What do you think?
Rate this book
Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment
Often seen as a political sop to the racial fears of white voters, aggressive policing and draconian sentencing for illegal drug possession and related crimes have led to the imprisonment of millions of African Americans—far in excess of their representation in the population as a whole. Michael Javen Fortner shows in this eye-opening account that these punitive policies also enjoyed the support of many working-class and middle-class blacks, who were angry about decline and disorder in their communities. Black Silent Majority uncovers the role African Americans played in creating today’s system of mass incarceration.
Current anti-drug policies are based on a set of controversial laws first adopted in New York in the early 1970s and championed by the state’s Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller. Fortner traces how many blacks in New York came to believe that the rehabilitation-focused liberal policies of the 1960s had failed. Faced with economic malaise and rising rates of addiction and crime, they blamed addicts and pushers. By 1973, the outcry from grassroots activists and civic leaders in Harlem calling for drastic measures presented Rockefeller with a welcome opportunity to crack down on crime and boost his political career. New York became the first state to mandate long prison sentences for selling or possessing narcotics.
Black Silent Majority lays bare the tangled roots of a pernicious system. America’s drug policies, while in part a manifestation of the conservative movement, are also a product of black America’s confrontation with crime and chaos in its own neighborhoods.
Current anti-drug policies are based on a set of controversial laws first adopted in New York in the early 1970s and championed by the state’s Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller. Fortner traces how many blacks in New York came to believe that the rehabilitation-focused liberal policies of the 1960s had failed. Faced with economic malaise and rising rates of addiction and crime, they blamed addicts and pushers. By 1973, the outcry from grassroots activists and civic leaders in Harlem calling for drastic measures presented Rockefeller with a welcome opportunity to crack down on crime and boost his political career. New York became the first state to mandate long prison sentences for selling or possessing narcotics.
Black Silent Majority lays bare the tangled roots of a pernicious system. America’s drug policies, while in part a manifestation of the conservative movement, are also a product of black America’s confrontation with crime and chaos in its own neighborhoods.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published September 7, 2015
15 people are currently reading
489 people want to read
About the author
Michael Javen Fortner
2 books8 followersMichael Javen Fortner is Assistant Professor and Academic Director of Urban Studies at the Murphy Institute at CUNY SPS. In 2010, he received a Ph.D. in government and policy from Harvard University. At Harvard, he was a doctoral fellow in the multidisciplinary program in inequality and social policy and an affiliate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. In Fall 2005, he was a visiting fellow at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics. His work studies the intersection of American political development and political philosophy—particularly in the areas of race, ethnicity, and class. Along with Amy Bridges, he edited a volume on city politics, Urban Citizenship and American Democracy: The Historical and Institutional Roots of Local Politics and Policy (SUNY Press, forthcoming). He is also the author of Black Silent Majority: Urban Politics and the Rockefeller Drug Laws (Harvard University Press, forthcoming). His articles have appeared in Studies in American Political Development, the Journal of Urban History, and the Journal of Policy History. He has been awarded fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Aspen Institute, the Center for American Political Studies, the American Political Science Association, the New York State Archives, the Rockefeller Archive Center, and the Mortar Board Honor Society. He has also received several teaching awards.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
November 2, 2019
So I really liked Fortner's approach to talking about the mass incarceration problem. He focused on New York (specifically Harlem) in the years between 1940 and the passage of Rockefeller's drug law in 1973. The strict laws are the beginning of the trend towards over-incarceration that led to our current huge problems. Other analysts have focused on these policies as white backlash against the end of Jim Crow, but Fortner makes a pretty persuasive case that the black silent majority was behind the scenes.
He argues that there is not a dichotomy between structural factors leading to drug use and individual bad choices. Rather than the typical frame in which liberals push for treatment and cite structural problems that cause incarceration and conservatives push for the penal system and site individual bad choices, Fortner acknowledges the structural problems and also criticizes individuals for making bad choices: "The disappearance of work for young black males and the postwar reappearance of drug trafficking produced a social environment in which young people relied on illegitimate sources of income for survival, turned to dangerous recreations for amusement and comfort, and found belonging and meaning in cohorts of similarly disenfranchised individuals engaged in self-destructive behavior.”.
He emphasizes that the black middle class in Harlem mid-century did not feel safe and wanted more policing, even though they were acutely aware of the structural forces that led to limited options in the ghetto: "the same people who believed that broader social forces were partly responsibly for Harlem's crime problem drew on their class-based morality to hold individuals responsible for Harlem's condition.” The lower and middle class blacks felt that the "violence in their communities forced them to prioritize public safety over economic and racial inequality.”
By including the entire time period of post WWII through 1973, Fortner is able to highlight the change in perception of the community. The Metcalf-Volker act in 1962 was pushed by white liberals and had minor support from black community members, but when funding did not come through to actually provide rehabilitation and when addicts chose to serve short sentences rather than go through drug treatment, the black silent majority was much less forgiving.
