Reimagining Black Conservatism: The Invisible Black Community and the Forgotten War on “Black-on-Black Crime” during the Post–World War II Urban Crisis (1970s-1980s)

Black Conservatism versus Black Republicanism

The rise of Black neoconservatism in the wake of President Ronald Reagan’s landslide election victory in 1980 has contributed to the popular tendency to conflate the phrase “Black conservatism” with “Black Republicanism.” Black neoconservatism—a term used to describe the political philosophy of mostly African American professionals who attended the 1980 Fairmount Conference in San Francisco, California, and later served in high level positions under Reagan’s administration—sparked a renewed interest in this Black political ideology. ¹¹ Like their white counterparts of the New Right, Black neoconservatives—who often self-identified as Republicans—touted free-market capitalism as an alternative to government support; opposed the civil rights establishment’s approach to racial equity; endorsed the white conservative movement’s ideology of color blindness; and viewed Black culture as the main cause of crime, poverty, and poor education. During the 1980s and 1990s, prominent African American Republicans like Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, and Glen Loury became the face of Black conservatism because of their visibility in the public sphere alongside other increasingly popular figures who wrote scintillating memoirs and autobiographies about their journey to conservatism. ¹² In today’s partisan political landscape, the visibility of former President Donald Trump supporters like rapper/producer Kanye West or author/talk show host Candice Owens has ostensibly enlarged the disconnect between Black conservatives and the larger African American community—despite the increase in self-identified Black conservatives since the 1990s. Yet a more grassroots approach to understanding the wider scope of conservative views within the African American community remains largely understudied.

Since African Americans represent the most partisan of any racial group in the United States with a historic voting record of support for the Democratic Party, scholars continue to debate the contested meaning of Black conservatism due to the apparent disconnect between ideology, partisanship, and voter choice. ¹³ Conservative Blacks seldom vote Republican at the national level, they are more likely to support a local candidate who deviates from the national party’s platform, and they tend to be more liberal on issues of race. With the exception of Black neoconservatives, African Americans who hold conservative views on a variety of issues ranging from welfare and public education to gay marriage or abortion tend to vote for the Democratic Party.

This article contributes to more recent works by scholars who question the conventional, narrow views of Black conservatism through their analysis of a more fluid definition that challenges monolithic representations. Leah Wright-Rigueur, Joshua Farrington, and La Tasha B. Levy offer a more sophisticated way of understanding modern Black Republicanism (primarily at the national and state level), examining the intersection of race, civil rights, and conservatism from the 1930s to the 1980s. ¹⁴ Moreover, Tasha Philpot and Angela K. Lewis disrupt the binary construct of liberal/conservative in their examination of Black conservatism by looking at its multilayered meanings and overlooked grassroots support among Black Democrats. Philpot contends that racial group consciousness helps to explain conservative Blacks’ reluctance to identify as Republicans, and Lewis points out that Black support for the Democratic Party “does not negate the fact that Blacks are just as moral and religious as conservatives and Republicans. Black loyalty to the Democratic Party simply means that race matters; it always matters.” ¹⁵ The importance of race and group-based norms of political behavior among African Americans has been described as racialized social constraint by some political scientists, a term that “rests not on blacks concerned with whites questioning their blackness but rather on the social costs to be paid when other blacks question their commitment to or standing within the racial group.” ¹⁶ Specifically, voting for the Republican Party is viewed as undermining the group interests of African Americans and their ability to leverage political power.

Lester K. Spence’s study of the neoliberal turn in Black politics since the early seventies offers insights into the wider scope of Black conservative thought on crime and culture. He contends that African American elected officials alongside some of their constituents in chocolate cities endorsed anticrime policies which negatively impacted poor Black communities, but their alliance with the Democratic Party and racial identity made them seemingly more palatable. In his critique of Philadelphia ex-Mayor Michael Nutter and former Police Chief Sylvester Johnson’s response to high crime rates and a series of (Black) flash mobs in the early 2000s—which resulted in curfews, fines, calls for more Black policing, and moralizing speeches at predominantly African American churches—Spence argued,

Neither could be said to dislike black people or black culture. But even as their cultural roots connected them to their communities in certain ways, it also gave them the latitude to criticize their black constituencies in ways their white counterparts arguably couldn’t. ¹⁷

The social cost of identifying with the Republican Party of Barry Goldwater or Richard Nixon may have been too high for the majority of African Americans, but it did not dissuade a significant number of them from adopting a more conservative approach to crime in cities controlled by Democrats and where African Americans held considerable power with the rise of Black elected officials. Anticrime attitudes in the Black community that underlined personal responsibility and self-help alongside root causes have a deep-rooted history in conservative Black political thought, especially the racial uplift ideology of Booker T. Washington and the African American elite; but legitimate fears of the rising crime rate in the 1970s crystalized their latent conservative views about crime and policing that heightened during the postwar urban crisis.

