The dissent was immediate. The NAACP, the AFL-CIO, and the National Organization for Women (NOW) released statements vowing to fight Thomas’s nomination. NOW was concerned with his stance on abortion; the AFL-CIO opposed his conservative positions. But it was the board of directors of the NAACP, the nation’s largest racial justice organization, whose position stands out in a 49–1 vote. “While we appreciate the fact that Judge Thomas came up in the school of hard knocks and pulled himself up by his own bootstraps,” NAACP chairman William F. Gibson said in a press conference, “our concern is for the millions of blacks who have no access to bootstraps, theirs or others.”
Despite this stance, Thomas polled well among African American voters. And more important for Republicans, his nomination initially found little resistance during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings that September. After a few days of testimony, the committee, chaired by Senator Joe Biden (D-Del.), split its vote, moving the process to the Senate floor without a clear majority in Thomas’s favor. After learning of Hill’s allegations in late August, a small group of Democratic senators led by Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) urged Biden to take up Hill’s case. After weeks of going back and forth with Democratic staffers and senators over how best to protect her privacy, Hill held a press conference on October 7, 1991, and said she was willing to testify.
In those few days leading up to her appearance, we learned a few facts about her. Like Thomas, she was born into a family of Southern farmers, had graduated from Yale Law School, and was a registered Republican. At the time, Republicans erased many of the same aspects of Hill’s biography that they extolled as virtues in Thomas’s. Framing Thomas as a rural, working-class African American who worked his way into the upper echelon of academia and the federal government, they used his life story to discredit Hill, eventually leading to a wide-scale character assault on her. Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) accused Hill of “flat-out perjury.” Republicans drew on centuries of sexist images of women as delusional, and racist ideas of Black women as hypersexual. Conservative John Doggett, a Texas businessman and lawyer, testified that Hill was an erotomaniac who fantasized about dating him.
In response, Hill revealed in great detail the extent of Thomas’s harassment. “He talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises or large breasts, involved in various sex acts,” she quietly recounted to the all-white, all-male Senate panel. “On several occasions, Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess.”
In trying to refute Hill’s claims before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Thomas called the hearing “a high-tech lynching for uppity Blacks.” He conjured up one of the most violent acts of America’s racial history to shore up his support among white liberals and conservatives alike. Not only was he successful, he also introduced a new racial and gendered trope that was well known among African Americans but less familiar to white Americans: the Black woman as race traitor. “Having made Anita Hill into a villain, he proceeded—wittingly or not—to erase her and return to a simpler and more conventional cast,” historian Nell Irvin Painter wrote.
By the end of his story Anita Hill had lost the only role, that of villain, that his use of stereotype had allowed her. She finally disappeared, as he spun out a drama pitting the lone and persecuted figure of Clarence Thomas, the black man, against an army of powerful white assailants. Democratic senators became the lynch mob; Thomas became the innocent lynch victim. As symbol and as actual person, Anita Hill was no longer to be found.
By the mid-twentieth century, the horror of lynching was transformed from a material reality to a political metaphor, one that Thomas not only used to his advantage but also canonized on the national stage. When R. Kelly, Bill Cosby, and Justin Fairfax, the lieutenant governor of Virginia, fended off charges from Black women (and in the case of Cosby, white women, from over several decades as well) who accused them of rape, they compared themselves to lynching victims. It is only now, in this age of #MeToo, that such analogies have started to ring hollow.
In the 1990s, however, the battles were much more internecine. “A conversation, a serious one among black men and women, has begun in a new arena, and the contestants defy the mold,” reflected Morrison.
By the end of the hearings, African American support for Thomas was the highest it had been, with 70 percent of African Americans backing his nomination and 50 percent of whites, according to an ABC News–Washington Post poll that was conducted the weekend after the hearings closed. The result was that Democrats and Republicans, emboldened by the public response, voted 52–48 to confirm Clarence Thomas as a justice of the Supreme Court.
The morning that the vote was announced, I was late for school. The radio in my family’s car, a used beige Jaguar, whose blaring muffler always made me shrink a little out of embarrassment as we climbed the driveway of my school, was turned on. When we reached the front steps, Michael Stipe, the front man for R.E.M., wailed, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” making me pause as I refastened my jacket and looked in the mirror to smooth my hair. Even then, I knew the song was a premonition.