He argues that "mass incarceration had less to do with white resistance to racial equality and more to do with the black silent majority's confrontation with the 'reign of criminal terror' in their neighborhoods.” Fortner pushes the point that neglecting to consider the black middle class perspective increases their status as victims. Not only did they have to deal with the crime in their homes, but their perspective is not remembered from a historical lens.
Further, Fortner highlights the distinction between the race argument (whites inflicted laws on blacks) and the class argument (working and middle class blacks attempted to inflict laws on criminals): "The causal story that undergirded the drug laws defined black addicts and pushers as outgroups and maintained that the threat they posed to themselves and society was the result of individual choices rather than structural conditions. As a result, black addicts and pushers deserved harsh punishment. This framing did not emanate from racial resentment of conservative legislators or their constituents. Working and middle class African Americans, including some legislators who voted against the bill, played a crucial role in the definitions of the 'weakness and immorality' of low-level pushers and drug addicts.”
In thinking through these issues, I feel that I am often presented with an "individual" or a "structural" argument. I really appreciate that Fortner provided a middle ground that acknowledges that people have different options and also behave in different ways both as a result of their environment and because of individual personality. I am not sure how passing some of the blame onto the black community (rather than the white supremacist culture) helps the current situation, but it is at least another framework to consider.
He argues that there is not a dichotomy between structural factors leading to drug use and individual bad choices. Rather than the typical frame in which liberals push for treatment and cite structural problems that cause incarceration and conservatives push for the penal system and site individual bad choices, Fortner acknowledges the structural problems and also criticizes individuals for making bad choices: "The disappearance of work for young black males and the postwar reappearance of drug trafficking produced a social environment in which young people relied on illegitimate sources of income for survival, turned to dangerous recreations for amusement and comfort, and found belonging and meaning in cohorts of similarly disenfranchised individuals engaged in self-destructive behavior.”.
He emphasizes that the black middle class in Harlem mid-century did not feel safe and wanted more policing, even though they were acutely aware of the structural forces that led to limited options in the ghetto: "the same people who believed that broader social forces were partly responsibly for Harlem's crime problem drew on their class-based morality to hold individuals responsible for Harlem's condition.” The lower and middle class blacks felt that the "violence in their communities forced them to prioritize public safety over economic and racial inequality.”
By including the entire time period of post WWII through 1973, Fortner is able to highlight the change in perception of the community. The Metcalf-Volker act in 1962 was pushed by white liberals and had minor support from black community members, but when funding did not come through to actually provide rehabilitation and when addicts chose to serve short sentences rather than go through drug treatment, the black silent majority was much less forgiving.
He argues that "mass incarceration had less to do with white resistance to racial equality and more to do with the black silent majority's confrontation with the 'reign of criminal terror' in their neighborhoods.” Fortner pushes the point that neglecting to consider the black middle class perspective increases their status as victims. Not only did they have to deal with the crime in their homes, but their perspective is not remembered from a historical lens.
Further, Fortner highlights the distinction between the race argument (whites inflicted laws on blacks) and the class argument (working and middle class blacks attempted to inflict laws on criminals): "The causal story that undergirded the drug laws defined black addicts and pushers as outgroups and maintained that the threat they posed to themselves and society was the result of individual choices rather than structural conditions. As a result, black addicts and pushers deserved harsh punishment. This framing did not emanate from racial resentment of conservative legislators or their constituents. Working and middle class African Americans, including some legislators who voted against the bill, played a crucial role in the definitions of the 'weakness and immorality' of low-level pushers and drug addicts.”
In thinking through these issues, I feel that I am often presented with an "individual" or a "structural" argument. I really appreciate that Fortner provided a middle ground that acknowledges that people have different options and also behave in different ways both as a result of their environment and because of individual personality. I am not sure how passing some of the blame onto the black community (rather than the white supremacist culture) helps the current situation, but it is at least another framework to consider.
September 6, 2021
This is an interesting and frustrating book, seemingly more based on a gap than on a finding. It brings home a lot of uncomfortable realities that our political habits — especially the widespread habit, on the left, center, and right, of assuming the “real” people are with them implicitly — evade. But it does not do what it’s author sets out to do.
Who is responsible for mass incarceration? Even conservatives increasingly agree that our justice system is a shambles and a shame. Most historians and social scientists who write about mass incarceration seem to agree that white reaction is at fault- presented with the upheavals of the black freedom movement and other social changes (including a rising crime rate), conservative politicians promised white voters they would restore control (and discipline “those people”) with massive increases in police, prisons, and punishment in general. There seems to be more debate about whether this truly constitutes a continuation of Jim Crow, ala popular political writer Michelle Alexander, or not, than whether that story is accurate.
