Drug Laws And Slavery

I have two close relatives that have battled crack addiction for a number of years and consequently have cost great pain within my family. My old neighborhood has partly been devastated by the drug trade. Many of my childhood friends are either jailed for or have been consumed by drugs. I understand first hand the devastation that drugs cost in our society and within the family.

However, everyday I go to work in a criminal justice system that is devastating the African-American community. The country’s drug laws, in the shear size of incarceration that is being imposed on the black community, is having a more devastating impact than drugs ever have.

According to the Sentencing Project 32.2 percent of young black men between the ages twenty and twenty nine are either in prison, in jail, or on probation and parole. This is in comparison with 6.7 percent of young white men. A total of 827,440 young African-American men are under the supervision of the criminal justice system at a cost of 6 billion dollars a year. The bulk of these convictions are drug related.

Those young men lucky enough to escape prison are more likely than not given felonies, the 666 of the twenty-first century. In human terms let me explain. To be found in possession of a 10 dollar rock of cocaine is an automatic felony. It means that you cannot vote, you cannot apply for student loans and if you apply for any meaningful job the felony appears on routine background check, which decreases if not blocks your chance for gainful employment.

So in effect each year 32.2 percent of young African-American men are rendered incapacitated in their ability to navigate in a sophisticated global economy. Many are simply removed altogether. Each year thousands go through the door of no return called prison. Like the door of no return of Goree Island in which millions of Africans went through during the slave trade, these young men never come back. A multiple offender sentence at a minimum means 15 years in jail without benefit of probation or parole.

You would never know from the media and going down to drug court and looking at the defendants that the typical crack user is a white suburban teenager. Do you really believe that white America would tolerate 32.2 percent of its young men going to jail primarily for using and selling drugs? Race does matter.

The drug laws in this country are hypocritical and immoral. They have taken a social issue and criminalized it. Other than creating a Prison Industrial Complex these laws are having no impact on crime and drug use.

The African-American community should demand that the drug laws be reformed by decriminalizing all but the most dangerous drugs. I think we can all agree that getting a felony record for possession for marijuana serves no societal purpose.

I personally think that even cocaine should be decriminalized but at the least the penalties for its possession should be greatly reduced. Shifting the money we spend on prisons to drug treatment and education should be our priority moving forward.

Return To Egypt

On February 16, 1861, Commissioner of the State of Louisiana, George Williamson speaking at the Texas Secession Convention stated: “The people of Louisiana would consider it a most fatal blow to African Slavery, if Texas either did not secede or having seceded should not join her destinies to theirs in a Southern Confederacy….The people of slave holding States are bound together by the same necessity and determination to preserve African-slavery….With the social balance wheel of slavery to regulate its machinery, we may fondly indulge the hope that our Southern government will be perpetual. “

One Hundred Forty-Six years later, every week several thousand African-Americans including Judges and lawyers walk under the Confederate Flag and Monument on the Caddo Parish Court House lawn, that honors people like Williamson. Shreveport’s first black mayor Cedric Glover became chief propagandist for the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, when he signed a proclamation declaring April to be Confederate History Month. Can you imagine Nelson Mandela after having defeated Apartheid declared April to be Apartheid month?

Glover states that he is attempting to promote understanding of the “root cause of the conflict” What kind of understanding can you promote by joining those who are attempting to positively promote a war whose “root cause” was to enslave human beings. Who do you need to educate? Certainly not Black people, we live with the legacy of the Confederacy everyday of our lives.

If Glover wanted to promote understanding he would have followed the moral courage of University of South Carolina football coach Steve Spurrier, a son of the south, who recently declared it was time to remove the Confederate flag from his schools’ athletic events, by challenging the Caddo Parish Commission to take down that offensive relic that flies over a building of supposed Justice.

If Glover is indeed a “history buff” then he would have to know that the Generals whose statutes now sit on the court house lawn issued a standing order that any black soldier found in a Union uniform was to be shot on the spot. After a battle, confederate soldiers would walk among the wounded shooting black soldiers. It was such a horrendous policy, that white Union doctors would order that black soldiers wounded in battle be removed from the battle field first. The reason was that a wounded white soldier was more likely to be given medical attention and imprisoned rather than shot.

After the civil war and reconstruction, the same traitors who had declared war upon their country were given back control of the south and they and their prodigy began a hundred year reign of terror and forced apartheid on black citizens. Well into the mid 19th century lynching, a barbaric public ritual, was a common tool used to terrorize blacks. Among other indignities, Blacks were forced to take part in medical experimentations that are to heinous to mention in a newspaper.

Roger Anderson spokesman for the Sons of Confederate Veterans stated the Klu Klux Klan “high jacked” their symbols. His movement and symbols got hijacked long before the Klan took up the cause.

Why would Glover give government sanction celebrating this sordid history?
History is about more than “visiting Civil War sites”. It’s about placing events into context and understanding the impact upon a nation and most importantly a people. Glover actions and statement lacked any historical context, and by aiding the Sons of the Confederate Veterans embarrassed the very people who lined up by the thousands in November to vote for him. They and the city deserved so much better from Glover.