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By Michael Nelson, October 5, 2015
POLisci: The Black Silent Majority
In 2015 Black Lives Matter means street protests to “end broken windows policing,” “limit use of force” by police,
institute “community oversight” of law enforcement, and other items on the movement’s 10-point “Campaign
Zero” agenda.
In 1973 “black lives matter” meant mainstream political activism in pursuit of “aggressive policing and punitive
policies to banish unsavory characters . . . and return commerce and communities back to normal.” Or so it did to
working- and middle-class African Americans in drug and crime-ridden neighborhoods like New York City’s
Harlem. That is the argument of Michael Javen Fortner, a young black Harvard-trained political scientist at the City
University of New York and the author of "Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of
Punishment."
We’ve all heard about President Richard Nixon’s “silent majority,” his term for the legions of Americans who did
not demonstrate against the Vietnam War or riot in the nation’s inner cities. They wanted peace with honor abroad
and respect for traditional values at home. And they were all white, right?
Not quite, according to Fortner In the 1960s and 1970s it was white-promoted progressive policies - notably New
York governor Nelson A. Rockefeller’s 1962 Metcalf-Volker Act treating drug-related behavior as illness rather
than crime - that made life unbearable for the “black silent majority” in Harlem. “This black silent majority did not
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blame their problems on white racism or capitalism,” Fortner writes. “When they thought about the black
underclass, they did not see brothers. They saw hoods” and “monsters” who made it too dangerous for churches to
hold evening services or stores to stay open after dark.
Rebutting accounts that treat African American political history as an unending chronicle of passive victimhood
(notably Michelle Alexander’s 2012 book "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness"),
Fortner describes the “agency” of grassroots leaders like Rev. Oberia D. Dempsey. He and many other pastors and
neighborhood activists lobbied Albany to pass new laws that would lock up drug pushers and, in many cases, throw
away the key for life. Overcoming liberal white resistance, Rockefeller persuaded the legislature to pass laws
(draconian, in Fortner’s opinion) that 47 other states soon copied. In 1986 President Ronald Reagan and Congress
enacted the now infamous Anti-Drug Abuse Act making crack cocaine (the kind mostly used by blacks) wildly
more criminal than the powdered cocaine favored by white drug users. Nearly two-thirds of the Congressional
Black Caucus voted for it.
“Silent majority” wasn’t Nixon’s only trademarked phrase. A related watchword from his 1968 presidential
campaign echoed independent candidate George C. Wallace’s main trope in that election: “law and order.” As
another example of how political issues and language change in meaning as the context changes, just five years
earlier, on the eve of his first inauguration as governor of Alabama and in the wake of a series of KKK-related
bombings targeting African Americans, Wallace had said he was “sick and tired of . . . too much hollerin’ about
law and order.”
Fortner reminds us that political alignments which seem unlikely from a contemporary vantage point nonetheless
periodically arise. In 1973 black voters in Harlem wanted addicts and pushers locked up. Rockefeller wanted an
issue that would allow him to exit the GOP’s vanishing liberal wing and move rightward in hopes of becoming
more palatable to Republican conservatives when he sought the party’s presidential nomination in 1976. New
York’s new drug laws became that issue. Of course, everything changed when Nixon resigned and Vice President
Gerald R. Ford succeeded to the presidency in 1974. But Rockefeller’s tough-on-crime stance was enough to make
him at least minimally acceptable to his party's conservatives as Ford’s appointed vice president. It was only when
Rockefeller resumed his leftward ways in office that Ford felt compelled to drop him from the ticket.
A similar alliance formed between Republicans and black politicians during the post-1990 census redistricting
process. Both wanted African American voters crammed into as many “majority-minority” House districts as
possible. Black pols liked the idea because it meant more of them would be elected to Congress, and Republicans
liked it because the remaining districts would be drained of the black voters that white Democrats rely on to get
elected.
To be sure, alliances like these are unusual. For that reason we all too often miss them when they form. Black
Silent Majority is well worth reading for multiple reasons, including that one.
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POLici is a new Cook Political Report feature providing our subscribers with fresh perspectives on American
political trends by a panel of highly regarded political scientists.
Senior Contributing Editor and Book Editor Michael Nelson is the Fulmer Professor of Political Science at
Rhodes College, a Senior Fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, and a Fellow at Southern
Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History.
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