Black-on-Black Crime

Black-on-Black crime has become a highly politicized and racially charged term used to define urban violence in today’s public lexicon, especially since some conservative political commentators have employed it as a retort against the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Mostly conservative media pundits argue that BLM protesters should be equally, indeed if not more, outraged at the high rate of crime and homicides in their own communities (rather than police shootings of unarmed Black men). However, this perspective not only obscures the protracted fears and concerns about Black-on-Black crime that eventually led to the proliferation of anticrime organizations in African American communities during the 1970s, but it also ignores its complicated history.

Historians, sociologists, and criminologists have reexamined the national discourse around Black-on-Black crime to underscore its socioeconomic causes while drawing attention to the ways in which the War on Crime expanded the criminalization of African Americans. By the mid-1960s, African Americans had become the most urbanized population in the country due to the Second Great Migration, and many of them were confined to socially constructed ghettos with limited resources and few options. As Thomas Sugrue observed, “Segregated housing compounded the urban crisis. The combination of deindustrialization, white flight, and hardening ghettoization proved devastating.” ¹⁸ While redlining and other forms of government sanctioned housing discrimination confined African Americans to declining neighborhoods, the eroding tax base and disinvestment in inner cities contributed to the concentration of poor and unemployed Blacks in places like Detroit and Baltimore, where an illegal drug economy became the source of survival for many young residents. In Heather Thompson’s new prologue to her book on the African American freedom struggle in Detroit during the 1960s and 1970s, she argues that “it had been the War on Crime that had created that illegal economy that, in turn, created a real crime problem” by the mid-1970s. ¹⁹ The role of public policy and structural inequalities became an integral part of the scholarship on the postwar urban crisis that emphasized root causes to explain the rise of crime in African American neighborhoods. But scholars also highlighted the racially biased understandings of crime and questioned the conventional wisdom about crime trends during this period.

Khalil Muhammad, Elizabeth Hinton, and Marie Gottschalk have critiqued crime statistics that primarily came from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, which was based on data given to the agency by the police. ²⁰ Commenting on how flawed statistical data distorted the picture of Black crime, Hinton points out that FBI information failed to look at whether suspects were convicted, which contributed to its deceptive reporting. Even though crime reports from the 1970s showed that African Americans had the highest rate of arrest for murder, robbery, and rape, “these crimes also had the lowest percentage of arrestees who eventually faced prosecution and trial.” The FBI primarily targeted street crime in Black neighborhoods which surveilled mostly young African American men in urban centers, resulting in a disproportionate number of first-time offenders becoming hardened criminals. ²¹

Despite the misleading information about crime reporting in the early 1970s, political science professor Lisa Miller explains that the disproportionate homicide rates among African Americans cannot be ignored. According to Miller, “In 1960, Black males were murdered at rates 10 times that of White males (36.7 compared to 3.6) and Black women nearly 10 times that of White females. By 1972, the order of magnitude difference for males remained, but rates had climbed to 76.2 and 7.6, respectively.” ²² Her findings reinforce American legal scholar James Forman Jr’s study of African American support for “get tough” measures on crime and drugs in Washington, D.C. In his observation of the historically unprecedented crime wave that devastated African American communities during the city’s heroin epidemic, Forman writes,

The problem wasn’t limited to D.C.; crime was spiraling out of control in black communities across the country. In Philadelphia murder rates nearly doubled in the 1960s; in Boston, Detroit, and New York, they more than doubled; Cleveland’s more than tripled. ²³

The rise of Black-on-Black crime also had an impact on the uptick in theses and dissertations (especially at Historically Black Colleges and Universities) that began to document this crisis. ²⁴

The surging Black-on-Black crime rate arose in urban communities that struggled to provide adequate solutions to a real problem. As a result, an increasing number of African Americans became more open to punitive policies toward crime that were not based on partisanship but local concerns. The ideological tensions between their emphasis on “root causes” and the “politics of responsibility” are critical to understanding the nuances of Black conservatism(s), because it accentuates structural racism while simultaneously blaming the cultural values of Black people or their individual behavior for soaring crime in cities.

The Invisible Black Community and Law and Order

As the invisible Black community became more vocal about crime in their communities, anticrime activists within this group began to espouse a law-and-order rhetoric that paralleled and deviated from white conservatives. Although both U.S. political parties embraced anti-Black law-and-order politics during the 1960s and 1970s, most African Americans associated the alienating concept with Senator Barry Goldwater’s racially divisive presidential campaign in 1964 and the racially coded messaging of presidential candidate Richard Nixon. During the hotly contested 1968 presidential campaign, Nixon promoted his infamous “southern strategy” to win the South by targeting its emerging middle-class suburban constituency and ostensibly distancing himself from Goldwater’s more explicit appeal to law and order and southern white segregationists under “Operation Dixie.” ²⁵ President Nixon denied the claim that preserving law and order had become a euphemism for criminalizing Blacks by stressing its importance to all Americans—especially African Americans who were its main victims. ²⁶ His statement that African Americans “want law and order with justice” appeared disingenuous, especially since his campaign commercial of a middle-aged white woman walking by herself down a dark street in the middle of night while clutching her purse invoked racial imagery that intentionally appealed to the silent majority of “forgotten” white voters, not Blacks. ²⁷ Even though an important number of African Americans supported Nixon’s reelection campaign in 1972, he received only 13 percent of the Black vote because of the strong opposition to his law-and-order politics and controversial position on school desegregation.

