Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire

Black Elites, and Many Black Voters, Supported Mass Black Incarceration
25 Jul 2017
🖨️ Print Article

Historian, author and activist Paul Street has high praise for James Forman Jr.’s new book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. Forman is a professor at Yale Law School and a former public defender in Washington, DC. His book “fills a giant hole in the literature,” illuminating the role played by “Black elites in the rise of the mass incarceration system,” said Street, himself an expert on race and the U.S. penal system. “Many ordinary, working class Black voters in the 70s and 80s have actively supported the racially disparate war on crime and drugs that ended up producing racist mass incarceration,” said Street, whose latest book is titled They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy.


More Stories


  • Gaza destruction
    Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    ESSAY: Fascist South Africa and Zionist “Israel”—Hitler’s Heirs, Victor Lungelo Mayekiso, 1969
    14 Feb 2024
    South African Pan-Africanist Victor Lungelo carefully maps the links between “Hitler’s Heirs:” Fascist South Africa and Zionist “Israel.”
  • Closeup of a child working in cobalt mine
    Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
    China in Congo
    14 Feb 2024
    Ann Garrison speaks to Maurice Carney about the role of China in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s mining industry.
  • China Congo
    Dee Knight
    Disappointing “rush to judgment” on China’s Role in the Congo
    14 Feb 2024
    Dee Knight’s comments on a review by Ann Garrison in Black Agenda Report, of Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives.
  • Austin Cole
    Roberto Sirvent , Austin Cole
    Black Liberation and Anti-Imperialism: An Interview with Austin Cole
    14 Feb 2024
    Book Forum Editor, Roberto Sirvent, interviews Austin Cole about his organizing work and political writing.
  • GDF and US troops in Guyana for Exercise Tradewinds
    Tamanisha John
    Exercise Tradewinds: 40 years of U.S. Counterinsurgency in the Caribbean
    14 Feb 2024
    Exercise Tradewinds has historically been a show of military might and a threat to other nations in the Caribbean and Latin America that the West would exert force if they dared to stray from…
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us