When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

by Donovan X. Ramsey

The word was popular, I assume, because it belonged to the grown-up world and using it made us feel grown. I suppose we made it a slur because we feared what it represented, a rock bottom to which any of us could sink.

That’s what children do when they’re in search of power over things that frighten us. We reduce them to words, bite-size things that can be spat out at a moment’s notice.

I understand now why Houston denied it. Crack left a residue on everything it touched. Anything could be done to a person associated with the evil substance. I surveyed my community and saw its effects in the way my neighborhood was policed. It was as though the police weren’t satisfied until everyone I knew had been stopped, questioned, searched, detained, fined, arrested, jailed, inconvenienced, awakened in the middle of the night, humiliated. Some would end up beaten, shot, or killed. All of us would be touched.

School felt like an extension of the streets. There, it was teachers, mostly white, who did the profiling. They labeled my classmates “emotionally disturbed” or “hyperactive,” diagnosed them with learning disabilities, and dismissed them accordingly. For us, Black boys mostly, it was a gradual process that sped up as we got bigger and more spirited. We didn’t realize we were inside the belly of a beast that ate insubordinate Black boys whole, one that labeled us so it could consume us and that used our reaction to justify itself to itself.

Crack babies were, the stories went, infants born afflicted due to their exposure to cocaine in the womb. They were the “tiniest victims” of the crack epidemic—deformed, intellectually disabled, and expected to overwhelm taxpayer-funded public services. Exactly how many crack babies were born was, it seems, secondary to the horror and resentment they could evoke.

When she finally concluded her research in 2015, the results were astounding: there were no significant differences in the development between children exposed to cocaine in utero and those who were not.

The myth of the crack baby was widely accepted as gospel, it seems, because it mapped so well onto existing ideas of Black biological inferiority and cultural pathology, and it stoked anxieties regarding violent crime and the cost of America’s social safety net. Indeed, in the form of the crack baby, America was delivered a perfect symbol for its animosity toward Black America—a ticking time bomb of violence and expense created because Black mothers cared too little about themselves and their offspring.

I have come to understand the persistence of the residue as a by-product of what theorists call “transgenerational trauma” and “postmemory.” “Transgenerational trauma,” or “intergenerational trauma,” is a psychological term for trauma that is transferred between generations. After a first generation of survivors experiences trauma, they are able to transfer their trauma to their children and further generations of offspring via complex mechanisms.

the U.S. criminal legal system functions as a means of social control by targeting Black communities through the war on drugs.

Tupac said as much on 1998’s “Changes”: “And still I see no changes, can’t a brother get a little peace? / It’s war on the streets and the war in the Middle East / Instead of war on poverty / They got a war on drugs so the police can bother me.” About the experience of so-called superpredators, he explained on 1991’s “Trapped,” “How can I feel guilty after all the things they did to me? / Sweated me, hunted me, trapped in my own community / One day I’m gonna bust, blow up on this society / Why did you lie to me? I couldn’t find a trace of equality.”

I became convinced the more we talked that his story might illustrate crack’s almost gravitational pull, the way it touched anyone and everyone close to poor Black and Latino people in the nation’s urban centers.

Swift described the unique racial mix but broad poverty of Yonkers in the seventies and eighties. He detailed his childhood in the streets, the way he was neglected by his addict father but adopted by the Black and Latino people around him.

Elgin’s nightmares also bring to the surface his deepest anxiety: the fear that he’ll end up where he started—back in Yonkers, poor and desperate with no way out. It’s in the moments after he wakes that he realizes how present that fear is in his everyday life. The nightmares call that fear forward like a word that has been on the tip of his tongue. He’s waiting, he realizes, for the other shoe to drop, for the life that he’s built to suddenly evaporate.

There were glimmers of a story in her eyes, I told her.

