Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire

Black Elites, and Many Black Voters, Supported Mass Black Incarceration
25 Jul 2017
🖨️ Print Article

Historian, author and activist Paul Street has high praise for James Forman Jr.’s new book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. Forman is a professor at Yale Law School and a former public defender in Washington, DC. His book “fills a giant hole in the literature,” illuminating the role played by “Black elites in the rise of the mass incarceration system,” said Street, himself an expert on race and the U.S. penal system. “Many ordinary, working class Black voters in the 70s and 80s have actively supported the racially disparate war on crime and drugs that ended up producing racist mass incarceration,” said Street, whose latest book is titled They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy.


More Stories


  • Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    ESSAY: David and Goliath Collaborate in Africa, Africa Research Group, 1969
    15 Oct 2025
    “Israel has played a relatively invisible but strategically important role in Africa as a servant of the United States…”
  • Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
    Dr. Denis Mukwege’s Nobel Peace Prize Brought No Peace to the Congolese
    15 Oct 2025
    Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to “the man who heals women” made Euro-Americans feel good without interrupting their catastrophic proxy war for Congo’s resources.
  • Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright
    Israel’s Perpetual War Machine Demonstrates that Environmental Warfare is a Tool, Not a Consequence of Genocide and Settler Colonialism
    15 Oct 2025
    Environmental destruction in Gaza is a calculated military strategy. By poisoning the land and water, Israel is ensuring a permanent and toxic genocide.
  • Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
    End the Epstein shutdown and F-bombing our cities!
    15 Oct 2025
    "End the Epstein shutdown and F-bombing our cities!" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
  • Erica Caines , Austin Cole , Tunde Osazua
    What's a "Peace Deal" in the War against Colonized People ?
    15 Oct 2025
    There will be no peace without justice.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us