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


  • Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    Censorship of the Black Left
    26 Jul 2023
    As the empire crumbles, the neoliberal capitalist order run by a corrupt duopoly is working to silence dissent. The Black left, of course, is always the first target.
  • Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    SPEECH: French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara, Tawia Adamafio, 1960
    26 Jul 2023
    A reminder of when Accra was at the center of struggles against nuclear imperialism. African people have always been at the forefront of peace and sanity. 
  • Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
    Virtual Slave Labor in Congo’s Cobalt Mines
    26 Jul 2023
    I spoke to Maurice Carney, Executive Director of Friends of the Congo, about the virtual slave labor in the cobalt mines of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s cobalt mines.
  • Clau O'Brien Moscoso
    Peruvians Take Over Lima, Continuing to Pressure Boluarte Coup Regime
    26 Jul 2023
    Seven months in, and in the face of brutal state repression, the people of Peru continue their struggle against the neoliberal dictatorship of the Boluarte coup regime.
  • Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
    Ruchell Magee Must Be Set Free!
    26 Jul 2023
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us