Most African Americans dreaded crime in their neighborhoods, but the invisible Black community remained silent out of fear of being associated with racist, conservative politicians who railed against urban crime while calling for law and order. The bipartisan roots of the punitive policies of the War on Crime originated during the presidential administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and these policies were shaped by culture of poverty arguments which perceived Black family dysfunction and social pathology or behavioral deficiencies as the primary reasons for crime. ²⁸ Yet during the early 1970s, law-and-order politics coupled with rhetoric that attributed crime to African American culture had become an alienating idea in the Black community that was more widely linked to white conservatives who used this racially coded language to criminalize Blacks. Thus, this partially helps to explain why many African Americans felt compelled to remain silent about addressing crime to avoid reinforcing racist tropes of an already marginalized group. In November 1970, Bayard Rustin, a prominent civil rights leader and labor activist, attributed this reluctance to speak out vigorously in favor of more law enforcement to three myths: most crimes are committed by Blacks against whites, anticrime programs denote anti-Black agendas, and law and order is racist and conservative. ²⁹ However, conservative ideas about crime and punishment started to garner more appeal as the crime situation worsened in African American neighborhoods and domestic programs seemingly had little impact on distressed inner cities.

As crime escalated in their communities, Black anticrime activists were more open to a conservative discourse on law and order and punishment that underlined the inherent tension within a kind of Black conservativism that aimed to avoid criminalizing Blacks while ultimately holding them individually accountable for the uptick in crime. Many of them feared that crime and drugs would cripple the Black community if they did not begin to take more immediate and drastic action. In 1974, Andrew Barrett, executive director of the Chicago NAACP, declared,

Blacks have always been concerned about crime, but have hesitated to crusade against it because of the negative meaning of the “crime in the street” and “law and order” slogans. But the situation is so bad now that action is the only thing left. ³⁰

The following year, Ethel Payne, renowned African American journalist and columnist for the Chicago Daily Tribune, commented on the surge of Black-on-Black crime conferences and proliferation of anticrime organizations in Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, to name a few. In a New York Times interview she told the reporter, “Today’s intense interest in crime among blacks represents a reversal of black attitudes a decade ago when many blacks voted against the Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, because of his ‘law and order’ views on crime.” “The climate was very different ten years ago, but ‘Black-on-Black’ crime showed people that there is a personal responsibility in the fight on crime,” she noted. ³¹ In 1976, Reverend Jesse Jackson, executive director of Operation PUSH, a Chicago-based civil rights organization, made no apologies about being more outspoken on crime. “We must be tough on crime,” he explained. “Handguns ought to leave. Dope pushers must be dealt with severely, and the streets must be made safe for normal citizens.” ³² Even though this shift in African American attitudes was not a reflection of their political alignment with the right or Republican Party, it did underscore the salience of more conservative views on crime.

The emergence of Black-on-Black crime conferences, scholarly publications, and heightened attention in the African American press shows that the walls of fear and silence surrounding Black-on-Black crime were breaking down. On October 14, 1974, the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice organized a two-day series of workshops in Washington, D.C. that brought together Black churchmen, community organizers, elected officials, and police officers who focused on developing strategies to curtail rising crime in the African American community. ³³ The following year, Howard University hosted a three-day conference, titled “Crime and Its Impact on the Black Community,” which attracted more than 200 people from across the country to discuss efforts to curb the significant rate of crime. ³⁴ The growth of national minority crime conferences coincided with increased coverage of crime in African American newspapers that put a spotlight on the issue. In fact, in 1979, Ebony magazine dedicated an entire issue to Black-on-Black crime that had “reached a level that threatens our existence as a people,” according to publisher John H. Johnson. ³⁵

