The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

Starting in the early 1960s, an astonishing spike in crime, in which blacks made up a disproportionate share of both perpetrators and victims, took on aspects of a national emergency. The emergency would pass through various stages: the looting episodes in Memphis that preceded the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968, and a new wave of deadly riots that followed it, the Attica Prison Revolt of 1971, the New York blackout of 1977, the crack epidemic of 1986, the Los Angeles “Rodney King” riots of 1992, O. J. Simpson’s acquittal in his 1995 murder trial. After that, crime rates fell in general, but the overrepresentation of blacks in the criminal statistics never went away. By 2011, toward the end of Barack Obama’s first term in office, blacks, who make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, still accounted for 39 percent of the arrests for violent crime.