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


  • BAR Radio Logo
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Black Agenda Radio January 23, 2026
    23 Jan 2026
    In this week’s segment, we cover state repression and regime change efforts. While the corporate media parroted state narratives about a popular uprising in Iran, all evidence indicates that recent…
  • ICE Protest
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    ICE Domestic Repression in Minnesota
    23 Jan 2026
    Mnar Adley is the founder and director of MintPress News, an independent media outlet. She joins us from Minneapolis, Minnesota, where Donald Trump's ICE enforcement is used as domestic police…
  • Iran
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    U.S. and Israel Attempt Regime Change Against Iran
    23 Jan 2026
    Nina Farnia is an assistant professor at Albany Law School in New York. She is a legal historian, focusing on the role of modern imperialism in U.S. law and politics, and a member of the Anti-…
  • Tobi Raji
    RFK-backed Infant Vaccine Study in Africa to Proceed Despite Backlash, U.S. Says
    21 Jan 2026
    U.S. funding for a study on the timing of hepatitis B vaccine doses in infants in Guinea-Bissau violates accepted standards of medical ethics.
  • Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    Racist, Imperialist U.S. Vassal Denmark Now Cries Over Greenland
    21 Jan 2026
    Donald Trump and other U.S. presidents are gangsters who will sometimes steal from their own crew. The Greenland heist is but the latest example, as the Denmark colonizers cry that they were robbed…
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us