Harvard University Press Blog

On the Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina

August 29 is the fifteenth anniversary of when Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans. In his new, definitive history, Katrina: A History, 1915–2015, Andy Horowitz shows how the decisions that caused the disaster extend across the twentieth century. Here is an excerpt.

On Sept. 29, 1915, at the muddy end of the Mississippi’s farthest reach into the Gulf of Mexico, 100 miles down river from New Orleans, an unnamed hurricane made landfall. An anemometer recorded wind gusts of 140 miles per hour there, at the town of Burrwood, La., where on easier days several hundred members of the Army Corps of Engineers lived in orderly cottages and worked to keep the shipping canal at the river’s mouth clear of sediment.

As the storm moved upriver, the barometer at Tulane University plummeted to 28.10 inches. The rain gauge filled with 8.36 inches of precipitation in 21 hours. Even in a region accustomed to hurricanes, these were extraordinary measurements. Isaac Cline, the chief meteorologist at the United States Weather Bureau in New Orleans, reported that the storm was “the most intense hurricane of which we have record in the history of the Mexican Gulf coast, and probably in the United States.”

On their own, these data reveal little about how the storm might have mattered to people, or how they might have responded to it. These precise metrics of wind speed, rainfall, and barometric pressure do not trace the shape of life in places that seem, repeatedly, to come under assault from the forces of nature. We need different tools to gauge those times when coincidences of earth, wind, and water upset the course of human events in ways so overwhelming that we name them with a word whose basic meaning suggests that the entire universe is out of joint: disaster.

Consider that during the 1915 hurricane, across the state of Louisiana, 275 people died. Property damage estimates ran to $12 million ($280 million in 2015 dollars). Upriver from Burrwood, only four houses remained standing in the town called Empire. East of New Orleans, in St. Bernard Parish, the settlement of Saint Malo was washed from the map entirely. A foot of water remained in parts of New Orleans for five days.

Nonetheless, once the storm passed, many New Orleanians celebrated. “Storm proof!” a newspaper proclaimed. The mayor quickly rejected outside offers of aid. Surveying the event a month later, the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board, the agency charged with protecting the city from floods, concluded that its new drainage system had passed a defining test. “It is safe to say,” its report asserted, “that no city anywhere in the world could have withstood these conditions with less damage and less inconvenience than has New Orleans.” The report reasoned that the recent extreme occurrence of wind and rain “renders more remote the probability of a repetition of any of these things in the early future.”

It was a curious logic in a city that had seen 92 hurricanes or tropical storms since its European colonial founding in 1718. Despite this history, the Sewerage and Water Board believed that even if another big storm came, New Orleans would be safe. The report’s authors reflected on the storm’s “lessons” this way: “there is no reason why this city and its surrounding country should not continue, even more successfully than heretofore, [its] developments in all directions.” The experience of the 1915 hurricane affirmed the consensus among engineers and investors, city planners and politicians, home builders and home buyers, that New Orleans should grow.

The city they created became one of the most celebrated places in the world. “Ain’t no city like the one I’m from!” the women in the Original Pinettes Brass Band sang a century later. New Orleans’s admirers lauded it as “The Land of Dreams,” “The Big Easy,” “The City that Care Forgot,” “America’s Most Interesting City,” and “the soul of America.” With its jazz, Mardi Gras, and other iconic contributions to world culture, more than any other place in America, New Orleans called to mind creativity, cosmopolitanism, and love of life.

But today, New Orleans also calls to mind catastrophe. The city drowned when its levee system collapsed on Aug. 29, 2005, killing hundreds of people, destroying thousands of homes, and precipitating not only one of the most horrific moments in modern American history, but offering an emblem for the idea of disaster itself: Katrina. The response to the 1915 storm thus cast a century-long shadow, because the new neighborhoods developed after that storm experienced the worst flooding in 2005.

More than any other single factor, including the race or class of its inhabitants, the age of a building best predicted how it would fare in 2005. Tracing the outline of the Katrina flood reveals the shape of New Orleans as it stood nine decades earlier: most houses built before 1915 did not flood, but most houses built after the Sewerage and Water Board’s 1915 call for further growth did.

Usually, we imagine disasters as exceptions. We describe them as external attacks, ahistorical acts of God, blows from without. That is why most accounts of Katrina begin when the levees broke and conclude not long after.

But these stories offer a denuded sense of what happened, why, or what might have prevented the catastrophe. Somebody had to build the levees before they could break.

