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

by Donovan X. Ramsey

“To be Black in the U.S. is no longer to be subordinate—not necessarily,” declared a 1974 Time cover story on the Black middle class. “The national effort to give Blacks a more equitable share of the nation’s goods and benefits has had results—uneven but undeniable.” The article went on to explain what middle-class status meant to Black Americans, how it came with an immense feeling of being “a useful, functioning part of society—not indispensable perhaps, but not easily dispensed with either.” It was a keen insight, because expendable is exactly how the rest of Black America was seen. Starting with the Nixon administration, the federal government adopted a policy of benign neglect regarding issues of race. That left Blacks to navigate post-civil-rights America—all the benefits and backlash—themselves. Efforts to fully integrate the country’s schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces withered on the vine. Poverty became concentrated in predominantly Black communities as the Black middle class joined with whites in their flight to the suburbs. From this emerged a Black America with two faces: a community either flourishing or languishing, depending on where the observer was standing.