Black Silent Majority

Black Silent Majority MICHAEL JAVEN FORTNER Black Silent Majority The Rocke fel ler Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment Cambridge, Mas sa chu setts, and London, England 2015 Copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Ame rica First printing Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Fortner, Michael Javen, 1979– Black silent majority : the Rocke fel ler drug laws and the politics of punishment / Michael Javen Fortner. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-74399-1 (alk. paper) 1. Discrimination in criminal justice administration— New York (State) 2. African American criminals— New York (State) 3. Drug control— New York (State) 4. African Americans— New York (State)—Social conditions. 5. Middle class—New York (State) I. Title. HV9955.N7F67 2015 364.1'3365089960730747— dc23 2015012136 For Curley Contents Preface ix Introduction “The Reign of Criminal Terror Must Be Stopped Now” 1 1 Rights and Wreckage in Postwar Harlem 24 2 Black Junkies, White Do- Gooders, and the Metcalf- Volker Act of 1962 67 3 Reverend Dempsey’s Crusade and the Rise of Involuntary Commitment in 1966 98 4 Crime, Class, and Confl ict in the Ghetto 133 5 King Heroin and the Development of the Drug Laws in 1973 173 6 Race, Place, and the Tumultuous 1960s and 1970s 217 Conclusion “Liberal Sentiments to Conservative Acts” 257 Notes 283 Ac know ledg ments 335 Index 339 Preface I HAVE NEVER BEEN INCARCERATED. But my brother has— for a long time. I have never been stopped and frisked. Yet as a black man I know how it feels to be watched. I know how it feels to scare strangers for no reason. At the same time, I know crime and the toll it takes on communities. Growing up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, during the height of the crack epidemic I watched as the drug trade killed people and destroyed families. I remember addicts knocking on my door hawking electronics, clothes, and sometimes food they stole from neighbors. I remember sleeping with my wallet under my pillow just in case addicts in my family became desperate for a hit in the midnight hour. I remember the sound of crime. All New Yorkers grow accustomed to the din of sirens, but you never really make peace with the clatter of gunshots. You never get used to vio lence and insecurity. Criminal acts that show up only once in data sets—if they show up at all— can have lasting impacts. I was only a couple of years old when one of my broth ers was stabbed to death. I do not remember him, but the pain and sorrow of that day stayed in my home like accumulated dust. x Preface Over the past twenty years, activists and academics have val- iantly come to the aid of the nation’s prison population. With per- spicacity and passion, they have drawn attention to the ways racism has corroded the administration of criminal justice, and they have awakened us to the insidious consequences of mass incarceration. We are now witnessing some of the benefi ts of these noble efforts. Entrepreneurial lawyers continue to set the innocent free. Politi- cians as ideologically opposed as Attorney General Eric Holder and Senator Rand Paul are fi ghting to end mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. Private prisons, the malignant cancer on the criminal justice system, are now in decline. Like the prophets of old, these advocates, experts, and public offi cials “preach good tidings unto the meek,” “bind up the brokenhearted,” “proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.”1 These great works notwithstanding, our new American dilemma is Janus- faced. There are those who have endured the inequities of the penal system, and there are those who have suffered the un- fairness of crime. This second face deserves a fair hearing. I started this pro ject because the lit erature on mass incarceration neglected the voices of working- and middle- class African Americans dealing daily with drug addiction and violent crime and their aftermath. Few scholars have taken stock of their views. In an essay entitled “Listen to the Black Community,” Glenn C. Loury wrote, “The young black men wreaking havoc in the ghetto are still ‘our youngsters’ in the eyes of many of the decent poor and working- class black people who are often their victims. The hard edge of judg- ment and retribution is tempered for many of these people by a sense of sympathy for and empathy with the perpetrators.” But that’s not what I heard. I remember a community at war with itself—not in the bloody, violent sense, but war as a state of constant confl ict between opposing and seemingly irreconcilable interests and values. Working- and middle- class families like mine were not Preface xi deeply invested in civil rights or the politics of race. Of course, par- ticu