I begin the story of Katrina in 1915 in order to pursue a different idea: that disasters come from within. Disasters are less discrete events than they are contingent processes. Seemingly acute incidents, like the largely forgotten 1915 hurricane, live on as the lessons they teach, the decisions they prompt, and the accommodations they oblige. Their causes and consequences stretch across much longer periods of time and space than we commonly imagine. Seeing disasters in history, and as history, demonstrates that the places we live, and the disasters that imperil them, are at once artifacts of state policy, cultural imagination, economic order, and environmental possibility.

And yet, if understanding history usually demands drawing connections between seemingly disparate dots, trying to make sense of what happened in Louisiana after Aug. 29, 2005, also poses the opposite problem, because the hurricane called Katrina did not cause many of the effects commonly attributed to it.

After the storm passed, New Orleans police officers shot and killed unarmed citizens. The Federal Emergency Management Agency gave flood victims trailers laced with formaldehyde. The New Orleans City Council voted to demolish the city’s public housing apartments. The Louisiana State Legislature voted to transform the city’s public school system into a confederacy of charter schools. Congress voted to fund the largest housing recovery program in United States history; the program appropriated money to homeowners but not to renters. New Orleans police officers arrested musicians for leading jazz funerals without permits, while violent crime plagued the city.

Louisiana State University shut down New Orleans’s public Charity Hospital, while rates of mental illness surged. The Army Corps of Engineers encircled the city with a new levee system, while the wetlands beyond the walls continued to erode and the city itself continued to sink. A decade after the storm, New Orleans’s population had fallen from 484,674 to 390,711. Of the people missing, the vast majority—nearly 92,000 people— were African American. We have come to refer to this sequence of events as “Katrina,” but for none of these effects was the hurricane the proximate cause. The flood line thus tells one important story, but it is not the only story that matters.

After the flood receded, policymakers reapportioned the challenges the water had posed. Legislators designed recovery programs that favored white people over African American people, wealthy people over poor people, and people who owned homes over people who rented them. These policies reinforced existing inequalities. And they often undermined what the many Louisianians who opposed them argued were essential facts of life: the bonds of family, the solidarity of community, notions of political legitimacy, feelings of cultural belonging, and a sense of moral order.

The etymology of the word disaster refers to stars out of alignment; but if the changes in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina seemed to some to proceed with the force of destiny, it is well to remember, as Shakespeare cautioned, “The fault . . . is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

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.

Going Downtown

As a child in Chicago, Emily Remus was enchanted by the sights and sounds of its downtown. Here she tells how those early experiences influenced her in writing A Shoppers’ Paradise, a book about how women in turn-of-the-century Chicago used their consumer power to challenge male domination of public spaces and stake their own claim to downtown.

“Downtown,” Petula Clark’s 1964 hit single about the vibrancy of the city center, entranced me long before I began studying urban life. In the early 1990s, nearly three decades after the song’s release, I replayed it endlessly on a plastic phonograph in my bedroom in suburban Chicago. Clark’s crooning insistence that “everything’s waiting for you” downtown seemed patently true to me as a young girl. Downtown—in my case, Chicago’s Loop—was the site of my greatest adventures, a font of novelty and excitement. The lights were “much brighter there,” I thought. You could “forget all your troubles, forget all your cares.”

The commercial landscape of the downtown was especially captivating to my youthful imagination. On every trip with my parents and sisters, I would marvel at the grand hotels, elegant theaters, and lively restaurants. Even more enticing were the glittering store fronts of State Street, especially during the holidays. The mix of color, light, and glass seemed to transform the retail district into a bustling winter wonderland. Nowhere was this effect more pronounced than at Marshall Field & Co., Chicago’s most beloved department store (later acquired by Macy’s). After surveying Field’s elaborate annual window displays, we would, like countless other families, retreat to the store’s seventh floor to sip hot cocoa beneath the twinkling glow of the Walnut Room’s famous Christmas tree. 

Even as a child, I wondered how and by whom the downtown had been created. I could not then have appreciated that the Loop was a product of innumerable policy decisions, commercial choices, cultural priorities, social inequalities, and political exigencies. Nor could I have grasped that its contours had been shaped not only by government officials, business leaders, and reformers but by historical actors not very different from my mother, sisters, and me—by women shoppers.      

