“The almost universal and unsolicited testimony of better class Negroes,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in his 1899 classic The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, “was that the attempted clearing out of the slums of the Fifth Ward acted disastrously upon them.” The “better class Negroes” complained because “prostitutes and gamblers” had moved to “respectable Negro” areas and the property purchased by “thrifty Negroes” had “greatly depreciated.” Du Bois explained that real estate agents rented to individuals that “ruined” these neighborhoods “on the theory that all Negroes belong to the same general class.” Finally, he remarked, “It is not well to clean a [cesspool] until one knows where the refuse can be disposed of without general harm.”
In his thoughtful review of Black Silent Majority, Daniel Kato reminds us of Du Bois’ famous dictum about the “color line.” The legendary Du Bois has also taught us much about economics and class. My book bears witness to the analytic power of both sets of insights. It exposes how persistent racial segregation and deindustrialization trapped many African Americans in declining communities and compelled working and middle-class blacks to confront challenges cultivated by the concentration of poverty, including drug addiction and violent crime. These urban residents feared threats to their person, property, civic and religious life, budding “consumers’ republic,” (Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, 2003) and the quality of their newly-won citizenship—at the moment, as Kato’s monograph makes clear, liberalism’s promise was redeemed. So they drew upon their class-based morality to understand these dangers and upon their organizational resources to advocate for policing and punishment.
That working- and middle-class African Americans cast a jaundiced eye on drug dealers and users should not surprise anyone. “Respectability” has always been a strong ideological current in black politics (Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920¸1993; Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics, 2009). Still, it is certainly appropriate to question, as Kato does, the prevalence of punitive attitudes: Conservative values need not imply penal cures for social ills. The voluminous survey evidence presented in the book, however, clearly establishes that African Americans were profoundly worried about drugs and crime and, because of the intensity of their hurt and terror, embraced harsh solutions. For example, a 1973 New York Times poll revealed that about three-fourths of blacks in New York City supported life sentences without parole for “pushers” and three in five favored the imposition of the death penalty for certain crimes.
Contrary to Kato, Black Silent Majority does not attribute the passage of the drug laws strictly to African American preferences. The book’s causal claims can be found in the details of its policy history. It traces the development of narcotics control strategies in the state from the late 1940s until 1973 and explains both periods of incrementalism and sudden bursts of change. For years, insufficient capacity frustrated attempts by the state’s drug policy issue network to implement a robust rehabilitative approach. Nonetheless, members of the network regularly acted autonomously, leveraging their expertise and reputation, to prevent undesirable revisions to the penal code and to expand, though gradually, rehabilitative resources. Events in the “political stream” (John W. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, 1984) occasionally prompted dramatic deviations from this path. In 1962, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, seeking to brandish his liberal bona fides, tackled the state’s drug problem by adopting previously ignored reformist ideas. In 1973, in order to remain competitive among Republican activists increasingly enamored with Ronald Reagan, the patrician politician released his controversial proposals and appropriated a narrative fashioned by working and middle-class African Americans to defend the plan.
These findings are not unusual. Black Silent Majority uncovers a people placed in dire straits and their all-too-human reactions, born of their earnest pain and lingering class-based biases. It documents a lethargic drug control policy regime weighted down by capacity constraints and bureaucratic rivalries. It demonstrates how an entrepreneurial executive abruptly lurched this apparatus in one ideological direction or another when it was in his interests to do so and how he adroitly deployed compelling and convenient frames to justify these endeavors. Like so many policy studies before it, it shows that, in the fevered rush of these moments, America’s liberal democracy convulses, rapidly crafting legislative responses to social problems without full recognition of the “general harm” that such remedies can unexpectedly incur.
