When Rosa Parks was arrested after refusing to give up her seat in the “colored” section of a public Montgomery, Alabama, bus to a white person when the “whites only” section was full, she became a symbol of nonviolent resistance. But the Montgomery bus boycott was neither the beginning nor the end of anything, for civil rights or for Rosa Parks herself. First of all, resistance to Jim Crow had been increasing since the end of World War II; second, the backlash by the white community after the U.S. District Court ruled that Alabama’s bus segregation was unconstitutional was severe and, in the short term at least, did not have the desired impact. The white response was typically savage. Snipers shot at buses carrying Black passengers and five Black churches were bombed. The seven Klansmen tried for the bombings were all acquitted. Just as with Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision ruling that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional, the bus segregation ruling was followed by the entrenchment and flaunting of white power.
As for Parks, she was fired from her department store job. By 1957, she had to move out of state with her family because she was unable to find new employment in Montgomery. For several years afterward she continued to receive death threats. Her involvement in the civil rights movement was much more complex than that one act of civil disobedience. She had been secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, and she worked in the Black Power movement alongside many others, including Robert F. Williams and Malcolm X, both of whom she befriended. Williams, an advocate for arming Blacks for the purposes of self-defense and the protection of civil rights activists from Ku Klux Klan terrorism, founded the Black Armed Guard, which had approximately sixty members. On October 5, 1957, when the Ku Klux Klan threatened Dr. Albert Perry, vice president of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the NAACP, Williams and the Guard set up a barrier of sandbags in front of Perry’s house and, when cars full of Klan members drove by and started shooting, Williams and his men shot back. In response, the Monroe City Council banned the Klan from having motorcades.
Years later, speaking at Williams’s funeral, Parks said that she had always admired him “for his courage and his commitment to freedom. The work that he did should go down in history and never be forgotten.” Her presence at Williams’s funeral and her remarks belie her depiction as the genteel Black woman who quietly started a movement.
But who were the antagonists in these scenarios? Who were the terrorists firebombing Black churches and lynching innocent Black people? Who were the cops who stood by or joined in? They remain elusive, perhaps because the cause they were fighting for, the reason they committed their atrocities—namely segregation and maintaining the status quo of racial inequality—was embraced by a significant minority of politicians in both the House and the Senate.
After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed by the House, then–majority leader Mike Mansfield had to bypass the Judiciary Committee and bring the bill directly to the Senate floor because James Eastland, the chair of Judiciary, a fellow Democrat, and a segregationist, would never have allowed it to survive. In the end, twenty-seven senators—including twenty-one Democrats—voted against passage of the Civil Rights Act. Many of them, including Strom Thurmond, who had staged the longest filibuster in the Senate’s history in an effort to kill an earlier civil rights bill in 1957, switched to the Republican Party after the bill’s passage.
So the path to the Civil Rights Act was neither simple nor straightforward. Like much of the fight for Black equality, it was fraught with crimes of violence, untold violation of rights and loss of property and opportunity, and very little accountability.
After 350 years, Blacks had achieved full equality and a guarantee that their rights would be protected, at least on paper. But American ingenuity is never more ingenious than when new finding ways to promote white supremacy.
The discrimination itself has never stopped—it’s just morphed into more subtle, more palatable forms of expression. Even if the thrust of some policies shifted more toward equity and inclusion, the results of decades-old government actions vis-à-vis housing, education, and criminal justice continue to have an impact on the day-to-day lives of Blacks and the opportunity gaps that still confront them. The Federal Reserve released data in early 2021 that show the average net worth of white families is 700 percent higher than that of Black families. By almost every metric—such as environmental pollution, exposure to climate risk, access to adequate and unbiased health care, and quality education—Black Americans continue to be greatly disadvantaged compared to their white counterparts.
Our very highway system is racist, not only because highway design in the 1950s destroyed Black neighborhoods, often by leveling them to make room for roads, but also because it prevented Blacks and other people of color from enjoying common resources whites take for granted. For example, Robert Moses, the architect of much of New York City’s infrastructure and, according to his biographer Robert Caro, “the most racist human being I had ever really encountered,” kept the bridges on Long Island parkways deliberately low so that buses carrying working-class Blacks and Hispanics, who were less likely to own cars at the time than whites, wouldn’t be able to travel to the beaches.
There is also a form of environmental terrorism being carried out because of those decades-old decisions. Predominantly Black neighborhoods situated next to intercity highway systems, including Virginia Park, Detroit, where Rosa Parks moved after Montgomery, are disproportionately affected by exposure to particulate matter. According to a study published in the journal Science Advances and discussed in The Washington Post in April 2021, such exposure kills between eighty-five thousand and two hundred thousand Americans prematurely every year.