This history began, slowly, to come into focus when I entered graduate school at the University of Chicago to study gender and capitalism. Inspired by historians such as Lizabeth Cohen and William Cronon, whose landmark works illuminated the imprint of industrial capitalism on Chicago’s material and cultural landscape, I began to investigate how the expansion of consumer capitalism influenced the urban environment. I probed the early growth of the State Street retail district, tracing the rise of new commercial spaces that catered primarily to female customers—department stores, theaters, grand hotels, restaurants, and soda fountains. These businesses, which proliferated in the 1880s and 1890s, drew an unprecedented number of moneyed white women into the downtown.

As I dug into my research, I expected to find a seamless incorporation, even a warm embrace, of these women into the commercial life of the Loop. After all, their consuming practices helped to fuel Chicago’s remarkable economic development in the late nineteenth century. To my astonishment, I instead uncovered heated conflict and resistance. Far from welcoming female consumers, many Chicago industrialists, city officials, religious leaders, and ordinary citizens challenged the growing presence and pursuits of moneyed women in the city center. Their conspicuously feminine clothing, street etiquette, dining and drinking preferences, entertainment choices, and very manner of walking distinguished them from traditional male occupants of the Loop and provoked intense opposition. The battles ranged from efforts to deny women shoppers access to downtown sidewalks during evening rush hour to the enactment of new laws banning voluminous hoopskirts and large hats to crusades against alcohol consumption in ladies’ cafés and tearooms.

A Shoppers’ Paradise probes these tensions and their consequences. As the book reveals, incorporating women into a downtown dominated by men—and creating an atmosphere favorable to female consumption—was not easy or automatic. In negotiating the terms of women’s public presence, Chicagoans clashed over the appropriate use of downtown space, the rights of women, and the moral legitimacy of new forms of consumption. This conflict, I argue, shaped the creation of a built environment and cultural norms that upheld moneyed white women’s new consuming habits and sustained the growth of American consumer capitalism. Indeed, it produced the class-bounded, racially-homogenous consumer playground that my sisters and I would unthinkingly enjoy a century later. 

I can no longer visit State Street without reflecting on its fraught history, on the opportunities and disparities produced by its development. I am also keenly aware that its landscape is still evolving. Many of the spaces I visited as a girl have since shuttered. State Street, like countless other urban retail districts across the country, has been struggling for decades to attract customers and retain businesses. These problems have only intensified as more and more commerce shifts to the digital realm. A century ago, Chicago civic and business leaders debated how—and whether—to accommodate the growing stream of downtown shoppers. Now, the concern is that this stream may someday dry up. Each moment conjures the same important question—what is a downtown for?

I pose this question not only in A Shoppers’ Paradise but on annual field trips to Chicago for my course on the history of consumer culture at the University of Notre Dame. After touring the Marshall Field building, I prompt my students to wander up and down State Street surveying the architecture and infrastructure. Our goal is to encounter the urban environment as a primary source, a clue to the past. The landscape opens up for my students new vistas for understanding power, inequality, and capitalist transformation. Standing with thirty undergraduates on a crowded street corner discussing the purpose, meaning, and uncertain future of America’s downtowns, I am reminded of the sheer dynamism of these spaces and, at least for a moment, can still find some truth in Petula Clark’s claim that there is “no finer place for sure.” 

Transpatialization: A New Look at the Old Question of How the Modern World Was Formed

Greater Syria—the region known in Arabic as Bilad al-Sham—is roughly coterminous with the modern nation states of Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. In The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World, historian Cyrus Schayegh offers a new history of the region from 1850 to 1950 that emphasizes the multiple layers of spatial identity embraced by the region’s inhabitants, presenting in the process a much-needed challenge to the predominant ways in which we talk about the formation of the modern world. Below, Schayegh decribes the experiences of the denizens of Bilad al-Sham, and outlines the notion of “transpatialization.”

-----

Each age comes with its own dominant historiographic lens. When nation states crystallized in the nineteenth century, many historians—especially European ones—made them history’s quasi-metaphysical objective and central subject. When a globalization wave built up from the 1970s, historians reacted, too. “All local, national, or regional histories must be global history, too,” the late Christopher Bayly famously stated in his landmark The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914.

Logically, the reverse is true as well. Global history must also be local, national, and regional. It is for this reason that quite a few global—and, related, transnational—histories materialize in specific locales. And it is for the same reason that some scholars define globalization not as uniformly tightening interdependence but as uneven interplays between border transgressions and reassertions; and that writing global history is not simply about topics but involves a global optic on past events and trends, as Sebastian Conrad has recently underlined in What Is Global History? Despite these historiographic insights, however, a “real challenge” persists, he has noted: To “shift between, and articulate, different scales of analysis… In many case historians have opted for novel geographies, but in the end have tended to then treat these spaces as given.”

