“Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone?”: Reverend Oberia Dempsey and His Citizens War on Drugs

On March 19, 1973, at 9:00 a.m. on New York City’s WNBC-TV, Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Reverend Oberia D. Dempsey appeared on Barbara Walter’s fledgling talk show, “Not for Women Only.” Rockefeller and the Harlem pastor defended the governor’s harsh new drug-control legislation and debated its opponents.¹ After the episode aired, Rockefeller and Dempsey took the show on the road, decrying the social consequences of drug addiction and promoting very punitive solutions. Eventually, the legislature passed and the governor signed the drug laws into law.² Over thirty years later, the New York State legislature drastically reformed the measures, repealing their most draconian components.³ But the damage had been done.

The drug laws facilitated the mass imprisonment of people of color in New York State. In 1970, 8.6 percent of the state’s prison population was incarcerated for drug law violations. By 2000, that number had risen to 31.2 percent. Clear racial disparities exist: Latinos are twenty-six times more likely than whites to go to prison for a drug-related crime and African Americans are thirty-four times more likely. From 1930 until 2000, the white proportion of the state’s prison population declined by 3.7 percent, while the African American proportion increased by 260 percent.⁴ Nonetheless, the explanations for mass incarceration in New York State and throughout the United States reference only parts of this story. “Not for Women Only” disappeared from television, but Barbara Walters became an icon. The fate of prisoners and ex-prisoners captured the attention of legal scholars, social scientists, historians, and activists.⁵ Rockefeller and his Republican contemporaries assumed a notorious position within the historiography of mass incarceration. Dempsey, however, was forgotten. And he is not alone.

The dominant history of mass incarceration, because of its inordinate focus on white racism, obscures the role that African Americans like Reverend Dempsey played in the expansion of the modern carceral state. Michelle Alexander, for example, likens mass incarceration to Jim Crow and situates the contemporary criminal justice system within a teleological history of the American racial order.⁶ According to her, the carceral state signifies a racial project determined to resist civil rights and restore the old racial order. Despite powerfully delineating the ways in which the modern prison system perpetuates racial inequality, the new Jim Crow thesis does not offer a comprehensive political theory of its origins. It does not consider black agency.

Marie Gottschalk offers a useful corrective. First, she criticizes the narrow temporal scope of most “‘law and order’ scholarship” and suggests that tracing penal policies over time (before and after the 1960s) would yield greater insight into what changed in the politics of crime to spur mass imprisonment.⁷ Second, Gottschalk’s second innovation is her focus on social movements. Specifically, she examines how the mobilization of victims’ rights groups, the social construction of “criminals” and “victims,” and evolving governmental capacities accelerated the astonishing growth of the carceral state after the 1960s.⁸ Despite these virtues, Gottschalk ignores black victims’ groups: a glaring omission since African Americans are both more likely to be imprisoned than whites and more likely to be victims of violent crime.⁹

Given their experiences, it is possible that black victims organized an anticrime social movement. In fact, the mid-twentieth-century economic, social, and political transformation of black communities made such a movement a serious potentiality. Urban deindustrialization and the suburbanization of work produced a “black underclass.” The expansion of equal rights improved the life chances of working- and middle-class African Americans and empowered them.¹⁰ Lingering residential segregation placed the black poor and working- and middle-class African Americans in conflict.¹¹ Urban decline concentrated and exacerbated social problems and cultivated new “criminals.” It created new “victims”: working- and middle-class blacks.¹² Accordingly, it is quite plausible that these new “victims” employed their newly found political power to police the urban black poor—and assisted the construction of the modern carceral state in the process.

Of...