Additionally, 26 percent of all Blacks and 28 percent of all minorities live within three miles of a Superfund site. Low-income communities suffer more from heat waves because they have fewer trees and green spaces and are, therefore, hotter.
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Dr. Joy DeGruy identifies high levels of stress, self-doubt, and problems with aggression and interpersonal relationships among Blacks as the fallout from post-traumatic slave syndrome. Anger, in particular, is insidious and pervasive, and can be experienced on a personal level due to thwarted ambition, but also communally by Black Americans as the result of not being able to achieve the goal of fully integrating into a society that continues to shut them out. Everything is seen through the prism of color.
There continues to be an interaction between the unhealed wounds of the past and wounds inflicted daily on Black Americans in every sphere and circumstance of social and civic life. The impacts are devastating. David Williams, a professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, has developed the Everyday Discrimination Scale to assess the frequency with which people experience being discriminated against in various settings. There is a direct correlation between high levels of discrimination and increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, and asthma. Health care for Blacks is often substandard, a trend that is partly driven by implicit biases held by medical professionals, which are to some degree the direct result of their training, where false ideas about the physiology of Black Americans (the myth about their high tolerance for pain, for example) persist.
The cumulative result of this health crisis is the stunning revelation by Williams that two hundred Black Americans die prematurely every day. And that was before COVID-19.
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This country has been dealing with drugs and addiction since its inception, but it wasn’t until Richard Nixon declared drugs “public enemy number one,” in 1971, that the war started. A war on drugs makes as much sense as a war on terror, but thanks to misguided legislation and reallocation of resources, the “war on drugs” went from being a catchphrase to being a reality—at least in inner cities and communities of color—complete with SWAT teams and heavily armed, and increasingly empowered, local police.
Nixon’s administration actually did, at least at the beginning, focus a
ttention on drug treatment and rehabilitation, but the approach became increasingly punitive. The question remains whether Nixon’s drug policies were purposefully crafted to target Blacks and anti-war liberals excessively. There is no doubt, however, that over time, particularly during Ronald Reagan’s eight years in office, strategies devised to fight the “war on drugs” were really means to entrap Black men—with increasingly disastrous consequences.
Under Reagan, the budget for the drug war increased more than tenfold and took Nixon’s measures to a whole new level. The euphemistically named Anti–Drug Abuse Act of 1986 enacted even more harsh sentences for most drugs, including marijuana. Federally mandated minimums were set at five years for five hundred grams of cocaine and the same term for only five grams of crack, despite the fact that crack has been shown to be no more dangerous than powdered cocaine. Under these guidelines, sentences were determined by statute, so judges had no leeway when it came to imposing them. Because of this act, prosecutors utilized extensive powers to coerce guilty pleas from defendants in exchange for more lenient sentencing. As of 2015, approximately 95 percent of prosecutors in the country were white.
By 2003, Blacks comprised 80 percent of the defendants federally sentenced for crack possession, even though only 30 percent of crack cocaine users were Black. Sixty-six percent of crack cocaine users in the United States were white or Hispanic. In an analysis of the arrest data provided by the FBI, Human Rights Watch found that “in every year between 1980 and 2007, arrests for drug possession have constituted 64 percent of all drug arrests. From 1999 through 2007, 80 percent or more of all drug arrests were for possession.” From 1980 to 2007, Blacks were 2.8 to 5.5 times more likely to be arrested on drug charges than whites. One of the most shocking statistics is highlighted by Jeremy Travis in his book But They All Came Back: In the year 2000, the incarceration rate for Blacks for all crimes was twenty-six times what it had been in the 1980s. Because there is very little variability by race in terms of who uses drugs or what drugs people use, these data clearly demonstrate the inevitable result of racist drug policies and sentencing guidelines.
As has so often been the case, the Supreme Court’s role in erring on the side of undermining the Constitution, failing to protect the vulnerable, and empowering antidemocratic legislation was in full force in the wake of the Anti–Drug Abuse Act. In a series of rulings devastating to protections afforded by the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizure, ignoring the purpose of the Constitution’s original text (as the Court’s so-called originalists often do), the power of the police to engage in such searches was expanded past the point of absurdity, until there was little need for them to show probable cause.
It all seems designed essentially to criminalize Blackness. The impact is difficult to quantify on a human level, but the statistics are mind-boggling. In 1986, federal drug sentences were 11 percent higher for Black Americans than whites. By 1990, after the Anti–Drug Abuse Act had been in place for four years, that average was 49 percent higher. The goal of mass incarceration of Black men appears to have been premeditated.