As crime rates spiked in cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Memphis, and Miami, Black civic leaders (especially African American elected officials, civil rights leaders, newspapers, and members of Black law enforcement) called for tough-on-crime measures, personal accountability, and more police protection. Their racialized experiences as a historically marginalized group had a profound impact on their brand of conservatism, which was not driven by party ideology but a desperate attempt to resolve a local crisis that required immediate action at the grassroots level. In 1975, for example, the Memphis NAACP chapter launched its OPERATION Whistlestop program in several neighborhoods that required residents to carry whistles to blow if they witness a crime or were a victim (anyone hearing a whistle is asked to call the police). Remarking on the need for such a program, Mrs. Vasco Smith, a member of the Memphis Board of Education, said, “Blacks have never been against law and order if it is tempered with justice.” Smith criticized the criminal justice system for cheapening and undermining the value of Black lives by giving longer sentences for Black crimes committed against white people. She professed, “We’ve got to equalize the penalties so it’s equally painful for a black to be offending a black as for offending a white.” ³⁶ Like other anticrime activists, respecting the quality of Black life was the driving force behind Smith’s more hard-nosed stance on sentencing African American perpetrators. Seeking equal or more punishment for Black male perpetrators in a criminal justice system that disproportionately targeted them illustrates some of the inherent paradoxes within Black conservatisms, particularly among anticrime activists.

Members of African American law enforcement represented some of the most outspoken advocates of conservative law-and-order rhetoric that acknowledged the deep-seated causes of crime but placed even greater emphasis on moral responsibility and individual accountability. In 1975, Roosevelt Dunning, Deputy Commissioner of New York City Police, delivered a speech at St. John’s Baptist Church, a predominantly African American congregation. Hearkening back to Chief Boone’s opening remarks about the fear of discussing crime in the Black community, Dunning compared the apparent silence around Black-on-Black crime to “the retarded child of the family in years past,” whom everyone knew existed but failed to accept.

The pathologies or conditions that breed crime, such as poor housing, joblessness, miseducation, and institutionalized racism, are not to be discounted as root causes. However, as a professional police official, I see the other side of the ledger, and it is not pleasant. It is at times apathy, indifference, hostility to any police action, and over-identification with the criminal. While the aforementioned rationalizations are cogent and oppressive, they must not be allowed to become solutions, or reasons to do nothing. ³⁷

Dunning expressed his ambivalence about discussing such a sensitive issue in the Black community while acknowledging the mitigating factors that breed crime in urban communities. But he also accused African Americans of tolerating lawlessness and failing to take responsibility for the discipline and moral training of their children. ³⁸ The inability to fully reconcile the tension between cultural reasons for Black-on-Black crime and structural ones is at the heart of Black conservatism among anticrime leaders.

Beyond African American law enforcement, national and local crime surveys from the 1970s show that Black residents were increasingly receptive to conservative tough-on-crime measures while demanding more accountability from local police. While the national shift to the right during this period shaped Black urban dwellers’ perception of crime, the greater threat of being victimized in their own communities had an equally, if not more, significant effect. In 1973, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA; founded as part of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968) conducted its first national study on criminal victimization surveying 60,000 households; it showed that African Americans, especially young men, were more likely to be victims of crime than whites. ³⁹ During the same year, a Gallup poll based on personal interviews with 1,504 adults (18 and older) in more than 300 localities across the nation revealed that one in three urban dwellers had been victimized by crime. The study found that when Americans were asked if they thought courts in their area “deal too harshly with criminals or not harshly enough” a majority of Blacks interviewees (64 percent) said “not harshly enough.” ⁴⁰ These punitive attitudes represented by almost two thirds of African Americans underscore the findings of polls conducted at the local and state levels, despite their limitations due to a smaller sample of people being interviewed. In 1975, for example, an American University poll posed the following question to approximately 900 persons in the District of Columbia: “Do you think stiffer sentences for criminals would cut down crime?” More African Americans (74%) than whites (61%) said yes, and an even larger number of Blacks (82%) agreed while 62 percent of whites approved when asked if they thought tougher policies on parole would cut down crime. ⁴¹ Similarly, one year after the District of Columbia study, a NYT poll indicated that four out of five of 722 residents surveyed throughout the state agreed with the statement, “Punishment for people who break the law should be made stiffer to discourage crime.” In the same study, however, more than half of whites opposed the prison furlough system while Blacks and Hispanics supported it. ⁴² In contrast to Washington, D.C. and New York, Black residents in Detroit responded quite differently when asked about the most effective way to reduce crime. While 25 percent of whites supported stricter courts, only 11 percent of African Americans agreed; they prioritized more policing and jobs over punitive measures on crime. ⁴³

The complexities of Black conservative attitudes toward crime become even more apparent when considering survey respondents’ mixed views on policing. Although African Americans and whites agreed on most survey issues about perceived rising crime rates, they differed on attitudes toward policing in the National Crime Survey program and LEAA’s victimization reports published in 1978. For instance, in response to questions about police performance in Miami, Milwaukee, and Washington, D.C., whites were twice as likely as African Americans to give the police a “good” rating. In contrast to the majority of white respondents who suggested improving personal resources for police, African Americans viewed operational practices and community policing as the most effective way to improve their performance. ⁴⁴

Most of the surveys/polls and anticrime leadership took place in largely Democratic-led cities where Black conservatisms rooted in a grassroots law-and-order politics could flourish without fear of local people being maligned as anti-Black for placing equally, if not more, emphasis on morality, punitive measures, and the personal responsibilities of Blacks to address crime rather than structural inequalities. Yet Black civic leaders like Police Chief Dunning identified the “root causes” of crime and some of the surveys revealed the lack of trust in policing among Black communities. The friction between wanting stricter penalties for Black-on-Black crime while assailing the broken U.S. criminal justice system and demanding more policing while drawing attention to systemic problems with law enforcement underscores the complexities of Black conservatism among anticrime activists.