A related challenge has to do with how we conceptualize the socio-spatial making of the modern world. That development cannot be reduced to nation-state formation or globalization or urbanization, to mention three usual suspects. Certainly, accelerated interdependence across space, states’ unprecedented ability to penetrate their territory, and record urban growth all have been instrumental in creating the modern world, distinguishing it from premodern times. But none has been clearly dominant. This is not the least because they are intertwined—because “all local, national, or regional histories must be global,” too, to quote Bayly again.

Enter transpatialization: what we may call modern cities, regions, states—nation-states and others—and global circuits reconstituting and transforming each other more thoroughly and at a faster rhythm than before. This, I argue in The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World, is the primary distinguishing feature of the modern world’s socio-spatial making. Transpatialization does not denote one single process, and it is not an empirical unit. (Neither are globalization, state formation, or urbanization, for that matter!) It refers to a set of processes; it is a heuristic umbrella that does not assign artificial primacy to any one presumably unitary process such as “nation-state formation” or “urbanization” or to any one seemingly distinct scale like “the global” or “the local.”

In Search of Bengali Harlem

Last week the Whiting Foundation announced the second class of recipients of the Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship, which celebrates and supports faculty in the humanities who embrace public engagement as part of the scholarly vocation. Among the 2017-2018 cohort is Vivek Bald, a scholar, writer, and documentary filmmaker who will use the time and funding granted by Whiting to continue his recovery of the stories of South Asian immigrants who quietly became part of some of the most iconic neighborhoods of color in the United States. He tells some of those stories in Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, which we published a few years back, and he’s working now to complete a documentary titled In Search of Bengali Harlem, a collaboration with the playwright Alaudin Ullah and musician/composer Vijay Iyer.

Here’s the description of the project from the Whiting Foundation’s site, where you can also see a preview of the film:

One of the earliest groups of Muslims to settle in the United States risked their lives to come to the country amid the harsh restrictions on entry of the Asian Exclusion Era (1890-1940). South Asian men working under indenture-like conditions on British steamers jumped ship in northeastern ports and linked up with clandestine networks of their fellows to start new lives working in restaurants and factories across the country. Many made their way to Harlem, where they integrated through marriage into African-American and Puerto Rican communities, in effect “disappearing” into the neighborhood.

Vivek Bald will use the Fellowship to help complete a documentary film recovering the lost history of these men, their families, and their contributions to American urban life. The story unfolds from the perspective of Bald’s collaborator, Bangladeshi-American playwright Alaudin Ullah, who is in search of answers about his parents’ own path to Harlem. As the search ripples outward, the film illuminates a larger twentieth-century history of Bengali Muslim settlement, inter-marriage, and cross-racial community-making in U.S. cities. As part of the Fellowship project, Bald will also implement a digital crowd-sourcing project to collect and share more stories of the descendants of these immigrants.

Bald, who became a documentary filmmaker before pursuing his PhD, met Ullah in the 1990s. That encounter inspired the extensive archival research that culminated in Bald’s book Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. The new documentary and website build upon this scholarly work, closing the circle to bring to life the family narrative that introduced Bald to this powerfully multicultural American moment.

The Whiting Foundation believes that “scholarship in the humanities is crucial in pushing forward the boundaries of our knowledge and understanding of the world,” and that “engagement with the humanities provides a blueprint for full, informed participation in civic life in a pluralist democracy; teaches the habit of thinking deeply and broadly, ensuring that we ask questions about history and context when making important decisions; and develops skills that allow us to contribute more to a productive economy, including analytical thinking, facility with complex ideas, clear and persuasive communication, and evidence-based decision-making.” We most certainly agree.

