Harvard University Press Blog

The Story of an Atlantic Slave War

Our third excerpt to celebrate Black History Month comes from Vincent Brown’s award-winning Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, which Cornel West calls “brilliant” and “groundbreaking.” This gripping account of the largest slave revolt in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world, an uprising that laid bare the interconnectedness of Europe, Africa, and America, shook the foundations of empire, and reshaped ideas of race and popular belonging.

Only the plotters truly knew if their plans had called for a general uprising from the beginning. The colonists were guessing based on evidence garnered from torture, and historians have little more to go on than their speculations. Were the events in St. Mary’s, Kingston, St. Thomas in the East, and Westmoreland part of a general insurrection?

Something important is at stake in the answer to this question. Historians sometimes view slave-conspiracy trials as evidence of panic, projections by slaveholders upon hapless victims. Another perspective casts the slaves’ actions as mostly reactive responses to immediate circumstances and opportunities, rather than as the outcome of careful organizing. By contrast, the first named historian to interpret Tacky’s revolt, Edward Long, agreed with his fellow colonists that the rebellion had been carefully planned:

“These circumstances show the great extent of the conspiracy, the strict correspondence which had been carried on by the Coromantins in every quarter of the island, and their almost incredible secrecy in the forming of their plan of insurrection; for it appeared in evidence, that the first eruption in St. Mary’s, was a matter pre-concerted, and known to all the chief men in the different districts; and the secret was probably confided to some hundreds, for several months before the blow was struck.”

For Long, Tacky was the “chief man” at the head of the conspiracy. But Long’s account is an unreliable guide. Most importantly, he offers an erroneous chronology of events. Wanting to show an island-wide conspiracy, he depicted the events in St. Mary’s Parish as simultaneous with later events in Westmoreland, extending the timeline for the St. Mary’s uprising and making it appear to last well beyond the Westmoreland insurrection. At least one detail of the account makes this misrepresentation seem willful. Long states that it was Admiral Charles Holmes who dispatched the naval vessels to the north side of the island, despite the fact that Holmes did not arrive at Jamaica until May 13, weeks after Tacky was killed and the rebels had dispersed. Long surely knew this, but distorting the sequence of events in this way had the effect of making the whole affair seem that it was indeed Tacky’s revolt.

This theory gave the insurrection an identifiable scapegoat, whom Long could blame and belittle all at once. Acknowledging Tacky as a “young man of good stature, and well made,” he called him “handsome, but rather of an effeminate than manly cast.” Mocking and demonizing black sexuality was an important part of establishing racial hierarchy, and Long hastened to add that Tacky “had flattered himself with the hope of obtaining (among other fruits of victory) the lieutenant governor’s lady for his concubine”—that lady being Edward Long’s eldest sister. In Long’s estimation, Tacky’s elevation stemmed not from his leadership abilities or military experience but from his supposed resemblance to “some favourite leader of their nation in Africa.” Most likely, Tacky had himself been a leader in Africa, but for Long this was merely a sign of Coromantees’ credulity. He compared Tacky’s followers to some Africans who had once encountered the bronze statue of a gladiator erected on a local plantation, which “the Coromantins no sooner beheld, than they were almost ready to fall down, and adore it.” With Tacky at the head of uprising, Long had devised an intelligible narrative of the violence that conveniently discounted the strategic implications he most feared. According to him, the uprising resulted from a concerted effort, but it was doomed by Africans’ intrinsic faults. Yet, as he knew, from the attack on Fort Haldane to Tacky’s death in the rocky valley upriver from Downes’s Cove, “Tacky’s Revolt” lasted only a week.

What explains Long’s desire to subsume the entire rebellion within a chronology that elevates the primacy of the events in St. Mary’s? Other sources, too, conspired to highlight the importance of the earliest clashes. The April 14 “Letter from a Gentleman at St. Mary’s” was the first and only coherently plotted account; the ones that followed display the irregularity and confusion of the colonists’ predicament. Dread governed their experience. By May, they were growing wild with fright as they ginned up the docket of African savagery. It is difficult to tell which stories came from captured rebels and which sprang from slaveholders’ imaginations, especially when the specter of cannibalism appeared in print. Colonists read that the rebels at Ballard’s Valley “cut off the Overseer’s Head, put his Blood in a Calabash, mixed gunpowder with it, and [ate] their Plantains dipp’d in it, as they did by every white Man they killed: In short, their savage Barbarity can scarcely be paralleled.” If there had indeed been a blood sacrifice at Ballard’s Valley, this report made it seem as if the rebels were taking some holy communion, with bananas instead of bread. The story made the sacrament all the more heinous by comparing the Coromantees to Catholics—Protestant Britain’s foremost global adversaries—and contributed to the sense that the colony was besieged from within and without by enemies at once familiar and strange. With each successive discovery of new unrest, the slaveholders grew more fearful and bewildered. Suddenly the uprising seemed to be happening everywhere at once. The shocking reminder that power did not guarantee security drove colonists wild with fear.

Over the next several weeks, lasting into July, they discovered several more conspiracies. In the commercial capital, colonial officials deepened their investigation into the circumstances surrounding the war-token mahogany sword. They learned that Kingston’s Coromantees had rallied around a woman named Cubah, whom they elevated “to the rank of royalty” and dubbed the “Queen of Kingston.” Like other Africans, she claimed territory for herself and her followers in the knowledge that the boundaries of her dominion were drawn more by peoples’ loyalties than by land surveyors. At meetings “she had sat in state under a canopy, with a sort of robe on her shoulders, and a crown upon her head,” adopting the “paraphernalia of power” she might have known on the Gold Coast. Upon this intelligence, the government seized Cubah and ordered her to be transported from the island. In the Vale of Louidas in St. John’s Parish, Coromantees belonging to the speaker of the House of Assembly, Charles Price, “had agreed to rise, ravage the estates, and murder the white men there.” Three people familiar with the plan betrayed the rebels, and the “ringleaders were taken up, and upon conviction, executed; others, who turned evidence, were transported off the island thus the whole of this bloody scheme was providentially frustrated.” More plots were afoot in the parishes of St. Dorothy’s, Hanover, and Clarendon, where Edward Long owned his estate. Throughout this time Henry Moore kept martial law in effect, and the military remained on the march all over the island.

Fear transported the slaveholders into a delirious fever dream from which they would not soon recover. Possibly the experience of frightened alarm during the uprising sent some of them into a fugue state, in which linear temporality had lost some of its purchase. They had lost the plot. The narrative they pieced together at the start of the rebellion represented the most linear description they could manage, until Long sat down a decade later in London to reconstruct the sequence. Partly for this reason, and partly because of events that occurred later in the 1760s, the St. Mary’s revolt established an enduring narrative pattern, providing an intelligible origin and knowable characters, with the colonists’ actions bending a discernible story arc from beginning to end.

The slaveholders were paranoid, and their slaves really were out to get them. Sometimes, these two facts could exist independently; the events of 1760 knotted them together. The causes of the insurrection were probably more broadly distributed and far more contingent than Long and the other slaveholders knew. Even so, whether or not these revolts were the result of a single grand design, they were not disconnected from each other nor merely opportunistic. The rebels coalesced around affiliations of language, regional identification, and military verve. If each uprising had its own inspiration, each also took careful account of local conditions, potential connections, and broader opportunities. In St. Mary’s, the path of the insurgency strongly suggests a defined objective: control or destruction of the commercial zone along the rivers. Yet if what happened in St. Mary’s parish could be called Tacky’s Revolt, it was only one conflict within a larger war, an unfolding uprising itself encompassed by wars within wars.

In the cascading series of events initiated by the rebels in St. Mary’s, we see how African militancy derived from the entanglements of empire, trade, and war across the Atlantic. Tacky’s Revolt was smaller and less significant than Long and subsequent historians have supposed only because the slave war it advanced was larger and more consequential. “A more dangerous or troublesome Affair I was never engaged in, in all my life,” wrote Zachary Bayly about the St. Mary’s insurrection. And still the Coromantee War was closer to its beginning than its end.