African American Newspapers’ Anticrime War

African American newspapers waged a fierce campaign against crime, underscoring the nuances of conservative attitudes that emphasized the effects of structural racism while drawing attention to perceived pathologies rooted in Black culture. While some African American readers criticized Black newspapers for being too conservative in their messaging on crime, others praised their efforts to address a problem that had created a code of silence in their communities. The Chicago Defender, for example, received harsh criticism from some Black readers for its coverage of crime. In a letter to the editor, Barbara A. Sizemore complained that in March 1972 the African American–owned newspaper published seven articles on Black-on-Black crime without mentioning the daily occurrences of police brutality, the rampant unemployment of Black men (especially ages 15-25), and the impact of institutional racism on crime. In fact, she accused the Defender of supporting “the same law and order line that George Wallace preaches,” and castigated the newspaper for not dedicating as much attention to government and laws that created crime-ridden conditions. ⁴⁵ Conversely, Vernessa M. Jones, president of the Ogontz Area Neighbors Association, praised the Philadelphia Tribune for its community call to action on crime and tough-on-crime approach. In the letter she wrote to the editor in 1976, Vernessa criticized Blacks for spending too much time “worrying about what the white man has done to us” and placed more emphasis on the moral and spiritual fabric of the community, especially racial dignity and pride. She discussed the need for more parental responsibility of children and a mandatory curfew from 8 p.m. until midnight to address many of the teenage problems related to crime and violence. Similar to other African American residents concerned about crime, she embraced a politics of responsibility that critically influenced her “get tough” course of action against Black-on-Black violence. She believed that the lesser penalty meted out to African American perpetrators who committed a crime against another person of color devalued the victim’s humanity while jeopardizing the safety of the entire community. She wrote, “The double standard used by judges must stop. Life must be dealt with as a God-given life, a life that cannot be reproduced, rather than a Black life which is invaluable and a white life which is valuable.” ⁴⁶ Even though anticrime advocates adopted a more hardline approach to crime, their efforts were driven by an attempt to address the criminal justice system’s leniency toward Black offenders when they committed a crime against Black victims.

Black newspapers exposed the underlying causes of crime while calling for an increasingly conservative grassroots “politics of personal responsibility” that supported harsher penalties and offered cultural critiques of Black criminality. Winston E. Moore, a trained psychology and chief of security for the Chicago Housing Authority, wrote a biting article in the 1979 Ebony magazine issue on crime titled “Going Easy on Criminals Encourages Crime.” After addressing the history of a dual “justice” system in the United States and drug-related offenses that constituted seventy percent of Black-on-Black crime, Moore railed against African Americans for “coddling the hoodlums” who have turned life in the nation’s urban ghettos into a veritable hell. ⁴⁷ He also challenged the poverty explanations for crime by arguing that the majority of unemployed law-abiding citizens in the African American community undermine this argument. ⁴⁸ While Moore did not refrain from castigating the criminal element in Black communities, he also stressed the importance of holding elected officials accountable by encouraging African Americans to make it clear that they

will no longer put up with the prevailing racist, White-controlled dual criminal justice system which comes down hard on Black criminals when their victims are White but lets them off with a slap on the wrist for a comparable crime whenever the victims are Black. ⁴⁹

In addition, Moore’s article evoked passionate responses from many Ebony readers who provide a sampling of conservative voices in the Black community that deemphasized the systemic problems associated with crime by accentuating the perceived criminal behavior of individuals. Rodgers Newman of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, praised the article and exhorted, “It is high time that we cease making excuses for criminals by blaming their criminality on racism, poverty, hopelessness, and unemployment.” ⁵⁰ Newman’s views underscored the argument of those who strongly supported his perspective and even used similarly jarring language to differentiate decent Black people from criminals.