Homesteading in Harlem

Harlem—America’s most famous neighborhood—transformed in the late twentieth century from the epitome of urban crisis to the most vivid embodiment of urban revival. Yet while observers point to Harlem as a dramatic exemplar of gentrification, historian Brian Goldstein locates the genesis of Harlem’s remarkable change in an unexpected place—the radical social movements of the 1960s, which sought to give Harlemites control over a built environment that officials had long shaped from the top down. In movements for community control, Harlemites demanded the right to plan their own redevelopment, founding an array of new community-based organizations to pursue that goal. In the following decades, those grassroots organizations became the crucibles in which residents debated competing conceptions of what Harlem should look like and who should live there. 1960s activists envisioned a Harlem built by and for its low-income, predominantly African-American residents. The new millennium saw, instead, a neighborhood with an increasingly expensive price of admission. In The Roots of Urban Renaissance, Goldstein charts the connection between these events and, in the process, offers an alternative to accounts that explain gentrification as something that happened to neighborhoods like Harlem. Indeed, the Harlem of the new century was not simply imposed on an unwitting community by affluent outsiders but grew from its grassroots, producing a legacy that both helped and harmed longtime residents.

In the excerpt below, Goldstein tells of the homesteading movement that took root in 1970s Harlem, where low-income residents came to see the rehabilitation of abandoned buildings as a means to learn construction skills and gain much-needed jobs in addition to housing.

-----

Groups coalesced rapidly in the early 1970s, representing both the interests of single buildings and the collective interests of like-minded groups. The Renigades were one of many small grassroots organizations to promote self-help rehabilitation. Though a self-described “street gang,” its members had turned the group toward neighborhood improvement, with involvement in activities like voter registration and exposure of drug dealers. Indeed, despite claiming criminal records, the Renigades were in many ways typical of homesteaders in general. Homesteaders were mostly young—a majority were under thirty years old—with income below the poverty line. The former squatters of Operation Move-In were among the Renigades’ contemporaries. Operation Move-In had taken ownership of an abandoned building just south of Harlem at 948 Columbus Avenue in October 1973, a transaction arranged by sympathetic city employees. In 1974, members of the Mosque of the Islamic Brotherhood began a rehab project in two long-abandoned adjacent Central Harlem tenements, at 55 St. Nicholas Avenue and 132 West 113th Street. The next year, in the spring of 1975, seven low-income Harlem families formed an organization called United Harlem Growth. The families all lived in abandoned housing, public housing, or apartments soon to come out of rent control, and saw in homesteading a chance to own stable, affordable homes. By 1976, United Harlem Growth—led by David Robinson, Jackie Robinson’s son, and with an expanded membership of fifteen families—had purchased five city-owned abandoned brownstones on 136th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues with plans to renovate them into low-income cooperative housing. In a parallel effort, tenants in single buildings across Harlem pursued conversion to cooperative status, to gain control of apartments that negligent landlords had effectively abandoned and to pool rents toward needed repairs.

Organizations with close ties in and near Harlem formed to unite these disparate but likeminded efforts. In 1974, the leaders of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, located just across Morningside Park from Harlem, formed the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB), in response to nearby squatters who questioned the church’s commitment to its neighbors. The new organization assisted participants in the incipient movement; for instance, UHAB helped the Mosque of the Islamic Brotherhood locate the buildings that members would rehabilitate. Similarly, a collection of community-based organizations came together in 1974 to form the Association of Neighborhood Housing Developers (ANHD), a resource intended to amass collective experience and technical expertise. Members included groups from the Bronx, the Lower East Side, and Brooklyn, as well as West Harlem Group Assistance, UHAB, and the West Harlem Community Organization (WHCO), the long-standing force that had played a central role in opposing disruptive urban renewal.

Such efforts emerged as part of a broader citywide network, whose proponents believed that through their own sweat they could provide decent housing for low-income residents. Philip St. Georges, a homesteading advocate who claimed partial responsibility for inventing the term “sweat equity,” became the Zelig of self-help housing, working at times with Msgr. Fox, the city, the Renigades, and UHAB. He explained the potential of abandoned buildings, which for many appeared as only a problem to be excised. “While many abandoned buildings may be structurally sound, and capable of being rehabilitated, they represent an overwhelming public nuisance in the eyes of City policy makers. They are a liability. And increasingly, they are simply demolished,” St. Georges wrote in 1973. However, for many groups of low-income tenants who suddenly see an opportunity to own their own homes, take control over their own lives, and improve the condition of their neighborhood, these vacant and abandoned structures are anything but a liability. They are a true resource. And indeed, they may be the last resource.”

