“The Only Battle in the Nation’s History in which the Black Community has not been Enlisted”: Black Agency, Resistance, and Alternatives to Incarceration Vesla M. Weaver, Yale University
[email protected] Charles Decker, Yale University
[email protected] March 26, 2014 Paper for presentation at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association, Seattle, WA, April 17-19, 2014. This draft is for presentation purposes; please do not cite or circulate without the author’s explicit permission. We thank the staff at the Library of Congress as well as Stephen Wulff for vital research assistance. “The war on crime has been one of the few battles in our history in which the black community has not been enlisted,” the young man thundered. The day was February 19, 1976, soon after the nation began its decades-long investment in punishment, ultimately swelling incarceration rates for the next thirty-five consecutive years. The normally soft-spoken man continued: “then and now, on urban fronts throughout the country thousands of poor and black people continue to be disproportionately victimized by crime…. The lack of black participation in the crime fight has created the false impression that the black community condones crime and protects criminals. Crime prevention, however, is a very high priority in the black community, as those of us who are of and in it know.”1 The young man was Ron Brown, the director of the National Urban League’s Washington Bureau, delivering the words of his junior colleague, Robert Woodson, and testifying before a congressional subcommittee that handled the main agency that would come to vastly bolster the nation’s prisons, police forces, and technologies of surveillance over the ensuing decades.