Where would the black community be had there been no 'Crack Era'?

[Wear My Dawg's Hat]

Watch black television and listen to black music and black radio before the Crack Era.

Then watch black television and listen to what's left of black music and black radio after the Crack Era.

The young people dancing on Soul Train from 1971-1983 are spiritually and physically unrecognizable in comparison to the children and grandchildren of the Crack Era.

 

[CreepyMcCreeperson]

Black people were slowly moving into the middle class, and were getting more media representation. Once whites saw that we're not naturally inferior to them, and we do well with good resources, you saw what happened. Whites go crazy when threatened by competition.

Slavery ended-Jim Crow and the Klan
Jim Crow and desegration ended, we got our voting rights-crack and prison
Obama elected-Trump

 

[feelosofer]

I can tell by a lot if these answers that some of you guys didn't live through the crack era.

First off yes there was always drugs in ths community and Blacks weren't afforded the same opportunities as other races despite that the Black median income was coming up in the 70's. You had a rising Black middle class. More Black people were attending college and getting better jobs. When crack went into full force in 83-84, it halted a lot of that progress. If crack never hits it literally changes the course for Black people. We don't become targets of the war on crime. The prison industrial complex doesn't get filled with Black bodies. Black children don't come out of crack addicted mothers. Drug induced crimes go down and the renmants of the Black middle class don't flee Black cities and I'm probably missing a couple of points.

 

[Will Ross]

The crack epedmic is what destroyed us. Without it we would be in such a better position as a people.

 

[Will Ross]

I can tell by a lot if these answers that some of you guys didn't live through the crack era.

First off yes there was always drugs in ths community and Blacks weren't afforded the same opportunities as other races despite that the Black median income was coming up in the 70's. You had a rising Black middle class. More Black people were attending college and getting better jobs. When crack went into full force in 83-84, it halted a lot of that progress. If crack never hits it literally changes the course for Black people. We don't become targets of the war on crime. The prison industrial complex doesn't get filled with Black bodies. Black children don't come out of crack addicted mothers. Drug induced crimes go down and the renmants of the Black middle class don't flee Black cities and I'm probably missing a couple of points.

The thing is the black middle class was destroyed by crack too.

 

[ahdsend]

Black community was already fukked up
Probably be in the same position
There were no jobs

yea the murder rate spiked long before crack came out....

crack epidemic made a bad situation 10 times worse...

this idea that everything was all good before crack... thats some revisionist bullshyt...



Decivilization in the 1960s

And figure two, Homicide rates in US and England 1900-2000, shows that in the 1960s the homicide rate in America went through the roof.


Figure two - Homicide rates in US and England 1900-2000

After a three-decade free fall that spanned the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, Americans multiplied their homicide rate by more than two and a half, from a low of 4.0 in 1957 to a high of 10.2 in 1980 (U.S. Bureau of Statistics; Fox and Zawitz: 2007). The upsurge included every other category of major crime as well, including rape, assault, robbery, and theft, and lasted (with ups and downs) for three decades. The cities got particularly dangerous, especially New York, which became a symbol of the new criminality. Though the surge in violence affected all the races and both genders, it was most dramatic among black men, whose annual homicide rate had shot up by the mid-1980s to 72 per 100,000.

The rebounding of violence in the 1960s defied every expectation. The decade was a time of unprecedented economic growth, nearly full employment, levels of economic equality for which people today are nostalgic, historic racial progress, and the blossoming of government social programs, not to mention medical advances that made victims more likely to survive being shot or knifed. Social theorists in 1962 would have happily bet that these fortunate conditions would lead to a continuing era of low crime. And they would have lost their shirts.

Why did the Western world embark on a three-decade binge of crime from which it has never fully recovered? This is one of several local reversals of the long-term decline of violence that I will examine in this book. If the analysis is on the right track, then the historical changes I have been invoking to explain the decline should have gone into reverse at the time of the surges.

An obvious place to look is demographics. The 1940s and 1950s, when crime rates hugged the floor, were the great age of marriage. Americans got married in numbers not seen before or since, which removed men from the streets and planted them in suburbs (Courtwright 1996). One consequence was a bust in violence. But the other was a boom in babies. The first baby boomers, born in 1946, entered their crime-prone years in 1961; the ones born in the peak year, 1954, entered in 1969. A natural conclusion is that the crime boom was an echo of the baby boom. Unfortunately, the numbers don’t add up. If it were just a matter of there being more teenagers and twenty-somethings who were committing crimes at their usual rates, the increase in crime from 1960 to 1970 would have been 13 percent, not 135 percent.[2] Young men weren’t simply more numerous than their predecessors; they were more violent, too.

 

[Chubbs]

yea the murder rate spiked long before crack came out....

crack epidemic made a bad situation 10 times worse...

this idea that everything was all good before crack... thats some revisionist bullshyt...