When the State’s Right to Punish Crime Is Compromised

 

When a society falls below the threshold for tolerable injustice and its governing institutions are responsible for the injustices (for either perpetrating them or not preventing them), the state’s right to punish crime is compromised. And if its criminal justice institutions are insufficiently fair, effective, or humane, the state’s right to punish can be completely undermined. Moreover, lacking the authority to create obligations through law, it has no moral basis for condemning disobedience to its laws as such, particularly the disobedience of those unjustly disadvantaged in society. Its laws serve to coordinate action and (when penalties are attached) to warn of impending sanctions. But the state’s laws lack the moral power to impose duties of compliance. Such a state, if it is not too unjust, may have a right to punish serious and harmful wrongdoing as a defense of those whom it would be wrong to harm. However, it would lack the right to criminalize wrongful acts beyond these most serious ones, and it would lack altogether the moral standing to condemn defiance to legal authority.

—Tommie Shelby, Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform

“We Have to Insist That Our Political Leaders Start Dealing With the History of Our Present”

“The debate we’ve been having about police reform, about body cameras, about black lives mattering, seems not to have fundamentally changed the calculation when a black motorist or pedestrian is stopped on the street.” So said historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad in a conversation with NPR’s Code Switch team after the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and the horrifying attack on police officers in Dallas.

Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, spoke of the need to continue working towards more just policing even as events threaten to jeopardize public sympathy. “We have to insist,” he said, “that our political leaders start dealing with the history of our present—which is a history of sustained policing in black communities that is wholly and fundamentally different than it is in the rest of America. That’s a fact.”

When asked by Code Switch how today’s organizers might spur something like the late-1960s sequence that saw urban unrest lead to President Johnson’s formation of a federal commission that ultimately pointed to the failure of housing, education, and social-service policies, Muhammad suggested that the terms of that exchange can no longer be accepted.

The strategy of the civil rights movement was a strategy of compromise, to some extent, and that compromise was a form of respectability politics that essentially said “we’re going to be perfectly articulate, we’re going to be perfectly dressed, we’re going to be nonviolent, and we’re going to fit a model of exceptionalism, such that you will then say ‘how could we not let them eat at our table, how could we not let them live in our neighborhood, how could we not let them into our schools?’” And that’s not the full measure of humanity. We cannot—or can no longer—say to black people “you have to be twice as good to have half the measure of freedom in this country.” You should be able to be poor, you should be able to be doing something illegal that is not violent, and live to be able to face a day in court. That should be able to happen in this country.

In further considering the prevailing culture of policing today, Muhammad drew the line to mass incarceration:

I think that police officers function today in a way that has systematically mass-criminalized black and brown populations. That’s just a fact. You can’t get to the problem of mass incarceration without the problem of hot spots, CompStat policing, the war on drugs, all of it. And I think many people would agree that mass incarceration is a step in the wrong direction. Seven million people under some form of criminal justice supervision is a step in the wrong direction in a moment where we’re supposed to be two generations removed from the civil rights movement. And policing is at the center of that, they are the starting point. If there’s no arrest, then there’s no mass incarceration.

Listen to the full conversation below, starting around the 11:10 mark.

“Operation Sting” and the Creation of Crime Itself

Among the general public, the rise of mass incarceration in America is usually attributed to Ronald Reagan’s “War on Drugs.” In From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, though, historian Elizabeth Hinton reveals that the nation’s prison problem is the outcome of a historical process that began under the Johnson administration during a period known more for its civil rights legislation and social welfare initiatives than for criminalization of the urban poor. Those Great Society programs were entangled with a set of assumptions about African Americans, poverty, and crime that underwrote the passage of the 1965 Law Enforcement Assistance Act, which authorized the infusion of federal money to “modernize” local law enforcement. By the mid-1970s, the federal government had embraced a new tactic, granting urban police departments money to purchase and fence stolen goods as a means of attracting criminals. As Hinton reveals in the passage excerpted below, what started as one outrageous setup in Washington, DC, soon spread across the nation, and these carefully orchestrated sting operations quickly evolved into an attack on black petty thieves and came to involve the creation of crime itself—a central feature of the rise of the carceral state.

-----

The Washington, DC, Police Department’s sting effort was the most elaborate and the most contrived of those supported by this federal funding. In the summer of 1975, Washington police lieutenant Robert Arscott had set up a small fake fencing operation masquerading as the consulting firm “Urban Research Associates.” The undercover officer who manned the operation in downtown Washington sat behind a desk with a hidden camera and a tape recorder, hoping that thieves who had recently lifted office equipment would attempt to sell the stolen merchandise to the Urban Research Associates outfit. But amid the highest unemployment rate since 1941, the façade attracted more job seekers than criminals. The police department promptly shut down Urban Research Associates.

