For Jackson and many other Black leaders, a major turning point came in 2010, when the New Press published civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The paradigm shift that this book spurred in the Black community would drive reform elsewhere as well.
Scholars and activists had previously noted the extreme racial disparities in the enforcement of drug laws. None, however, had made their analysis as accessible as Alexander’s, which connected the mass criminalization of Black people under the guise of the drug war to Jim Crow laws that had used the criminal legal system more overtly to suppress Blacks.
Jackson encountered the book when he was teaching at Baltimore City Community College. “Word spread like wildfire” among students and academics, he says. Soon he began to hear about it in neighborhood meetings and from people recovering from addiction. “It was written in a way that people could relate to,” says Jackson, who as chief of police in Annapolis, Md., now supports programs and policies that treat addiction as a health problem rather than a crime.
“It changed the game for me,” says the Rev. Dr. Frederick Douglass Haynes III, the pastor of the 12,000-strong Friendship West Baptist Church in Dallas. At the time, Haynes was cochair of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, a network of Black clergy devoted to social justice. They invited Alexander to speak—an invitation that would soon lead to dozens of others.
“She exposed the fact that mass incarceration had taken place on the backs of Black men in this so-called drug war,” Haynes says. “And I was especially reminded of Tupac Shakur, who had already put it in rap terms. He said, ‘Instead of war on poverty, they got a war on drugs so the police can bother me.’”
Alexander backed her argument with facts and data. She gave context to ideas that had been put forward by rappers and radicals but had not found mainstream acceptance—especially within the Black church, where drug use tended to be viewed as an individual sin and those who engaged in it were often rejected as a threat to “respectable” Black people.
Haynes described organizing an anti-drug march before he read The New Jim Crow. “Our theme was ‘Dreams Over Drugs,’” he says. “I won’t say we were supporting the drug war, but definitely, as far as I’m concerned, we were allies because of our ignorance.” After encountering Alexander’s work, Haynes saw the problem very differently. Police officials he knew confirmed what she had written about how whites sell and use drugs at least as much as Black people do—but rarely go to prison.