lar moments— the murder of Michael Griffi th in Howard Beach, Queens, in 1986 and the shooting death of Yusef Hawkins in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in 1989—awakened deep feelings of racial solidarity, but in between the ethnic confl agrations that oc- casionally engulfed the city, I remember black folks constantly wor- rying about keeping their children, homes, and property safe. These working- and middle- class families did not express much “sympathy for and empathy with the perpetrators” of crime in the neighborhood. I recall hearing “That’s what he gets” every time one of “our youngsters” was arrested. I recall hearing about fathers calling the cops on sons and mothers throwing daughters out onto the street. I remember that from the pews of my Pentecostal church sanctifi ed working- and middle- class African Americans distin- guished between saints and sinners. They certainly believed that salvation was free for drug users and dealers, but salvation was al- ways a choice— a test of individual morality and fortitude— because these iniquities were rooted in the soul rather than social structure. These saints had no compunction about beseeching po- lice or calling forth prisons for their own salvation when junkies and pushers became a cross too heavy to bear.2 Black Silent Majority is neither a memoir nor a polemic. It is a scholarly history of drug policy development in New York State from 1944 to the passage of the Rocke feller drug laws—the nation’s most consequential and devastating narcotics control legislation— in 1973. It systematically gathers a mélange of materials to adju- dicate between contending explanations of crime policy forma- tion. Drawing on a diverse collection of sources, it documents the existence of a black silent majority, a phenomenon insuffi ciently explored in histories of the 1960s and 1970s, social scientifi c studies of African American politics, and narratives of mass incarceration. My own experiences prompted me to investigate the role that African Americans played in crime policy development. xii Preface Whether my memories are representative of the views of millions of working- and middle- class African Americans trapped in dan- gerous urban ghettos and whether these voices shaped drug policy in New York State are empirical questions that this book pursues. These are controversies than can be resolved only by listening to the black community and tracing the legislative histories of drug policies. I hope advocates and scholars continue to lay bare the bewil- dering immorality of the criminal justice system and its blatant in- humanity. However, I wrote this book to redeem the agency of black people who are portrayed, at best, as backbenchers to history, treated either as hostages of white supremacy or as the collateral damage of neoliberalism. I wrote this book to recover the voice of the “invisible black victim.” While the lit erature on mass incarceration has correctly highlighted racial discrimination within the criminal justice system, it has unnecessarily discounted the hurt and terror of those who clutch their billfolds as they sleep, of those who exit their apartments and leave their buildings with trepida- tion, and of those who have had to bury a son or daugh ter because of gang activity, the drug trade, or random vio lence. I pray that one day we can proclaim liberty to the captives of violent crime and open the prison to which residents of Brownsville, the South Side of Chicago, and urban minority neighborhoods across the country are bound. My fervent wish is that we can bind up those brokenhearted by crime.3 Black Silent Majority Introduction “The Reign of Criminal Terror Must Be Stopped Now” “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,” Governor Nelson Rocke fel ler announced, “this is an unusual press conference.” On January 23, 1973, fi ve Harlem civic leaders joined New York’s governor in the state capital’s ornate Red Room to voice their support for Rocke- fel ler’s proposal for new, punitive antidrug mea sures. During his annual message to the legislature a few weeks earlier, the governor had proposed mandatory life sentences for individuals convicted of selling any amount of “hard” drugs, including heroin, cocaine, and hashish. He had also advocated life sentences for individuals convicted of violent crimes while under the infl uence of such drugs. Now fi ve leaders from the nation’s most prominent black neighborhood—Rev. Oberia D. Dempsey, pastor of the Upper Park Ave nue Baptist Church; Glester Hinds, founder of the People’s Civic Welfare Association; Dr. George W. McMurray, pastor of the Mother African Zion Church; Rev. Earl B. Moore, pastor of St. Paul Baptist Church; and Dr.

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