At the turn of the twentieth century, an arrest for loitering could condemn a Black man to a life of hard labor on a cotton plantation or in a turpentine forest. There was no recourse, no appeal, and almost never any relief. After the passage of the 1986 act, Black men and women, often imprisoned for similarly minor infractions or because they got caught up in an inefficient and callous system that forced plea bargains, found their lives forever shadowed by the shame of being labeled an ex-con.
Politicians could no longer get away with turning loitering into a serious felony deserving of a life sentence, but by declaring a war on drug users and falsely claiming that some drugs, like crack, were more dangerous than other drugs and used predominantly by Blacks, the means were justified. The increasingly militarized approach of law enforcement and the extreme sentences sought by prosecutors perpetuated this lie.
Thanks in part to our Puritan roots, our justice system has always been more about punishment than rehabilitation—and it doesn’t work. The results, as measured by resources squandered and lives destroyed, have been catastrophic. And at almost every point along the way, Blacks are unfairly targeted, more likely to be charged with more serious crimes, and much more likely to serve longer sentences than their white counterparts.
All of this is bad enough. But in America, at least for certain segments of the population, there is no such thing as serving your time. The price is never paid. The hurdle placed between a felon and the ability to participate fully in civic life, the possibility of living a life of dignity and prosperity, is, much more often than not, insurmountable. Even if the alleged crime was a minor drug offense, and even if the accused pleaded guilty only in order to avoid an excessive sentence, life after prison is a continuation of the nightmare. As Michelle Alexander writes in The New Jim Crow, “Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal.”
Plus ça change …
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On the face of it, the “broken windows” theory, developed by the criminologist George L. Kelling and the political scientist James Q. Wilson, seems uncontroversial, reasonable even: obvious signs of decay and disorder can lead to more disorder until things spiral out of control. In the context of law enforcement, the hypothesis was that if local police, especially in urban areas (read: inner cities; read: ghettos), clamp down on minor crimes, more serious ones can be prevented. Taking these small infractions seriously would, theoretically, have the effect of creating an atmosphere of order, thereby promoting more lawful behavior. Basically, signs of crime lead to crime.
The broken windows theory appealed to many politicians and law enforcement officers of all stripes. The Columbia University law professor Bernard Harcourt described the reaction to the policy this way: “It seemed like a magical solution. It allowed everybody to find a way in their own mind to get rid of the panhandler, the guy sleeping on the street, the prostitute, the drugs, the litter, and it allowed liberals to do that while still feeling self-righteous and good about themselves.”
The newly elected mayor of New York City, Rudolph Giuliani, and his police commissioner, William Bratton, were enthusiastic adopters of the broken window policy in the mid-1990s. Almost as soon as Giuliani came into office, it went into effect, and misdemeanors such as public drinking, jaywalking—literally crossing the street at the wrong place—painting graffiti, and loitering were criminalized. Turnstile jumping—subway fare evasion—was considered a huge problem by the Metropolitan Transit Authority at the time, and hundreds of police officers fanned out through subway stations across the five boroughs to arrest offenders. This was the law enforcement equivalent of classifying marijuana as a gateway drug for heroin.
The perceived success of broken windows policing played a big role in Giuliani’s reelection in 1997, but ultimately it was as illusory as the undeserved reputation he garnered after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. It also turns out, according to a study by the sociologists Robert J. Sampson and Stephen W. Raudenbush, that “observed disorder predicts perceived disorder, but racial and economic context matter more.” In other words, neighborhoods that are poor or Black or both are perceived to be more disordered than other neighborhoods even when they are not.
Broken windows policing in New York seems to have had no impact on crime rates overall. Although they did go down, this was a nationwide trend following a period of significantly high crime rates. This was not a matter of cause and effect. The actual impact was the increase in contact between the police and young (mostly) Black (mostly) men, which almost inevitably led to arrests for minor infractions like turnstile jumping. Once one is in the system, as we’ve seen, it becomes difficult to extricate oneself from it.
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There are many failures in the way we teach our children, most fundamentally about themselves and each other. Imposing a broken windows approach on schools has had a devastating impact on those lessons. In practical terms, addressing structural problems would have made perfect sense—a well-ordered, intact physical environment can increase a child’s sense of safety and self-worth, which in turn can enhance learning. But as with law enforcement, the misapplication of the practice to schools ended up with administrators and teachers treating children as if they were the broken windows.
Suddenly, relatively minor offenses were treated with a previously unheard-of severity. Students were being expelled for cutting class or talking back. School suspensions are supposed to be based on a set list of rules, yet, as a mammoth Texas study of over one million schoolchildren found, 97 percent of suspensions were at the administration’s discretion and not based on the rules. As Libby Nelson and Dara Lind reported for Vox, Black students “were 31 percent more likely to receive a discretionary suspension, even after controlling for 83 other variables.”
The Reckoning Page 13