Decivilization in the 1960s

And figure two, Homicide rates in US and England 1900-2000, shows that in the 1960s the homicide rate in America went through the roof.


Figure two - Homicide rates in US and England 1900-2000

After a three-decade free fall that spanned the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, Americans multiplied their homicide rate by more than two and a half, from a low of 4.0 in 1957 to a high of 10.2 in 1980 (U.S. Bureau of Statistics; Fox and Zawitz: 2007). The upsurge included every other category of major crime as well, including rape, assault, robbery, and theft, and lasted (with ups and downs) for three decades. The cities got particularly dangerous, especially New York, which became a symbol of the new criminality. Though the surge in violence affected all the races and both genders, it was most dramatic among black men, whose annual homicide rate had shot up by the mid-1980s to 72 per 100,000.

The rebounding of violence in the 1960s defied every expectation. The decade was a time of unprecedented economic growth, nearly full employment, levels of economic equality for which people today are nostalgic, historic racial progress, and the blossoming of government social programs, not to mention medical advances that made victims more likely to survive being shot or knifed. Social theorists in 1962 would have happily bet that these fortunate conditions would lead to a continuing era of low crime. And they would have lost their shirts.

Why did the Western world embark on a three-decade binge of crime from which it has never fully recovered? This is one of several local reversals of the long-term decline of violence that I will examine in this book. If the analysis is on the right track, then the historical changes I have been invoking to explain the decline should have gone into reverse at the time of the surges.

An obvious place to look is demographics. The 1940s and 1950s, when crime rates hugged the floor, were the great age of marriage. Americans got married in numbers not seen before or since, which removed men from the streets and planted them in suburbs (Courtwright 1996). One consequence was a bust in violence. But the other was a boom in babies. The first baby boomers, born in 1946, entered their crime-prone years in 1961; the ones born in the peak year, 1954, entered in 1969. A natural conclusion is that the crime boom was an echo of the baby boom. Unfortunately, the numbers don’t add up. If it were just a matter of there being more teenagers and twenty-somethings who were committing crimes at their usual rates, the increase in crime from 1960 to 1970 would have been 13 percent, not 135 percent.[2] Young men weren’t simply more numerous than their predecessors; they were more violent, too.

 

[BmoreGorilla]

We'd definitely be better off. We'd be deeper in number. We'd have stronger families. A lot more positive role models for the youth.

This right here. I didn’t fully understand what was happening at the time but it was crazy being 7 and seeing strong black men and women around the way even in my own family and parents of kids that I knew. And a few years later they were looking like completely different people

 

[KENNY DA COOKER]

i know i might get a lot of HATE/NEGS for this statement

but fukk it im a old flabby n sick black man who actually LIVED prior to the CRACK ERA and lived and done business during the crack era from the BX to DUVAL

so im a SPEAK MY MIND ....

hoe

and im a tell right now..YEAH SHYT WAS FUKKED UP..but WE COPED WITH IT...

the crack plague coexisted with the black empowerment we ONCE HAD before GENTRIFICATION and the full onslaught of INTERGRATION killed it

and i ain't got time to put up no damn wikepdia accounts and graphs and charts and stats to prove my point

my experiences speak for it...

harlem HAD MAD BLACK BUSINESSES..LEGAL BLACK BUSINESS DURING THE CRACK ERA

for example along with all the black owned restaurants and clubs ..hair salons you had Guy Fisher a COCAINE DEALER purchase the shabby looking APOLLO and refurbish it during the late 70's....giving out jobs to many black people even DJ HOLLYWOOD a pioneer of hip hop to provide entertainment

shyt was all good...till he got sent off to prison and NBC/PARAMOUNT came in and bought the APOLLO and made it corporate to help usher in the gentrification of harlem along with BILL CLINTON who moved his OFFICE into HARLEM

hell same situation down south...i first came to savannah to visit family in the late 80s and decided to come to school at Savannah State home of Shannon Sharpe

it was beautiful seeing West Broad street which was the 125th of the southeast ga area....which was shoutout by James brown on wax

black business all up that street....even a black owned bank..CARVER STATE BANK..which gave me my first loan

i remember being inspired to get into the promotional game when they changed West Broad street name to MLK street in honor of Dr. King in the early 90s

i witnessed probally the biggest nightclub i ever seen in my life on the next block to MLK called the "BARN" on montgomery street it was huge....opened and operated by a "crack dealer" named Big Terry originally from the MIA ....

but unfortuantly that shyt along with the property got bought out "illegaly" by a white mafioso funded art school known as S.C.A.D..which has basically destroyed savannah and raised property value to move out blacks

but i still BIG TERRY..him and a number of dealers was opening mad businesses throughout the city..i personally knew one cat who purchased land and help a sista open a daycare and a nail salon ..and yes he was a crack dealer too...