THE CITIES MOST IMPACTED by crack cocaine were sites of unrest and white flight in the 1960s. The population shift in the 1970s and 1980s produced Black leadership and many elected Black mayors. Such was the case with David Dinkins in New York, Sharpe James in Newark, Tom Bradley in Los Angeles, Lionel Wilson in Oakland, Wilson Goode in Philadelphia, Marion Barry in Washington, D.C., Ernest Morial in New Orleans, Andrew Young in Atlanta, and Kurt Schmoke in Baltimore. Schmoke is not as well-known as his Black mayor peers, but his contribution to the era and the history of Baltimore are important.

I do not like many politicians, but I immediately connected to Schmoke’s story. He reminded me of the bookish guys I studied alongside at Morehouse whose greatest ambitions were to learn everything so they could go back home and save their communities. They—we—were community projects, full of investment from our families and friends and teachers and churches. This investment fueled us, but it could also weigh us down at times.

Contrary to popular opinion and against the advice of many, he advocated for drug decriminalization as early as 1988. It was Schmoke’s belief then that Baltimore, a city with a world-renowned medical and public-health resource in Johns Hopkins University, could serve as a model for treating addiction as a public-health issue instead of a criminal one.

Schmoke’s position was so well known within Baltimore that it was incorporated into a storyline on the hit HBO crime drama The Wire decades later. In the series, his proposal to decriminalize drugs came to life as Hamsterdam, a neighborhood created by police major Howard “Bunny” Colvin to study the potential positive effects of de facto legalization of the drug trade. The real-life Schmoke even appeared in two episodes from the third season, in a bit part as the Baltimore health commissioner.

“Sometimes, in the toughest of places against the longest of odds, a guy gets a break, makes a vow and keeps it. The vow takes hold and grows stronger, and everyone is better for it,” read a story in The Star-Ledger.

ALL EVENTS ARE THE RESULT of countless others, big and small, coming together at a particular moment. They pile up like logs on a pyre. Then there’s some kindling, a spark fed by the atmosphere, and, suddenly, a fire. That’s how it was with what became known as the crack epidemic: one thing led to the next, and so many things happened at once that it’s impossible to name just a single cause or responsible party. But as it is with fire, there were knowable elements—the substance itself, poverty, violence, grief.

“One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free,” Kennedy said during a televised address on June 11, 1963. “They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.”

The law-enforcement response to the events in both Detroit and Newark was staggering. In Newark, 7,917 members of the police and National Guard were deployed, leading to 1,465 arrests and twenty-six deaths. The National Guard was also deployed in Detroit in addition to local police and the United States Army’s 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. The result was 43 dead, 1,189 injured, and more than 7,200 arrests.

The commission released its report seven months later, on February 29, 1968. The 426-page document reasoned that the riots of 1967 resulted from Black frustration with a lack of economic opportunity and access to the mainstream of American life. It called out both state and federal governments for failures in housing, education, and social services. “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one Black, one white—separate and unequal,” it famously concluded.

“What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto,” the report read. “White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., called the report a “physician’s warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life.”

There may be no better symbol for America’s relationship to its Black citizens than King, the most widely respected member of the race, sprawled on a motel balcony in a pool of his own blood. He died a senseless and sudden death, one devoid of dignity—a Black death.

This philosophy helped Nixon win the presidential election of 1968, and in the decades to come, it would pervade American politics and animate policy. Politically, it became the foundation of the “Southern strategy,” a Republican Party scheme to lock in the support of white voters in the South and other parts of America by appealing to their faith in white supremacy and anti-Blackness.

“By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires,” Atwater said. “So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other.”

In a diary entry from 1969, White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman paraphrased Nixon’s private thoughts. Referring to the president as “P,” Haldeman wrote, “P emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people,” Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but 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.”

The Nixon administration did not require evidence that drug use was linked to rising crime, however. And it did not need to prove to the American public that doped-up Blacks were responsible for that crime. It had two facts: drug use was up, and so was violent crime in big cities. Americans would fill in the blank, using the same brutal imagination they always had to rationalize a war on drugs targeting Black Americans.

