Martin Luther King Jr. might have turned 91 years old this month if he had not been felled by an assassin\u2019s bullet on April 4, 1968. It is, of course, impossible to know what the United States would look like today if he had lived \u2014 or what he would think about the political dilemmas of our own time.<\/p>\n
Yet there are certain obvious parallels between his time and ours. The country is again bitterly divided along political lines. And many activists and scholars argue that the racist power structure that King fought has re-congealed \u2014 this time in the guise of the \u201cwar on drugs\u201d and mass incarceration. His legacy therefore holds lessons for those now fighting for cannabis legalization.<\/p>\n
Foremost among those scholars is Michelle Alexander, author of the 2010 bestseller\u00a0The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness<\/em><\/a>. Alexander takes a long view of the struggle for racial justice in the United States and paints a grim picture. She illustrates how many of the gains that King won in his life being reversed after his death \u2014 this time in a new \u201crace-neutral\u201d guise that only serves to mask continued institutionalized racism. \u00a0<\/p>\n Alexander notes that in 1972, there were under 350,000 people in prisons and jails nationwide. Today there are 2 million. In fact, the U.S. has the\u00a0most people behind bars of any nation on Earth, in both\u00a0per capita\u00a0<\/em>and absolute terms. This is certainly an irony for the country that touts itself as the \u201cland of the free.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Among those 2 million people in prison are 40,000 who remain incarcerated in state or federal prisons on cannabis-related convictions \u2014 about half of them for marijuana offenses alone. When those waiting to see a judge in local jails are added in, the figure may approach 100,000 on any given day. And the racial disparity could not be more obvious. A 2013 American Civil Liberties Union report,\u00a0Marijuana in Black and White: Billions of Dollars Wasted on Racially Biased Arrests<\/a>, crunched\u00a0the national data. It found that black people are more than three times as likely as whites to be arrested for cannabis \u2014 despite consuming the plant at essentially similar rates.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n And this is not the first time the country has seen significant and hard-won racial progress being in large part (at least) reversed, with the same power structure re-establishing itself in new guise. Slavery was abolished in the aftermath of the Civil War. But, as Alexander quotes historian and early civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, from his 1935 book\u00a0Black Reconstruction in America<\/em><\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0\u201cThe slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again toward slavery.\u201d<\/p>\n In the South under occupation by Union troops after the Civil War, black people for the first time voted, served on juries and held elected office \u2014 until the backlash came. In 1877, the federal troops\u00a0were withdrawn<\/a>. In subsequent years, without federal interference, Ku Klux Klan terror enforced legal apartheid in the southern states \u2014 the system known as Jim Crow. Blacks were often reduced to a state of near-slavery through share-cropping and were barred from the vote by systematic disenfranchisement. \u00a0<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t until nearly a century after the Civil War that this system would be challenged. In his book\u00a0Why We Can\u2019t Wait<\/em><\/a>, an account of the 1963\u00a0Birmingham Campaign<\/a>\u00a0to desegregate Alabama\u2019s biggest city, King wrote of \u201cAmerica\u2019s third revolution \u2014 the Negro Revolution.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n By King\u2019s reckoning, the country\u2019s first revolution had been the one we actually call \u201cthe Revolution\u201d \u2014 the War of Independence, although it left the slave-owning aristocracy of the South thoroughly in place. The second was arguably far more revolutionary \u2014 the Civil War, in which the slave system was broken. King\u2019s Civil Rights Movement was avowedly nonviolent, but it was still a revolution \u2014 the overturning of a power structure by physical as well as moral opposition.<\/p>\n Despite the violent backlash, both from the police and\u00a0Ku Klux Klan terrorists<\/a>, the campaign ultimately swayed the nation, resulting in the passage of the\u00a0Civil Rights Act of 1964<\/a>\u00a0and other landmark legislation that finally ended legal apartheid in America.<\/p>\n But the year of King\u2019s assassination saw the country\u2019s national political establishment embracing the backlash \u2014 exactly as in 1877. In the 1968 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Richard Nixon first adopted the rhetoric of a \u201cwar on drugs\u201d (although he would actually coin that phrase three years later, when the Controlled Substances Act was passed). And, in just barely coded terms, Nixon was promoting the rhetoric of racism.<\/p>\n In her book, Alexander quotes\u00a0Nixon\u2019s special counsel John Ehrlichman explicitly summing up the campaign strategy in his 1982 memoir,\u00a0Witness To Power: The Nixon Years<\/em><\/a>:<\/em>\u00a0\u201cWe\u2019ll go after the racists.