The Origin Story of Black Education

To celebrate Black History Month, we’ve chosen excerpts from our books that reflect varied aspects of the Black experience. Fittingly, our first excerpt comes from a book about historian and educator Carter Woodson, the founder of Black History Month. The Los Angeles Review of Books praised Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching by Jarvis R. Givens, saying it “would make Woodson, the ever-rigorous teacher, proud.”

Before Emancipation, the enslaved had to gain their education by “snatching learning in forbidden fields,” as Woodson characterized it. The black abolitionist and teacher Francis Ellen Watkins Harper explained that some tried “to steal a little from the book. And put words together, and learn by hook or crook.” Acquiring knowledge was a criminal act. As Frederick Douglass’s master put it, a slave who learned to read and write against the will of his master was tantamount to “running away with himself.” Stealing one’s self in this way meant that the literate slave was a fugitive slave: to secretly acquire literacy—for religious, practical, and intellectual ends (or, perhaps, especially as leisurely activity)—was akin to black flight from the sites of their enslavement.

Antiliteracy laws targeting black people were older than the United States itself. The first law of this kind was a slave code enacted in 1740 in reaction to the Stono Slave Rebellion of 1739 in South Carolina. This code, which was meant to improve surveillance of the enslaved, listed writing among other illegal activities. Black people’s disallowance from the realm of educational opportunity anteceded the birth of the nation. This prohibition was absorbed into the dominant ideology of the nation, even as American common schools were established after American independence for the purpose of training a responsible citizenry; thus, conceptions of citizenship emerged as a metonym for whiteness. The antiblack sentiments that justified slavery justified excluding black Americans from citizenship and from schools—this antagonism was not an anomaly but was, in fact, a structural feature.

Antiliteracy laws and the intellectual surveillance that accompanied them left great marks on the politics of black education. They enforced the idea that blacks were outside the social contract of American society—inconceivable as fully human, citizen, or student. Many enslaved and free blacks subverted these legal mandates by acquiring literacy through fugitive tactics—leaving a mark of equal or greater consequence.While the overwhelming majority of blacks were illiterate under slavery, approximately 10 percent learned to read and/or write; suggesting that literate slaves were not so unusual as to be unknown to other blacks. These literate slaves were recognized as leaders with a practical skill set that benefitted their community.

How did the 10 percent of blacks who learned to read and write in the South before Emancipation gain the gift of literacy? As Woodson recounted time and again in his writings: “Negroes themselves…stole away to secret places at night to study.” The historical record documents black Americans climbing into holes in the ground under the cover of night, attending schools run by free blacks, “playing school” with white children, “stealin’ a meetin’” in the woods, and trading food for lessons, among other covert means. In her remarkable narrative of black education in the antebellum South and early in Emancipation, Heather Williams reveals that black people were self-taught and their own biggest advocates for education, in slavery and in freedom.

Frederick Douglass, raised in Maryland between the 1820s and 1830s, represents the best-known example of learning in secret. Left alone to look after the master’s house, he employed his own version of fugitive pedagogy. He spent his time “writing in the spaces left in Master Thomas’s copy book, copying what he had written.” Douglass wrote in the margins of the Webster Spelling Book, populating these in-between spaces with words he appropriated and mimicked, turning them toward his own semantic and political ends. Woodson’s nearby home state of Virginia passed laws prohibiting education for enslaved and free blacks as early as 1819. This legal precedent was reinforced through subsequent acts passed in Virginia leading up to Emancipation. In April 1831, for instance, an act was passed declaring “that all meetings of free negroes or mulattoes, at any schoolhouse, church, meetinghouse or other place for teaching them reading or writing, either in the day or night, under whatever pretext, shall be deemed and considered as an unlawful assembly.” The law then authorized whippings “at the discretion of any justice of the peace, not exceeding twenty lashes.” Such legislation, and the sentiments of antiliteracy ideology, became nearly universal in the South. When the Civil War began, black Americans challenged the prohibition of their mental elevation. Their efforts to learn expanded in formal and public ways; they initiated “native schools” in the Contraband Camps, which prefigured the Freedmen’s Bureau schools, and then the first public school system in the US South.

With the end of the Civil War came “jubilee,” as the formerly enslaved described the biblical time of freedom. No longer in bondage, black people across the South performed their first acts of freedom by occupying the classroom. Booker T. Washington recalled a “whole race trying to go to school,” and he noted: “Few were too young, and none were too old, to make the attempt to learn. As fast as any kind of teachers could be secured, not only were day-schools filled, but night schools as well.” The rush to the schoolhouse transcended any single location. Washington’s narrative described blacks’ quest for education throughout all the Southern states.

Once legally permitted to become educated in the postbellum South, black Americans continued to experience violence and other forms of opposition to their efforts. Yet they continued to resist in the best ways they knew how. Even as black education developed institutionally through the endeavors of blacks themselves and also in conjunction with white northern church denominations and philanthropists, black Americans nonetheless pursued critical parts of their educational lives in secret. As a class of political actors, black students and teachers emerged as persuasive advocates in fundraising for their respective institutions. And like black preachers, teachers (or, more expansively, Negroes “who had some learning”) were important leaders in black communities, not just because of their professional status but also as stokers and caretakers of the freedom dreams that helped initiate their escape from bondage. Black Americans shared an “equal rights” vision that remained unfulfilled. This vision fueled the emergence of black equal rights leagues and other organizational entities representative of black life during Reconstruction and the decades to follow. Black teachers’ associations reflected this collective drive on the part of a segment of leaders who signified the living history presented in Carter G. Woodson’s first classrooms.

Black people’s fugitive pedagogy lent itself to an origin story of black freedom. It was a central part of the general strike initiated by the absconded slaves who refused the political economic arrangement of slavery when they fled the plantations during the war. As a framework for learning, it contested ideas of black inferiority, while rejecting the superexploitation and ownership of black people as fungible laborers. The black schools and teachers after the war, by their very existence, symbolized the refutation of a knowledge realm that debased them, educational institutions that excluded them, and curricula that portrayed them as always already subjugated and “narratively condemned.” Fugitive pedagogy framed black educational life from the time of slavery through Jim Crow as a narrative plot that transcended the limited world in which black folks found themselves. It became more than a teaching method—more than utilitarian skills to be learned. Instead teaching and learning themselves continued to be “a means of escape,” as Woodson wrote. Education would guide blacks in pursuit of a new world and a new way of being; it was a total critique of the current order. Black Americans passed this narrative on as a panacea for social ills, and it heavily informed both politics and values after Emancipation. Carried over from slavery, fugitive pedagogy reflected the general story of black people’s shared past and present. In the postbellum era, black Americans continued to live their educational lives through the frame of this origin story. It continued to structure the relationship between education and the black political struggle more broadly. Woodson himself contributed to this long memory of education’s role in black America’s quest for freedom and justice.

Finding Solidarity in Others’ Struggles

As we celebrate Passover, after a year marked by protests for racial equality and social justice, Amelia M. Glaser, author of Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine, reminds us of the Yiddish poets during the interwar years who drew on the trauma of pogroms to depict the suffering of other marginalized peoples and embraced a global community of the oppressed.

Last Spring, George Floyd gasped, “I can’t breathe,” seconds before his murder under the knee of a police officer. His plea became a metaphor for the violence of racism in America, and the months of reckoning that have followed have revealed a painful rift in America over the country’s commitment to equality. This year, many Americans have asked how it’s possible to express solidarity with, and fight for, the human rights of all groups, including those that may not be our own. In a year marked both by a deepening divide over social justice and the fear and loss due to the global pandemic, the celebration of Passover, a holiday commemorating exodus from slavery, offers an opportunity to think about how one group’s experience of injustice can help to understand another group’s pain.