For its next attempt, the DC Police Department used federal and local funds to purchase an unheated warehouse near Langdon Park in the segregated northeast side of the District as a more convincing space for illegal transactions. Beginning in fall 1975, law enforcement purchased $2.4 million worth of stolen property with $67,000 in government funds. The project, called “Operation Sting,” involved the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the Law Enforcement Assistance Act (LEAA). After only five months, the initiative succeeded in its implicit purpose: to round up hundreds of small-time crooks, nearly all of them unemployed black men. The undercover police officers and federal agents posing as Mafia “dons” gave themselves Italian names straight out of the then-recent Godfather films, including “Angelo Lasagna,” “Mike Franzino,” “Tony Bonano,” “Rico Rigatone,” and “Bohana LaFountaine.” None of the officers were of Italian descent, but they interspersed terms like “Ciao” and “Arrivederci” as they played these roles.

Operation Sting created a demand for crime by providing crooks with a market on which to sell stolen goods. Word quickly spread that the fencing outfit, known to its customers as PFF Inc (for “Police-FBI Fencing Incognito”), was tied to the Mafia and would pay the highest prices in town. The petty thieves furnished PFF Inc with typewriters, adding machines, radios, and television sets, and then went back out to steal more items for the “dons.” If no valuable material goods were to be found, the crooks went after their neighbors’ mail, bringing stolen housing and welfare checks and credit cards. As their employer, PFF Inc provided the thieves with a steady and continuous source of income as long as they could deliver the plunder.

The Unknown Kenneth B. Clark

In the latter half of the 1960s, with the nation’s eyes on unrest in its cities, there arose a role for African American intellectuals in helping white America to understand black urban life. As Daniel Matlin details in On the Corner: African American Intellectuals and the Urban Crisis, these “indigenous interpreters” were left to balance the opportunities afforded by their prominence with the dilemmas and demands of their perceived social obligations. Among them was psychologist Kenneth B. Clark—born one hundred years ago this week—who became known as an establishment figure committed to an integrationist approach to solving the urban crises of the post-civil rights era. However, as Matlin explains below, Clark’s public acceptance of that role both concealed and constrained his sense of race as “merely one manifestation of a much deeper set of problems that confront human beings.”

-----

Civil rights anniversaries abound this year. Media interest has centered on the Civil Rights Act signed into law by Lyndon Johnson fifty years ago, but the summer of 1964 also witnessed the Harlem Riot, an event that inaugurated years of urban uprisings which broke any illusion that America’s racial divisions had been laid to rest. It was sixty years ago that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education shattered the legal foundations underpinning segregation. And one hundred years ago, on July 14, 1914, the scholar whose name became inextricably entwined with that landmark legal victory was born to Jamaican parents in the Panama Canal Zone.

Histories of the civil rights movement testify to Kenneth B. Clark’s vital contribution in coordinating the expert psychological testimony cited in the Brown ruling. Segregated schools, the Court was persuaded, stigmatized and harmed black children by their very nature, regardless of whether white and black schools were equally resourced. The famous “doll tests” through which Clark and his wife, Mamie Phipps Clark—like him, a psychologist trained at Howard and Columbia Universities—had exposed black children’s marked preference for white dolls still provides perhaps the most graphic and abiding image of the interior, emotional costs of institutionalized white supremacy.

Clark, who died in 2005, remains for historians a “symbol of integrationism,” the civil rights movement’s “reigning academic,” and “the epitome of the establishment social scientist” during the Kennedy-Johnson era of liberal reform. His credentials as a pillar of the postwar liberal establishment are plain to see. A tenured professor at the City College of New York, Clark served as an expert witness before courts and congressional committees and at White House conferences, fraternized with politicians and their advisers, and secured federal and municipal grants to support his research and activism. Those credentials, and his aura of respectability, were only underlined in 1969 when Clark was elected to serve as the first black president of the American Psychological Association, one of the nation’s largest professional bodies.

And yet, the remarkable controversy that ensued during Clark’s presidency is a forgotten story—one that casts his life and thought in a dramatically different light, and reveals much about the pressures and dilemmas that have confronted generations of African American intellectuals. On September 4, 1971, at the end of his term of office, Clark rose to deliver his presidential address at the APA’s annual convention in Washington, D.C. Within days, he had been ridiculed in the national press, denounced by many of his academic peers, and censured by the vice president of the United States.