Protecting Black Womanhood

Gender-based violence significantly influenced the law-and-order messaging of African American anticrime advocates, particularly those who viewed the assault on Black womanhood as a justification for tough-on-crime measures. During the second half of the twentieth century, an increasing number of Black women’s testimonies against sexual violence marked a significant shift within a tradition of silence in the African American community that historian Darlene Clark Hine has described as a “culture of dissemblance.” In Danielle McGuire’s groundbreaking book on Black women, sexual assault, and the civil rights movement, she explains, “African American women’s refusal to remain silent offered African American men an opportunity to assert themselves as men by rallying around the protection of black womanhood.” ⁵¹ Even though Black women found the courage to testify against the ubiquitous assault of white men, they invariably remained silent about intraracial attacks for multiple reasons—including protecting Black men from a criminal justice system that disproportionately targeted them. However, as African Americans became more vocal critical of Black-on-Black crime, they also spoke out against Black male perpetrators who were increasingly viewed as enemies of the community. In 1976, the Philadelphia Tribune editorialized,

The time has arrived for the total community to declare an all-out war against criminals who make it unsafe for women to walk the streets, to leave our homes to go to work or to shop, or for our children to play in schoolyards or playgrounds.

In outrage against the ostensible disregard for Black life, particularly vulnerable women and children, the newspaper declared, “We cannot pass the buck to the police or put the blame for crime on discrimination.” ⁵² Two years earlier, Senator Charles Chew, an African American Democrat best known for his involvement in civil rights, gave a blistering speech on crime that lamented the assault on Black female victims of crime. After recounting the number of illegal shootings, stabbings, and crime in Chicago, Sen. Chew proclaimed,

Police should question suspicious looking niggers because our poor black women have as much to live for and live in freedom, as those rich white women. I think our problem lies with the police department, using all available techniques after crimes have been committed and a damn few preventative measures. Maybe, I am one who has been guilty of attempting to hold back some of the measures needed to prevent crime. ⁵³

Chew seemingly bemoans the fact that he has been too soft on crime by not adopting stronger preventative measures while drawing attention to the humanity of African American women who deserve the same protection as white women.

Not just elected officials but local people and grassroots organizations also took a more hardline approach to crime that diminished the significance of root causes when the victims were Black women and girls. In a letter to the editor of the Chicago Defender, Mollie Ward wrote that 65 percent of the 20,000 murders in 1974 were Black victims. “It may be theoretically satisfying to some to explain criminal behavior in terms of inadequate education or economic opportunity, but that is a small comfort to a mother whose 15-year-old daughter is gang-raped on her way to school as happened recently in Chicago,” she wrote. ⁵⁴ For women like Ward, structural explanations about crime became harder to support because she prioritized the pain of Black victims—especially when they were young girls.

Although Black women–led anticrime organizations adopted a multifaceted agenda that recognized the importance of addressing the socioeconomic roots of crime, the gendered experiences of rape victims also shaped their more conservative law-and-order approach to policing African American communities (particularly the behavior of Black men). In February 1974, African American journalist Ethel Payne, Congresswoman Cardiss Collins (D-IL), and Connie Seals (executive director of the Illinois Human Relations Commission) co-founded the Coalition of Concerned Women in the War on Crime (CCWWC). They joined approximately forty Black women from local organizations and communities at the Chicago Daily Defender to launch a major campaign against crime in Black neighborhoods. The grave concerns of women like Val Gray Ward, who lamented the “corrosive influences in the media” and “called for a campaign to clean up the smut that is destroying black children,” animated discussions about Black-on-Black crime at the inaugural meeting. The newly formed group of women established an agenda for their anticrime crusade that outlined the importance of cooperating with the Chicago Police Department, fostering “great citizenship responsibility” and supporting an upcoming rally against rape sponsored by the League of Black Women. ⁵⁵ In their “War on Crime” position statement CCWWC announced,

Women and children, in particular, are the chief victims of crime. To sit by and deplore the dastardly deeds that are committed by the hoodlums roaming our streets and menacing our homes is not enough. Only through strong, united citizen action can we, the people, become the masters and not be intimated slaves of criminals.

As Simon Balto points out in his book on policing in Black Chicago, “The fact of the matter is that plenty of black citizens—contra the Panthers—wanted more, not less, police in their communities” and “they argued that police operations as currently constituted were not doing enough to keep people safe.” ⁵⁶ At the same time, however, CCWWC was “equally concerned about police brutality and corruption” in Chicago. ⁵⁷ The women’s organization adopted an all-of-the-above strategy toward crime that confronted police brutality and sought ways to address the social inequities often associated with high crime in Black communities. Yet the safety of Black people, especially women and children (alongside efforts to combat negative cultural influences), was a top priority for the organization.