Political scientist Michael Javen Fortner sets out to do something between complicate and overthrow that story. He does this in the name of “restoring agency” to working- and middle-class black people who called for more policing and harsher penalties for crimes committed in their neighborhoods. Fortner’s case study is the politics of crime and punishment in postwar New York City. A number of black civic leaders in the city, mostly ministers, backed Governor Nelson Rockefeller as he executed a “heel turn” of sorts- liberal Republican turned architect of some of the most repressive, brutal drug laws in the country, passed in 1973.
The impulse here is clear: disillusion liberals and radicals (implicitly white, as they seem to always be in this book) who might be reading the book from their cherished notions of an authentic black working-class subject who backs their efforts and implicitly agrees with them about stuff. Black people get upset about crime, Fortner points out, experience more of it than white people generally do, and turn to the conventional remedies — police and prisons — for relief. Fortner doesn’t defend the carceral state but insists denying black involvement in it denies black agency and distorts the tasks involved in repairing the situation.
The problem here is that notions of “real” people following one or another politics can cut a lot of different ways. Speaking as a socialist organizer, I can tell you, for every collegiate lefty who fondly believes in a multiethnic queer working class just champing st the bit to fight cops and read Lenin under their leadership, there’s an (equally overeducated, usually) twitter-bound lefty who sincerely believes there’s a blue-collar, implicitly white, mass of ex-factory workers who would become socialists if only they didn’t have to think about they/them pronouns, and who would provide them with the masculine approval they failed to secure from their fathers. This shit is just endemic.
Fortner doesn’t avoid it. He doesn’t really prove that the black masses he projects onto think or thought as he claims they did (and, implicitly, do). It’s hard to really prove these things, generally- one of the pitfalls of people-based politics. Fortner proves that Harlemites interviewed by magazines at the time were upset about crime and mad at criminals. He also shows that some ministers and local politicos in Harlem were willing to go along with a powerful politician, Nelson Rockefeller, who had to seem tough on crime in order to compete with up-and-coming right-wingers in the Republican Party like Ronald Reagan (and who didn’t give a shit about black lives). There’s some interesting stuff here about how black people saw black criminals as threatening the gains of the WWII and civil rights periods that some black Harlemites saw. How representative were such people of black opinion? Whose to say? No one, in the end. Fortner further writes that people who opposed ramping up police power, like “white liberals” and black radicals like Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, didn’t represent many people in Harlem. That, he doesn’t prove. At the end of the day, the assertions aren’t all that different from those of the abolitionists at whom he wags his finger.
Well… what did the people of Harlem believe or want at the time? It’s hard to say. There were a lot of them, it was a while ago now, and, this seems important but hard to actualize, it seems likely that most people of all classes and races don’t have especially coherent politics. That doesn’t mean they’re ignorant or stupid or don’t know their interests, though that describes plenty of people (a progressively lower number for each adjective, in my opinion). It just means they don’t think that much about or that rigorously about politics. This makes sense, given how politics usually is in most places- a plaything of the elite where they figure out how to screw over everyone else, with a few do-gooders on the margins trying to change things and generally failing in embarrassing fashion.
Split the difference- we, those of us who organize, can’t just fit our politics to what we think “the people” want. There’s no real way to know, and if there was, we shouldn’t do that anyway, because popular approval doesn’t make something right. We should try to convince people of what we believe (and listen to others when they have ideas that are worth having). But we also have to listen. Listening isn’t the same thing as agreeing. But people — across the political spectrum — become so enamored with their picture of a mass that agrees with them, and with a wicked minority that doesn’t, that it becomes tempting to cast potential members of that mass who disagree on some things into the wicked minority, secure in the “knowledge” that the “real people” are with you on what might actually be a fairly extended limb.
Especially with a problem like crime, it’s easy for leftists to handwave it when conservatives get as febrile as they do about the issue, and when crime rates have been low for a while. It’s easy to mock rich suburban white people terrified that MS-13 is going to steal their aboveground pool. But criminal violence and damage does happen, it disproportionately affects poor people and people of color, and whether the crime rate is objectively going up or down doesn’t make people whose lives are hurt by crime feel better about it. That doesn’t mean we should uphold the carceral state, which just brings more violence to these communities. It means we’d better be ready to take the problems involved seriously and be goddamned good and ready to implement our better solutions when we have the chance. Fortner probably would have been better off writing about that than this, but it’s a good reminder in any event. ***
Who is responsible for mass incarceration? Even conservatives increasingly agree that our justice system is a shambles and a shame. Most historians and social scientists who write about mass incarceration seem to agree that white reaction is at fault- presented with the upheavals of the black freedom movement and other social changes (including a rising crime rate), conservative politicians promised white voters they would restore control (and discipline “those people”) with massive increases in police, prisons, and punishment in general. There seems to be more debate about whether this truly constitutes a continuation of Jim Crow, ala popular political writer Michelle Alexander, or not, than whether that story is accurate.
