Harlem's drug warriors: was the drug war imposed on black America, or did black America demand it?

• Author: Mayeux, Sara
• Position: "Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment" and "We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire" - Book review

Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment, by Michael faven Partner, Harvard University Press, 368 pages, $29.95

We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire, by Suzanna Reiss, University of California Press, 328 pages, $29.95

IN 1973 NEW YORK'S blue-blood governor, Nelson Rockefeller, declared drug treatment programs a failure and called for a newer, tougher approach, including mandatory life in prison for selling any amount of "hard drugs." Later that year. New York lawmakers enacted legislation that, while slightly more lenient than Rockefeller's initial bill, prescribed harsh punishments for drug crimes, including prison terms of 15 years to life for low-level drug sales and possession. In 1973, the state had fewer than 1,500 prisoners doing time for drugs; by 1999, that figure had ballooned to over 20,000.

Throughout the 1960s, "Rocky," the paradigmatic East Coast liberal Republican, had endorsed a public health approach to drug addiction. What changed? In the conventional explanation. Rockefeller sacrificed New Yorkers, and perhaps his own principles, to his presidential ambitions. By the 1970s, East Coast liberal Republicans were falling out of fashion and voters were clamoring for "law and order," so the governor rearranged his politics accordingly. In a less cynical variant of this theory, the governor didn't shift positions purely for political gain but because, like so many of his constituents, he had become genuinely disillusioned with rehabilitation.

Either way, historians typically fit the Rockefeller Drug Laws within a broader narrative of right-wing backlash. Whatever the governor's personal motivations, he embarked on his state-level war on drugs in partnership with the same "silent majority" of suburban white voters historians blame for electing Nixon, derailing school desegregation, and cheering the massive expansion of America's prisons since the 1970s.

Not so, argues the City University of New York political scientist Michael Javen Fortner. As its title suggests, Fortner's new book--Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment--seeks to reverse the conventional wisdom about not only the Rockefeller laws themselves, but also the broader history of the war on drugs. In Fortner's account, punitive narcotics laws were dreamed up not by paranoid suburban housewives but in the church basements and neighborhood newspapers of Harlem and central Brooklyn, where working-and middle-class African Americans, who felt besieged by violent addicts and predatory "pushers," had long agitated for a crackdown. Rockefeller had the latitude to get tough, Fortner argues, not in spite of opposition from black constituents but precisely because black New Yorkers "begged for aggressive policing and punitive policies."

In support of his argument, Fortner has unearthed a deep vein of rhetoric in midcentury Harlem that would indeed have fit right into a Nixon '68 campaign speech. In 1959, for instance, the New York Age, a black newspaper, invited "more use of the nightstick on the trespassers and criminals in our society... and more policemen to protect the majority of citizens in Harlem who are, despite all the trials of living here, law-abiding and God-fearing human beings." Three...