I expect that this year, perhaps more than usual, many will be asking at their seder tables how Jews can translate the collective experience of trauma to speak out against racist violence in the United States. This was a burning question for the Yiddish poets who are the subject of my book, Songs in Dark Times, who found themselves between a privileged majority and threatened minority. In 1931, for example, Malka Lee, an immigrant from Galicia to New York, wrote about a Black man on a subway who described a lynching in the American south.

Now I hear his young cry on the wind

“My brother’s body’s swinging from a pine.”

He raises his fist and waves it, wild,

He sees the murderer’s portrait in every white...

The Yiddish poets I write about were not religious Jews. Nevertheless, the poetry they wrote in the interwar period is a wellspring of thought on the struggle among Jews to fight for other groups’ freedom. My book is the story of Yiddish leftist internationalist poets who, in the 1920s and ’30s, described the struggles of non-Jewish groups, including Chinese workers, Black Americans, Spanish republicans, Palestinian Arabs, and Ukrainian peasants. These writers attempted to translate the pain of others by using passwords from Jewish religious texts and collective memory. They were, in essence, changing what “we” meant—altering it from “we Jews” to “we workers of the world.” These poets were rejecting the very idea of a religious or ethnic community of Jews. But they were also drawing from a rich tradition of Jewish text and practice to make sense of a polarized world.

The Yiddish internationalist poets were drawing from a history of Jewish struggle to convince their readers to empathize with others’ struggles. For example, in keeping with the Jewish tradition of the yahrzeit (commemoration of the anniversary of a death), H. Leivick marked the occasion of a year after the execution of the Italian-born anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in his poem “A Sacco-Vanzetti Year.” Leivick identifies the perpetrator of the crime against the two anarchists as “The same evil from accuser to accuser.” In the Yiddish original, Leivik’s “accuser” is a “kateyger,” the talmudic term for prosecutor which had come to mean, in Yiddish, “prosecuting angel.” Leivick, with this Jewish password, links the injustice against the Italian anarchists to the many historical injustices against Jews.

Esther Shumiatsher, who wrote poignantly in the late 1920s about the human suffering she observed on her world travels with her spouse, the playwright Peretz Hirschbein, wrote:

The whole world has become my comrade,—

From the Yangtze’s valleys

And the thirst of India’s hot plains.

The Soviet poet Khane Levin, who is best known for her verse about motherhood and the Revolution, weaves Biblical motifs into her poems about building a new Soviet society. In her 1928 “Crimean motifs,” Levin describes a young Jewish man named “Anaki,” a name conjuring the Biblical giants known as Anakim. Anaki, a strapping youth, must overcome the influence of his two fathers—one a Jewish peddler who “sang on the wagon” and the other the tsar who “didn’t learn to work.”

Even among these Yiddish-speaking secularists, Jewish prayer did not entirely disappear. The poet Aaron Kurtz left his Hassidic family as a teenager to join the circus and later made his way to the US where he joined the Communist Party. And yet Kurtz, writing about the Spanish Civil War in 1938, describes a Jewish volunteer for the International Brigades reciting the Kol Nidre prayer on the eve of Yom Kippur together with his comrades in arms, Pedro of Madrid and Johannes of Hamburg.

With World War II, Jewish internationalism changed. Yiddish poets in the Soviet Union, the United States, and elsewhere turned inward, mourning the genocide that had taken place in Europe. The internationalist excitement of the interwar period had faded. Those Yiddish poets who had fought the rise in fascism by binding themselves to the Soviet cause were now forced to confront Stalin’s atrocities. The radical internationalism that had become de rigueur in the 1920s and ’30s gave way to new forms of Yiddish poetry as the Jewish world mourned the horrific murder of the majority of the Jews of Europe in the Holocaust. Many of the poets who had once focused on the struggles of others now turned, in their writing, to face this indescribable loss.

And yet some writers still found ways of simultaneously mourning Jewish loss and the losses of other minorities. Two decades after World War II, following the murder of four young Black girls in a church in the Civil Rights era, Aaron Kurtz turned to the traditional Mourner’s Kaddish as a way of honoring the victims of American race violence:

I am not a Kaddish-sayer. But today mamas

The world over bitterly

Wept and mourned the four little black girls—

I responded to the rabbi’s Kaddish:

Omeyn!

Today, a year into a global pandemic, we celebrate Passover, at a time of personal and communal struggles for freedom and justice. Some may find hope in the utopian Yiddish writers who believed that a fairer world was at hand.

Book Club Spotlight: The Origin of Others

We’re continuing our book club series with a look at one devoted to Toni Morrison. “Toni Morrison’s untimely death in 2019 gave me the idea of a year-long book club dedicated to her, to gather all of her fans and those who still haven’t touched her genius, to pay homage to the gifted writer,” said book club creator Aayushi Jain. “The book club was a success, and we are left with only one book for December and have finished all of her fiction.”

For #NonFictionNovember, the group read The Origin of Others, based on Morrison’s Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. In it, Morrison reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, and the desire for belonging. She asks questions such as what is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid?

We spoke to members of Jain’s book club about the experience they had reading The Origin of Others. Here’s what they told us:

“In The Origin of Others, Morrison discusses the concept of ‘otherness’ by drawing examples from literature and her own personal experiences. She discusses her earlier works and how her thoughts shaped the character and storyline she created in her book. This book gave another significant depth to her earlier works. It is really commendable that in a few pages, she addresses so many powerful and insightful messages. Morrison's writing always makes me think and eventually changes my perspective of the world, and this book was no exception.”

—Shraddha Sen

 

“The Origin of Others was introduced in the Toni Morrison book club for nonfiction November. And I am glad that I got a chance to come a little closer to Morrison through her words. Thinking of her words is to think of the emotional and physical domination the women had to go with. Her stories are all about what it feels like to be a woman and that of being a black woman. The story of not lagging but reigning under the same sky of moon and stars, where there is an assurance of scintillating dawn and a new beginning.”

—Akanksha Kinwaar

 

“Race is the classification of a species, and we are the human race, period. Although a small book, The Origin of Others was an important read for me, all thanks to our book club. Growing up as a Northeasterner in India, I have always been on the receiving end of racism from the mainlanders because of my features. I am the ‘other’ to them, so this book hit close to home. The essays have opened my eyes regarding many international issues, especially in light of the recent BLM movement in the USA. The forward by Ta-Nehisi Coates is a powerful one, too. I am going to reread, reflect, and absorb this book again.”

—Priyanka Elangbam

 

“I perceived this book to be about racism and I couldn’t have been more wrong. It is more about the important role literature plays in perpetuating certain concepts such as racist beliefs in our society. Morrison’s analysis of fictional works by Hemingway and Harriet Beecher Stowe opened my eyes to new perspectives. A key takeaway for me from this book is that a single word choice can have huge ramifications, and it is important for us as readers to also engage in self-examination in how we perceive literature.”

—Vasudha Nukala

 

“As an African American woman, Toni Morrison holds a special place in my heart. Even though I found her work later in life, Morrison’s writings have always spoken to the truth of my existence, and her stories never fail to turn my focus inward and back onto my Blackness and womanhood. In The Origin of Others, Morrison explores themes of race, the desire to belong, ‘othering,’ and society’s preoccupation with color amongst other subjects in the span of six lectures. Morrison’s writing within these lectures speaks to current events while also touching on her novels. As always, the gift of Toni Morrison’s writings stayed with me well beyond me closing the collection.”

—Adira-Danique Philyaw

 

“The title accurately reflects the ideas that would unfold in the book. With acuity that is characteristic of her, Morrison reflects on the germination of the idea of race, the genesis of the vile phenomenon, racism that has firmly spread its roots in our society, and also on the concept of us versus ‘others’ that has created irreparable chasms in humankind.”