same way with ATL......i thank the dopeboys and former crack kingpins on Old national and the rest of the SWATs of ATL for putting me on to game to become a legal businessman and even real estate ...

hell if it wasnt for the crack dealers i couldnt get my promotional hustle on......my first business opportunity to become a LLC came courtesy of a crack dealer...

and it wasnt just a AA GANG ting

jah bless likkle john da dread who hustled herb from night till morning.....who assisted me during my child support issue time and was very supportive as well when i entered the dancehall field

big up Trev.....da yardie who taught me business fundementals from his shop he owned till dem crakkkers came in and hijacked his spot

so im sorry to say you might not agree but thier was PROS AND CONS to the crack era

I LIVED IT...YOU GUYS JUST WITNESSING IT FROM SOME SUBJECTIVE MEDIA SPINNED WIKPEDIA NOTEPADS

 

[ahdsend]

if u peep the study... black folks violent crime rate was highest in 1991...

it was already thru the roof by the mid 70s tho...

dont get me wrong, crack epidemic was definitely the DEATH BLOW... aint no denying that..

but we were already goin in the wrong direction before that happened...



Homicide Rate (per 100,000), 1950–2014

https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf

 

[BmoreGorilla]

I can tell by a lot if these answers that some of you guys didn't live through the crack era.

First off yes there was always drugs in ths community and Blacks weren't afforded the same opportunities as other races despite that the Black median income was coming up in the 70's. You had a rising Black middle class. More Black people were attending college and getting better jobs. When crack went into full force in 83-84, it halted a lot of that progress. If crack never hits it literally changes the course for Black people. We don't become targets of the war on crime. The prison industrial complex doesn't get filled with Black bodies. Black children don't come out of crack addicted mothers. Drug induced crimes go down and the renmants of the Black middle class don't flee Black cities and I'm probably missing a couple of points.

Alot if it also affected the psyche of many of us kids who grew up in that era becuz we couldn’t fully comprehend what was happening. One of my best friends to this day found his pops dead in the bathroom after ODing when we were around 10 years old. This was a man who was one of the most visible in the neighborhood. One of my pops best friends. That was a coming of age moment for me and my friends where we were able to put 2 and 2 together. My homeboy still struggles to this day with what he saw

 

[Taadow]

Of course we would be better off, but how much better is hard to say.

As was said, Black folks were already fucced in the game before Crack hit...
but really if there wasn't Crack, they just woulda found something else.







The real thing that exacerbated the effects of the Crack Era was the effect it had on women.
I'm not a scientist - but I'm confident in saying that (at the time) there was no drug that was so effective on women.

 

[Po pimp]

I will argue that the prison industrial system hurt the black community more than the crack epedemic.
And also the extreme poverty and lack of job opportunity

Prison industrial system has always existed, but crack made a bad thing worse.

 

[Black Haven]

Between 1984 and 1989, the homicide rate for black males aged 14 to 17 more than doubled, and the homicide rate for black males aged 18 to 24 increased nearly as much. During this period, the black community also experienced a 20–100% increase in fetal death rates, low birth-weight babies, weapons arrests, and the number of children in foster care.[8] In 1996, approximately 60% of inmates incarcerated in the US were sentenced on drug charges. The United States remains the largest overall consumer of narcotics in the world as of 2014.[9][10] A 2018 found that the crack epidemic had long-run consequences for crime, contributing to the doubling of the murder rate of young black males soon after the start of the epidemic, and that the murder rate was still 70 percent higher 17 years after crack's arrival.[11] The paper estimated that eight percent of the murders in 2000 are due to the long-run effects of the emergence of crack markets, and that the elevated murder rates for young black males can explain a significant part of the gap in life expectancy between black and white males.[11]

The reasons for these increases in crime were mostly because distribution for the drug to the end-user occurred mainly in low-income inner city neighborhoods. This gave many inner-city residents the opportunity to move up the "economic ladder" in a drug market that allowed dealers to charge a low minimum price.

Crack cocaine use and distribution became popular in cities that were in a state of social and economic chaos such as Los Angeles and Atlanta. "As a result of the low-skill levels and minimal initial resource outlay required to sell crack, systemic violence flourished as a growing army of young, enthusiastic inner-city crack sellers attempt to defend their economic investment."[12] Once the drug became embedded in the particular communities, the economic environment that was best suited for its survival caused further social disintegration within that

Crack epidemic - Wikipedia
It absolutely destroyed us more than we could imagine so much so that we still feel the remnants to this day. The black American community wasn't in good shape but, we were heading in the right direction with many black Americans moving up in class and education prior to the crack epidemic.

 

[feelosofer]

The thing is the black middle class was destroyed by crack too.

I agree. That's why I said the renmants.