Jin Z

“Most of all, the fight against crack helped to enshrine the notion that police must be warriors, aggressive and armored, working ghetto corners as an army might patrol enemy territory. At”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“Keeping blacks subjugated required that they be unarmed. Alabama’s law was typical: “Any freedman, mulatto, or free person of color in this state” was forbidden “to own fire-arms, or carry about his person a pistol or other deadly weapon.”76 Blacks caught breaking the law were subject to incarceration—which, in the early twentieth century, often meant being sold into debt servitude and forced to work in conditions that approximated slavery. According to Douglas Blackmon, “In an era when great numbers of southern men carried sidearms, the crime of carrying a concealed weapon—enforced almost solely against black men—would by the turn of the century become one of the most consistent instruments of black incarceration.”77”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“During the first, in 1857, he forced himself to witness a public execution in Paris, and the sight shook him so deeply that he vowed he would never again serve any government.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“As the historian David Krugler explains, “African Americans were not so much rioting as fighting back, counterattacking, repelling violence; above all, resisting.”79”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America