—Prerna Mishra

 

“I had only read Sula by Toni Morrison and I loved her then and there. When I saw that Morrison’s nonfiction work had been picked for November, I got curious to know what her personal thoughts would be like. I got to know that she is a prolific essayist, and there are many other essays that I’d like to explore one day. One of the quotes in the beginning gave way to my curiosity about her. And it made me sure that I picked this book for the right reason and Morrison can never fail anyone. The quote says, ‘Race is the classification of species, and we are the human race, period. Then what is this other thing—the hostility, the social racism, the Othering?’”

—Niyati Thakkar

 

“Morrison and many such essayists have called out the Otherization of a race and also gender. The idea of Othering a race because of their color and because they are different is a topic debated across nations. Morrison states one simple thing that what is the need for discrimination when humanity itself is a race? We humans are one entire species among thousands more which are still unidentified. Having read almost all of her work, one thing is similar about Morrison that she believes in digging and re-rooting her history. Her characters have always vouched for her. You cannot separate Africa from America because of their history. You cannot separate the twins.”

—Aayushi Jain

 

Thanks to Aayushi Jain, and the members of the Toni Morrison book club for talking to us. You can follow Aayushi on Instagram at @_penandpapers to learn more about the book club.

Celebrating University Press Week

The week of November 9-15 is University Press Week. This year’s theme is Raise UP, which highlights the role that the university press community plays in elevating authors, subjects, and whole disciplines that bring new perspectives, ideas, and voices to readers around the globe. University Presses were asked to submit titles to a reading list in keeping with this year’s theme, and we chose Racism in America: A Reader, a free ebook we published this summer in response to events roiling the nation. To celebrate University Press Week, we asked a few of its contributors for their thoughts on how the book should be used.

Kwame Anthony Appiah

“I’m hoping teachers will use this book to help the rising generation understand how far we have come and how far we need to go in undoing the legacies of White Supremacy.”

Ned Blackhawk

“I'm glad to see that this anthology has generated such broad interests and am honored to be included with such an incredible range of scholars. From my own perspective, I read Playing in the Dark in my first year of graduate school and am extremely honored to have my own work included in its company, particularly as I open the introduction of Violence over the Land with quotes from Morrison. I would hope that interested readers continue to take interest in the centrality of race and Indigenous dispossession to the making of America and to see the interconnections between the multiplicities of American racial formation over the centuries. I tried in my work to ‘historicize colonialism’ and to assess the multiple phases of colonial disruptions that pervaded western North America, often generations prior to the arrival of Euro-Americans. I believe that within such cycles of violent colonial expansion lie some of the deepest origins of American racism.”

Adriane Lentz-Smith

“I hope complete strangers read this anthology. Family, I can talk to; students, I can teach. The anthology will prove immensely useful to enrich those conversations and lectures. But the events of this past summer revealed how little most white people know about racism in America’s past and present—and, hearteningly, how much many of them wish to learn. I want this anthology to reach them.”

Beth Lew-Williams

“I would love to see Asian Americans pick up this book. Our community would benefit from more open conversations about racism, ideally conversations informed by the history of anti-blackness in America. These essays provide an excellent starting point.”

William Sturkey

“I’d love to see students of all ages read the anthology. The most important reason to study history is not necessarily to honor those who came before us but rather to empower those who come after us.”

Augustus White

“My great hope and enthusiastic recommendation is that all my fellow humans 18 years or older will read this anthology.”

“Predictive Policing” and Racial Profiling

While technology used in policing has improved, it hasn’t progressed, says Khalil Gibran Muhammad, if racial biases are built into those new technologies. This excerpt from his book, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, shows that for the reform called for by the current protests against systemic racism and racially-biased policing to be fulfilled, the police—especially those at the top—will need to change their pre-programmed views on race and the way they see the Black citizens they are supposed to “serve and protect.”

Law enforcement, especially, has doubled down on crime statistics in what is now the era of big data, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics. Old ideas, yet again, have been programmed into the latest technology.

At the 2015 New York Times Cities for Tomorrow conference on the newest advances in technology and data analytics for everything from urban-based environmental sustainability to crime control, then Police Commissioner William J. Bratton spoke about the New York Police Department’s latest crime-fighting tool. I sat in the audience anxious to hear him speak. With a broad smile and supreme confidence, he praised the newest release of the pioneering crime mapping software known as CompStat, which had been at the heart of stop and frisk policing when it began a generation ago. He likened the latest version to the 2002 film Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise as head of a special precrime unit. Set in Washington, D.C., in the year 2054, officers gathered intelligence from a trio of precogs, humanlike beings who can predict murders and identify killers before they act. Bratton was almost giddy about the comparison; the unintended pun on the film’s title seemed to escape him.

Two years later at a 2017 Heritage Foundation summit on “Policing in America: Lessons from the Past, Opportunities for the Future,” Bratton gave more details about the architecture of CompStat 2.0. The software is based on algorithms and “advanced data mining techniques, we call ‘predictive policing,’” he said. “Effectively, it’s the CompStat of the ‘90s on steroids in the 21st century.” And just like all new technology promises, it was guaranteed to be better than before. “It is discriminating, not discriminatory,” he bragged. “It is precise, not prejudiced.”

Until he retired, Bratton was known as America’s Top Cop. Starting his career as a military police officer in Vietnam and then onto Boston in the 1970s, he spent the next five decades running the biggest and most racially troubled police agencies in the country. Bratton served in six departments coast to coast, from New York to Los Angeles and back to the Big Apple. Several of these departments were subject to federal investigations for police brutality either before or after he left. Over the years, he developed a strong personal sense of history, covering the entire span of the post–civil rights era in policing.

But unlike the many critics of aggressive policing tactics, Bratton has rarely, if ever, publicly questioned the value of social science data, except when the research critiqued police racism. In his Heritage speech, he celebrated the theoretical founders of broken windows policing, the criminologist George Kelling and the political scientist James Q. Wilson, “two personal heroes of mine.” He also repudiated the Kerner Commission findings, which he said he had read in 1974 to pass the sergeant’s exam for the Boston Police Department: “They believed at the time that the causes of crime were racism, were poverty, were police practices in many instances, unemployment, demographics. They thought those were the causes. They were not. They are not. And they never have been.” Bratton’s emphatic dismissal of the Kerner report, and all the published evidence of police bias since, demonstrates just how enduring Hoffman’s original innovation with racial crime data has been.

At the summit, Bratton said that by the 1990s, the policing profession had finally figured out how to get past the flawed Kerner legacy. Police leaders started coming together at a series of executive sessions led by faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School. There, “we began to get it right,” he noted. “The cause of crime is people.” Paraphrasing Al Gore, he said “there is an inconvenient truth” that cops go where the criminals are. “Data-driven or evidence-based policing is not bias policing.” He continued: “The disparities are not a policing issue. It is about behavior. You have the crime numbers and they are self-evident.”

Future historians will have to place Bratton’s legacy in its fullest context. For now, what’s clear is that he has had an oversized influence on how racial crime data continues to shape the lives of African Americans and Latinx people in the post–civil rights era. But of course, he was not alone. Near the end of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s third term, when activists were demanding an end to stop and frisk and the New York Civil Liberties Union and Center for Constitutional Rights were suing the city, Bloomberg refused to change the policy. He consistently dug in, insisting that racial disparities in stops were not evidence of bias, but of criminality. And, at times, he ridiculed critics for not understanding how crime data works. “In that case, incidentally, I think, we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little,” he said in late June 2013 on his weekly radio show. “It’s exactly the reverse of what they’re saying. I don’t know where they went to school, but they certainly didn’t take a math course, or a logic course.”

Less than two months later, the day after a federal judge ruled that stop and frisk was racially discriminatory and unconstitutional in the case of Floyd, et al. v. New York, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly went on national television to defend racial profiling. He suggested that black and brown people, subjected to stop and frisk policing, could not be innocent no matter that they had not broken the law. David Gregory, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, asked him about the 4.4 million stops of New Yorkers, over 80 percent of whom were black or Latino, and 88 percent of whom were not even subject to a summons or arrest, between 2004 and 2012. Gregory said, let’s start with the nearly nine out of ten people “not doing anything wrong.” Kelly responded, “It doesn’t mean that people are not doing anything wrong. If you look at the statute, it says reasonable suspicion that individuals may be about, are committing, or have committed a crime.” Like precogs, the police were acting on data-driven predictions based on Compstat. “There’s a preventive aspect to this. People say innocent,” he said, stammering his way to an explanation. “That’s not the appropriate word.” Their crimes: living while black and brown. “This, by the way, is the standard law enforcement practice throughout America.”