What I didn’t know was that a year later, I’d experience this same scene of emotional shock and sartorial realignment as I walked to my dorm room, the morning after a well-respected African American man, three years my senior, sexually assaulted me. The Hill hearings had betrayed a simple and tragic truth: if I were to come forward against this upwardly mobile, Ivy League–educated Black man, most Black people would not believe me.
But I believed Hill. And Hill’s words did change the world, bit by bit and for the better. Sexual harassment cases more than doubled, according to Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filings, from 6,127 in 1991 to 15,342 in 1996. During that period, awards to victims under federal laws nearly quadrupled, from $7.7 million to $27.8 million. 1992 was dubbed the “Year of the Woman” in politics because more women ran and won their elections. Five women became U.S. senators, including Carol Moseley Braun, the first African American woman ever elected, and twenty-four women won new seats in the House of Representatives.
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 Fo
rd.” 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.
By the time the Legislature adjourned, reality had come close to the rhetoric. There will be no more private televisions for inmates and no radios, record players, tape or compact disc players, computers or stereos. Weight-lifting equipment, too, will be eliminated.
In sum, prison populations grew increasingly larger and the institutions themselves became more repressive and less likely to encourage people in prison to engage in self-rehabilitative activities—whether studying toward a degree or weight training. This punitive turn was especially apparent in the inclusion of the Violence Against Women Act within the Crime Bill, which proposed criminalization and carceral “solutions” to gender violence and helped to encourage the development of carceral feminism.
In response to this governmental promotion of state violence, antiprison activism intensified throughout the country, and in the fall of 1998 a massive conference drew 3,500 advocates, activists, artists, and scholars under the rubric “Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex.” The ultimate goal of this gathering was to propose new vocabularies and a new discourse that would help to shift the “law and order” rhetoric to one that acknowledged the role played by the multifaceted criminalization of Black, Brown, and poor communities in consolidating the punitive turn. Emphasizing the danger of authorizing incarceration as the primary response to disrupted social relations—economic disorder, illiteracy, the lack of healthcare, harm, etc.—and as the legitimate and immutable foundation of justice, the conference initiated broad conversations on racism and repression within the prison system. Challenging the reverberations of the 1994 Crime Bill and the political climate defined by “law and order” rhetoric, Critical Resistance inaugurated a movement philosophically anchored by the notion of abolition that would popularize radical analyses of the ways imprisonment and policing mask structural racism.
1999–2004
THE BLACK IMMIGRANT
Esther Armah
Kadiatou Diallo. Her people called her Kadi. She got married at thirteen, to an older man who already had one wife. She didn’t want to get married, but for her family in Guinea, a predominantly Muslim nation in West Africa, marriage was her purpose. She was sixteen when her firstborn child came into the world. He started his life’s journey in Liberia. His life ended on the steps of a Bronx apartment building on February 4, 1999. His body was riddled with bullets from forty-one shots fired from the guns of four New York Police Department officers. He was twenty-four years old.
His name was Amadou Diallo.
An African immigrant, America-bound in search of a future he could not find in Liberia. His path was purposed with dreams of becoming a teacher. He was proud of his American savings account with $9,000. Happy with his girlfriend. Confident about his promise to his mother, Ka
di, that he would enroll in college.
In her 2003 memoir, Kadi describes her son as quiet and soft-spoken, with kind eyes. The NYPD officers believed her kind-eyed son was a serial rapist.
Amadou was part of an African-born population in the United States that from 1980 to 2009 grew from just under 200,000 to almost 1.5 million. In 2019 Africans made up 3.9 percent of 38.5 million immigrants in the United States. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act eased entry for Africans desiring to enter the country. Legal journeys reveal little about emotional ones. Yet the emotional journeys are the bedrock of so many millions of African immigrants. And they were also the launchpad from which Kadi waved anxiously as her America-bound firstborn child left a war-torn nation in search of the sweet probability of realized purpose. Amadou Diallo was born in Liberia. And it was from West Africa—nations like Nigeria, Ghana, and Senegal—that Black immigrants poured into the United States after the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act.
Numbers tell only partial stories, however. They are not conveyers of ambition, disappointment, discovery, falling in love, or battling America’s racism.
Amadou means “to praise” in Arabic. But he was much more than a name. The killing of this twenty-four-year-old Black man brought a city to its feet, brought New Yorkers to the streets, and incited rage poured into protest, throats hoarse from screaming “41 shots!”
Four Hundred Souls Page 34