Political scientist Michael Javen Fortner sets out to do something between complicate and overthrow that story. He does this in the name of “restoring agency” to working- and middle-class black people who called for more policing and harsher penalties for crimes committed in their neighborhoods. Fortner’s case study is the politics of crime and punishment in postwar New York City. A number of black civic leaders in the city, mostly ministers, backed Governor Nelson Rockefeller as he executed a “heel turn” of sorts- liberal Republican turned architect of some of the most repressive, brutal drug laws in the country, passed in 1973.
The impulse here is clear: disillusion liberals and radicals (implicitly white, as they seem to always be in this book) who might be reading the book from their cherished notions of an authentic black working-class subject who backs their efforts and implicitly agrees with them about stuff. Black people get upset about crime, Fortner points out, experience more of it than white people generally do, and turn to the conventional remedies — police and prisons — for relief. Fortner doesn’t defend the carceral state but insists denying black involvement in it denies black agency and distorts the tasks involved in repairing the situation.
The problem here is that notions of “real” people following one or another politics can cut a lot of different ways. Speaking as a socialist organizer, I can tell you, for every collegiate lefty who fondly believes in a multiethnic queer working class just champing st the bit to fight cops and read Lenin under their leadership, there’s an (equally overeducated, usually) twitter-bound lefty who sincerely believes there’s a blue-collar, implicitly white, mass of ex-factory workers who would become socialists if only they didn’t have to think about they/them pronouns, and who would provide them with the masculine approval they failed to secure from their fathers. This shit is just endemic.
Fortner doesn’t avoid it. He doesn’t really prove that the black masses he projects onto think or thought as he claims they did (and, implicitly, do). It’s hard to really prove these things, generally- one of the pitfalls of people-based politics. Fortner proves that Harlemites interviewed by magazines at the time were upset about crime and mad at criminals. He also shows that some ministers and local politicos in Harlem were willing to go along with a powerful politician, Nelson Rockefeller, who had to seem tough on crime in order to compete with up-and-coming right-wingers in the Republican Party like Ronald Reagan (and who didn’t give a shit about black lives). There’s some interesting stuff here about how black people saw black criminals as threatening the gains of the WWII and civil rights periods that some black Harlemites saw. How representative were such people of black opinion? Whose to say? No one, in the end. Fortner further writes that people who opposed ramping up police power, like “white liberals” and black radicals like Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, didn’t represent many people in Harlem. That, he doesn’t prove. At the end of the day, the assertions aren’t all that different from those of the abolitionists at whom he wags his finger.
Well… what did the people of Harlem believe or want at the time? It’s hard to say. There were a lot of them, it was a while ago now, and, this seems important but hard to actualize, it seems likely that most people of all classes and races don’t have especially coherent politics. That doesn’t mean they’re ignorant or stupid or don’t know their interests, though that describes plenty of people (a progressively lower number for each adjective, in my opinion). It just means they don’t think that much about or that rigorously about politics. This makes sense, given how politics usually is in most places- a plaything of the elite where they figure out how to screw over everyone else, with a few do-gooders on the margins trying to change things and generally failing in embarrassing fashion.
Split the difference- we, those of us who organize, can’t just fit our politics to what we think “the people” want. There’s no real way to know, and if there was, we shouldn’t do that anyway, because popular approval doesn’t make something right. We should try to convince people of what we believe (and listen to others when they have ideas that are worth having). But we also have to listen. Listening isn’t the same thing as agreeing. But people — across the political spectrum — become so enamored with their picture of a mass that agrees with them, and with a wicked minority that doesn’t, that it becomes tempting to cast potential members of that mass who disagree on some things into the wicked minority, secure in the “knowledge” that the “real people” are with you on what might actually be a fairly extended limb.
Especially with a problem like crime, it’s easy for leftists to handwave it when conservatives get as febrile as they do about the issue, and when crime rates have been low for a while. It’s easy to mock rich suburban white people terrified that MS-13 is going to steal their aboveground pool. But criminal violence and damage does happen, it disproportionately affects poor people and people of color, and whether the crime rate is objectively going up or down doesn’t make people whose lives are hurt by crime feel better about it. That doesn’t mean we should uphold the carceral state, which just brings more violence to these communities. It means we’d better be ready to take the problems involved seriously and be goddamned good and ready to implement our better solutions when we have the chance. Fortner probably would have been better off writing about that than this, but it’s a good reminder in any event. ***
February 25, 2023
Single-cause interpretations are a huge problem. They are tools used by idealogues to convince people to step into the “Us vs. Them” morass. It stirs polarization and partisanship. Single-cause interpretations are a serious problem. But a single-cause interpretation is not to be found in the 368-page hardback “Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment” written by Michael Javen Fortner, who was Assistant Professor and Academic Dean of Urban Studies at the CUNY School of Professional Studies and is presently Associate Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, California. It’s a slow read filled with details, data, and reports of and by real people. It is an essential read, especially if one is concerned with penal reforms, or restoring racial relationships.
