Treatment didn’t always work, of course—some programs weren’t very good, while others limped along on shoestring budgets, and even the best ones failed sometimes. Addiction is a terrible disease, witnesses explained, and addicts often needed multiple chances before finding success. But treatment worked better than any of the alternatives and at lower cost. Since you could put eight people in a drug program for the cost of a single prison bed, treatment was what one New York official called “the cheapest game in town.”
The biggest problem with drug treatment was that there wasn’t enough of it. When a national association surveyed states about their treatment capacity, 94 percent said that they couldn’t meet their citizens’ needs. In one twenty-four-hour period, nine heroin overdose victims were brought unconscious to Boston City Hospital; emergency personnel saved them all, but because every program in the city was full, officials couldn’t offer treatment to any of them.
It was a powerful case. But not for the first—or last—time, politics, ideology, fear, and racism would prove more powerful. Ignoring the call to fund more treatment, research, and prevention, the Reagan administration did the opposite and shifted funds toward law enforcement. Where the Nixon administration had devoted two-thirds of the federal drug budget to treatment and one-third to law enforcement, Reagan reversed that ratio to what it has remained since: two-thirds law enforcement, one-third treatment. A New Jersey official, describing the massive waiting lists for programs in his state, complained to Rangel’s committee that this reallocation of funding constituted “simple abandonment by the Federal Government of the prevention and treatment field.”
By cutting treatment in the midst of a drug crisis, the Reagan administration established the template that would define drug policy in America for decades to come. The consequences have been grave and lasting. Most immediately, cutting funding for treatment denied help to people in pain. After all, behind every statistic presented in the testimony before Rangel’s committee were people, most of them poor, struggling to keep their families and lives together in the face of dependency and addiction.
But drug warriors of the era succeeded in presenting drug users in a different light. Defining addiction as an individual choice and personal failure, they contended that society bore no responsibility for the consequences. If a person became dependent on or addicted to drugs, it was because they were weak, selfish, irresponsible, or depraved. Female drug users were especially frequent targets of denunciation. For example, when asked about the challenge of caring for pregnant women addicted to crack, D.C.’s health commissioner blamed the women. “The response of a rational person would be to come in and find out whether they are pregnant, but we aren’t talking about rational people,” he said. “We are talking about women who simply do not care. The maternal instinct is being destroyed.”
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.
Farrakhan had been an avid supporter of Jesse Jackson during the 1984 campaign. To many of us, Farrakhan appealed to the more radical vision of Black political thought that we embraced at the time. When he and Jackson stood together during the campaign, they helped us imagine new possibilities beyond the historic integration versus separation divide.
Other influential voices inspired our search for a new Black political center that made sense for our time. Reaching out from college campuses to the grass roots were individuals like Julian Bond, Maulana Karenga, Sonia Sanchez, Kwame Touré, Naim Akbar, Bobby Seale, Haki Madhubuti, and Nikki Giovanni.
The 1986–87 school year jump-started a series of National Black Student Unity Conferences: the first featured keynotes by Jackson and Farrakhan and topped seven hundred attendees. Conferences would follow in 1987–88 at Howard University and at Columbia University the following school year.
All these developments, including Jackson’s presidential campaign, helped shape our political consciousness. But the most significant development that captivated our generation was the emergence on the national scene of hip-hop with conscious messages of resistance.
Hip-hop in those days was not yet fully embraced as mainstream culture. It was still largely an underground phenomenon and a lived folk culture that we saw as our own. Wherever hip-hop showed up, we saw it as the source of our own entry. But even more, this convergence of Black Power generation politics with hip-hop’s emerging political impulse gave our generation agency.
In 1987, on the heels of their debut, Yo! Bum Rush the Show, Public Enemy sampled Malcolm X’s speech “Message to the Grassroots” on their single “Bring the Noise,” which would become the lead single for their second album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988). Malcolm’s haunting words at the start of the song hung in the air and captured the tone of the moment: “Too Black, too strong.”
Similar to It Takes a Nation of Millions, KRS-one’s By All Means Necessary sent Black youth scrambling for books he referenced, such as Message to the Blackman in America by Elijah Muhammad, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and How to Eat to Live, also by Elijah Muhammad. His album laid the groundwork for the Stop the Violence movement. 1988 also saw the release of Eric B and Rakim’s Follow the Leader on July 25, one week after Jackson’s second address to the Democratic National Convention. Talib Kweli recently called Follow the Leader “the most important hip-hop record ever.”