The CCWWC’s newsletter identified the unique dangers facing African American women who were often the victims of sexual assault. Dee Maybin, a representative of the women’s coalition, presented a seventeen-point list of safety measures for Black women to protect themselves against rape in her report on crime tips. Some of the tips encouraged Black women to: (a) Never leave your doors or windows unlocked; (b) Don’t take shortcuts, walk on busy streets at night to avoid attacks; and (c) If you think someone is inside your home—don’t go in—call the police. The organization also established a hotline for women to call if they needed additional tips to prevent rape. ⁵⁸ In another one of their efforts to teach African Americans—especially women—how to protect themselves from criminals, CCWWC featured an article in the Defender that showed a cartoon image of a determined woman with a shoe in her hand pounding on the table. In this image with the caption “Rapping Hard Against Crime,” the woman used the heel of the shoe to destroy the legs that had signs labeled “Rapes” and “Crime Streets.” ⁵⁹

The emergence of organizations like the Black Women’s Coalition Against Rape (BWCAR; founded 1982) demonstrated African American women’s efforts to make the taboo of intraracial sexual assault an integral part of the anticrime campaign against Black-on-Black violence. Like CCWWC, BWCAR established a rape telephone hotline number, whistle program, escort service, and self-defense programs. The group also created a neighborhood watch program that encouraged residents to monitor the neighborhood by “looking for any suspicious men in the area.” In addition to providing classes and community programs designed to reduce the number of sexual assaults against Black women, BWCAR offered rewards for information “leading to the arrest and conviction of rapists.” In April 1982, the organization offered a thousand dollar reward for any leads resulting in the arrest of three men accused of abducting and raping a young woman. In a press release, Marlinda Flowers, president of BWCAR, wrote, “None of us can feel secure as long as our mothers, sisters, and daughters are being victimized by sexual assaulters.” Commenting on Black-on-Black crime, Flowers said the sexual assault of Black women deserves more attention, and the societal pressures caused by racial discrimination against Black men should not mitigate their crime. “In the Inner City, the majority of heads of household are women. But they don’t go out and rob banks or kill people,” she declared. Even though Flowers hoped to eventually persuade Black men to join BWCAR, she believed that “black women need a group for themselves” to speak boldly about sexual assault crimes in their neighborhoods without fear of “betraying the race.”

Recent scholarship on the feminist war on crime examines how women fighting against gendered offenses championed penal reform measures often associated with modern conservatism that contributed to the rise of mass incarceration. As Aya Gruber argues in her book on feminism’s influence on criminal law, feminist groups advanced reform agendas that “expanded police and prosecutorial power, emphasized criminals’ threat to vulnerable women, diverted scare resources to law enforcement, and ultimately made feminists soldiers in the late twentieth-century war on crime.” ⁶⁰ Although Gruber’s work examines a much later time period and not all Black anticrime advocates (including women) identified as feminists, it provides insights into the forces motivating them to adopt harsher policies. The racialized gendered experiences of Black women shaped Black anticrime advocates, who viewed protecting them as an important part of the African American freedom struggle. In 1980, for example, historian Manning Marable wrote an article in the Oakland Post, titled “Rape and Race: Our Violence Against Black Women,” assailing Black institutions for their “male-dominant culture sanctions” and failure to protect their daughters, mothers, wives, and sisters from violence. Manning called for the names of rapists and sexual offenders to be “spread throughout every community, in an effort to pressure police to enforce the law.” He added,

If we are unable to combat rape systematically and to drive black sexual offenders out of our neighborhoods, how can we be seriously expected to wage the freedom struggle against the system? If black men cannot uproot the backward sexist patterns of male behavior within ourselves, how can sisters expect us to be serious about our commitment to black liberation? ⁶¹

The gendered aspect of urban crime fostered a Black conservatism steeped in a patriarchal masculinity that promoted tough polices on crime against male perpetrators to protect Black womanhood while affirming the humanity and dignity of female rape survivors who deserved equal justice under the law. It empowered African American men to assert their manhood by trying to solve a seemingly internal problem in their communities through cultural uplift and galvanized Black women to take a bold stand against sexual assault that called for strong anticrime policies. But Black women–led anticrime organizations like the CCWWC and their male allies such as Marable Manning also challenged external problems or systemic racism in the criminal justice system and police brutality which disproportionately affected Black men.

Conclusion

Members of the invisible Black community included grassroots anticrime activists who established initiatives that had deep roots in the conservative tradition of self-help and moral uplift. Their attitudes toward crime were not only shaped by rising crime rates but also federal funding for anticrime measures. Under LBJ’s administration, LEAA became the driving force behind the president’s War on Crime that modernized law enforcement and allocated “resources to increasing the nation’s punitive and carceral capacities,” which included anticrime funding in Black communities. ⁶² In 1975, a group of Black anticrime activists led a multifaceted war on crime in Milwaukee, WS, under the auspices of Project Respect, Inc., a federal nonprofit, tax exempt crime control program that received funding from the LEAA to help promote some of its objectives, which included encouraging “citizen participation in crime prevention in cooperation with law enforcement and the criminal justice system, with emphasis on crime education and information.” ⁶³ Its parent organization, the United Black Community Council (UBCC; founded 1974), promoted self-help and community control of African American neighborhoods to fight against high crime rates, unemployment, and neighborhood deterioration. ⁶⁴ After its inception, UBCC initiated an aggressive campaign called “Warning! We Must Respect Each Other” to alert the larger community (especially criminals) about the urgent need to stop crime, and Project Respect soon developed in response to the demand for a broader anticrime movement.

