Condemning Crack, Condemning Crime, Condemning Ourselves: Crack Era Reform from the Grassroots to Washington

Despite persistent scholarly focus on black agency in recent decades, grassroots black activists are frequently rendered invisible in histories of mass incarceration.  Much scholarship treating the rise of the carceral state points to a coherent racial project engineered by white conservatives.  As the narrative holds, these operatives used the racial politics of crime control to reverse past gains under the civil rights movement.  In this respect black citizens are portrayed as hapless victims—devoid of agency—crushed by the rising tide of modern conservatism. 

This paper will explore the relationship between grassroots reform movements, urban policing, and the state.  More specifically, the efforts and agency of anti-crack and anti-crime activists in the Crack Era Bronx will be evaluated.  Groups such as the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, as well as the United Black Church Appeal aggressively fought for nuanced reform.  Said groups advocated for much needed structural interventions, harsher sentencing, and thoughtful community policing.  However, grassroots appeals for reform would soon be co-opted and flattened by the state in the midst of a national moral panic surrounding crack-cocaine.  Through the haze of federalism, moral panic, and mid-term election jockeying, only draconian calls for “harsher sentencing” and “more police” remained. 

In this respect, paths not taken in the War on Drugs will also be examined.  Earnest, well-organized local attempts at community control and empowerment eventually worked only to reinforce a broader “condemnation of blackness”.  Attempts to reassert order by grassroots activists further legitimated pre-existing stereotypes regarding poor urban districts as the loci of vice and crime.  Moreover, calls for community policing would be misinterpreted as further proof that repressive law enforcement stood as the only possible solution to the looming “crack attack”.