1989 mirrored 1988 as a year of essential conscious hip-hop music. Few can remember the year 1989 and not recall Chuck D’s words “1989, the year, another summer.” Those words capture that singular moment in time when nearly everyone in hip-hop was fighting the power: Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing; The Cress Theory of Color Confrontation reprinted inside the jacket of Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet; Queen Latifah’s album All Hail the Queen; and Reginald Hudlin’s film House Party (all of which placed front and center hip-hop’s Afrocentric aesthetic such as crowns, African prints, Africa-shaped leather medallion necklaces, and African hairstyles epitomized by Kid and Play).
The hip-hop generation shaped American history for decades to follow. The Million Man March in 1995, for example, was heavily supported by the hip-hop community. The 2004 National Hip-Hop Political Convention—inspired by the Gary, Indiana, convention of 1972—brought over four thousand young Black people to Newark, New Jersey. Black youth political participation witnessed a surge during the elections of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. These young Black voters were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine. At the core of each of these moments is what it has meant for the hip-hop generation to come into its own.
1989–1994
ANITA HILL
Salamishah Tillet
Every evening when my family enters our comfortable three-bedroom townhouse in downtown Newark, a large, limited-series, fire-truck-red-framed poster greets us. Originally made by the Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, the poster is a reproduction of a full-page ad taken out on November 17, 1991, in eight of our nation’s largest newspapers, including The New York Times.
On that Sunday morning, the ad headline, “African American Women in Defense of Ourselves,” appeared one month after law professor Anita Hill testified before Congress with allegations that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her while he was her supervisor at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 1981 to 1982.
Before I received my own copy as a gift, I’d seen the poster only two other places. The first was in the foyer of Gloria Steinem’s home, hanging high like mine, in spaces traditionally reserved for photographs of presidents, prime ministers, or religious symbols. The second time was in the hallway of Spelman College’s famed Women’s Research and Resource Center, founded by Beverly Guy-Sheftall in 1981. During both visits, I’d lose myself in a trance parsing through and memorizing the names of the more than sixteen hundred Black women who—organized by feminist scholars Barbara Ransby, Deborah King, and Elsa Barkley Brown—made history by declaring their unwavering public support for Hill.
“We were all Anita Hill at that moment,” Barbara Ransby told The Washington Post in an interview in 2018 about the ad’s origins. “Elsa set up a bank account,” she recalled. “Someone had a husband who worked at an ad agency in New York. We collected lots and lots of small checks.” Combining word of mouth and a 1-800 number, they raised the $50,000 necessary for the ad campaign. “Now we tweet or text,” Ransby opined.
I was sixteen years old when I saw Anita Hill for the first time. In my memory, I sat glued to the television, trying to interpolate every detail of Hill’s statement into my newly forming Black feminist consciousness. But the truth is, I didn’t watch it live. At the actual time of her testimony, I was finishing my senior year at my predominantly white private high school in Livingston, New Jersey, and spent the hours between English class and soccer practice arguing about the merits of her allegations.
I knew many of my white classmates looked at Hill as an oddity because m
ost of the Black women with whom they were in regular contact were their nannies at home or our school’s cafeteria staff. In their suburban enclaves, Yale Law School–educated Black women did not exist. That Hill dared to stand before the all-white, all-male Senate Judiciary Committee was even more confounding.
The summer before Anita Hill testified, in her now-iconic teal linen skirt suit, with her left hand slightly hidden behind her back, her right hand held high to be sworn in, I had undergone my own political conversion. I spent the summer in Boston with my dad, first street canvassing for the National Environmental Law Center, then volunteering for the NAACP. But I also read three books that changed my life: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley. Because of these narratives, I learned to see how my racial and gender identities were interlinked. That if my Blackness overdetermined my past and future opportunities, my experiences as a girl heightened my vulnerability and my likelihood to be a victim of misogyny and violence.
So by the time Hill came forward, I had already had a primer into a debate that had been happening among Black people since slavery. Reflecting on the impact of the hearings, Toni Morrison would later write, “In matters of race and gender, it is now possible and necessary, as it seemed never to have been before, to speak about these matters without the barriers, the silences, the embarrassing gaps in discourse.”
Before Thomas’s nomination, Thurgood Marshall was the only African American to be appointed to the Supreme Court. When Marshall announced his plan to retire in June 1991, President George H. W. Bush saw it as an opportunity to increase his support among two disparate, and increasingly dispirited, political blocs: the anti-abortion, anti-affirmative-action white American base of his own Republican Party; and right-leaning, Reagan-voting African Americans. In Clarence Thomas, a forty-three-year-old African American Republican from Pinpoint, Georgia, with only two years of experience as a federal judge, Bush found the ideal candidate to help him appeal to both these constituencies.
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