At the same time, the bill offered significant funding for crime prevention, including community policing, drug treatment, and programs for young people. The draft bill contained many provisions to which they objected, such as giving states incentives to implement mandatory minimum sentences and preventing currently incarcerated people from obtaining Pell grants for education. It was against this backdrop that the CBC considered its options. wrote in his much-cited 2017 book, Locking Up Our Own, “At the height of the epidemic, Black political and civic leaders often compared crack to the greatest evils that African Americans had ever suffered.” Writing twenty years earlier, another prominent African American scholar, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, argued that “Blacks have suffered more from being left unprotected or under-protected by law enforcement authorities than from being mistreated as suspects or defendants” (“Unprotected or under-protected” are interesting and important choice of words, to which we’ll return).
And that’s why yours truly, and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus, voted for that 1994 crime bill.”Īs Yale law professor James Forman Jr. “They wanted it out of those communities, and they had gotten very tough on drugs. “Crack cocaine was a scourge in the Black community,” he recalled.
James Clyburn, a member of the House leadership and one of the most powerful African American elected officials, reflected on the reasons for his vote in favor of the bill. Schmoke said, “We’re trying very hard to explain to Congress that this is a matter that needs bipartisan support.” As he joined a delegation of mayors lobbying Congress to back the bill, Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Most Black mayors, who were grappling with a record wave of violent crime, did so as well. According to a 1994 Gallup survey, 58% of African Americans supported the crime bill, compared to 49% of white Americans. Although Bass reported that she would have opposed the bill if she had been in Congress at the time, she said, “I understand very well why elected officials did what they did, because the masses of the people in these communities were demanding it.” It came up during his vice-presidential selection when Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) chair Karen Bass, who was under consideration as his running-mate, responded with a shrewd history lesson. Since the beginning of his presidential race, however, former Vice President Joe Biden has been asked repeatedly about his role in creating this bill. Although the 2020 Democratic National Convention mentioned the Violence Against Women Act, it did not dwell on the more controversial parts of the crime bill.
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