Library District presents Black History Month program on health activism in Kansas City, 1900-1940
Press release from the Alachua County Library District
GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Join us for a captivating presentation from Dr. Alyssa Cole, an assistant professor in African American Studies at the University of Florida. Dr. Cole specializes in the intersections of history, health activism, and Black communities in the Midwest. Dr. Cole will discuss her current work, “Movement before the Movement: Black Women’s Health Activism in Kansas City, 1900-1940,” which explores the roles of Black women who advocated for health equity during the early twentieth century.
Join us on Saturday, February 21, starting at 3 p.m. at the Tower Road Branch of the Alachua County Library District (3020 SW 75th Street). No registration is required. Bring yourself and any questions you’d like to ask at the end.
“Join us for a captivating presentation from Dr. Alyssa Cole, an assistant professor in African American Studies at the University of Florida.”
Oops….. perhaps a better choice of words. I would think many would be worried about the captivating part…..especially if they just got out of jail.
So clever aren’t you? Mass incarceration was the goal. Follow the money and racist policies.
John Ehrlichman, a top domestic policy adviser to President Richard Nixon, reportedly admitted in a 1994 interview with journalist Dan Baum that the “war on drugs” was designed to target political enemies. According to Baum’s account, Ehrlichman stated: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, 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.”
Ehrlichman allegedly added that the strategy included arresting leaders, raiding homes, breaking up meetings, and vilifying these groups in the media, acknowledging, “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” These remarks, not publicly revealed until 2016 when Baum revisited his notes, suggest the drug war was politically motivated rather than driven by public health concerns.
Multiple family members of Ehrlichman (who died in 1999) challenge the veracity of the quote:
The 1994 alleged ‘quote’ we saw repeated in social media for the first time today does not square with what we know of our father…We do not subscribe to the alleged racist point of view that this writer now implies 22 years following the so-called interview of John and 16 years following our father’s death, when dad can no longer respond.[21]
In an expository piece focused on the quote,[22] German Lopez does not address the family’s assertion that the quote was fabricated by Baum, but suggests that Ehrlichman was either wrong or lying:
But Ehrlichman’s claim is likely an oversimplification, according to historians who have studied the period and Nixon’s drug policies in particular. There’s no doubt Nixon was racist, and historians told me that race could have played one role in Nixon’s drug war. But there are also signs that Nixon wasn’t solely motivated by politics or race: For one, he personally despised drugs – to the point that it’s not surprising he would want to rid the world of them. And there’s evidence that Ehrlichman felt bitter and betrayed by Nixon after he spent time in prison over the Watergate scandal, so he may have lied.
More importantly, Nixon’s drug policies did not focus on the kind of criminalization that Ehrlichman described. Instead, Nixon’s drug war was largely a public health crusade – one that would be reshaped into the modern, punitive drug war we know today by later administrations, particularly President Ronald Reagan…
“It’s certainly true that Nixon didn’t like blacks and didn’t like hippies,” Courtwright said. “But to assign his entire drug policy to his dislike of these two groups is just ridiculous.”[23
Two sides of every story. You are relying on Baum’s hand written notes 22 years after the alleged quote. Never a mention by Ehrichman to anyone else. No tape recording.
“ The prison population began to grow in the 1970s, when politicians from both parties used fear and thinly veiled racial rhetoric to push increasingly punitive policies. Nixon started this trend, declaring a “war on drugs” and justifying it with speeches about being “tough on crime.” But the prison population truly exploded during President Ronald Reagan’s administration. When Reagan took office in 1980, the total prison population was 329,000, and when he left office eight years later, the prison population had essentially doubled, to 627,000. This staggering rise in incarceration hit communities of color hardest: They were disproportionately incarcerated then and remain so today.
Incarceration grew both at the federal and state level, but most of the growth was in the states, which house the vast majority of the nation’s prisoners. The number of prisoners grew in every state — blue, red, urban, and rural. In Texas, for example, the state incarceration rate quadrupled: In 1978, the state incarcerated 182 people for every 100,000 residents. By 2003, that figure was 710.”
If one looks at the data, it’s hard to discount that the goals attributed Nixon administration were put in place with lamentable effect.
Maybe the country decided to get tougher on crime. And maybe more people though it would be a better lifestyle being a criminal. More criminals being locked up is a good thing.