Fortner put this book together “because the literature on mass incarceration neglected the voices of working- and middle-class African Americans dealing daily with drug addiction and violent crime and their aftermath. Few scholars have taken stock of their views” (x). He further desires to “redeem the agency of black people who are portrayed, at best, as backbenchers to history, treated either as hostages of white supremacy or as collateral damage to neoliberalism. I wrote this book to recover the voice of the ‘invisible black victim’” (xii). I think the author has skillfully achieved his aim.
This densely argued work is “not about the morality of the criminal justice system in the United States” but, instead, “brings to light the complexities of crime policymaking and” to “solve one particularly vexing puzzle: why the carceral state, this nation’s most ignoble institution, appeared after the monumental civil rights victories of the 1960s.” Fortner finds that the answer has less to do with white resistance to racial equality and “more to do with the black silent majority’s confrontation with the ‘reign of criminal terror’ in their neighborhoods” (22-3). That is the book in a nutshell.
Working from roughly 1940s to the 1970s, Fortner piles in heavy data, strong studies, and weighty resources to show the various levels of change in black Barrios, Ghettoes, and Hoods, when it came to crime and punishment. From the white reformers who worked toward rehabilitation but didn’t live in the high-crime neighborhoods, to the black activists who lost much to crime in their communities and worked toward criminal punishment. The author examines multiple layers explaining the changes in perspective and policymaking.
Though the author uses Harlem as his main investigative sample, he makes it clear how the same trends were happening in Chicago, Detroit, and beyond. “Black Silent Majority” is a significant work that needs to be read by policymakers, those concerned with policing policies, pastors, and anyone working on promoting a healthy America. It is an impressive tale, and will carefully lead readers to see that “the black silent majority spoke. It organized. It abandoned liberalism, embracing harsh sentences and aggressive policing methods in order to end their nightmare and restore the benefits of their newly won citizenship…The carceral state did not rise like the sun at an appointed time: the black silent majority was present at its making” 279-80). I highly recommend the work!
Fortner put this book together “because the literature on mass incarceration neglected the voices of working- and middle-class African Americans dealing daily with drug addiction and violent crime and their aftermath. Few scholars have taken stock of their views” (x). He further desires to “redeem the agency of black people who are portrayed, at best, as backbenchers to history, treated either as hostages of white supremacy or as collateral damage to neoliberalism. I wrote this book to recover the voice of the ‘invisible black victim’” (xii). I think the author has skillfully achieved his aim.
This densely argued work is “not about the morality of the criminal justice system in the United States” but, instead, “brings to light the complexities of crime policymaking and” to “solve one particularly vexing puzzle: why the carceral state, this nation’s most ignoble institution, appeared after the monumental civil rights victories of the 1960s.” Fortner finds that the answer has less to do with white resistance to racial equality and “more to do with the black silent majority’s confrontation with the ‘reign of criminal terror’ in their neighborhoods” (22-3). That is the book in a nutshell.
Working from roughly 1940s to the 1970s, Fortner piles in heavy data, strong studies, and weighty resources to show the various levels of change in black Barrios, Ghettoes, and Hoods, when it came to crime and punishment. From the white reformers who worked toward rehabilitation but didn’t live in the high-crime neighborhoods, to the black activists who lost much to crime in their communities and worked toward criminal punishment. The author examines multiple layers explaining the changes in perspective and policymaking.
Though the author uses Harlem as his main investigative sample, he makes it clear how the same trends were happening in Chicago, Detroit, and beyond. “Black Silent Majority” is a significant work that needs to be read by policymakers, those concerned with policing policies, pastors, and anyone working on promoting a healthy America. It is an impressive tale, and will carefully lead readers to see that “the black silent majority spoke. It organized. It abandoned liberalism, embracing harsh sentences and aggressive policing methods in order to end their nightmare and restore the benefits of their newly won citizenship…The carceral state did not rise like the sun at an appointed time: the black silent majority was present at its making” 279-80). I highly recommend the work!
July 4, 2020
This book is one of several I've picked up to try to get a better understanding of things from that era, and today. I stumbled across Michael Fortner in a discussion panel, and upon hearing mention of this book he worked on, thought it would be worth a shot, and I was certainly enlightened by it.
The drug laws which preceded the national "war on drugs" initiative, and effectively laid the foundation for that national push were developed over the course of a good number of years, and the "Silent Black Majority" played, as this book argues, an integral role in the punitive solutions to the drug/crime problem facing Harlem at the time.
The process with Rockefeller, trying to understand the hearts and minds of both middle class blacks, and lower class, and trying to develop a viable solution before ultimately throwing in the towel to an ever expanding problem of drug abuse, was fascinating to read about.
It was a very challenging time for many communities, but especially Harlem.
The only reason I knocked it down a star was because, at times, I did find myself wandering, and losing focus. I'm not sure if it was the font, the text size, or Fortner's writing style, or maybe a mixture of those things, but it was tough to keep my attention in some spots, not for lack of trying.
Ultimately, I'm thrilled I finished it. I learned a lot, and feel I'm better for it.