Alongside its war on drugs, the Nixon administration was engaged in an all-out offensive on Black political leadership. The FBI had been surveilling, threatening, and attempting to discredit Black leaders since as early as 1956 as part of its Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). The FBI sank to new lows under Nixon, however, with its efforts to destroy the Black Panther Party and, according to a bureau memo, “...

Hoover had declared the Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” in 1968. In the years that followed, the group became the primary focus of COINTELPRO, with the FBI employing surveillance, informants, psychological warfare, legal threats, smear campaigns, and violence in an attempt to “neutralize” the Panthers. The organization, its chapters and leaders, were the target of an estimated 233 authoriz...

By the end of 1969, five leaders within the Black Panther Party—Spurgeon Winter, Jr., Bunchy Carter, John Huggins, Alex Rackley, and Bobby Hutton—had been murdered in confrontations with police, rival groups, and other Panthers. Most notably, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were murdered when Chicago Police Department officers raided Hampton’s apartment. Hampton, it would later be revealed, had been marked as a “key militant leader” by the FBI. And on the night of his ...

By 1970, a number of leaders within the Black Panther Party, including Lawrence S. Bell, Bobby Rush, Bobby Seale, George W. Sams, Jr., Geronimo Pratt, Eddie Conway, William Lee Brent, Chip Fitzgerald, Cinque Magee, Albert Nuh Washington, Anthony Bottom, Pete O’Neal, Ed Poindexter, David Rice, Russell Shoatz, the Panther 21, and Angela Davis, were behind bars or facing criminal charges rangi...

Nixon signed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act into law that same year. The law was the opening salvo in the modern war on drugs, and it provided the federal government a legal foundation for its fight. The law had a number of important provisions, but the most significant was Title II, the Controlled Substances Act, which established five “sche...

With the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act on the books, the Nixon administration slowly ramped up its war. Responding to reports that 15 to 25 percent of servicemen in Vietnam were using heroin, Nixon famously declared drug abuse “America’s public enemy number one” at a press conference on June 17, 1971. He announced an “all-out offensive,” including the creation of a new federal agency dedicated to fighting drugs, the Special Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention.

And so it was that in the span of just a few years, the Nixon administration was able to successfully mold its campaign of law and order in response to the civil disobedience of the sixties into a full-fledged war on drugs. And with his insistence on a link between rising crime and drugs—heroin, specifically—Nixon thoroughly racialized his war, making it effectively a war on Black users, Black dealers, Black communities. The Office of Drug Abuse and Law Enforcement performed six thousand drug arrests in its first eighteen months, and the majority of those arrests were carried out on Black people.

“I could tell you shit about your mama and your daddy that would bust your head,” she said. Lennie asked, “Ain’t you my mama?” Bea replied, “I didn’t even want you. Your daddy wanted you. If I had my pick, I would have got me a boy. But they wouldn’t let me take just the boy, because he was a twin, so I had to get you.” That’s how Lennie learned, at seven years old, that she was adopted. Not just unwanted by her birth mother, she thought, but by her adopted mother, who settled for her because she couldn’t take on twin boys.

Unbridled ambition requires a vehicle. Without one, it can torture those who have it, perverting their judgment until ambition meets opportunity and is finally satisfied. It seems that’s what happened for many young Blacks in the late 1970s determined to let “nothin’, nothin’ ” stand in their way.

The country’s appetite for stories of Black suffering and sickness is well documented, and Black drug addiction is one topic for which Americans have proven ravenous.

“Jimmy’s World,” Cooke gave her bosses at the Post and its readers something they couldn’t resist: a story that confirmed all their worst ideas of the ghetto, written by the right kind of Black person. Who needed to fact-check “Jimmy’s World” when so many were sure it existed?

This period marked the birth of America’s racial double standard on drugs. While previous generations believed that drugs had a special impact on Blacks, they were simultaneously puritanical about drug use in whites. In the 1970s, however, Americans developed two minds regarding drugs. They continued to believe in the Black drug fiend but also came to accept “experimentation” in whites as a hallmark of youth. At the absolute worst, addiction in whites was considered a sickness, a tragedy.