Bratton, Bloomberg, Kelly, and so many other police and elected officials continue to defend their vision of policing today based on what they claim the data says and tells them to do. Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani put it this way: “When I assigned police officers with Commissioner Bratton and Commissioner Safir, we did it based on statistics. We didn’t do it based on race. If there were a lot of murders in a community, we put a lot of police officers there.” In the name of saving black people from themselves, they’ve turned policing into the most important legacy of the civil rights movement. “In our country, the first obligation of government is public safety,” Bratton told the Heritage audience. But policing has always been at the heart of civil rights activism and the fight for equal citizenship. That is the civil rights movement’s most enduring legacy and unfinished business. Even to take them at their word, by their own empirical standards, there is no research consensus on whether or how much violence dropped in cities due to policing.

[…]

The link between race and crime is as enduring and influential in the twenty-first century as it has been in the past. Violent crime rates in the nation’s biggest cities are generally understood as a reflection of the presence and behavior of the black men, women, and children who live there. The U.S. prison population is larger than at any time in the history of the penitentiary anywhere in the world. Nearly half of the more than two million Americans behind bars are African Americans, and an unprecedented number of black men will likely go to prison during the course of their lives. These grim statistics are well known and frequently cited by white and black Americans; indeed for many they define black humanity. In all manner of conversations about race— from debates about parenting to education to urban life—black crime statistics are ubiquitous. By the same token, white crime statistics are virtually invisible, except when used to dramatize the excessive criminality of African Americans. Although the statistical language of black criminality often means different things to different people, it is the glue that binds race to crime today as in the past.

Shopping for Racial Justice, Then and Now

Using one’s buying power to support causes one believes in and to effect change is not new. During the years leading up to the Civil War, Bronwen Everill tells us, many supported the end of slavery by purchasing products that didn’t use slave labor. Her new book, Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition, will be published in September.

Black-owned bookstores. Apps to find Black-owned businesses near you. Pledges from corporations large and small to stock products from Black-owned producers.

As the world reels in the aftermath of the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, many have taken to social media to ask how they can support Black people and to make sure that this time is different.

What isn’t different this time, though, is the use of positive purchasing to try to effect change.

Attempts to use “Buying Black” to improve the circumstances of people in the Black diaspora date back to the late eighteenth century, and by the mid-nineteenth century both white and black activists were involved in promoting active consumption to try to combat the institution of slavery.

From the start of the movements against the transatlantic slave trade in places like Britain, the U.S., and West Africa, abstention and non-consumption (what we know as boycotts) were a popular way of withdrawing support of the slave trade. People abstained from sugar in Britain, they refused to import British slaves in the North American colonies, or they refused to export slaves in West Africa. They argued that if consumer purchases were responsible for the production of sugar by enslaved labor, then consumers could change that production by withholding their money.

But it would be even more effective if they could then actively support another way of producing that good, one that didn’t rely on slavery. Pretty soon, people began to argue that you could replace the item you were refusing to purchase on political grounds with a more ethically-sourced version: East India “free labor” sugar instead of the West India sugar produced by enslaved laborers; products like palm oil and timber from West Africa, instead of enslaved captives; and Nigerian cotton instead of Mississippi cotton.

And so people who didn’t want to support slavery with their spending sought out shops and suppliers who could guarantee the ethical origins of their goods. One of those guarantees was a label saying that a good was made by “escaped slaves.” Another was to advertise its origin in Haiti or Liberia. In shops like George W. Taylor’s Philadelphia Free Labor Warehouse, consumers who wanted to undermine the slave system could by Liberian and Haitian coffee. William Whipper’s or James Pierce’s Philadelphia stores, run by members of the Colored Free Produce Society, sold tobacco produced by Black farmers in Ohio, Kentucky, and Connecticut. “Buying Black” in this sense not only guaranteed a supply chain free of enslaved labor, but also supported the economic empowerment of formerly enslaved people around the Atlantic World.

And just like now, other companies also felt compelled to alert their customer base to their values.  In recent days, a wide variety of local, national, and international companies, retailers, brands, and institutions have issued declarations of support for racial justice and a commitment to bringing that into the heart of their culture. But what does this mean for “Buying Black”?  Is this just an example of woke market segmentation? Or is it a true commitment to change? And what does it mean for consumer behavior if a favorite brand commits to change: should one still feel as compelled to shop at Black-owned bookstores if a big retailer with next-day delivery issues a statement in support of racial justice? Is it enough to buy from a company that supports ethical goals, or is it more important for the consumer’s dollar to go directly to the effected community?

In the decades before the Civil War, members of the Colored Free Produce Association and other groups active in Black civic activism confronted these kinds of questions as the shops and suppliers providing “free labor” goods—especially cotton—increasingly turned to white, Quaker producers as a guarantee of a slave-free supply chain. Shopping at these stores was certainly one way of supporting the fight against slavery. But was a dollar spent there worth more in the fight than a dollar spent in a Black-owned business? If one had to choose between Black-owned businesses that sold regular cotton, and George W. Taylor’s warehouse, with its “free labor” cotton, which was the more ethical purchase?

In the end, while Black-owned business often thrived within the Black community, the positive purchasing campaigns advocated by the free produce movement during the antebellum period prioritized white abolitionists’ desire to get the most people possible involved in the movement. Abstaining from slave-produced cotton would really only be effective in eliminating the “financial inducements” to own enslaved people if enough people participated, for a sustained period. They believed this had to be a mass consumer movement, or link itself to one. 

And so in order to achieve their goal of the abolition of slavery, the consumer-driven free produce movement narrowed their focus and broadened their message: undermine the economics of slavery; support free labor and free soil. For those who were convinced to use their consumer power against slavery as the movement grew in the 1850s, buying from Black-owned businesses became less important than simply buying from any producer who was free.

Positive purchasing allowed black and white abolitionist consumers to feel like they had power in an economic system they objected to. They felt, as so many who are just turning to “Buying Black” feel now, that they should “put their money where their mouth is.” But then, as now, it was easy to elide the goals of the movement and gloss over the complexity of second-order effects as campaigners weighed up different, but ultimately not equal, ways of using the power of consumer demand to change an economic system built on inequality.

The Urban Origins of Militaristic Policing

As the nation is gripped in the throes of large-scale protests and there are calls for justice in the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, as well as for an end to systemic racism and police brutality, this excerpt from Elizabeth Hinton’s From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America details how the War on Crime, begun in the ’60s, focused mainly on urban areas and unfairly targeted African Americans.

In a 1969 petition called "The Forgotten Cities," sixteen mayors from the urban Midwest complained to Attorney General Mitchell about the way state planning agencies kept law enforcement funds from the places in the state with the most severe crime problems. Instead, crime control block grants were awarded to powerful state legislators representing rural constituencies. These mayors as well as like-minded policymakers contended that urban crime was as much a threat to the security of the United States as was Vietnam. "The forces of lawlessness appear to be alarmingly close to victory over the forces of peace," Indiana Democrat Vance Hartke told his colleagues in Congress in support of the petition. "If positive action is not taken, and taken soon, a crime crisis of unprecedented proportions will soon surely envelop the nation." It seemed to Hartke and many other politicians and law enforcement officials that the LEAA did little more than build criminal justice bureaucracies at the state level. Not only did state criminal justice planning agencies use substantial portions of LEAA funding for other agencies, such as the Federal Housing Authority and the Department of Defense, but planners in Hartke's own state of Indiana used block grants for seemingly foolish programs.

