturing sector, especially in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, had the result, according to Joe William Trotter, that “the black urban working class nearly disappeared by the early 1990s.” Combined with the disestablishment of welfare state benefits, these economic shifts caused vast numbers of Black people to seek other—sometimes “illegal”—means of survival. It is not accidental that the full force of the crack epidemic was felt during the 1980s and early ’90s.
During this period there were few signs of governmental effort to address the circumstances responsible for the rapid impoverishment of working-class Black communities, and the 1994 Crime Bill was emblematic of the turn to carceral “solutions” as a response to the impact of forces of global capitalism. As Cedric Robinson has pointed out, capitalism has always been racial capitalism, and the Crime Bill was a formidable indication that Republicans and Democrats in Washington were united in their acceptance of punitive strategies to stave off the effects of Black impoverishment. Originally written by Senator Joe Biden, who would become vice president during the two terms of Barack Obama, the 356 pages of the bill contained provisions for one hundred thousand new police and over $12 billion in funding for state prisons, giving precedence to states that had enacted three-strikes laws and truth-in-sentencing. Moreover, the stipulations of the bill, which terminated Pell Grants for prisoners, led to the disestablishment of degree-granting educational programs in prisons. Recreational facilities began to be increasingly removed from prison settings as well.
The passage of the Crime Bill consolidated a political “law and order” environment, which prompted state legislatures to complement its provisions by passing ever more repressive laws affecting imprisoned people. During the same month that the bill was passed, the Mississippi legislature, which met in a special session to address prison overcrowding, instead focused on passing legislation to revoke prisoner access to amenities. According to The New York Times,
There was talk of restoring fear to prisons, of caning, of making prisoners “smell like a prisoner,” of burning and frying, of returning executions to the county seat and of making Mississippi “the capital of capital punishment,” as Gov. Kirk Fordice, a Republican, put it.