\u201d Ehrlichman unabashedly\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0how throughout the 1968 race, \u201csubliminal appeal to the anti-black voter was always present in Nixon\u2019s statements and speeches.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Alexander did not mention, however, another quote attributed to Ehrlichman in which he just as explicitly made the connection between this subliminal racism and the anti-drug drumbeat. Journalist Dan Baum in the April 2016 edition of\u00a0Harper\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0recalls a quote he says he got from a 1994 interview with Ehrlichman: \u201cThe Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people\u2026 by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.\u201d<\/p>\n And the backlash was just beginning.<\/p>\n The new order would be consolidated over the next decade. In 1973, the same year the federal Drug Enforcement Administration was created,\u00a0New York state\u2019s\u00a0Rockefeller Laws<\/a>\u00a0imposed the nation\u2019s first mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses. In 1977, New York decriminalized cannabis, overturning the harsh Rockefeller Laws where personal quantities of marijuana were concerned \u2014 but the draconian provisions for cocaine and heroin remained intact.<\/p>\n With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the \u201cdrug war\u201d rhetoric was revived with a vengeance, and the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 imposed mandatory minimum sentences nationwide. Ten years later, an\u00a0ACLU report<\/a>\u00a0would find that the law \u201cdevastated African American and low-income communities.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The 1986 law also instated the sentencing disparity for crack and powder cocaine \u2014 with the prior, that was flooding black communities, landing the far longer sentences. This was also reflected in public perceptions and media portrayals. In the early \u201980s, powder cocaine was a status symbol for white yuppies. When crack hit the streets from New York to Los Angeles, it was immediately stigmatized by association with the criminal (read: black)\u00a0underclass.<\/p>\n This period also saw the rapid militarization of police forces, and the War on Drugs, in Alexander\u2019s words, went \u201cfrom being a political slogan to an actual war.\u201d The 1981 Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act started to erode the firewall that had existed between the armed forces and police since the end of Reconstruction.<\/p>\n The DEA joined with local police forces to instate\u00a0Operation Pipeline<\/a>, a program of traffic stops and vehicle searches that was\u00a0protested by the ACLU<\/a>\u00a0as based on systematic \u201cracial profiling.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n This was enabled by a series of bad Supreme Court decisions \u2014\u00a0Terry vs Ohio<\/em><\/a>\u00a0in 1968,\u00a0Florida vs. Bostick<\/em><\/a>\u00a0in 1991,\u00a0Ohio vs. Robinette<\/em><\/a>\u00a0in 1996 \u2014 that dramatically eroded the Fourth Amendment. Alexander writes that these decisions enabled \u201cconsent searches\u201d \u2014 in which the motorist (or pedestrian, or home resident) verbally consents to the search, but actually does so under police intimidation.<\/p>\n All-white juries were more likely to convict black people, of course \u2014 and prosecutors were still able to strike non-whites from serving as jurors despite the 1986 Supreme Court decision\u00a0Batson v. Kentucky<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>which barred discrimination on the basis of race in jury selection. As Alexander writes, \u201cthe only thing that has changed is that prosecutors must come up with a race-neutral excuse for the strikes.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In a vicious cycle, mass incarceration itself served to entrench the system of mass incarceration. Convicted felons are excluded from juries in many states, and only Maine and Vermont allow prison inmates to vote (as most Western European countries do).<\/p>\n Nor did this system turn around when the Democrats returned to the White House. The Bill Clinton years saw a 60% drop in federal spending on public housing, and a 170% boost in prison spending up to $19 billion. Prison construction would finally begin leveling off in the 2000s, but the actual prison population broke new records in 2008, \u201cwith no end in sight.\u201d<\/p>\n Alexander writes: \u201cNinety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states were black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to the needs and demands of the current political climate. The New Jim Crow was born.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n And this was utterly out of proportion to any real threat posed by illegal drugs. In the 1980s, there were some 22,000 drunk driving deaths per year, among 100,000 alcohol-related deaths. In Alexander\u2019s words: \u201cThe number of deaths related to\u00a0all illegal drugs combined<\/em>\u00a0was tiny compared to the number of deaths caused by drunk driving.