Concerned about the misguided use of block grant funds, LEAA administrators debated "the degree of federal intervention required to achieve national purposes." Even if state criminal justice expenditures failed to address the problems stemming from urban street crime as policymakers had intended with block grants, the White House and the Justice Department shaped the course of the national law enforcement program with novel use of discretionary aid to ensure that "high crime" neighborhoods would be adequately patrolled and that "hard-core" criminals would receive swift and sure punishment. Treating the "all-out war" on black urban street crime as a "military operation," Nixon officials sought to "first establish the machinery that enables us to gain control of the problem before we can hope to solve it," as White House aide Tom Charles Huston put it in a March 1970 memo. This meant not only appropriating more discretionary funds but also creating new opportunities for the arrest and sentencing of the citizens whom the White House held responsible for the nation's crime.

The Nixon administration led Congress in a series of steps that successfully expanded the carceral state at the local level and maintained the War on Crime's intended focus on low-income black urban communities. First, following the recommendation of his Advisory Council on Crime and Law Enforcement, Nixon pledged to launch a special crime control effort in Washington, DC. The administration could channel funds to the District via the "Large City Special Grants" section of the Safe Streets Act in the interim. Under this discretionary program, cities could receive up to $100,000 in federal funds based on formulas that took into account population size and crime rates. Although DC did not meet the same criteria as did New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Houston, Baltimore, Dallas, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and San Francisco, the District had been a federal concern since it assumed a black majority and received a special grant. Congress gave cities the freedom to spend the funds for "any phase of law enforcement or crime control activity" as long as the program was "targeted at high crime areas and high crime problems." When the legislation came up for reauthorization in 1970, congressional representatives allocated even more funds to "the nation's large cities where high crime incidence and law enforcement projects present the most difficult challenges." Whereas Congress allocated $32 million to discretionary funding in 1969, with a third going to large cities, that figure more than doubled to $70 million the following year, with more than 40 percent going to large cities. Further reflecting the federal government's commitment to fighting street crime, the maximum grant skyrocketed from $100,000 to $1 million during the same period, an allocation that only New York City received. Finally, with the 1972 election approaching and with rates of reported crime continuing to soar, top White House and Department of Justice officials planned the discretionary High Impact program in eight cities with serious crime problems and fewer than a million residents. Although the program was touted as an "across-the-board attack on burglaries, robberies, muggings, assaults and rapes," during the four years in which High Impact operated, these problems worsened in all of the cities involved.

Nixon began to implement the recommendations of the Advisory Council on Crime and Law Enforcement less than a week after his inauguration, refocusing anticrime attention on troublesome urban areas. On January 27, 1969, at a press conference publicizing the $123,524 grant the local police department received from the LEAA that day, Nixon declared a separate "War on Crime" for Washington, DC. The District had evolved into a majority black city with one of the highest rates of reported crime in the nation over the course of the 1950s, as federal employees steadily moved to the suburbs. The president believed that lack of safety in the capital city, where federal officials would not "dare leave their cars in the capital garage and walk alone," was a "tragic example" of the national crime problem. The District had been a testing ground for federal law enforcement initiatives since the anti-delinquency programs of the Kennedy administration, and Lyndon Johnson's DC Crime Control Bill of 1967 set the precedent for the federal government's explicit focus on law enforcement in the District.

After receiving a set of recommendations from the President's Commission on Crime in the District of Columbia in late 1966, Johnson sent Congress a legislative proposal for action. Johnson's version of the bill gave police the authority to issue citations to suspects on the streets and in lieu of taking a person into custody, allowed warrantless arrests with probable cause, and instituted "investigative detention," whereby DC residents could be questioned for up to three hours without formal charges. All of these measures enabled law enforcement officials to establish criminal records on a wider range of residents and to easily bring suspects into the criminal justice system. In anticipation of future uprisings, the legislation also included a special riot control law that regulated the gathering of residents in groups of five or more persons. With conservative representatives leading the way, the House overwhelmingly passed Johnson's bill in late June 1967 with a few critical additions. The House version made robbery a crime of violence in the District and attached a host of new mandatory minimums of one to five years for burglary, two years for robbery, and an indeterminate sentence of two years to life for any crime committed with a firearm. Before the bill passed the Senate with these provisions, Iowa's Republican senator Jack Miller introduced an amendment that extended the warrantless arrests for residents who appeared as though they were "about to commit" a misdemeanor. Both the House and Senate accepted this provision by voice vote, as did the president when he signed the bill into law. Foreshadowing the same reluctance he would go on to express in enacting the Safe Streets Act—not because of block grants but because of the questionable wiretapping provisions the legislation included—Johnson signed the DC Crime Control Bill into law despite his reservations about the mandatory minimum sentences the act imposed. Along with northern Democrats and moderate eastern Republicans, Johnson viewed such measures as an attack on judicial discretion and a "backward step in modern correctional policy." Ultimately however, "no more serious domestic problem faces America than the growing menace of crime in our streets," as Johnson said in his remarks on signing the DC Crime Act, regardless of the ethical and constitutional issues they raised.

The Nixon administration built eagerly on this precedent, beginning with the January 1969 grant. Under Nixon, roughly an eighth of the entire budget of the LEAA went to DC, resulting in the largest number of police per capita in the world. With pressure coming directly from the White House, Washington police chief Jerry V. Wilson instructed his captains in 1971 to reduce crime in the city or expect to leave the force. To help the city reach Wilson's goal and the federal government's shared objectives, the LEAA funded a four-person "warrant squad" to arrest parole violators with discretionary "Large City Special Grants" funding. It also supported measures to supervise suspects released on bail in the District, relying on new statistical systems the federal government was funding and developing, including the National Crime Information Center and Project SEARCH (System for Electronic Analysis and Retrieval of Criminal Histories). These initiatives received a $50 million LEAA grant to coordinate criminal information and make arrest histories easily accessible to officers.

Congress expanded the federal government's authority in low-income urban areas with discretionary allocations, whereby national programs could be implemented outside of the block grant funding structure, to enable municipal authorities in Washington, DC, to fight their own crime war complete with an unprecedented criminal code. The Nixon administration's District of Columbia Court Reorganization Act of 1970 —the first of the administration's crime control bills approved by Congress—reflected the approach of the most ardent law-and-order policymakers, bureaucrats within the administration, and conservative criminologists, all of whom believed only severe sentences and wide-spread arrests could make a dent on crime.

The 1970 legislation introduced an entirely new plane of punitive policy. It required a mandatory minimum sentence of five years for anyone convicted of a second armed offense and allowed life sentences for those convicted of a third felony in an early version of the "three strikes and you're out" law later adopted by California and New York. It also reduced judicial discretion by establishing several categories of offenders and requiring standardized punishments for various new classifications. "Dangerous special criminals" who committed "offenses with high risk of additional public danger if the defendant is released," such as bank robbery or narcotics trafficking, could now be confined for longer periods, and "narcotics addicts" suddenly faced prison time. The act permitted judges to increase sentences of habitual offenders by thirty years if the suspects were charged with a third offense, and applied the same formula to first-time offenders if the crime seemed to fit a "pattern of criminal conduct." The act also gave judges the authority to place individuals on probation without a verdict for relatively minor crimes such as disturbing the peace or public intoxication, and established a permanent requirement for formerly incarcerated city residents to submit to drug testing. Finally, the legislation was particularly harsh on youth offenders. It stipulated that any youth age sixteen or above (and in very special cases, fifteen or above) charged with first degree burglary, armed robbery, rape, or murder or with an intent to commit one of these offenses should be taken out of the jurisdiction of juvenile court. As a result of this measure, adult courts soon heard more than half of all juvenile cases in the District, and the act effectively increased the likelihood that young residents would be incarcerated for long periods.

