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.
In 1990, Lawrence Bell was 14, orphaned and living in an abandoned house when three Camden cops pressured him to sign a confession of murder.
The US university is marked by the dominance of intellectual white liberalism in tension and complicity with conservative nationalism and neoliberalism.
Alabama Communists helped lay the foundation for the organized civil rights movement that emerged in the late 1940s and early ’50s.
Prison and police abolition were key to the thinking of many midcentury civil rights activists.
If there’s ever a time when a Reconstruction might actually lead to democratization and the end of American imperialism, this is the opportunity, says Robin D.G. Kelley.
