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


  • The US Refuses to Concede Defeat as the World Resists Domination
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    The US Refuses to Concede Defeat as the World Resists Domination
    23 Jun 2023
    Dr. Gerald Horne is an author and historian who currently holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston.
  • The East is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    The East is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century
    23 Jun 2023
    Carlos Martinez is a co-editor of Friends of Socialist China, a co-founder of No Cold War, and a coordinating committee member of the International Manifesto Group. He joins us from London to discuss…
  • Ukraine Stays with the West But Russia Is Winning and Has the Receipts
    Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    Ukraine Stays with the West But Russia Is Winning and Has the Receipts
    21 Jun 2023
    A delegation of African leaders travelled to Ukraine and Russia to help broker peace. But the collective west insists on prolonging the conflict.
  • U.S. Based Black Radicals Convening in Atlanta, Georgia to Develop An Agenda for Resistance and Transformation!
    ​​​​​​​ Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist
    U.S. Based Black Radicals Convening in Atlanta, Georgia to Develop An Agenda for Resistance and Transformation!
    21 Jun 2023
    An upcoming conference will bring Black radicals together to develop strategies for self-determination, Pan-African solidarity, and liberation.
  • ESSAY: I Go to Jail for the Scottsboro Boys, Ada Wright, 1932
    Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    ESSAY: I Go to Jail for the Scottsboro Boys, Ada Wright, 1932
    21 Jun 2023
    Mrs. Ada Wright, mother of two of the “Scottsboro Boys,” traveled the world to advocate on their behalf. This essay is a remarkable testament to the unrewarded and unheralded labors of the Black…
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us