Walter Fauntroy, the pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church who would be elected that fall as the first delegate to Congress from DC, characterized the law as "the cutting edge of fascism and oppression in the United States." Indeed, the DC Court Reorganization Act pioneered several measures whose widespread adoption the Nixon administration hoped to encourage. Preventative detention—the practice of detaining suspects without bail for up to two months—appeared for the first time in the American criminal code in the legislation. For Nixon's officials, the preemptive policy offered a "reasonable and necessary approach to the crime problem" by ensuring that accused criminals were behind bars and thus unable to possibly commit crime. Because most of the people who were detained as a pretrial measure were too poor to make bail, the opponents of the practice charged that it violated the equal protection clause and prohibitions against excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishment under the Constitution. In addition, the broad wiretapping authority the legislation provided to federal and local police forces, as well as the "no knock" raids it endorsed allowing police to break into the home of a suspect without a warrant or without announcing their purpose, presented a direct assault on the Supreme Court's expansion of defendants' rights and search-and-seizure rulings during the 1960s. Despite the questionable constitutionality of the legislation, with DC as its "showcase," the administration set a precedent for state and local governments to endorse a more punitive approach to patrol, arrest, and sentencing and the wider adoption of mandatory minimums and preventative detention. Variations of the "no knock" provision were already on the books in twenty-nine states, but immediately following the enactment of the DC Court Reorganization Act, law enforcement officials arrested thousands of residents while conducting thousands of "no knock" raids from New York City to Atlanta. In 1973, New York State revised existing codes and instituted the drug laws favored by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, which called for a mandatory minimum sentence of fifteen years to life for suspects caught with relatively small amounts of heroin or cocaine. Five years later, the Michigan legislature passed the "650-Lifer Law," requiring judges to sentence offenders convicted of the possession of 1.5 pounds of cocaine or more to life imprisonment without parole. Although the federal government and most state governments did not embrace preventative detention practices until the 1980s, when half of all the current laws were enacted, the practice of incarcerating individuals believed to be dangerous to the public went on to become widely sanctioned during the wars on drugs and terror as a mechanism to detain suspects.

When Congress reauthorized the LEAA in 1970, it advanced the federal government's commitment to fighting urban street crime by allocating nearly 40 percent of the agency's discretionary budget to support projects in "the nation's large cities where high crime incidence and law enforcement problems present the most difficult challenges." Ostensibly, the $25 million grant was intended to improve "coordination and understanding" between black residents and police in "high crime" neighborhoods. But in reality, the Nixon administration was increasingly distancing itself from police-community relations programs. Half of the discretionary funds continued to support the hardware and manpower needs of local police departments. Following the pattern that emerged during the early law enforcement programs of the Johnson administration, crime increased after the LEAA placed more police officers with advanced weapons on the streets.

With this substantial raise in discretionary funding from Congress, the Nixon administration initiated the single most ambitious project the LEAA would launch in its short history, costing $160 million (just under $1 billion in today's dollars). Vice President Spiro Agnew, Attorney General John Mitchell, White House domestic affairs assistant John Ehrlichman, and head Law Enforcement Assistance Administrator Jerris Leonard devised High Impact in late 1971 to focus the national government's law enforcement intervention beyond major metropolitan centers. The program sought to "bring sharp, rapid reduction in street crime and burglary—the types of violent, serious crime most prevalent and most feared by the public" in eight selected cities with less than a million residents, the majority with high concentrations of low-income African Americans. The LEAA guaranteed each city $20 million over a three-year period to create local criminal justice planning agencies to design and implement innovative law enforcement programs with extra assistance and oversight from White House and Department of Justice officials.

In January 1972, LEAA administrators announced the High Impact program to great media attention, claiming it would lower rates of serious crimes by 5 percent in the first two years and as much as 20 percent within five years. Martin Danziger, one of the main High Impact planners at the Criminal Justice Institute, later commented on the crime indication figures: "I just made them up. It sounded good They needed the twenty percent goal for sex appeal. It was an educated guess and it was important to start sending quantified goals in the criminal justice system." Nevertheless, these quantified goals provided Nixon with a powerful talking point during the 1972 campaign if his record on crime came into question, since the problem had worsened under his watch despite the promises of his 1968 campaign.

The administration's selection of High Impact sites had clear electoral and racial implications. Nixon needed to carry Texas, Oregon, and Colorado to secure his reelection. Thus, the administration selected Dallas, Portland, and Denver for the program—High Impact's "advantaged cities," as federal planners called them—despite their comparatively low crime rates and the fact that all three cities had witnessed an increase in both population and manufacturing sector employment during the 1960s. With black populations of less than 10 percent each, the LEAA granted the local criminal justice planning agencies in these southern and western cities relative autonomy in administering the program. In Newark, Baltimore, Cleveland, Atlanta, and St. Louis—High Impact's "disadvantaged cities"—LEAA officials worked closely with municipal authorities to develop guidelines and strategies for High Impact projects. A black majority seemed imminent in these eastern and midwestern sites, and all five faced higher percentages of families living below the poverty level, the loss of tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs, and the decline of middle-class tax bases in the wake of urban unrest during the previous decade.

Reflecting the larger strategies that federal policymakers developed for the crime war, the priority of the program was to improve street patrol and surveillance. The federal funds would support the influx of "more policemen, with better tactics, equipment, and training," as LEAA director Leonard put it. High Impact planners drastically expanded street patrols more than any other facet of the program. In its grant application, Baltimore indicated that it would use High Impact funds to engender a fivefold increase of foot patrolmen by 1973, from just seventy officers to 410. As soon as Baltimore officials received their first grant installment, they used nearly half of their $1.8 million check to add fifty-two policemen to the streets, using the remaining funds for walkie-talkies, helicopters, and the addition of nine special tactical units. High Impact directors could easily get funding for new equipment such as helicopters (which, the Department of Justice averred, had "been successful as a crime deterrent in some areas") and improved radio and dispatch systems to dispatch officers to crime scenes efficiently, and Baltimore officials took full advantage of this federal priority.

Not surprisingly, given federal policymakers' long concern about delinquency and crime among young low-income urban residents, many of High Impact's youth-focused programs continued the strategies that emerged during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations that tied anti-delinquency efforts to social services. Planners in Cleveland concluded that "male young adults and juveniles, non-white, uneducated and unemployed" had committed most of the crimes in the city. Local officials turned to the Youth Service Bureau model, spending $6 million to establish a center for young people with criminal records and "potentially delinquent" youth. By comparison, the Cleveland Vocation and Educational Program, providing summer recreation for low-income youths and generating "adequate jobs for the socially disadvantaged and economically deprived," received a paltry $1.4 million in funding from the High Impact pot. Baltimore planners limited the participation in these types of job training programs to juvenile offenders alone. The Port of Baltimore Sea School trained and prepared convicts for maritime careers, providing educational and counseling services for the sixteen- to eighteen-year-old male participants. The Sea School and other such programs in other High Impact cities increasingly made access to social services available only to residents who had criminal or prison records, or who appeared vulnerable to criminal activity. New approaches to juvenile corrections, including alternatives to institutionalization, vocational education for ex-offenders, counseling services, and employment placement, amounted to a meager 14 percent of all High Impact initiatives.

The actual results of the High Impact program exposed the War on Crime's essential misfires, as two separate evaluations of the program concluded—one by the private Mitre Corporation with $2.4 million in LEAA funds, one conducted independently by the National Security Center (NSC)—that the 200 separate anticrime projects launched by the program had no immediate impact. (The NSC characterized the High Impact program in its 1976 report as an "irresponsible, ill-conceived and politically motivated effort to throw money at a social program.") Instead of dropping 5 percent as Attorney General Mitchell promised, total crime in all eight cities rose more than 43 percent from 1972 to 1976. As planners in Baltimore focused on hardware and security in housing projects, spending $200,000 for additional guards, television monitors, and intercoms in public facilities, crime in the city went up nearly 50 percent. In Dallas, which spent more than $50,000 on a program that tied burglar alarms to a helicopter response system, crime shot up 82 percent. Theft and burglary rates did stabilize in some cities, but violent crime grew to be an even more severe problem by the end of the program.