The drug laws which preceded the national "war on drugs" initiative, and effectively laid the foundation for that national push were developed over the course of a good number of years, and the "Silent Black Majority" played, as this book argues, an integral role in the punitive solutions to the drug/crime problem facing Harlem at the time.
The process with Rockefeller, trying to understand the hearts and minds of both middle class blacks, and lower class, and trying to develop a viable solution before ultimately throwing in the towel to an ever expanding problem of drug abuse, was fascinating to read about.
It was a very challenging time for many communities, but especially Harlem.
The only reason I knocked it down a star was because, at times, I did find myself wandering, and losing focus. I'm not sure if it was the font, the text size, or Fortner's writing style, or maybe a mixture of those things, but it was tough to keep my attention in some spots, not for lack of trying.
Ultimately, I'm thrilled I finished it. I learned a lot, and feel I'm better for it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 4, 2020
The author shows the complexity of the developments of black life in the latter half of the 21st century. There's not one single story that accounts for the movement from Jim Crow to Civil Rights to Mass Incarceration. Many different factors and societal dynamics are in play. There's not just a single story that explains the plight of black people in America. This book offers another, not often discussed thread in the tapestry - the posture of working class and middle class black people in Harlem from 1950-1975. Their views on crime contributed to the culture of mass incarceration that is America's shame today.
March 15, 2018
Solid 3.5 stars. I was looking forward to more of a quantitative analysis over attitudes to drug policy in NYC, but it was very much a narrative driven history, detailing the advocacy of certain activists during the period and the evolution of Gov Rockefeller’s views on drug policy.
I think combining this book with Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow or John Pfaff’s Locked In and James Q Wilson’s Thinking About Crime would make for a worthwhile time
I think combining this book with Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow or John Pfaff’s Locked In and James Q Wilson’s Thinking About Crime would make for a worthwhile time
July 12, 2023
It is a very repetitive account, but a worthwhile read anyway, because it really shows, as often these accounts do, how well-meaning bleeding hearts are often trying to represent people who feel very differently than they do. Too much detail, perhaps I can write a better review later, but I do recommend this book to better illustrate how those whose lives were affected, how they thought and what types of remediation they sought.
August 4, 2024
If you walked away from Michelle Alexander's book moved but with the nagging thought of "Where is the evidence?" This book is a political analysis of historical evidence, primarily newspaper clippings, magazine articles, press conferences, and meeting notes. If you want to know how the war on drugs started, Fortner presents a competent, compelling argument.
May 25, 2018
Good book. Does for NYC/Rockefeller laws what James Forman Jr did with DC anti-crime laws. Amazing quotes from NAACP sounding like Jeff Sessions at times. Ultimately, this book bogged down in too many details. Not as readable. Could have used a strong edit.
December 17, 2025
Covering only about 30 years this feels like history in a phonebooth. What it may or may not be missing in breadth it accounts for with expansive, precise data and analysis. It's a great example of the complex and ever changing nature of history.
April 7, 2016
A rare book that actually has something original to say about the ongoing tragedy of black-white relations in America. The story begins in 1940s Harlem when a genuine achievement is underway: the development of a black middle class with minimal government involvement. It ends in the Harlem of the 1970s when that same class inadvertently contributed to the draconian drug laws that some are now calling a new Jim Crow. It is a shame that the black intelligentsia are threatened by Fortner's ideas (read Donna Murch's Boston Review review when you are done with this book for an example of a disgraceful, willing misreading of it in order to shoot it down). One of the great things Fortner achieves is bringing *irony* into racial theory, not something racists and anti-racists are especially known for.
He is certainly not an artist, so I cannot give him too much credit for his excellent sense for history. He does something unusual for an intellectual in letting the people speak for themselves, quoting liberally throughout the book the common folk of Harlem you would have met on the streets. His sense for irony, I suspect, may be unintentional. Even after finishing the book I cannot tell where he stands on the black middle class. At some points he seems to castigate them for their bourgeoisie-ness, at other times he refrains, probably for refusing to castigate his own kind. It is irony born of ambivalence, in other words.
I would recommend this book even more highly except for two factors: (1) For whatever reason, Fortner chooses to ignore the tremendous expansion of capital as an explanatory cause. An Age of Affluence, the Golden Age of Capital, however you wish to describe it, many excellent historians and economists show that it ended right around 1973, the exact year of the signing of Rockefeller's unprecedented, strict drug laws. It is one thing to admit economic theory is beyond your abilities, but Fortner seems to insist that things like "neoliberal capitalism" are irrelevant to the story. (2) It is not really Fortner's aim, but there is an excellent quote by James Baldwin from 1963 that wonders what has happened to his neighborhood and his people, which reads in part:
"I'm aware that something terrible has happened that is hard to describe... I was raised by families whose roots were essentially... Southern rural and whose relationship to the church was very direct because it was the only means they had of expressing their pain and their despair. But twenty years later the moral authority which was present in the Negro Northern community when I was growing up has vanished."
