JF

So I think the first thing that’s really crucial to understand is the role that crime, addiction, and violence played. In D.C., the homicide rate tripled in the 1960s and it would double again in the crack years of the late 1980s. It tripled during the heroin epidemic. People remember crack but heroin was the crack before crack. Heroin devastated black communities nationally.

But it’s more than the numbers. I went back and looked at the papers of various city council members who had retired and given their papers to D.C. libraries. Included in those papers are volumes of letters from citizens. One of the things that’s so striking is to see is the pain and anguish that jump off the pages. Citizens are writing — and these are mostly black citizens writing to mostly black elected officials — saying “I feel like a prisoner in my own home. … I feel like a stranger in my own streets … I can’t go outside … I don’t want to walk my children to school by the drug dealers … I can’t leave my children in the park after school because people are shooting … There are syringes in my backyard … What’s happened to our city? … What’s happened to us as a community? … What’s happened to us as a people?” There are these desperate pleas in the years shortly after the end of formal Jim Crow. They see drugs marching through their community and feel overwhelmed.

The next part of the story to think about is: who are the people receiving these letters? They are this first generation of black elected officials and they have their counterparts in judging, policing, and in court functionaries and civil servants. Many of them are from the South, out of the civil rights movement. They are aware of the generations of under-enforcement of the law in black communities. They remember when you didn’t call the police in black neighborhoods. You didn’t call the police if there was a fight or something because they were not going to come and if they did, they were just going to make matters worse.

They remembered this history and they were bound and determined to protect black lives. Chapter two of my book is called “Black Lives Matter” even though it’s 1975 and they didn’t use that phrase. I use that title because I want to highlight that this is a generation of elected officials that is committed to making black lives matter, to protecting black victims who had never received adequate protection of the law. That to me is the judge in the opening story of the book. He saw himself as just as motivated by a civil rights commitment as I did. That’s why he’s talking about Martin Luther King, Jr. But he flips the script by saying that protecting the black victims of crime and communities who have not historically received that protection is his motivation to carry out what I consider to be a very harsh sentence for Brandon. And so that’s the thing that I think is crucial to understand and what I learned through the research: how many individuals saw protecting black lives and protecting black victims of crime as an extension of the civil rights struggle and not in contradiction to it.

The last piece of the explanation focuses on the constraints African American politicians were under. This is a story about black elected officials, but it’s also a story of constraint and the limitations that they were under. The first constraint is that of imagination. Consider David Clark, a city council member who is one of the few white characters that gets a lot of attention in the book. He’s an unusual white character in that he went to Howard University Law School and worked with Dr. King. He’s not a drug warrior at all. He fights for marijuana decriminalization. But he also gets letters from citizens saying “Hey, you know there’s an addict in front of my apartment building or in front of my place of business.” And he takes those letters and he does what a responsible elected official should do and forwards them on to the relevant public agency. They say they’re going to look into it, and he relays that back to the citizens. That’s good constituent services! But he’s constrained by his imagination. Which government agency does he forward the citizen complaint letters to? Is it the Department of Drug Rehabilitation, the Department of Health, or the Department of Mental Health? No, it’s the police department. Because he, like so many Americans, thinks of an addict on the corner as a criminal justice problem. He cannot imagine a different approach.

Black elected officials are also constrained by politics. I spend a lot of time on this in the book. These are local actors, they’re responding to this problem at the city level, but they want help from the federal government. They know they can’t solve these problems on their own. Black officials say “we want gun control, we want a national investment in jobs in the inner cities, we want a Marshall Plan for Urban America, we want black communities to be treated the way Europe was after World War II, to invest, rebuild, and revitalize.” So they have an “all of the above” strategy to fight crime and violence but they only get one of the above, they get law enforcement.

They are also constrained by history: a history of racism and a history of white supremacy that has meant that they are responsible for protecting communities that have always gotten too little public investment. They were elected to represent black neighborhoods that were the first to lose jobs, were redlined, were stripped of their wealth by rapacious lenders, and that have always gotten inadequate public services. So they’re protecting or representing neighborhoods that are desperate. Early on at a conference at Columbia University, history professor Jelani Cobb asked me “Is it fair to say that people you’re writing about had the power to respond to crime but they didn’t have the power to respond to the underlying conditions that helped cause crime?” And my answer to him at that conference was yes, that’s a very good summary of the dilemma that they were facing.