Whether the reported escalation of crime in the High Impact cities was due to the increase in patrol and surveillance technologies the federal government introduced in the targeted areas with discretionary funding, it was clear to the Nixon administration that the national law enforcement program was losing the war against the "enemy within." Instead of seriously reevaluating their own strategies, policymakers and law enforcement officials increasingly came to view the failures of federal crime control programs as evidence that black urban violence was a foregone conclusion. Unsuccessful law enforcement programs, proponents said, were less the result of questionable tactics and misguided strategy and more the consequence of community pathology. In this respect, the War on Crime had not gone far enough. In order to effectively stop crime, the national law enforcement program needed to shift the focus of its urban intervention, deploying its foot soldiers not only in courts but also in prisons.

The unprecedented federal investment into local police departments from 1965 onward during the first stage of the War on Crime produced an increase in arrests that led, in turn, to the overcrowding of urban jails, court systems, and, increasingly, rural correctional facilities. At the same time, the provisions of the DC Court Act and the practices it generated eventually doubled the number of felony indictments, fueling the incarceration of young urban black men during the 1970s, who accounted for half of the increase in the national prison population during what Nixon officials came to regard as a "new era" for penal confinement. The government's response to the perceived crisis of crime in DC and other cities with high concentrations of African American residents had produced a new series of problems in its penal and juridical systems. Accordingly, the Nixon administration led Congress in enacting fundamental changes to the scope and purpose of American prisons. By revising the LEAA's block grant structure yet again, federal policymakers started a new direction for their punitive intervention within the corrections arm of the criminal justice system, a critical complement to the Nixon administration's general use of discretionary funds and the punitive climate officials spawned in Washington, DC, with an ongoing focus on low-income black urban Americans.

Core Values of American History

In his new book, The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America, prize-winning historian T. H. Breen provides the missing piece in the story of America’s founding, introducing us to the ordinary men and women who turned a faltering rebellion against colonial rule into an unexpectedly potent and enduring revolution. Here, he discusses the 400th anniversary of slaves being brought to America and how some people are trying to excuse this dark side of American history by using the claim of historical context.

Commemoration of the 1619 arrival of the first African slaves in Virginia has sparked passionate controversy over how to weave slavery and racism into our shared history. The major objection about giving human bondage a central role in the American story seems to be that it involves presentism. Critics claim that while white settlers once enslaved black people, contemporary Americans condemn such practices, and therefore, it is a partisan misreading of the past to project our values on earlier generations who viewed human property from a different perspective. We are advised to pay attention to the specific contexts in which whites justified slavery. We know that many Founders owned slaves—Thomas Jefferson, for example—but there is no reason to condemn them since they did not regard their behavior as morally wrong. The lesson here is that if we insist on rehearsing the failures of the past we shall inevitably discount how the nation’s leaders defended noble principles such as liberty and freedom.

The problem with this interpretative strategy is that it discounts a historical narrative that suffers not in the least from presentism. Appeals for greater sensitivity to context is, in fact, an evasive move that serves to privilege the interests of the masters over those of the slaves. After all, from their initial sale in Virginia, Africans in America have adopted a consistent view of slavery. Context makes not the slightest difference. It was wrong in the seventeenth century; it was wrong at the time of the American Revolution; and it is wrong now. No slave saw bondage as preferable to freedom. On that point there can be no doubt. From their first landing in 1619, slaves resisted their status, running away, breaking laws that aimed at controlling them, and when offered the opportunity to gain freedom through a process known as “self-purchase,” they toiled hard for liberty.  

The earliest records of colonial Virginia reveal that blacks aspired to the same goals as did their white neighbors. In a deposition taken in 1645 Edwyn Conway, the clerk of the Northampton County court reported that two men—“Anthony the negro” and Captain Philip Taylor—had viewed a parcel of land which they had purchased together. The partnership apparently had not gone well. When they returned from the field, Conway asked Anthony what had transpired. The former slave responded, “Mr. Taylor and I have devided our Corne And I am very glad of it [for] now I know my owne, hee finds fault with mee that I doe not worke, but now I know myne owne ground and I will worke when I please and play when I please.” Anthony spoke the language of other Virginia settlers. He had labored hard to obtain his “owne ground,” knowing that economic self-determination was the key to personal liberty.

Anthony gained freedom. By the end of the seventeenth century that achievement became more difficult. Slave codes tightened the grip of bondage. As more and more Africans arrived in the colony, some Virginia planters comforted themselves in the belief that the newcomers could never rebel. They spoke too many different languages, making communication among conspirators impossible. Governor Alexander Spotswood warned them against foolish complacency. He reminded them “freedom Wears a Cap which can without a Tongue, Call Together all Those who long to Shake off the fetters of Slavery.”

The siren of liberty inspired slaves during the American Revolution. In 1774, Caesar Sarter, a black man living in Essex County, Massachusetts, drafted a petition for the freedom of the colony’s slaves. He observed “this is a time of great anxiety and distress among you [the whites], on account of the infringement, not only of your Charter rights, but of the natural rights and privileges of freeborn men.” Could they not understand that slaves had the same goals? “Why,” Sarter asked, “will you not pity and relieve the poor distressed, enslaved Africans?—Who, though they are entitled to the same natural rights of mankind, that you are, [are] nevertheless groaning in bondage.” In June 1773, a group of blacks appealed to the governor of Massachusetts, “Your Petitioners apprehend that they have in common with other men a naturel right to be free and without molestation to injoy such property as they may acquire by their industry, or by any other means not detrimental to their fellow men.”

The archives contain many declarations of this sort. The point is black Americans countered racism and slavery in the same language of freedom and liberty that white Americans have so long celebrated. There is no need to argue that the context of slavery changed over time. From the earliest moments of settlement in Virginia, slaves appealed for liberty and freedom—for the right to determine the character of their own lives. To observe that they have given voice to the same principles that their white neighbors hold dear is not presentism. It is a fundamental truth of American history.

Ira Berlin (1941-2018)

Towering American historian Ira Berlin passed away yesterday at the age of 77. A preeminent scholar of slavery and African American social history, Berlin was the author of numerous field-shaping works, and founding editor of the pioneering Freedmen and Southern Society Project. We at HUP have had the great good fortune of working with Berlin for decades, and the honor of publishing his magisterial Many Thousands Gone, winner of the Bancroft and Frederick Douglass Prizes; Generations of Captivity, which demonstrated the dramatic making and remaking of slavery across the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries; and, most recently, The Long Emancipation, a slim volume that drew on his lifetime of thinking about slavery to present the story of its long demise.

As evidenced by the outpouring of tribute and affection across social media today, Berlin was beloved by generations of historians not just for his scholarship but also for his generosity, guidance, and friendship. Joyce Seltzer, his longtime editor here at HUP, echoes that widespread appreciation for Berlin as a profoundly influential scholar who touched a great many lives:

Ira was special—wise, warm, funny, true to himself. He was a dear friend as well as an author. And, above all, a great historian. Reading Many Thousands Gone truly transformed my understanding of the slave experience over the first two centuries in North America—the shifting meanings of being black and white over time and what that history continues to mean today. Our loss is immense.

Berlin began The Long Emancipation with the following passage:

History is not about the past; it is about arguments we have about the past. And because it is about arguments that we have, it is about us. In the study of American history, few arguments have been as impassioned and persistent as the seemingly endless debates about the nature and causes of slavery’s demise. Who did it, how, and
why—and ultimately, what was its meaning? The tenacious nature of this argument speaks to the centrality of freedom in American life, which, in turn, is embedded in the very meaning of American citizenship as stated in the nation’s founding charters and in its connection to the nation’s most critical contemporary social problem: racism. For the American people, the struggle to abolish slavery, secured by constitutional amendment almost 150 years ago, remains very much alive among us and about us.

No one did more to help us understand that struggle than Berlin. No one did more to help us understand ourselves.