The age of affluence, the increase of drug use, the contempt held toward religion, we see this nowadays among a certain kind of "liberal" in their need for a war against Muslims. Not from Obama though, the supreme black intellectual of our age. Fortner's book, in this sense of church, is a good reader on the absence of the black community's voice in this war. (How many "New Atheists" have you come across that are rooted in a community and are black? For me, none.) It is hard to imagine the healing process that took place last year in Charleston, South Carolina after the massacre, for instance, had there been no black church, had there been no President Obama to lead it. Moments like those ones almost redeem this country. Almost. Or let us say not yet.
He is certainly not an artist, so I cannot give him too much credit for his excellent sense for history. He does something unusual for an intellectual in letting the people speak for themselves, quoting liberally throughout the book the common folk of Harlem you would have met on the streets. His sense for irony, I suspect, may be unintentional. Even after finishing the book I cannot tell where he stands on the black middle class. At some points he seems to castigate them for their bourgeoisie-ness, at other times he refrains, probably for refusing to castigate his own kind. It is irony born of ambivalence, in other words.
I would recommend this book even more highly except for two factors: (1) For whatever reason, Fortner chooses to ignore the tremendous expansion of capital as an explanatory cause. An Age of Affluence, the Golden Age of Capital, however you wish to describe it, many excellent historians and economists show that it ended right around 1973, the exact year of the signing of Rockefeller's unprecedented, strict drug laws. It is one thing to admit economic theory is beyond your abilities, but Fortner seems to insist that things like "neoliberal capitalism" are irrelevant to the story. (2) It is not really Fortner's aim, but there is an excellent quote by James Baldwin from 1963 that wonders what has happened to his neighborhood and his people, which reads in part:
"I'm aware that something terrible has happened that is hard to describe... I was raised by families whose roots were essentially... Southern rural and whose relationship to the church was very direct because it was the only means they had of expressing their pain and their despair. But twenty years later the moral authority which was present in the Negro Northern community when I was growing up has vanished."
The age of affluence, the increase of drug use, the contempt held toward religion, we see this nowadays among a certain kind of "liberal" in their need for a war against Muslims. Not from Obama though, the supreme black intellectual of our age. Fortner's book, in this sense of church, is a good reader on the absence of the black community's voice in this war. (How many "New Atheists" have you come across that are rooted in a community and are black? For me, none.) It is hard to imagine the healing process that took place last year in Charleston, South Carolina after the massacre, for instance, had there been no black church, had there been no President Obama to lead it. Moments like those ones almost redeem this country. Almost. Or let us say not yet.
February 18, 2017
It is one of the great paradoxes of U.S. history that, on the very heels of the Civil Rights movement, the Black community in the US found itself captured by the modern carceral state. How is it, scholars ask, that empowerment could be so quickly followed by disenfranchisement? Most current theories point to racial tension, economic forces, or some combination of the two to explain this seeming-paradox. Fortner, however, takes a different view.
In Black Silent Majority, Fortner has examined the ways in which the Black community’s newly-empowered agency contributed to the development of the Rockefeller drug laws in New York. It’s not an enviable position, but care must be taken to understand what Fortner is not saying, just as much as what he is. Fortner is not laying all blame for the current carceral state at the feet of the African American community. Neither is he defending that same state. He recognizes the yoke that modern drug policies have levied against minority communities (including the African American community), but all of that—every consequence, seen or unforeseen--is irrelevant to his argument.
What Fortner set out to do—what he in fact has done--is simple. He set out to demonstrate that Black politics, Black civil society, Black voices are not and were not powerless victims of the dominant society around them, but rather important actors in the development of legislation in New York. He breaches the shroud around the ‘subaltern black counterpublic,’ and eloquently demonstrates its impact on the dominant society in which it found itself. Insodoing, he sets himself against the dominant macro-level interpretations of events—not dismissing them out-of-hand, but examining them and finding them lacking in the face of the evidence.
Technically, , Fortner has drawn conclusions only about New York State and the Rockefeller drug laws. (As is reasonable, since if he’d spent this much effort on every major city in the U.S., the book would be far too long to read.) Those laws, however, as the first laws of their kind in the United States, represent such a milestone in U.S. drug policy at large, that his conclusions put a giant crack through the middle of the White Backlash narrative of mass incarceration, as made so prevalent in the popular consciousness by such works as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
Exhaustively researched, eloquently argued, and unflinchingly objective, Fortner’s study is a credit to study of the history and origins of mass incarceration in the United States. Well worth the read.
In Black Silent Majority, Fortner has examined the ways in which the Black community’s newly-empowered agency contributed to the development of the Rockefeller drug laws in New York. It’s not an enviable position, but care must be taken to understand what Fortner is not saying, just as much as what he is. Fortner is not laying all blame for the current carceral state at the feet of the African American community. Neither is he defending that same state. He recognizes the yoke that modern drug policies have levied against minority communities (including the African American community), but all of that—every consequence, seen or unforeseen--is irrelevant to his argument.
