Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment by Michael Javen Fortner

Abstract

BLACK SILENT MAJORITY: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and Politics of Punishment. By Michael Javen Fortner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2015.Black Silent Majority proffers an alternative explanation for emergence of mass incarceration in post-Civil Rights era. Refuting consensus of origins of mass incarceration, most popularly averred by legal scholar Michelle Alexander, that backlash against black freedom movement spurred mass incarceration, Fortner locates agency of black New Yorkers in passage of 1973 Rockefeller Drug Laws, asserting, basically, that black-on-black rather than a reformulated supremacy, explains rise of carceral state.Between 1940s and early 1970s, black majority, at first a quiescent, unorganized group of working-and-middle class black New Yorkers, mobilized a citywide movement in Harlem against heroin-related crimes and for enforcement of punitive legislation. Fortner argues that with conservative turn in national politics in late 1960s and punitive frame that black majority ushered into policy arena Governor Nelson Rockefeller embraced demands of black majority and sponsored punitive laws to authenticate his conservative credentials.Fortner centers movement for safety and punitive legislation around activism of Reverend Oberia D. Dempsey-the pistol-toting pastor of Upper Park Avenue Baptist Church-and other black leaders, such as Roy Wilkins, of National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Dempsey, Wilkins, and others spoke of visceral fear that black New Yorkers experienced at hands of their neighbors. Fortner here convincingly highlights longstanding conditions of intraracial crime and violence within black America, then and now.Though he powerfully calls attention to Harlemites' fears of, and demands for, protection from intraracial crime, Fortner's conceptual formulation of black majority reduces complexity and diversity of black activism to punishment. According to Fortner, since Harlemites discovered a measure of social mobility in 1950s, their concern with white gaze, waned. Consequently, the violence in their communities forced them to prioritize public safety over economic and racial inequality(9). Yet despite notable progress and because of deindustrialization and employer and union racism black New Yorkers' job security was invariably vulnerable.Fortner's historical and conceptual claim that black punitive politics emerged in 1950s is misleading. Since early twentieth century, as historians Khalil G. Muhammad, Nathan D. B. Connolly, and others have shown, blacks had rarely been silent about eradicating intra-racial black crime. Blacks employed anti-crime politics not only to fight crime but also to make demands for inclusion of black police officers, demonstrate their commitment to law and order, and to stave off violence from police officers. Thus, if they were not silent, did black politics shift from a struggle for civil rights, as Fortner avers, to advocating punishment in postwar New York City?Although Fortner's use of media polls provides a measurement of public opinion at a given moment, he neither unpacks data nor places it within its historical context. For example, using a poll in late 1973 from New York Times, Fortner notes that 71 percent of black respondents favored life sentences without parole for pushers, but he provides neither its sample size nor its racial breakdown (99). Does number of blacks interviewed adequately represent political diversity of city's large black population, which by late 1960s was more than half of a million people? …