\u201d<\/p>\n Among the numberless stories of police terror in the name of drug enforcement, one recounted by Alexander is that of Alberta Spruill \u2014 a 57-year-old Harlem woman who\u00a0died of a heart attack<\/a>\u00a0in May 2003 after police officers broke down her door and threw a concussion grenade into her apartment. No drugs or any contraband were found in the apartment. The cops were acting on a\u00a0bad tip<\/a>\u00a0from snitches snared on a marijuana rap.\u00a0<\/p>\n A Fourth Revolution?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Thanks in large part to growing public consciousness, there certainly appears to have been some progress in the fight against the War on Drugs over the past decade. In 2009, following a hard-fought activist campaign, the\u00a0Rockefeller Laws were finally overturned<\/a>\u00a0in New York. Eleven states have now legalized cannabis, and\u00a0nearly all<\/a>\u00a0have at least some kind of provision for medical use of cannabis \u2014 significantly lifting the pressure on one federally controlled substance.<\/p>\n But even amid the progress, there are clear and frustrating signs that a mere change in the law isn\u2019t enough.\u00a0From New York City<\/a>\u00a0(where cannabis arrests have been de-emphasized by policy)\u00a0to Colorado<\/a>\u00a0(where cannabis is now legal), overall arrests for pot are significantly reduced \u2014 but the stark racial disparity persists in those arrests that continue under various loopholes.<\/p>\n Michelle Alexander concludes with a litany of necessary legal reforms and then states that, ultimately, they are insufficient: \u201cMandatory drug sentencing laws must be rescinded. Marijuana ought to be legalized (and perhaps other drugs as well)\u2026 The list could go on, of course, but the point has been made. The central question for racial justice advocates is this: are we serious about ending the system of control, or not?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n She quotes from Martin Luther King\u2019s book of collected speeches,\u00a0A Testament of Hope<\/em><\/a>:\u00a0<\/em>\u201cWhite America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society. The comfortable, the entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change in the status quo.\u201d<\/p>\n There are many other quotes from the great civil rights leader that shed equal light on the current impasse, in which the limitations of mere legal progress are becoming clear. In his\u00a0April 1963\u00a0Letter from Birmingham Jail<\/a>, King justified his civil disobedience in these words:\u00a0\u201cAn unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself.\u201d<\/p>\n This recalls both the relative impunity for white coke-snorters in the \u201980s as black communities were militarized in the name of drug enforcement \u2014 and the white entrepreneurs now disproportionately getting rich off legal cannabis, while black users remain disproportionately criminalized. \u00a0<\/p>\n In\u00a0Why We Can\u2019t Wait<\/em><\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0King wrote of how the country needed a\u00a0\u201cBill of Rights for the Disadvantaged\u201d \u2014 anticipating the current demands for\u00a0drug war reparations<\/a>,\u00a0wedding legal cannabis to addressing the harms caused by prohibition and the related matrix of social injustice.<\/p>\n The notion that cannabis legalization is necessary but not sufficient recalls King\u2019s 1967 report to the staff of the\u00a0Southern Christian Leadership Conference<\/a>, the main coordinating body of the civil rights campaign.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the \u201cReport to SCLC Staff,\u201d he noted how the 1965\u00a0Selma to Montgomery March<\/a>\u00a0culminated in passage of the\u00a0Voting Rights Act<\/a>\u00a0later that year \u2014 a critical victory. Yet, he\u00a0wrote<\/a>:\u00a0\u201cWe have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights, an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society. We have been in a reform movement\u2026 But after Selma and the voting rights bill, we moved into a new era, which must be the era of revolution. We must recognize that we can\u2019t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power.\u201d<\/p>\n If cannabis legalization is to truly undo the social harms of prohibition, its advocates may be in for a similar reckoning in the coming period.<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/strong>\u00a0what are you doing to fight the War on Drugs?<\/p>\n The post MLK & Marijuana: How the Civil Rights Leader\u2019s Work Informs the Push for Legal Pot<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Martin Luther King Jr. might have turned 91 years old this month if he had not been felled by an assassin\u2019s bullet on April 4, 1968. It is, of course, impossible to know what the United States would look like today if he had lived \u2014 or what he wouldContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,120,320,13124,13125,11575,3516,1883,122,97],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40768"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40768"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40768\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40769,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40768\/revisions\/40769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Birth of the New Jim Crow\u00a0<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: MLK & Marijuana: How the Civil Rights Leader\u2019s Work Informs the Push for Legal Pot<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"