Project Respect’s vigilant approach to community policing promoted a conservative law-and-order ethos in African American neighborhoods absent the overt racial biases of various white political leaders. Between the 1970s and 1980s, much of the promotional literature for Project Respect and UBCC highlighted the importance of crime prevention through advertisements of businesses with captions of anticrime slogans, published lists of patrons who endorsed the “We Support Crime Prevention,” and cartoon drawings that alerted the community about the imminent internal threat to the Black community that must be stopped. One photograph in their brochure, for example, showed three Black women driving a car at the 5th Annual “Warning: We Must Respect Each Other Campaign” (1979-1980) parade with a sign on the side door that read: “Milwaukee Courier Supports Project Respects. Fight to Stop Black-on-Black Crime.” ⁶⁵ (The Milwaukee Courier was the leading African American newspaper in the city.) Another sketch of an ominous dark male figure groping a disheveled woman screaming for help painted a stark picture of the female victim being assaulted by the rapist. Even though some of their illustrations conjured up stereotypical images of Black people rooted in racist beliefs used to defend white supremacy, they were intended for a targeted Black audience grappling with an endemic problem. ⁶⁶ Anticrime organizations like UBCC and its affiliate, Project Respect, developed in other major cities across the country.

The Philadelphia chapter of the Black Economic Development Conference, Inc. (BEDC; founded 1974) declared war on the “Black Mafia,” an African American organized crime syndicate that controlled the distribution of heroin and cocaine in the city’s Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods. ⁶⁷ Rev. Muhammad Kenyatta, a Baptist minister and executive director of BEDC, condemned white supremacy and the racial exploitation of African American communities while forcefully speaking out against former police commissioner Frank Rizzo’s law-and-order approach to policing Black and Brown communities in the city. However, these views did not dissuade BEDC from seeking support from local law enforcement to strengthen their fight against African American organized crime. In January 1974, Kenyatta held a morning press conference at the Sheraton Hotel that outlined BEDC’s nine-point crusade against Black-on-Black crime, which included meetings with Mayor Frank Rizzo, Police Commissioner Joseph O’Neill, and District Attorney-elect Emmett Fitzpatrick. “We are damn sick and tired of dope pushers parading through our community with apparent amnesty from the law,” said Kenyatta. “We ask Commissioner O’Neill to crack down on all known hardcore pushers, their bosses and financers,” he added. ⁶⁸ In contrast to the white, blue-collar conservatism and law and order politics in Northeast Philadelphia that “derived from the politicization of a culture of reverence for the police that was indebted to the mutually reinforcing politics of race, space, and class commonality,” the conservatism of Black Nationalist leaders like Kenyatta, who sought police protection and strict law enforcement, was fueled by a desire to protect African American communities from the crime and destruction exacerbated by the Black Mafia. ⁶⁹

Black anticrime leaders in Detroit and Chicago adopted an all-of-the-above strategy that addressed socioeconomic factors while employing rhetoric of a deviant culture later touted by Black neoconservatives. In 1969, the Detroit Urban League launched its Total Citizens’ Campaign Against Crime in Our Streets (TCCAC) in a city that developed the infamous reputation as the “murder capital” of the country during the mid-1970s. The organization advanced a holistic agenda that focused on education, juvenile delinquency, neighborhood block associations, and police–community relations, and its social action committee made a concerted effort to push for stricter legislation at the city and state levels. One of their initiatives stressed the need for existing curfew laws to “be aggressively enforced, making parents responsible for the actions of their children.” ⁷⁰ In addition, TCCAC supported Detroit Mayor Jerome Patrick Cavanagh’s plan to put more police officers on the streets while encouraging cooperation between the local Board of Education and Police Department to get police counselors in district schools “with authority to arrest on the spot (in schools) if necessary.” ⁷¹ To be fair, notwithstanding these more disciplinary actions, various committees addressed the silence surrounding “white-collar crime” and problems with the racialization of crime. ⁷²

The grassroots activism of anticrime organizations demonstrates how the urban crisis of crime which affected the day-to-day lives of African Americans significantly influenced the range of conservative thought in postwar Black America. Their anticrime campaigns challenge conventional views of Black conservatism by shifting the focus away from prominent individuals and organizations typically associated with either the Republican Party or a relatively small group of self-described conservatives. Scholars have overlooked the importance of local concerns, like crime, in the formation of a modern Black conservative ideology that was more fluid and dualistic in nature because it included an interesting mix of both liberal and conservative ideas. Indeed, the postwar urban crisis profoundly shaped the diversity of political ideology within the Black community as members of the civic elite, law enforcement, and grassroots organizations grappled with the most effective ways to address a crime epidemic in their neighborhoods. Although the invisible Black community became more forceful in combatting crime, the activism and political ideology of anticrime activists remains hidden from scholarly and popular discourse about Black conservatism.