Racial Bias: The Black Athlete, Reagan’s War on Drugs, and Big-Time Sports Reform

Len Bias was on the brink of unimagined worldly success— pro stardom and millions of dollars in salaries and product endorsements. And it was all blown away in moments by a mistaken fling with drugs. But if his death inspires a war on drug dealers and a reform of college athletics, it will not have been in vain.

John Jacob, “The Len Bias Tragedy,” Baltimore Afro-American, 22 July 1986

Too many ivory tower types on faculties who choose to ignore sports scandals consider them unrelated to their teaching and research. And the factory system of education found at large universities has given administrators enormous power. Most faculty members are convinced they have little effect on athletic matters. Few faculties have attempted to speak out collectively on this issue.

“College Athletics’ Smoking Gun,” Christian Science Monitor, 21 July 1986

Figure 1.

Photo of University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias.

Photograph by The Washington Post, courtesy of Getty Images.

On the morning of June 19, 1986, the University of Maryland’s (UMD) African American star basketball player Len Bias died of cocaine intoxication. Bias’s death sent shockwaves across the United States, for less than two days before, the illustrious Boston Celtics of the National Basketball Association (NBA) had drafted him in the first round, offering him a lucrative contract. Young, gifted, black, and now on the cusp of being wealthy, he had everything to live for; he was the epitome of the American Dream, a story of racial uplift through intercollegiate athletics. Yet, his life was now over thanks to one night of celebration with an illicit drug in a college dorm room.

Even before the NBA draft, Bias was already nationally renowned. He was the UMD Terrapins’ all-time leading scorer, a two-time Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) player of the year, and named to the All-America Team. A dynamic player who moved with exuberance, one sports journalist described Bias as akin to Muhammad Ali on the court.¹ At 6’8”, 210 pounds, he was a picture of health and vitality.²

In a matter of days, his death became the center of a national conversation about the dangers of cocaine, especially the new “demon drug” of crack cocaine, and the need for a more concerted war on drugs.³ Bias’s tragic demise and its aftermath typically garner a line or two in most histories of President Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs and the so-called crack epidemic as a catalyst for the increasingly punitive turn in drug policy and the concomitant criminalization of African Americans.⁴ However, no one has yet unpacked why this up-and-coming black athlete became one of the chief symbols driving the frenzied rush to national action and the resulting expansion of the neoliberal carceral state. By analyzing the racial and gendered formation of the black athlete as criminal suspect, this article builds on work that explores the cultural construction of the war on drugs and the normalization of punitive logic in the United States.⁵

The fallen Bias proved to be a flexible figure that government and university officials from across the political spectrum used to support various types of policy reform. At the same time that Bias’s death became a justification for the criminalization of black youth beyond the university, it also inspired calls for the more systematic disciplining of black athletes, along with the expansion of policing on college campuses. However, Bias’s drug abuse at UMD was not the only cause for concern. In the weeks after his death, reports surfaced exposing Bias’s and his teammates’ academic failures.⁶ Although a senior, Bias was twenty-one credits short of graduation, and he had dropped two and failed three courses in his last term. Likewise, four of his teammates had flunked the previous semester. These revelations sparked debates about the proper management of “student athletes” in revenue-producing sports, particularly NCAA Division I men’s basketball and football, which by the mid...