What Fortner set out to do—what he in fact has done--is simple. He set out to demonstrate that Black politics, Black civil society, Black voices are not and were not powerless victims of the dominant society around them, but rather important actors in the development of legislation in New York. He breaches the shroud around the ‘subaltern black counterpublic,’ and eloquently demonstrates its impact on the dominant society in which it found itself. Insodoing, he sets himself against the dominant macro-level interpretations of events—not dismissing them out-of-hand, but examining them and finding them lacking in the face of the evidence.
Technically, , Fortner has drawn conclusions only about New York State and the Rockefeller drug laws. (As is reasonable, since if he’d spent this much effort on every major city in the U.S., the book would be far too long to read.) Those laws, however, as the first laws of their kind in the United States, represent such a milestone in U.S. drug policy at large, that his conclusions put a giant crack through the middle of the White Backlash narrative of mass incarceration, as made so prevalent in the popular consciousness by such works as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
Exhaustively researched, eloquently argued, and unflinchingly objective, Fortner’s study is a credit to study of the history and origins of mass incarceration in the United States. Well worth the read.
October 4, 2017
"To understand the evolution of the indigenous framing of Harlem's drug trade, it is important to juxtapose this cautious optimism with the seemingly inexplicable rise in drug addiction and trafficking. Because of the political and economic achievements of the 1940s and 1950s, the force of the white gaze began to wane, and material interests and class-based values started to define how Harlemites understood black criminality. Because of improved social and political conditions, some were less likely to blame delinquency and addiction on structural conditions." (43-4)
"Despite the progressive tradition in African American politics, experiential assessments of crime threats and moral judgements of individual character ultimately determined when black middle-class values were deployed on behalf of punishment or reform." (157-8)
"Although many contemporary historical documents situate urban riots and black militancy within the mainstream of African American politics, they were not. Throughout the 1960s, polls consistently showed that only a minority embraced black nationalists and militants. ... While conservative white elites condemned the violent tactics of black militants and liberal white elites justified them, the black silent majority felt invisible -- unheard and unanswered." (165-6)
"[T]he reactions of white ethnic New Yorkers to the social and political events of the period were narrowly tailored to the specific threats they encountered because of place, ethnicity, and class position, and their values more than racial attitudes influenced how they interpreted these events. To the extent that white ethnics worried about crime, their qualms were products of particular patterns of illegal activities in their neighborhoods instead of racial politics." (229)
"Despite the progressive tradition in African American politics, experiential assessments of crime threats and moral judgements of individual character ultimately determined when black middle-class values were deployed on behalf of punishment or reform." (157-8)
"Although many contemporary historical documents situate urban riots and black militancy within the mainstream of African American politics, they were not. Throughout the 1960s, polls consistently showed that only a minority embraced black nationalists and militants. ... While conservative white elites condemned the violent tactics of black militants and liberal white elites justified them, the black silent majority felt invisible -- unheard and unanswered." (165-6)
"[T]he reactions of white ethnic New Yorkers to the social and political events of the period were narrowly tailored to the specific threats they encountered because of place, ethnicity, and class position, and their values more than racial attitudes influenced how they interpreted these events. To the extent that white ethnics worried about crime, their qualms were products of particular patterns of illegal activities in their neighborhoods instead of racial politics." (229)
May 2, 2016
The Silent majority is a book that expresses the voice of a Black community in Harlem that became distressed due to high occurrences of crime. In the mid twentieth century, media outlets chose to shine attention on Black leaders, such as Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, and drown out the voices of the every day working class Black person living in these conditions. Drug addicts, drug dealers, robbers and rapists were running amok in Harlem,NY and many Middle-Class Blacks were becoming fed up. The silent majority actually felt that the laws weren't draconian enough. Many Blacks in Harlem wanted to bring the community back to its renaissance days. In order to do so, they supported what came to be known as the Rockefeller drug laws. The results could be seen as mixed, but ultimately a failure.
This is a decent book, but way too wordy and overwritten. By time you get to the 150th page, the story becomes redundant and boring. I loved the pictures and illustration of the Black frustration, but the constant long paragraphs of documented conditions, became repetitive.
This is a decent book, but way too wordy and overwritten. By time you get to the 150th page, the story becomes redundant and boring. I loved the pictures and illustration of the Black frustration, but the constant long paragraphs of documented conditions, became repetitive.
January 11, 2016
Very interesting topic, but alas the book wasn't as good as I had hoped. It's definitely thoroughly researched, but the writing is dry...The writer is not a great storyteller and that's a shame, because the topic and the material certainly could have resulted in some gripping stories. And the looooong paragraphs, small type font and crammed pages didn't help either. Too bad.
October 20, 2015
Interesting premise...the responsibility for the drug war and the disproportionate incarceration of minorities (specifically black males) lies w many different groups. It's a history book so it's semi-dense but thought provoking.
Read
May 22, 2019Interesting.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews