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BY TA-NEHISI COATES

Between the World and Me

The Beautiful Struggle

Between
the World
and Me

Son,

Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me

what it meant to lose my body. The host was broadcasting

from Washington, D.C., and I was seated in a remote stu-

dio on the far west side of Manhattan. A satellite closed

the miles between us, but no machinery could close the

gap between her world and the world for which I had

been summoned to speak. When the host asked me about

my body, her face faded from the screen, and was replaced

by a scroll of words, written by me earlier that week.

The host read these words for the audience, and when

she finished she turned to the subject of my body, al-

though she did not mention it specifically. But by now I

am accustomed to intelligent people asking about the

condition of my body without realizing the nature of their

request. Specifically, the host wished to know why I felt

6 TA-NEHISI COATES

that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of

those Americans who believe that they are white, was built

on looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and

indistinct sadness well up in me.- The answer to this ques-

tion is the record of the believers themselves. The answer
is American hist01y

There is nothing extreme in this statement. Americans

deity democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness

that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of

their God. But democracy is a forgiving God and Amer-

ica’s heresies-torture, theft, enslavement-are so common

among individuals and nations that none can declare them-

selves immune. In fact, Americans, in a real sense, have

never betrayed their God. When Abraham Lincoln de-

clared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure

“that government of the people, by the people, for the

people, shall not perish from the earth,” he was not merely

being aspirational; at the onset of the Civil War, the United

States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage

in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly

meant “government of the people” but what our country

has, throughout its history, taken the political term “peo-

ple” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother

or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me.

Thus America’s problem is not its betrayal of “government

of the people,” but the means by which “the people” ac-
quired their names.

This leads us to another equally important ideal, one

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 7

that Americans implicitly accept but to which they make

no conscious claim. Americans believe in the reality of

“race” as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural

world. Racism-the need to ascribe bone-deep features to

people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them-

inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this

way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother

Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or

the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a

tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as be-

yond the handiwork of men.

But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the

process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of

genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.

Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the pre-

eminence ofhue and hair, the notion that these factors can

correctly organize a society and that they signifY deeper

attributes, which are indelible-this is the new idea at the

heart of these new people who have been brought up hope-

lessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.

These new people are, like us, a modern invention. But

unlike us, their new name has no real meaning divorced

from the machinery of criminal power. The new people

were something else before they were white-Catholic,

Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish-and if all our na-

tional hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be

something else again. Perhaps they will truly become

American and create a nobler basis for their myths. I can-

8 TA-NEHISI COATES

not call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of

washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the

belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tast-

ings and ice cream socials, but rath”er through the pillaging

oflife, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs;

the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the de-

struction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of chil-

dren; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to

deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own

bodies.

The new people are not original in this. Perhaps there

has been, at some point in history, some great power whose

elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of

other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to dis-

cover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse

America, because America makes no claim to the banal.

America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and no-

blest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing be-

tween the white city of democracy and the terrorists,

despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One

cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead

mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of

American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I pro-

pose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral stan-

dard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an

apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face

value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to

look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ig-

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 9

nore the great evil done in all of our names. But you and I

have never truly had that luxury. I think you know.

I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you be-

cause this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to

death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that

Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John

Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department

store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and

murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they

were oath-bound to protect. And you have seen men in

the same uniforms pummel Marlene Pinnock, someone’s

grandmother, on the side of a road. And you know now, if

you did not before, that the police departments of your

country have been endowed with the authority to destroy

your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result

of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it

originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the

destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes

without the proper authority and your body can be de-

stroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and

it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your

body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held

accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And de-

struction is merely the superlative form of a dominion

whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings,

and humiliations. All of this is common to black people.

And all of this is old for black people. No one is held re-

sponsible.

10 TA-NEHISI COATES

There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or

even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men en-

forcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting

its heritage and legacy. It is hard to face this. But all our

phrasing-race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial

profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy-serves

to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dis-

lodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs,

cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from

this. You must always remember that the sociology, the

history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regres-

sions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

That Sunday, with that host, on that news show, I tried

to explain this as best I could within the time allotted. But

at the end of the segment, the host flashed a widely shared

picture of an eleven-year-old black boy tearfully hugging

a white police officer. Then she asked me about “hope.”

And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that

I had expected to fail. And I wondered again at the indis-

tinct sadness welling up in me. Why exactly was I sad? I

came out of the studio and walked for a while. It was a

calm December day. Families, believing themselves white,

were out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were

bundled in strollers. And I was sad for these people, much

as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there

watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then

why I was sad. When the journalist asked me about my

body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 11

most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It

is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day

cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is

treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like

peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for

so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold

my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never

been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the

bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, know-

ing that the Dream persists by warring with the known

world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families,

I was sad for my country, but above all, in that moment, I

was sad for you.

That was the week you learned that the killers of Mi-

chael Brown would go free. The men who had left his

body in the street like some awesome declaration of their

inviolable power would never be punished. It was not my

expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you

were young and still believed. You stayed up till 11 P.M.

that night, waiting for the announcement of an indict-

ment and when instead it was announced that there was ,
none you said, “I’ve got to go,” and you went into your

room, and I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after,

and I didn’t hug you, and I didn’t comfort you, because I

thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell

you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it

would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents

tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your

12 TA-NEHISI COATES

world, that this is your body, and you must find some way

to live within the all of it. I tell you now that the question

of how one should live within a black body, within a

country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and

the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately an-‘
swers itself.

This must seem strange to you. We live in a “goal-

oriented” era. Our media vocabulary is full of hot takes,

big ideas, and grand theories of everything. But some time

ago I rejected magic in all its forms. This rejection was a

gift from your grandparents, who never tried to console

me with ideas of an afterlife and were skeptical of preor-

dained American glory. In accepting both the chaos ofhis-

tory and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly

consider how I wished to live-specifically, how do I live

free in this black body? It is a profound question because

America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the

black body is the clearest evidence that America is the

work of men. I have asked the question through my read-

ing and writings, through the music of my youth, through

arguments with your grandfather, with your mother, your

aunt Janai, your uncle Ben. I have searched for answers in

nationalist myth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on

other continents. The question is unanswerable, which is

not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant inter-

rogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my coun-

try, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me
against the sheer terror of disembodiment.

14 TA-NEHISI COATES

And I am afraid. I feel the fear most acutely whenever

you leave me. But I was afraid long before you, and in this

I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I

knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, ada-

mantly; dangerously afraid. I had seen this fear all my young

life, though I had not always recognized it as such.

It was always right in front of me: The fear was there in

the extravagant boys of my neighborhood, in their large

rings and medallions, their big putty coats and full-length

fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against their

world. They would stand on the corner of Gwynn Oak

and Liberty; or Cold Spring and Park Heights, or outside

Mondawmin Mall, with their hands dipped in Russell

sweats. I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear,

and all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts

of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered

’round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black

body might be torched, then cut away. The fear lived on

in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big

T-shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a cata-

log ofbehaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief

that these boys were in firm possession of everything they
desired.

I saw it in their customs of war. I was no older than five
‘

sitting out on the front steps of my home on Woodbrook

Avenue, watching two shirtless boys circle each other close

and buck shoulders. From then on, I knew that there was

a ritual to a street fight, bylaws and codes that, in their very

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 15

need, attested to all the vulnerability of the black teenage

bodies.

I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music

that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and

bluster. The boys who stood out on Garrison and Liberty

up on Park Heights loved this music because it told them,

against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of

their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies. I

saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded

bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over.

And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how

they would cut you with their eyes and destroy you with

their words for the sin of playing too much. “Keep my

name out your mouth,” they would say. I would watch

them after school, how they squared off like boxers, vas-

elined up, earrings off, Reeboks on, and leaped at each

other.

I felt the fear in the visits to my Nana’s home in Phila-

delphia. You never knew her. I barely knew her, but what

I remember is her hard manner, her rough voice. And I

knew that my father’s father was dead and that my uncle

Oscar was dead and that my uncle David was dead and

that each of these instances was unnatural. And I saw it in

my own father, who loves you, who counsels you, who

slipped me money to care for you. My father was so very

afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which

he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who

beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that is

16 TA-NEHISI COATES

exactly what was happening all around us. Everyone had

lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to

guns. It was said that these lost girls were sweet as honey

and would not hurt a fly. It was said that these lost boys had

just received a GED and had begun to turn their lives

around. And now they were gone, and their legacy was a
great fear.

Have they told you this story? When your grandmother

was sixteen years old a young man knocked on her door.

The young man was your Nana Jo’s boyfriend. No one

else was home. Ma allowed this young man to sit and wait

until your Nana Jo returned. But your great-grandmother

got there first. She asked the young man to leave. Then

she beat your grandmother terrifically, one last time, so

that she might remember how easily she could lose her

body. Ma never forgot. I remember her clutching my small

hand tightly as we crossed the street. She would tell me

that ifi ever let go and were killed by an onrushing car, she

would beat me back to life. When I was six, Ma and Dad

took me to a local park. I slipped from their gaze and

found a playground. Your grandparents spent anxious

minutes looking for me. When they found me, Dad did

what every parent I knew would have done-he reached

for his belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze,

awed at the distance between punishment and offense.

Later, I would hear it in Dad’s voice-“Either I can beat

him, or the police.” Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn’t.

All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 17

from a fire, and I cannot say whether that violence, even

administered in fear and love, sounded the alarm or choked

us at the exit. What I know is that fathers who slammed

their teenage boys for sass would then release them to

streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the

same justice. And I knew mothers who belted their girls,

but the belt could not save these girls from drug dealers

twice their age. We, the children, employed our darkest

humor to cope. We stood in the alley where we shot bas-

ketballs through hollowed crates and cracked jokes on the

boy whose mother wore him out with a beating in front

of his entire fifth-grade class. We sat on the number five

bus, headed downtown, laughing at some girl whose

mother was known to reach for anything-cable wires,

extension cords, pots, pans. We were laughing, but I know

that we were afraid of those who loved us most. Our par-

ents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague

years resorted to the scourge.

To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be

naked before the elements of the world, before all the

guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness

is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the cor-

rect and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot

of people forced for centuries to live under fear. The law

did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has be-

come an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to

say, for furthering the assault on your body. But a society

that protects some people through a safety net of schools,

18 TA-NEHJSJ COATES

government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but

can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has

either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has suc-

ceeded at something much darker. However you call it,

the result was our infirmity before the criminal forces of

the world. It does not matter if the agent of those forces is

white or black-what matters is our condition, what mat-

ters is the system that makes your body breakable.

The revelation of these forces, a series of great changes,

has unfolded over the course of my life. The changes are

still unfolding and will likely continue until I die. I was

eleven years old, standing out in the parking lot in front of

the 7 -Eleven, watching a crew of older boys standing near

the street. They yelled and gestured at … who? … another

boy, young, like me, who stood there, almost smiling,

gamely throwing up his hands. He had already learned the

lesson he would teach me that day: that his body was in

constant jeopardy. Who knows what brought him to that

knowledge? The projects, a drunken stepfather, an older

brother concussed by police, a cousin pinned in the city

jail. That he was outnumbered did not matter because the

whole world had outnumbered him long ago, and what do

numbers matter? This was a war for the possession of his

body and that would be the war of his whole life.

I stood there for some seconds, marveling at the older

boys’ beautiful sense of fashion. They all wore ski jackets,

the kind which, in my day, mothers put on layaway in Sep-

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 19

tember, then piled up overtime hours so as to have the

thing wrapped and ready for Christmas. I focused in on a

light-skinned boy with a long head and small eyes. He was

scowling at another boy, who was standing close to me. It

was just before three in the afternoon. I was in sixth grade.

School had just let out, and it was not yet the fighting

weather of early spring. What was the exact problem here?

Who could know?

The boy with the small eyes reached into his ski jacket

and pulled out a gun. I recall it in the slowest motion, as

though in a dream. There the boy stood, with the gun

brandished, which he slowly untucked, tucked, then un-

tucked once more, and in his small eyes I saw a surging

rage that could, in an instant, erase my body. That was

1986. That year I felt myself to be drowning in the news

reports of murder. I was aware that these murders very

often did not land upon the intended targets but fell upon

great-aunts, PTA mothers, overtime uncles, and joyful

children-fell upon them random and relentless, like great

sheets of rain. I knew this in theory but could not under-

stand it as fact until the boy with the small eyes stood

across from me holding my entire body in his small hands.

The boy did not shoot. His friends pulled him back. He

did not need to shoot. He had affirmed my place in the

order of things. He had let it be known how easily I could

be selected. I took the subway home that day, processing

the episode all alone. I did not tell my parents. I did not tell

20 TA-NEHISI COATES

my teachers, and ifi told my friends I would have done so

with all the excitement needed to obscure the fear that
came over me in that moment.

I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise

up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like

fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the

north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that

the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father

lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there be-

yond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were

other worlds where children did not regularly fear for

their bodies. I knew this because there was a large televi-

sion resting in my living room. In the evenings I would sit

before this television bearing witness to the dispatches

from this other world. There were little white boys with

complete collections of football cards, and their only want

was a popular girlfriend and their only worry was poison

oak. That other world was suburban and endless, organized

around pot roasts, blueberry pies, fireworks, ice cream sun-

daes, immaculate bathrooms, and small toy trucks that

were loosed in wooded backyards with streams and glens.

Comparing these dispatches with the facts of my native

world, I came to understand that my country was a galaxy,

and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium ofWest

Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I

obsessed over the distance between that other sector of

space and my own. I knew that my portion of the Ameri-

can galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 21

gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was

not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the

breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation be-

tween that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic

injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, ir-

repressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the

velocity of escape.

Do you ever feel that same need? Your life is so very

different from my own. The grandness of the world, the

real world, the whole world, is a known thing for you.

And you have no need of dispatches because you have

seeri so much of the American galaxy and its inhabitants-

their homes, their hobbies-up close. I don’t know what it

means to grow up with a black president, social networks,

omnipresent media, and black women everywhere in their

natural hair. What I know is that when they loosed the

killer of Michael Brown, you said, “I’ve got to go.” And

that cut me because, for all our differing worlds, at your

age my feeling was exactly the same. And I recall that even

then I had not yet begun to imagine the perils that tangle

us. You still believe the injustice was Michael Brown. You

have not yet grappled with your own myths and narratives

and discovered the plunder everywhere around us.

Before I could discover, before I could escape, I had to

survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets,

by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the

people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles

and strange perils that seem to rise up from the asphalt it-

22 TA-NEHISI COATES

self. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series

of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-

down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives un-

scathed. And yet the heat that springs from the constant

danger, from a lifestyle of near-death experience, is thrill-

ing. This is what the rappers mean when they pronounce

themselves addicted to “the streets” or in love with “the

game.” I imagine they feel something akin to parachutists,

rock climbers, BASE jumpers, and others who choose to

live on the edge. Of course we chose nothing. And I have

never believed the brothers who claim to “run,” much less

“own,” the city. We did not design the streets. We do not

fund them. We do not preserve them. But I was there,

nevertheless, charged like all the others with the protec-
tion of my body.

The crews, the young men who’d transmuted their fear

into rage, were the greatest danger. The crews walked the

blocks of their neighborhood, loud and rude, because it

was only through their loud rudeness that they might feel

any sense of security and power. They would break your

jaw, stomp your face, and shoot you down to feel that

power, to revel in the might of their own bodies. And their

wild reveling, their astonishing acts made their names ring

out. Reps were made, atrocities recounted. And so in my

Baltimore it was known that when Cherry Hill rolled

through you rolled the other way, that North and Pulaski

was not an intersection but a hurricane, leaving only splin-

ters and shards in its wake. In that fashion, the security of

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 23

these neighborhoods flowed downward and became the

security of the bodies living there. You steered clear of]o-

Jo, for instance, because he was cousin to Keon, the don of

Murphy Homes. In other cities, indeed in other Balti-

mores, the neighborhoods had other handles and the boys

went by other names, but their mission did not change:

prove the inviolability of their block, of their bodies,

through their power to crack knees, ribs, and arms. This

practice was so common that today you can approach any

black person raised in the cities of that era and they can tell

you which crew ran which hood in their city, and they can

tell you the names of all the captains and all their cousins

and offer an anthology of all their exploits.

To survive the neighborhoods and shield my body, I

learned another language consisting of a basic comple-

ment of head nods and handshakes. I memorized a list of

prohibited blocks. I learned the smell and feel of fighting

weather. And I learned that “Shorty, can I see your bike?”

was never a sincere question, and “Yo, you was messing

with my cousin” was neither an earnest accusation nor a

misunderstanding of the facts. These were the summonses

that you answered with your left foot forward, your right

foot back, your hands guarding your face, one slightly

lower than the other, cocked like a hammer. Or they were

answered by breaking out, ducking through alleys, cutting

through backyards, then bounding through the door past

your kid brother into your bedroom, pulling the tool out

of your lambskin or from under your mattress or out of

24 TA-NEHISI COATES

your Adidas shoebox, then calling up your own cousins

(who really aren’t) and returning to that same block, on

that same day, and to that same crew, hollering out, “Yeah,

nigger, what’s up now?” I recall learning these laws clearer

than I recall learning my colors and shapes, because these
laws were essential to the security of my body.

I think of this as a great difference between us. You have

some acquaintance with the old rules, but they are not as

essential to you as they were to me. I am sure that you have

had to deal with the occasional roughneck on the subway

or in the park, but when I was about your age, each day,

fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was

walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of

our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I

smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not-all of

which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets a
‘ culture concerned chiefly with securing the body. I do not

long for those days. I have no desire to make you “tough”
” ” h b or street, per aps ecause any “toughness” I garnered

came reluctantly. I think I was always, somehow, aware of

the price. I think I somehow knew that that third of my

brain should have been concerned with more beautiful

things. I think I felt that something out there, some force,

nameless and vast, had robbed me of … what? Time? Ex-

perience? I think you know something of what that third

could have done, and I think that is why you may feel the

need for escape even more than I did. You have seen all

the wonderful life up above the tree-line, yet you under-

———— ——

—–

—-~-

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 25

stand that there is no real distance between you and Tray-

von Martin, and thus Trayvon Martin must terrifY you in a

way that he could never terrifY me. You have seen so

much more of all that is lost when they destroy your body.

The streets were not my only problem. If the streets

shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left. Fail to

comprehend the streets and you gave up your body now.

But fail to comprehend the schools and you gave up your

body later. I suffered at the hands of both, but I resent the

schools more. There was nothing sanctified about the laws

of the streets-the laws were amoral and practical. You

rolled with a posse to the party as sure as you wore boots

in the snow, or raised an umbrella in the rain. These were

rules aimed at something obvious-the great danger that

haunted every visit to Shake & Bake, every bus ride down-

town. But the laws of the schools were aimed at something

distant and vague. What did it mean to, as our elders told

us, “grow up and be somebody”? And what precisely did

this have to do with an education rendered as rote dis-

cipline? To be educated in my Baltimore mostly meant

always packing an extra number 2 pencil and working qui-

etly. Educated children walked in single file on the right

side of the hallway, raised their hands to use the lavatory,

and carried the lavatory pass when en route. Educated

children never offered excuses-certainly not childhood

itsel£ The world had no time for the childhoods of black

boys and girls. How could the schools? Algebra, Biology,

and English were not subjects so much as opportunities to

26 TA-NEHISI COATES

better discipline the body, to practice writing between the

lines, copying the directions legibly, memorizing theorems

extracted from the world they were created to represent.

All of it felt so distant to me. I remember sitting in my

seventh-grade French class and not having any idea why

I was there. I did not know any French people, and noth-

ing around me suggested I ever would. France was a rock

rotating in another galaxy, around another sun, in another

sky that I would never cross. Why, precisely, was I sitting
in this classroom?

The question was never answered. I was a curious boy,

but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They

were concerned with compliance. I loved a few of my

teachers. But I cannot say that I truly believed any of them.

Some years after I’d left school, after I’d dropped out of

college, I heard a few lines from Nas that struck me:

Ecstasy, coke, you say it’s love, it is poison

Schools where I learn they should be burned, it is poison

That was exactly how I felt back then. I sensed the

schools were hiding something, drugging us with false

morality so that we would not see, so that we did not ask:

Why-for us and only us-is the other side of free will

and free spirits an assault upon our bodies? This is not a

hyperbolic concern. When our elders presented school to

us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but

as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing.

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 27

Fully 60 percent of all young black men who drop out of

high school will go to jail. This should disgrace the coun-

try. But it does not, and while I couldn’t crunch the num-

bers or plumb the history back then, I sensed that the fear

that marked West Baltimore could not be explained by the

schools. Schools did not reveal truths, they concealed

them. Perhaps they must be burned away so that the heart

of this thing might be known.

Unfit for the schools, and in good measure wanting to

be unfit for them, and lacking the savvy I needed to master

the streets, I felt there could be no escape for me or, hon-

estly, anyone else. The fearless boys and girls who would

knuckle up, call on cousins and crews, and, if it came to it,

pull guns seemed to have mastered the streets. But their

knowledge peaked at seventeen, when they ventured out

of their parents’ homes and discovered that America had

guns and cousins, too. I saw their futures in the tired faces

of mothers dragging themselves onto the 28 bus, swatting

and cursing at three-year-olds; I saw their futures in the

men out on the corner yelling obscenely at some young

girl because she would not smile. Some of them stood

outside liquor stores waiting on a few dollars for a bottle.

We would hand them a twenty and tell them to keep the

change. They would dash inside and return with Red Bull,

Mad Dog, or Cisco. Then we would walk to the house of

someone whose mother worked nights, play “Fuck tha

Police,” and drink to our youth. We could not get out. The

ground we walked was trip-wired. The air we breathed

—–

28 TA-NEHISI COATES

was toxic. The water stunted our growth. We could not
get out.

A year after I watched the boy with the small eyes pull

out a gun, my father beat me for letting another boy steal

fr_om me. Two years later, he beat me for threatening my

nmth-grade teacher. Not being violent enough could cost

me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body.

We could not get out. I was a capable boy, intelligent, well-

liked, but powerfully afraid. And I felt, vaguely, wordlessly,

that for a child to be marked off for such a life, to be forced

to live in fear was a great injustice. And what was the

source of this fear? What was hiding behind the smoke

screen of streets and schools? And what did it mean that

number 2 pencils, conjugations without context, Pythago-

rean theorems, handshakes, and head nods were the differ-

ence between life and death, were the curtains drawing
down between the world and me?

I could not retreat, as did so many, into the church and

its mysteries. My parents rejected all dogmas. We spurned

the holidays marketed by the people who wanted to be

white. We would not stand for their anthems. We would

~ot kneel before their God. And so I had no sense that any
JUSt God was on my side. “The meek shall inherit the

earth” meant nothing to me. The meek were battered in

West Baltimore, stomped out at Walbrook Junction, bashed

~~ on Park Heights, and raped in the showers of the city
Jatl. My understanding of the universe was physical, and its

moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box.

————-

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 29

That was the message of the small-eyed boy, untucking the

piece-a child bearing the power to body and banish

other children to memory. Fear ruled everything around

me, and I knew, as all black people do, that this fear was

connected to the Dream out there, to the unworried boys,

to pie and pot roast, to the white fences and green lawns

nightly beamed into our television sets.

But how? Religion could not tell me. The schools

could not tell me. The streets could not help me see be-

yond the scramble of each day. And I was such a curious

boy. I was raised that way. Your grandmother taught me to

read when I was only four. She also taught me to write, by

which I mean not simply organizing a set of sentences into

a series of paragraphs, but organizing them as a means of

investigation. When I was in trouble at school (which was

quite often) she would make me write about it. The writ-

ing had to answer a series of questions: Why did I feel the

need to talk at the same time as my teacher? Why did I not

believe that my teacher was entitled to respect? How

would I want someone to behave while I was talking?

What would I do the next time I felt the urge to talk to

my friends during a lesson? I have given you these same

assignments. I gave them to you not because I thought

they would curb your behavior-they certainly did not

curb mine-but because these were the earliest acts of in-

terrogation, of drawing myself into consciousness. Your

grandmother was not teaching me how to behave in class.

She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the

30 TA-NEHISJ COATES

subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing-

myself Here was the lesson: I was not an innocent. My

impulses were not filled with unfailing virtue. And feeling

that I was as human as anyone, this must be true for other

humans. If I was not innocent, then they were not inno-

cent. Could this mix of motivation also affect the stories

they tell? The cities they built? The country they claimed
as given to them by God?

Now the questions began burning in me. The materials

for research were all around me, in the form of books as-

sembled by your grandfather. He was then working at

Howard University as a research librarian in the Moorland-

Spingarn Research Center, one of the largest collections

of Africana in the world. Your grandfather loved books

and loves them to this day, and they were all over the house,

books about black people, by black people, for black peo-

ple spilling off shelves and out of the living room, boxed

up in the basement. Dad had been a local captain in the

Black Panther Party. I read through all of Dad’s books

about the Panthers and his stash of old Party newspapers. I

was attracted to their guns, because the guns seemed hon-

est. The guns seemed to address this country, which in-

vented the streets that secured them with despotic police,

in its primary language-violence. And I compared the

Panthers to the heroes given to me by the schools, men

and women who struck me as ridiculous and contrary to
everything I knew.

Every February my classmates and I were herded into

32 TA-NEHISI COATES

assemblies for a ritual review of the Civil Rights Move-

ment. Our teachers urged us toward the example of free-

dom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers,

and it seemed that the month could not pass without a

series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on

camera. The black people in these films seemed to love

the worst things in life-love the dogs that rent their chil-

dren apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the fire-

hoses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into the

streets. They seemed to love the men who raped them, the

women who cursed them, love the children who spat on

them, the terrorists that bombed them. Why are they show-

ing this to us? Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I

speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense

that blacks are in especial need of this morality. Back then

all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I

knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children

pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents

wielding extension cords, and “Yeah, nigger, what’s up

now?” I judged them against the country I knew, which

had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under

slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across

the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real

one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means.

How could the schools valorize men and women whose

values society actively scorned? How could they send us

out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they
were, and then speak of nonviolence?

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 33

I came to see the streets and the schools as arms of the

same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state

while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and

violence were the weaponry of both. Fail in the streets and

the crews would catch you slipping and take your body.

Fail in the schools and you would be suspended and sent

back to those same streets, where they would take your

body. And I began to see these two arms in relation-

those who failed in the schools justified their destruction

in the streets. The society could say, “He should have

stayed in school,” and then wash its hands of him.

It does not matter that the “intentions” of individual

educators were noble. Forget about intentions. What any

institution, or its agents, “intend” for you is secondary. Our

world is physical. Learn to play defense-ignore the head

and keep your eyes on the body. Very few Americans will

directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people

being left to the streets. But a very large number of Amer-

icans will do all they can to preserve the Dream. No one

directly proclaimed that schools were designed to sanctifY

failure and destruction. But a great number of educators

spoke of “personal responsibility” in a country authored

and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility. The point of

this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility”

is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were

broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried

our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a

sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.

34 TA-NEHISI COATES

An unceasing interrogation of the stories told to us by

the schools now felt essential. It felt wrong not to ask why,

and then to ask it again. I took these questions to my fa-

ther, who very often refused to offer an answer, and instead

referred me to more books. My mother and father were

always pushing me away from secondhand answers-even

the answers they themselves believed. I don’t know that I

have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But

every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best

of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being

“politically conscious”-as much a series of actions as a

state ofbeing, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual,

questioning as exploration rather than the search for cer-

tainty. Some things were clear to me: The violence that

undergirded the country, so flagrantly on display during

Black History Month, and the intimate violence of “Yeah,

nigger, what’s up now?” were not unrelated. And this vio-

lence was not magical, but was of a piece and by design.

But what exactly was the design? And why? I must

know. I must get out … but into what? I devoured the

books because they were the rays of light peeking out

from the doorframe, and perhaps past that door there was

another world, one beyond the gripping fear that under-
girded the Dream.

In this blooming consciousness, in this period of intense

questioning, I was not alone. Seeds planted in the 1960s,

forgotten by so many, sprung up from the ground and bore

fruit. Malcolm X, who’d been dead for twenty-five years,

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 35

exploded out of the small gatherings of his surviving apos-

tles and returned to the world. Hip-hop artists quoted him

in lyrics, cut his speeches across the breaks, or flashed his

likeness in their videos. This was the early ’90s. I was then

approaching the end of my time in my parents’ home and

wondering about my life out there. If I could have chosen

a flag back then, it would have been embroidered with a

portrait of Malcolm X, dressed in a business suit, his tie

dangling, one hand parting a window shade, the other

holding a rifle. The portrait communicated everything

I wanted to be-controlled, intelligent, and beyond the

fear. I would buy tapes of Malcolm’s speeches-“Message

to the Grassroots,” “The Ballot or the Bullet”-down at

Everyone’s Place, a black bookstore on North Avenue,

and play them on my Walkman. Here was all the angst I

felt before the heroes of February, distilled and quotable.

“Don’t give up your life, preserve your life,” he would say.

“And if you got to give it up, make it even-steven.” This

was not boasting-it was a declaration of equality rooted

not in better angels or the intangible spirit but in the sanc-

tity of the black body. You preserved your life because

your life, your body, was as good as anyone’s, because your

blood was as precious as jewels, and it should never be sold

for magic, for spirituals inspired by the unknowable here-

after. You do not give your precious body to the billy

clubs of Birmingham sheriffs nor to the insidious gravity

of the streets. Black is beautiful-which is to say that the

black body is beautiful, that black hair must be guarded

36 TA-NEHISI COATES

against the torture of processing and lye, that black skin

must be guarded against bleach, that our noses and mouths

must be protected against modern surgery. We are all our

beautiful bodies and so must never be prostrate before bar-

barians, must never submit our original self, our one of

one, to defiling and plunder.

I loved Malcolm because Malcolm never lied, unlike the

schools and their fas;ade of morality, unlike the streets and

their bravado, unlike the world of dreamers. I loved him

because he made it plain, never mystical or esoteric, be-

cause his science was not rooted in the actions of spooks

and mystery gods but in the work of the physical world.

Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first

honest man I’d ever heard. He was unconcerned with mak-

ing the people who believed they were white comfortable

in their belief. If he was angry, he said so. If he hated, he

hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the

enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds. He would

not turn the other cheek for you. He would not be a better

man for you. He would not be your morality. Malcolm

spoke like a man who was free, like a black man above the

laws that proscribed our imagination. I identified with him.

I knew that he had chafed against the schools, that he had

almost been doomed by the streets. But even more I knew

that he had found himself while studying in prison, and

that when he emerged from the jails, he returned wielding

some old power that made him speak as though his body

were his own. “If you’re black, you were born injail,” Mal-

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 37

colm said. And I felt the truth of this in the blocks I had to

avoid, in the times of day when I must not be caught walk-

ing home from school, in my lack of control over my body.

Perhaps I too might live free. Perhaps I too might wield the

same old power that animated the ancestors, that lived in

Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Nanny, Cudjoe, Malcolm X,

and speak-no, act-as though my body were my own.

My reclamation would be accomplished, like Malcolm’s,

through books, through my own study and exploration.

Perhaps I might write something of consequence someday.

I had been reading and writing beyond the purview of the

schools all my life. Already I was scribbling down bad rap

lyrics and bad poetry. The air of that time was charged

with the call for a return, to old things, to something es-

sential, some part of us that had been left behind in the

mad dash out of the past and into America.

This missing thing, this lost essence, explained the boys

on the corner and “the babies having babies.” It explained

everything, from our cracked-out fathers to HIV to the

bleached skin of Michael Jackson. The missing thing was

related to the plunder of our bodies, the fact that any claim

to ourselves, to the hands that secured us, the spine that

braced us, and the head that directed us, was contestable.

This was two years before the Million Man March. Al-

most every day I played Ice Cube’s album Death Certificate:

“Let me live my life, if we can no longer live our life, then

let us give our life for the liberation and salvation of the

black nation.” I kept the Black Power episodes of Eyes on

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 39

the Prize in my weekly rotation. I was haunted by the

shadow of my father’s generation, by Fred Hampton and

Mark Clark. I was haunted by the bodily sacrifice of Mal-

colm, by Attica and Stokely. I was haunted because I be-

lieved that we had left ourselves back there, undone by

COINTELPRO and black flight and drugs, and now in

the crack era all we had were our fears. Perhaps we should

go back. That was what I heard in the call to “keep it real.”

Perhaps we should return to ourselves, to our own pri-

mordial streets, to our own ruggedness, to our own rude

hair. Perhaps we should return to Mecca.

The New Jim Crow

Mass Incarceration in the
Age of Colorblindness

MICHELLE ALEXANDER

NEW YORK
LONDON

© 2010 by Michelle Alexander j For Nicole, Jonathan, and Corinne
All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form,
without written permission from the publisher.

Request for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to:
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Published in the United States by The New Press, NewYork, 2010
Distributed by Perseus Distribution

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Alexander, Michelle.
The new Jim Crow : mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness 1 Michelle Alexander.

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-59558-103-7 (hc. : alk. paper) 1. Criminal justice, Administration of—
United States. 2. African American prisoners—United States. 3. Race discrimination—

United States. 4. United States—Race relations. I. Title.
HV9950.A437 2010

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Introduction

J arvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather,
and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in

our electoral democracy. Cotton’s family tree tells the story of several gener

ations of black men who were born in the United States but who were de

nied the most basic freedom that democracy promises—the freedom to vote
for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one’s life. Cotton’s

great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was

beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather
was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from
voting by poii taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote be-

cause he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon

and is currently on parole.1
Cotton’s story illustrates, in many respects, the old adage “The more things

change, the more they remain the same.” In each generation, new tactics
have been used for achieving the same goals—goals shared by the Founding

Fathers. DenyingAfrican Americans citizenship was deemed essential to the

formation of the original union. Hundreds of years later, America is still not
: an egalitarian democracy. The arguments and rationalizations that have been

trotted out in support of racial exclusion and discrimination in its various

forms have changed and evolved, but the outcome has remained largely the

same. An extraordinary percentage of black men in the United States are

legally barred from voting today, just as they have been throughout most

of American history They are also subject to legalized discrimination in

2 THE NEW JIM CROW INTRODUCTION 3

employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service, just as
their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents once were.

What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the
basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In
the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, ex
plicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt.
So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to
label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we sup-
posedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals
in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African
Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—
employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to
vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other pub-
lic benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a crimi
nal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black
man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial
caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

I reached the conclusions presented in this book reluctantly. Ten years ago,
I would have argued strenuously against the central claim made here—
namely, that something akin to a racial caste system currently exists in the
United States. Indeed, if Barack Obama had been elected president back
then, I would have argued that his election marked the nation’s triumph over
racial caste—the final nail in the coffin ofJim Crow. My elation would have
been tempered by the distance yet to be traveled to reach the promised land
of racial justice in America, but my conviction that nothing remotely similar
to Jim Crow exists in this country would have been steadfast.

Today my elation over Obama’s election is tempered by a far more sober-
ing awareness. As an African American woman, with three young children
who will never know a world in which a black man could not be president of
the United States, I was beyond thrilled on election night. Yet when I walked
out of the election night party, full of hope and enthusiasm, I was immedi
ately reminded of the harsh realities of the New Jim Crow. A black man was
on his knees in the gutter, hands cuffed behind his back, as several police
officers stood around him talking, joking, and ignoring his human existence.
People poured out of the building; many stared for a moment at the black

man cowering in the street, and then averted their gaze. What did the elec

tion of Barack Obama mean for him?
Like many civil rights lawyers, I was inspired to attend law school by the

civil rights victories of the 1950s and 96Os. Even in the face of growing so-

cial and political opposition to remedial policies such as affirmative action,

I clung to the notion that the evils ofJim Crow are behind us and that, while

we have a long way to go to fulfill the dream of an ega1itarian multiracial
democracy, we have made real progress and are now struggling to hold on to

the gains of the past. I thought myjob as a civil rights lawyer was to join with

the allies of racial progress to resist attacks on affirmative action and to

eliminate the vestiges of Jim Crow segregation, including our still separate

and unequal system of education. I understood the problems plaguing poor

communities of color, including problems associated with crime and rising

incarceration rates, to be a function of poverty and lack of access to quality

education—the continuing legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Never did I seri

ously consider the possibility that a new racial caste system was operating in

this country. The new system had been developed and implemented swiftly,

and it was largely invisible, even to people, like me, who spent most of their

waking hours fighting for justice.
I first encountered the idea of a new racial caste system more than a de

cade ago, when a bright orange poster caught my eye. I was rushing to catch

the bus, and I noticed a sign stapled to a telephone pole that screamed in

large bold print: THE DRUG WAR Is THE NEw JIM CROW. I paused for a mo
ment and skimmed the text of the flyer. Some radical group was holding a
community meeting about police brutality, the new three-strikes law in Cali

fornia, and the expansion of America’s prison system. The meeting was be-

ing held at a small community church a few blocks away; it had seating
capacity for no more than fifty people. I sighed, and muttered to myself
something like, “Yeah, the criminal justice system is racist in many ways, but

it really doesn’t help to make such an absurd comparison. People will just

think you’re crazy.” I then crossed the street and hopped on the bus. I was

headed to my new job, director of the Racial Justice Project of the American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Northern California.

When I began my work at the ACLU, I assumed that the criminal justice
system had problems of racial bias, much in the same way that all major in-

stitutions in our society are plagued with problems associated with conscious

4 THE NEW JIM CROW INTRODUCTION 5

and unconscious bias. As a lawyer who had litigated numerous class-action
employment-discrimination cases, I understood well the many ways in
which racial stereotyping can permeate subjective decision-making pro-
cesses at all levels of an organization, with devastating consequences. I was
familiar with the challenges associated with reforming institutions in which
racial stratification is thought to be normal—the natural consequence of
differences in education, culture, motivation, and, some still believe, innate
ability. While at the ACLU, I shifted my focus from employment discrimina
tion to criminal justice reform and dedicated myself to the task of working
with others to identify and eliminate racial bias whenever and wherever it
reared its ugly head.

By the time I left the ACLU, I had come to suspect that I was wrong
about the criminal justice system. It was not just another institution in-
fected with racial bias but rather a different beast entirely. The activists who
posted the sign on the telephone pole were not crazy; nor were the smatter-
ing of lawyers and advocates around the country who were beginning to
connect the dots between our current system of mass incarceration and ear-
her forms of social control. Quite belatedly, I came to see that mass incar
ceration in the United States had, in fact, emerged as a stunningly
comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that
functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow.

In my experience, people who have been incarcerated rarely have diffi
culty identifying the parallels between these systems of social control. Once
they are released, they are often denied the right to vote, excluded from
juries, and relegated to a racially segregated and subordinated existence.
Through a web of laws, regulations, and informal rules, all of which are
powerfully reinforced by social stigma, they are confined to the margins of
mainstream society and denied access to the mainstream economy. They
are legally denied the ability to obtain employment, housing, and public
benefits—much as African Americans were once forced into a segregated,
second-class citizenship in the Jim Crow era.

Those of us who have viewed that world from a comfortable distance—yet
sympathize with the plight of the so-called underclass—tend to interpret the
experience of those caught up in the criminal justice system primarily
through the lens of popularized social science, attributing the staggering in-
crease in incarceration rates in communities of color to the predictable,
though unfortunate, consequences of poverty, racial segregation, unequal

educational opportunities, and the presumed realities of the drug market,
including the mistaken belief that most drug dealers are black or brown.
Occasionally, in the course of my work, someone would make a remark
suggesting that perhaps the War on Drugs is a racist conspiracy to put
blacks back in their place. This type of.remark was invariably accompanied
by nervous laughter, intended to convey the impression that although the
idea had crossed their minds, it was not an idea a reasonable person would
take seriously.

Most people assume the War on Drugs was launched in response to the
crisis caused by crack cocaine in inner-city neighborhoods. This view holds
that the racial disparities in drug convictions and sentences, as well as the
rapid explosion of the prison population, reflect nothing more than the
government’s zealous—but benign—efforts to address rampant drug crime
in poor, minority neighborhoods. This view, while understandable, given the
sensational media coverage of crack in the 1 980s and 1 990s, is simply wrong.

While it is true that the publicity surrounding crack cocaine led to a dra
matic increase in funding for the drug war (as well as to sentencing policies
that greatly exacerbated racial disparities in incarceration rates), there is no
truth to the notion that the War on Drugs was launched in response to crack
cocaine. President Ronald Reagan officially announced the current drug war
in 1 982, before crack became an issue in the media or a crisis in poor black
neighborhoods. A few years after the drug war was declared, crack began to
spread rapidly in the poor black neighborhoods of Los Angeles and later
emerged in cities across the country.2The Reagan administration hired staff
to publicize the emergence of crack cocaine in 1985 as part of a strategic ef
fort to build public and legislative support for the war.3 The media campaign
was an extraordinary success. Almost overnight, the media was saturated
with images of black “crack whores,” “crack dealers,” and “crack babies”—
images that seemed to confirm the worst negative racial stereotypes about
impoverished inner-city residents. The media bonanza surrounding the ‘new
demon drug” helped to catapult the War on Drugs from an ambitious federal
policy to an actual war.

The timing of the crack crisis helped to fuel conspiracy theories and gen
eral speculation in poor black communities that the War on Drugs was part
of a genocidal plan by the government to destroy black people in the United
States. From the outset, stories circulated on the street that crack and other
drugs were being brought into black neighborhoods by the CIA. Eventually,

6 THE NEW JIM CROW INTRODUCTION

even the Urban League came to take the claims of genocide seriously. In its
1990 report “The State of Black America,” it stated: “There is at least one
concept that must be recognized if one is to see the pervasive and insidious
nature of the drug problem for the African American community. Though
difficult to accept, that is the concept of genocide.”4While the conspiracy
theories were initially dismissed as far-fetched, if not downright loony, the
word on the street turned out to be right, at least to a point. The CIA admit-
ted in 1998 that guerilla armies it actively supported in Nicaragua were
smuggling illegal drugs into the United States—drugs that were making
their way onto the streets of inner-city black neighborhoods in the form of
crack cocaine. The CIA also admitted that, in the midst of the War on Drugs,
it blocked law enforcement efforts to investigate illegal drug networks that
were helping to fund its covert war in Nicaragua.5

It bears emphasis that the CIA never admitted (nor has any evidence
been revealed to support the claim) that it intentionally sought the destruc
tion of the black community by allowing illegal drugs to be smuggled into
the United States. Nonetheless, conspiracy theorists surely must be for-
given for their bold accusation of genocide, in light of the devastation
wrought by crack cocaine and the drug war, and the odd coincidence that
an illegal drug crisis suddenly appeared in the black community after—not
before—a drug war had been declared. In fact, the War on Drugs began at a
time when illegal drug use was on the decline.6 During this same time pe
nod, however, a war was declared, causing arrests and convictions for drug
offenses to skyrocket, especially among people of color.

The impact of the drug war has been astounding. In less than thirty years,
the U.S penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than
2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase.7
The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world,
dwarfing the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those
in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran. In Germany, 93
people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children. In the United
States, the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750 per 100,000.8

The racial dimension of mass incarceration is its most striking feature. No
other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minori
ties. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population
than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our
nation’s capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and

nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in
prison.9 Similar rates of incarceration can be found in black communities
across America.

These stark racial disparities cannot be explained by rates of drug crime.
Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably
similar If there are significant differences in the surveys to be found,
they frequently suggest that whites, particularly white youth, are more likely
to engage in drug crime than people of color.’ ‘ That is not what one would
guess, however, when entering our nation’s prisons and jails, which are over-
flowing with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, black men
have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fifty times
greater than those of white 12 And in major cities wracked by the drug
war, as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have crimi
nal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of
their lives.’3 These young men are part of a growing undercaste, perma
nently locked up and locked out of mainstream society.

It may be surprising to some that drug crime was declining, not rising, when
a drug war was declared. From a historical perspective, however, the lack of
correlation between crime and punishment is nothing new. Sociologists
have frequently observed that governments use punishment primarily as a
tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often
unrelated to actual crime patterns. Michael Tonry explains in Thinking
About Crime: “Governments decide how much punishment they want, and
these decisions are in no simple way related to crime rates.” This fact, he
points out, can be seen most clearly by putting crime and punishment in
comparative perspective. Although crime rates in the United States have
not been markedly higher than those of other Western countries, the rate
of incarceration has soared in the United States while it has remained
stable or declined in other countries. Between 1 960 and 1 990, for example,
official crime rates in Finland, Germany, and the United States were close
to identical. Yet the U.S. incarceration rate quadrupled, the Finnish rate
fell by 60 percent, and the German rate was stable in that period.’ De
spite similar crime rates, each government chose to impose different levels
of punishment.

Today, due to recent declines, U.S. crime rates have dipped below the
international norm. Nevertheless, the United States now boasts an incar

8 THE NEW JIM CROW INTRODUCTION 9

ceration rate that is six to ten times greater than that of other industrialized
nations’6—a development directly traceable to the drug war. The only coun
try in the world that even comes close to the American rate of incarceration
is Russia, and no other country in the world incarcerates such an astonish-
ing percentage of its racial or ethnic minorities.

The stark and sobering reality is that, for reasons largely unrelated to ac
tual crime trends, the American penal system has emerged as a system of
social control unparalleled in world histoiy And while the size of the system
alone might suggest that it would touch the lives of most Americans, the pri
mary targets of its control can be defined largely by race. This is an astonish-
ing development, especially given that as recently as the mid-1970s, the
most well-respected criminologists were predicting that the prison system
would soon fade away. Prison did not deter crime significantly, many experts
concluded. Those who had meaningful economic and social opportunities
were unlikely to commit crimes regardless of the penalty, while those who
went to prison were far more likely to commit crimes again in the future.
The growing consensus among experts was perhaps best reflected by the
National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals,
which issued a recommendation in 1 973 that “no new institutions for adults
should be built and existing institutions for juveniles should be closed.”7
This recommendation was based on their finding that “the prison, the refor
matory and the jail have achieved only a shocking record of failure. There is
overwhelming evidence that these institutions create crime rather than pre
vent it.”18

These days, activists who advocate “a world without prisons” are often
dismissed as quacks, but only a few decades ago, the notion that our society
would be much better off without prisons—and that the end of prisons was
more or less inevitable—not only dominated mainstream academic dis
course in the field of criminology but also inspired a national campaign by
reformers demanding a moratorium on prison construction. Marc Mauer,
the executive director of the Sentencing Project, notes that what is most re
markable about the moratorium campaign in retrospect is the context of im
prisonment at the time. In 1972, fewer than 350,000 people were being
held in prisons and jails nationwide, compared with more than 2 million
people today. The rate of incarceration in 1972 was at a level so low that it
no longer seems in the realm of possibility, but for moratorium supporters,

that magnitude of imprisonment was egregiously high. “Supporters of the
moratorium effort can be forgiven for being so naïve,” Mauer suggests, ‘since
the prison expansion that was about to take place was unprecedented in hu
man ry’9 No one imagined that the prison population would more
than quintuple in their lifetime. It seemed far more likely that prisons would
fade away.

Far from fading away, it appears that prisons are here to stay. And despite the
unprecedented levels of incarceration in the African American community,
the civil rights community is oddly quiet. One in three youngAfrican Amen-
can men is currently under the control of the criminal justice system—in
prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole—yet mass incarceration tends to
be categorized as a criminal justice issue as opposed to a racial justice or
civil rights issue (or crisis).

The attention of civil rights advocates has been largely devoted to other
issues, such as affirmative action. During the past twenty years, virtually
every progressive, national civil rights organization in the country has mobi
lized and rallied in defense of affirmative action. The struggle to preserve
affirmative action in higher education, and thus maintain diversity in the na
tion’s most elite colleges and universities, has consumed much of the atten
tion and resources of the civil rights community and dominated racial justice
discourse in the mainstream media, leading the general public to believe
that affirmative action is the main battlefront in U.S. race relations—even
as our prisons fill with black and brown men.

My own experience reflects this dynamic. When I first joined the ACLU,
no one imagined that the Racial Justice Project would focus its attention on
criminal justice reform. The ACLU was engaged in important criminal jus
tice reform work, but no one suspected that work would eventually become
central to the agenda of the RacialJustice Project. The assumption was that
the project would concentrate its efforts on defending affirmative action.
Shortly after leaving the ACLU, I joined the board of directors of the Law-
yers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. Although
the organization included racial justice among its core priorities, reform of
the criminal justice system was not (and still is not) a major part of its racial
justice work. The Lawyers’ Committee is not alone.

Injanuary 2008, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights—an organiza

10 THE NEW JIM CROW INTRODUCTION 11

tion composed of the leadership of more than 180 civil rights organizations—
sent a letter to its allies and supporters informing them of a major initiative
to document the voting record of members of Congress. The letter explained
that its forthcoming report would show “how each representative and sena
tor cast his or her vote on some of the most important civil rights issues of
2007, including voting rights, affirmative action, immigration, nominations,
education, hate crimes, employment, health, housing, and poverty.” Crimi
nal justice issues did not make the list. That same broad-based coalition
organized a major conference in October 2007, entitled Why We Can’t Wait:
Reversing the Retreat on Civil Rights, which included panels discussing
school integration, employment discrimination, housing and lending dis
crimination, economic justice, environmental justice, disability rights, age
discrimination, and immigrants’ rights. Not a single panel was devoted to
criminal justice reform.

The elected leaders of the African American community have a much
broader mandate than civil rights groups, but they, too, frequently overlook
criminal justice. In January 2009, for example, the Congressional Black
Caucus sent a letter to hundreds of community and organization leaders
who have worked with the caucus over the years, soliciting general informa
tion about them and requesting that they identify their priorities. More than
thirty-five topics were listed as areas of potential special interest, including
taxes, defense, immigration, agriculture, housing, banking, higher educa
tion, multimedia, transportation and infrastructure, women, seniors, nutri
tion, faith initiatives, civil rights, census, economic security, and emerging
leaders. No mention was made of criminal justice. “Re-entry” was listed, but
a community leader who was interested in criminal justice reform had to
check the box labeled “other.”

This is not to say that important criminal justice reform work has not been
done. Civil rights advocates have organized vigorous challenges to specific
aspects of the new caste system. One notable example is the successful
challenge led by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to a racist drug sting op
eration in Tulia, Texas. The 1999 drug bust incarcerated almost I 5 percent
of the black population of the town, based on the uncorroborated false
testimony of a single informant hired by the sheriff of Tulia. More recently,civil

rights groups around the country have helped to launch legal attacks
and vibrant grassroots campaigns against felon disenfranchisement laws and

have strenuously opposed discriminatory crack sentencing laws and guide-
lines, as well as “zero tolerance” policies that effectively funnel youth of
color from schools to jails. The national ACLU recently developed a racial
justice program that includes criminal justice issues among its core priori-
ties and has created a promising Drug Law Reform Project. And thanks to
the aggressive advocacy of the ACLU, NAACP, and other civil rights organi
zations around the country racial profiling is widely condemned, even by
members of law enforcement who once openly embraced the practice.

Still, despite these significant developments, there seems to be a lack of
appreciation for the enormity of the crisis at hand. There is no broad-based
movement brewing to end mass incarceration and no advocacy effort that
approaches in scale the fight to preserve affirmative action. There also re
mains a persistent tendency in the civil rights community to treat the crimi
nal justice system as just another institution infected with lingering racial
bias. The NAACP’s Web site offers one example. As recently as ivlay 2008.
one could find a brief introduction to the organization’s criminaijustice work
in the section entitled Legal Department. The introduction explained that
“despite the civil rights victories of our past, racial prejudice still pervades
the criminal justice system.” Visitors to the Web site were urged to join the
NAACP in order to “protect the hard-earned civil rights gains of the past
three decades.” No one visiting the Web site would learn that the mass in-
carceration of African Americans had already eviscerated many of the hard-
earned gains it urged its members to protect.

Imagine if civil rights organizations and African American leaders in the
1940s had not placed Jim Crow segregation at the forefront of their racial
justice agenda. It would have seemed absurd, given that racial segregation
was the primary vehicle of racialized social control in the United States
during that period. This book argues that mass incarceration is, metaphori
cally, the New Jim Crow and that all those who care about social justice
should fully commit themselves to dismantling this new racial caste system.
Mass incarceration—not attacks on affirmative action or lax civil rights
enforcement—is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against
the Civil Rights Movement. The popular narrative that emphasizes the death
of slavery and Jim Crow and celebrates the nation’s “triumph over race” with
the election of Barack Obama, is dangerously misguided. The colorblind pub-
lic consensus that prevails in America today—i.e., the widespread belief that

12 THE NEW JIM CROW INTRODUCTION 13

race no longer matters—has blinded us to the realities of race in our society
and facilitated the emergence of a new caste system.

Clearly, much has changed in my thinking about the criminaljustice system
since I passed that bright orange poster stapled to a telephone pole ten years
ago. For me, the new caste system is now as obvious as my own face in the
mirror. Like an optical illusion—one in which the embedded image is im
possible to see until its outline is identified—the new caste system lurks in-
visibly within the maze of rationalizations we have developed for persistent
racial inequality. It is possible—quite easy, in fact—never to see the embed-
ded reality. Only after years of working on criminal justice reform did my
own focus finally shift, and then the rigid caste system slowly came into
view. Eventually it became obvious. Now it seems odd that I could not see
it before.

Knowing as I do the difficulty of seeing what most everyone insists does
not exist, I anticipate that this book will be met with skepticism or some-
thing worse. For some, the characterization of mass incarceration as a “racial
caste system” may seem like a gross exaggeration, if not hyperbole. Yes, we
may have “classes” in the United States—vaguely defined upper, middle,
and lower classes—and we may even have an “underclass” (a group so es
tranged from mainstream society that it is no longer in reach of the mythical
ladder of opportunity), but we do not, many will insist, have anything in this
country that resembles a “caste.”

The aim of this book is not to venture into the long-running, vigorous de
bate in the scholarly literature regarding what does and does not constitute
a caste system. I use the term racial caste in this book the way it is used in
common parlance to denote a stigmatized racial group locked into an infe
nor position by law and custom. Jim Crow and slavery were caste systems.
So is our current system of mass incarceration.

It may be helpful, in attempting to understand the basic nature of the new
caste system, to think of the criminal justice system—the entire collection
of institutions and practices that comprise it—not as an independent system
but rather as a gateway into a much larger system of racial stigmatization and
permanent marginalization. This larger system, referred to here as mass in-
carceration, is a system that locks people not only behind actual bars in ac
tual prisons, but also behind virtual bars and virtual walls—walls that are
invisible to the naked eye but function nearly as effectively as Jim Crow laws

once did at locking people of color into a permanent second-class citizenship.
The term mass incarceration refers not only to the criminal justice system
but also to the larger web of laws, rules, policies, and customs that control
those labeled criminals both in and out of prison. Once released, former
prisoners enter a hidden underworld of legalized discrimination and perma
nent social exclusion. They are members ofAmerica’s new undercaste.

The language of caste may well seem foreign or unfamiliar to some. Public
discussions about racial caste in America are relatively rare. We avoid talking
about caste in our society because we are ashamed of our racial history. We
also avoid talking about race. We even avoid talking about class. Conversa
tions about class are resisted in part because there is a tendency to imagine
that one’s class reflects upon one’s character. What is key to America’s un
derstanding of class is the persistent belief—despite all evidence to the
contrary—that anyone, with the proper discipline and drive, can move from
a lower class to a higher class. We recognize that mobility may be difficult,
but the key to our collective self-image is the assumption that mobility is al
ways possible, so failure to move up reflects on one’s character. By exten
sion, the failure of a race or ethnic group to move up reflects very poorly on
the group as a whole.

What is completely missed in the rare public debates today about the
plight of African Americans is that a huge percentage of them are not free
to move up at all. It is not just that they lack opportunity attend poor
schools, or are plagued by poverty. They are barred by law from doing so.
And the major institutions with which they come into contact are designed
to prevent their mobility. To put the matter starkly: The current system of
control permanently locks a huge percentage of the African American corn-
munity out of the mainstream society and economy. The system operates
through our criminal justice institutions, but it functions more like a caste
system than a system of crime control. Viewed from this perspective, the so-
called underclass is better understood as an undercaste—a lower caste of in-
dividuals who are permanently barred by law and custom from mainstream
society. Although this new system of racialized social control purports to be
colorblind, it creates and maintains racial hierarchy much as earlier systems
of control did. Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates
as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions
that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined
largely by race.

14 THE NEW JIM CROW INTRODUCTION 15

This argument may be particularly hard to swallow given the election of
Barack Obama. Many will wonder how a nation that just elected its first
black president could possibly have a racial caste system. It’s a fair question.
But as discussed in chapter 6, there is no inconsistency whatsoever between
the election of Barack Obama to the highest office in the land and the exis
tence of a racial caste system in the era of colorblindness. The current sys
tern of control depends on black exceptionalisrn; it is not disproved or
undermined by it. Others may wonder how a racial caste system could exist
when most Americans—of all colors—oppose race discrimination and en-
dorse colorblindness. Yet as we shall see in the pages that follow, racial caste
systems do not require racial hostility or overt bigotry to thrive. They need
only racial indifference, as Martin Luther King Jr. warned more than forty-
five years ago.

The recent decisions by some state legislatures, most notably New York’s,
to repeal or reduce mandatory drug sentencing laws have led some to believe
that the system of racial control described in this book is already fading
away. Such a conclusion, I believe, is a serious mistake. Many of the states
that have reconsidered their harsh sentencing schemes have done so not out
of concern for the lives and families that have been destroyed by these laws
or the racial dimensions of the drug war, but out of concern for bursting state
budgets in a time of economic recession. In other words, the racial ideology
that gave rise to these laws remains largely undisturbed. Changing economic
conditions or rising crime rates could easily result in a reversal of fortunes
for those who commit drug crimes, particularly if the drug criminals are per-
ceived to be black and brown. Equally important to understand is this:
Merely reducing sentence length, by itself, does not disturb the basic archi
tecture of the New Jim Crow. So long as large numbers of African Amen-
cans continue to be arrested and labeled drug criminals, they will continue
to be relegated to a permanent second-class status upon their release, no
matter how much (or how little) time they spend behind bars. The system of
mass incarceration is based on the prison label, not prison time.

Skepticism about the claims made here is warranted. There are important
differences, to be sure, among mass incarceration, Jim Crow, and slavery—
the three major racialized systems of control adopted in the United States
to date. Failure to acknowledge the relevant differences, as well as their
implications, would be a disservice to racial justice discourse. Many of the
differences are not as dramatic as they initially appear, however; others serve

to illustrate the ways in which systems of racialized social control have man-
aged to morph, evolve, and adapt to changes in the political, social, and legal
context oven time. Ultimately, I believe that the similarities between these
systems of control overwhelm the differences and that mass incarceration,
like its predecessors, has been largely immunized from legal challenge. If
this claim is substantially correct, the implications for racial justice advo
cacy are profound.

With the benefit of hindsight, surely we can see that piecemeal policy re
form or litigation alone would have been a futile approach to dismantling
Jim Crow segregation. While those strategies certainly had their place, the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the concomitant cultural shift would never
have occurred without the cultivation of a critical political consciousness in
the African American community and the widespread, strategic activism
that flowed from it. Likewise, the notion that the New Jim Crow can ever be
dismantled through traditional litigation and policy-reform strategies that
are wholly disconnected from a major social movement seems fundamen
tally misguided.

Such a movement is impossible, though, if those most committed to abol
ishing racial hierarchy continue to talk and behave as if a state-sponsored
racial caste system no longer exists. If we continue to tell ourselves the pop-
ular myths about racial progress or, worse yet, if we say to ourselves that the
problem of mass incarceration is just too big, too daunting for us to do any-
thing about and that we should instead direct our energies to battles that
might be more easily won, history will judge us harshly. A human rights
nightmare is occurring on our watch.

A new social consensus must be forged about race and the role of race in
defining the basic structure of our society, if we hope ever to abolish the
New Jim Crow. This new consensus must begin with dialogue, a conversa
tion that fosters a critical consciousness, a key prerequisite to effective so-
cial action. This book is an attempt to ensure that the conversation does not
end with nervous laughter.

It is not possible to write a relatively short book that explores all aspects of
the phenomenon of mass incarceration and its implications for racial jus
tice. No attempt has been made to do so here. This book paints with a broad
brush, and as a result, many important issues have not received the atten
tion they deserve. For example, relatively little is said here about the unique

16 THE NEW JIM CROW INTRODUCTION 17

experience of women, Latinos, and immigrants in the criminal justice sys
tern, though these groups are particularly vulnerable to the worst abuses and
suffer in ways that are important and distinct. This book focuses on the ex
perience of African American men in the new caste system. I hope other
scholars and advocates will pick up where the book leaves off and develop
the critique more fully or apply the themes sketched here to other groups
and other contexts.

What this book is intended to do—the only thing it is intended to do—is
to stimulate a much-needed conversation about the role of the criminal jus
tice system in creating and perpetuating racial hierarchy in the United
States. The fate of millions of people—indeed the future of the black com
munity itself—may depend on the willingness of those who care about racial
justice to re-examine their basic assumptions about the role of the criminal
justice system in our society. The fact that more than half of the young black
men in any large American city are currently under the control of the crimi
nal justice system (or saddled with criminal records) is not—as many argue—
just a symptom of poverty or poor choices, but rather evidence of a new
racial caste system at work.

Chapter 1 begins our journey. It briefly reviews the history of racialized
social control in the United States, answering the basic question: How did
we get here The chapter describes the control ofAfricanAmericans through
racial caste systems, such as slavery and Jim Crow, which appear to die but
then are reborn in new form, tailored to the needs and constraints of the
time. As we shall see, there is a certain pattern to the births and deaths of
racial caste in America. Time and again, the most ardent proponents of ra
cial hierarchy have succeeded in creating new caste systems by triggering a
collapse of resistance across the political spectrum. This feat has been
achieved largely by appealing to the racism and vulnerability of lower-class
whites, a group of people who are understandably eager to ensure that they
never find themselves trapped at the bottom of the American totem pole.
This pattern, dating back to slavery, has birthed yet another racial caste sys
tem in the United States: mass incarceration.

The structure of mass incarceration is described in some detail in chap-
ter 2, with a focus on the War on Drugs. Few legal rules meaningfully con-
strain the police in the drug war, and enormous financial incentives have been
granted to law enforcement to engage in mass drug arrests through military-
style tactics. Once swept into the system, one’s chances of ever being truly

free are slim, often to the vanishing point. Defendants are typically denied
meaningful legal representation, pressured by the threat of lengthy sen
tences into a plea bargain, and then placed under formal control—in prison
or jail, on probation or parole. Upon release, ex-offenders are discriminated
against, legally, for the rest of their lives, and most will eventually return to
prison. They are members of America’s new undercaste.

Chapter 3 turns our attention to the role of race in the U.S. criminal jus
tice system. It describes the method to the madness—how a formally race-
neutral criminaijustice system can manage to round up, arrest, and imprison
an extraordinary number of black and brown men, when people of color are
actually no more likely to be guilty of drug crimes and many other offenses
than whites. This chapter debunks the notion that rates of black imprison-
ment can be explained by crime rates and identifies the huge racial dispari
ties at every stage of the criminal justice process—from the initial stop,
search, and arrest to the plea bargaining and sentencing phases. in short,
the chapter explains how the legal rules that structure the system guarantee
discriminatory results. These legal rules ensure that the undercaste is over-
whelmingly black and brown.

Chapter 4 considers how the caste system operates once people are re
leased from prison. In many respects, release from prison does not represent
the beginning of freedom but instead a cruel new phase of stigmatization
and control. Myriad laws, rules, and regulations discriminate against ex
offenders and effectively prevent their meaningful re-integration into the
mainstream economy and society I argue that the shame and stigma of the
“prison label” is, in many respects, more damaging to the African American
community than the shame and stigma associated with Jim Crow. The crim
inalization and demonization of black men has turned the black community
against itself, unraveling community and family relationships, decimating
networks of mutual support, and intensifying the shame and self-hate expe
rienced by the current pariah caste.

The many parallels between mass incarceration and Jim Crow are ex
plored in, chapter 5. The most obvious parallel js legalized discrimination. Like

J im Crow, mass incarceration marginalizes large segments of the African
American community, segregates them physically (in prisons, jails, and ghet
tos), and then authorizes discrimination against them in voting, employment,
housing, education, public benefits, and jury service. The federal court sys
tem has effectively immunized the current system from challenges on the

18 THE NEW JIM CROW INTRODUCTION 19

grounds of racial bias, much as earlier systems of control were protected and

endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court. The parallels do not end there, how-

ever. Mass incarceration, like Jim Crow, helps to define the meaning and

significance of race in America. Indeed, the stigma of criminality functions

in much the same way that the stigma of race once did. It justifies a legal,

social, and economic boundary between “us” and “them.” Chapter 5 also

explores some of the differences among slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incar

ceration, most significantly the fact that mass incarceration is designed to

warehouse a population deemed disposable—unnecessary to the function-

ing of the new global economy—while earlier systems of control were de

signed to exploit and control black labor. In addition, the chapter discusses

the experience of white people in this new caste system; although they have

not been the primary targets of the drug war, they have been harmed by it—

a powerful illustration of how a racial state can harm people of all colors.

Finally, this chapter responds to skeptics who claim that mass incarceration

cannot be understood as a racial caste system because many “get tough on

crime” policies are supported by African Americans. Many of these claims, I

note, are no more persuasive today than arguments made a hundred years

ago by blacks and whites who claimed that racial segregation simply re

flected “reality,” not racial animus, and that African Americans would be

better off not challenging the Jim Crow system but should focus instead on

improving themselves within it. Throughout our history there have been AS-

rican Americans who, for a variety of reasons, have defended or been com

plicit with the prevailing system of control.

Chapter 6 reflects on what acknowledging the presence of the New Jim

Crow means for the future of civil rights advocacy. I argue that nothing short

of a major social movement can successfully dismantle the new caste sys

tem. Meaningful reforms can be achieved without such a movement, but

unless the public consensus supporting the current system is completely

overturned, the basic structure of the new caste system will remain intact.

Building a broad-based social movement, however, is not enough. It is not

nearly enough to persuade mainstream voters that we have relied too heavily

on incarceration or that drug abuse is a public health problem, not a crime.

If the movement that emerges to challenge mass incarceration fails to con-

front squarely the critical role of race in the basic structure of our society

and if it fails to cultivate an ethic of genuine care, compassion, and concern

for every human being—of every class, race, and nationality—within our

nation’s borders (including poor whites, who are often pitted against poor
people of color), the collapse of mass incarceration will not mean the death
of racial caste in America. Inevitably a new system of racialized social con-
trol will emerge—one that we cannot foresee, just as the current system of
mass incarceration was not predicted by anyone thirty years ago. No task is
more urgent for racial justice advocates today than ensuring that Americas
current racial caste system is its last.

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Letter From Birmingham Jail 1

A U G U S T 1 9 6 3

Letter from Birmingham Jail

by Martin Luther King, Jr.

From the Birmingham jail, where he was imprisoned as a participant in nonviolent demonstrations against segregation, Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in longhand the letter which follows. It was his response to a public statement of concern and
caution issued by eight white religious leaders of the South. Dr. King, who was born in 1929, did his undergraduate work at
Morehouse College; attended the integrated Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, one of six black pupils
among a hundred students, and the president of his class; and won a fellowship to Boston University for his Ph.D.

WHILE confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling our present activities “unwise
and untimely.” Seldom, if ever, do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all of the criticisms
that cross my desk, my secretaries would be engaged in little else in the course of the day, and I would have no time for
constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I would like
to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should give the reason for my being in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the argument of “outsiders
coming in.” I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating
in every Southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty-five affiliate organizations all across the
South, one being the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Whenever necessary and possible, we share staff,
educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago our local affiliate here in Birmingham invited us to be
on call to engage in a nonviolent direct-action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour
came we lived up to our promises. So I am here, along with several members of my staff, because we were invited here. I am
here because I have basic organizational ties here.

Beyond this, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the eighth-century prophets left their little villages and carried
their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their hometowns; and just as the Apostle Paul left his little village of
Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet and city of the Greco-Roman world, I too am compelled
to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my particular hometown. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for
aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be
concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an
inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never
again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can
never be considered an outsider.

You deplore the demonstrations that are presently taking place in Birmingham. But I am sorry that your statement did not express
a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being. I am sure that each of you would want to go
beyond the superficial social analyst who looks merely at effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. I would not
hesitate to say that it is unfortunate that so-called demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham at this time, but I would say in
more emphatic terms that it is even more unfortunate that the white power structure of this city left the Negro community with no
other alternative.

IN ANY nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive,
negotiation, self-purification, and direct action. We have gone through all of these steps in Birmingham. There can be no
gainsaying of the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city
in the United States. Its ugly record of police brutality is known in every section of this country. Its unjust treatment of Negroes
in the courts is a notorious reality. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than
in any other city in this nation. These are the hard, brutal, and unbelievable facts. On the basis of them, Negro leaders sought to
negotiate with the city fathers. But the political leaders consistently refused to engage in good-faith negotiation.

Then came the opportunity last September to talk with some of the leaders of the economic community. In these negotiating
sessions certain promises were made by the merchants, such as the promise to remove the humiliating racial signs from the
stores. On the basis of these promises, Reverend Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human
Rights agreed to call a moratorium on any type of demonstration. As the weeks and months unfolded, we realized that we were
the victims of a broken promise. The signs remained. As in so many experiences of the past, we were confronted with blasted
hopes, and the dark shadow of a deep disappointment settled upon us. So we had no alternative except that of preparing for direct
action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and national
community. We were not unmindful of the difficulties involved. So we decided to go through a process of self-purification. We

Letter From Birmingham Jail 2

started having workshops on nonviolence and repeatedly asked ourselves the questions, “Are you able to accept blows without
retaliating?” and “Are you able to endure the ordeals of jail?” We decided to set our direct-action program around the Easter
season, realizing that, with exception of Christmas, this was the largest shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong
economic withdrawal program would be the by-product of direct action, we felt that this was the best time to bring pressure on
the merchants for the needed changes. Then it occurred to us that the March election was ahead, and so we speedily decided to
postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that Mr. Conner was in the runoff, we decided again to postpone
action so that the demonstration could not be used to cloud the issues. At this time we agreed to begin our nonviolent witness the
day after the runoff.

This reveals that we did not move irresponsibly into direct action. We, too, wanted to see Mr. Conner defeated, so we went
through postponement after postponement to aid in this community need. After this we felt that direct action could be delayed no
longer.

You may well ask, “Why direct action, why sit-ins, marches, and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are exactly right
in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and
establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks
so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. I just referred to the creation of tension as a part of the work of the
nonviolent resister. This may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have
earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for
growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage
of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having
nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism
to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. So, the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed
that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. We therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our
beloved Southland been bogged down in the tragic attempt to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

One of the basic points in your statement is that our acts are untimely. Some have asked, “Why didn’t you give the new
administration time to act?” The only answer that I can give to this inquiry is that the new administration must be prodded about
as much as the outgoing one before it acts. We will be sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Mr. Boutwell will bring the
millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is much more articulate and gentle than Mr. Conner, they are both
segregationists, dedicated to the task of maintaining the status quo. The hope I see in Mr. Boutwell is that he will be reasonable
enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from the devotees of
civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and
nonviolent pressure. History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges
voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has
reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the
oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct-action movement that was “well timed” according to the timetable of
those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “wait.” It rings in the
ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This “wait” has almost always meant “never.” It has been a tranquilizing
thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration. We must come
to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” We have waited for more than
three hundred and forty years for our God-given and constitutional rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike
speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee
at a lunch counter. I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say “wait.” But when you
have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen
hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast
majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when
you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she
cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes
when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little
mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when
you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos, “Daddy, why do white people treat colored
people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable
corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs
reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger” and your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you
are) and your last name becomes “John,” and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are
harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never knowing what to
expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of
“nobodyness” — then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs
over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding
despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

Letter From Birmingham Jail 3

YOU express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so
diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather
strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well ask, “How can you advocate breaking some laws and
obeying others?” The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I
would agree with St. Augustine that “An unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made
code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To
put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. Any law that
uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because
segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a
false sense of inferiority. To use the words of Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher, segregation substitutes an “I – it”
relationship for the “I – thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. So segregation is not only
politically, economically, and sociologically unsound, but it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is
separation. Isn’t segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, an expression of his awful estrangement, his
terrible sinfulness? So I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court because it is morally right, and I can urge
them to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.

Let us turn to a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that
is not binding on itself. This is difference made legal. On the other hand, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to
follow, and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

Let me give another explanation. An unjust law is a code inflicted upon a minority which that minority had no part in enacting or
creating because it did not have the unhampered right to vote. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up the
segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout the state of Alabama all types of conniving methods are used to
prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties without a single Negro registered to vote, despite
the fact that the Negroes constitute a majority of the population. Can any law set up in such a state be considered democratically
structured?

These are just a few examples of unjust and just laws. There are some instances when a law is just on its face and unjust in its
application. For instance, I was arrested Friday on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong with an
ordinance which requires a permit for a parade, but when the ordinance is used to preserve segregation and to deny citizens the
First Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and peaceful protest, then it becomes unjust.

Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was seen sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach,
and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar because a higher moral law was involved. It was practiced superbly by the
early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks before submitting to certain
unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil
disobedience.

We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in
Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. But I am sure that if I had lived in Germany
during that time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal. If I lived in a Communist
country today where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I believe I would openly advocate disobeying
these anti-religious laws.

I MUST make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years
I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great
stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate
who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace
which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods
of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of
time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of
good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more
bewildering than outright rejection.

In your statement you asserted that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But
can this assertion be logically made? Isn’t this like condemning the robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the
evil act of robbery? Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical
delvings precipitated the misguided popular mind to make him drink the hemlock? Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because His
unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to His will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see,
as federal courts have consistently affirmed, that it is immoral to urge an individual to withdraw his efforts to gain his basic
constitutional rights because the quest precipitates violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.

Letter From Birmingham Jail 4

I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth of time. I received a letter this morning from a white brother in
Texas which said, “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but is it possible that you are
in too great of a religious hurry? It has taken Christianity almost 2000 years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ
take time to come to earth.” All that is said here grows out of a tragic misconception of time. It is the strangely irrational notion
that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time is neutral. It can be used either
destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the
people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but
for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It
comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work time
itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.

YOU spoke of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my
nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I started thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in
the Negro community. One is a force of complacency made up of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, have been
so completely drained of self-respect and a sense of “somebodyness” that they have adjusted to segregation, and, on the other
hand, of a few Negroes in the middle class who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because at points
they profit by segregation, have unconsciously become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of
bitterness and hatred and comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups
that are springing up over the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement. This movement is
nourished by the contemporary frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination. It is made up of people who have
lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incurable
devil. I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need not follow the do-nothingism of the complacent or the
hatred and despair of the black nationalist. There is a more excellent way, of love and nonviolent protest. I’m grateful to God that,
through the Negro church, the dimension of nonviolence entered our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, I am
convinced that by now many streets of the South would be flowing with floods of blood. And I am further convinced that if our
white brothers dismiss as “rabble-rousers” and “outside agitators” those of us who are working through the channels of
nonviolent direct action and refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes, out of frustration and despair, will seek
solace and security in black nationalist ideologies, a development that will lead inevitably to a frightening racial nightmare.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The urge for freedom will eventually come. This is what has happened to the
American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom; something without has reminded him that he
can gain it. Consciously and unconsciously, he has been swept in by what the Germans call the Zeitgeist, and with his black
brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America, and the Caribbean, he is moving with a sense of
cosmic urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. Recognizing this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community,
one should readily understand public demonstrations. The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations. He has to
get them out. So let him march sometime; let him have his prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; understand why he must have sit-
ins and freedom rides. If his repressed emotions do not come out in these nonviolent ways, they will come out in ominous
expressions of violence. This is not a threat; it is a fact of history. So I have not said to my people, “Get rid of your discontent.”
But I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled through the creative outlet of nonviolent direct
action. Now this approach is being dismissed as extremist. I must admit that I was initially disappointed in being so categorized.

But as I continued to think about the matter, I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist. Was not
Jesus an extremist in love? — “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.” Was not
Amos an extremist for justice? — “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Was not Paul an
extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ? — “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist?
— “Here I stand; I can do no other so help me God.” Was not John Bunyan an extremist? — “I will stay in jail to the end of my
days before I make a mockery of my conscience.” Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist? — “This nation cannot survive half
slave and half free.” Was not Thomas Jefferson an extremist? — “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal.” So the question is not whether we will be extremist, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for
hate, or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the
cause of justice?

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this. Maybe I was too optimistic. Maybe I expected too much. I guess I should
have realized that few members of a race that has oppressed another race can understand or appreciate the deep groans and
passionate yearnings of those that have been oppressed, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by
strong, persistent, and determined action. I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers have grasped the meaning of
this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still all too small in quantity, but they are big in quality. Some,
like Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, Harry Golden, and James Dabbs, have written about our struggle in eloquent, prophetic, and
understanding terms. Others have marched with us down nameless streets of the South. They sat in with us at lunch counters and
rode in with us on the freedom rides. They have languished in filthy roach-infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of
angry policemen who see them as “dirty nigger lovers.” They, unlike many of their moderate brothers, have recognized the
urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful “action” antidotes to combat the disease of segregation.

Letter From Birmingham Jail 5

LET me rush on to mention my other disappointment. I have been disappointed with the white church and its leadership. Of
course, there are some notable exceptions. I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on
this issue. I commend you, Reverend Stallings, for your Christian stand this past Sunday in welcoming Negroes to your Baptist
Church worship service on a nonsegregated basis. I commend the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Springhill College
several years ago.

But despite these notable exceptions, I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say that as
one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say it as a minister of the gospel who loves
the church, who was nurtured in its bosom, who has been sustained by its Spiritual blessings, and who will remain true to it as
long as the cord of life shall lengthen.

I had the strange feeling when I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery several years ago
that we would have the support of the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests, and rabbis of the South would be some
of our strongest allies. Instead, some few have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and
misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the
anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.

In spite of my shattered dreams of the past, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this
community would see the justice of our cause and with deep moral concern serve as the channel through which our just
grievances could get to the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

I have heard numerous religious leaders of the South call upon their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because
it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers say, follow this decree because integration is morally right and the Negro is
your brother. In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churches stand on the sidelines and
merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and
economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say, “Those are social issues which the gospel has nothing to do with,” and I
have watched so many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which made a strange distinction
between bodies and souls, the sacred and the secular.

There was a time when the church was very powerful. It was during that period that the early Christians rejoiced when they were
deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas
and principles of popular opinion; it was the thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Wherever the early Christians
entered a town the power structure got disturbed and immediately sought to convict them for being “disturbers of the peace” and
“outside agitators.” But they went on with the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven” and had to obey God rather than
man. They were small in number but big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.”
They brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contest.

Things are different now. The contemporary church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often
the arch supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average
community is consoled by the church’s often vocal sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the
early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no
meaning for the twentieth century. I meet young people every day whose disappointment with the church has risen to outright
disgust.

I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of
justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives
are presently misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of
America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America. Before the
Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson scratched across the pages of history the majestic word of
the Declaration of Independence, we were here. For more than two centuries our foreparents labored here without wages; they
made cotton king; and they built the homes of their masters in the midst of brutal injustice and shameful humiliation — and yet
out of a bottomless vitality our people continue to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us,
the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal
will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.

I must close now. But before closing I am impelled to mention one other point in your statement that troubled me profoundly.
You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping “order” and “preventing violence.” I don’t believe you would
have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its angry violent dogs literally biting six unarmed, nonviolent
Negroes. I don’t believe you would so quickly commend the policemen if you would observe their ugly and inhuman treatment of
Negroes here in the city jail; if you would watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you would see
them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys, if you would observe them, as they did on two occasions, refusing to give us
food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I’m sorry that I can’t join you in your praise for the police department.

Letter From Birmingham Jail 6

It is true that they have been rather disciplined in their public handling of the demonstrators. In this sense they have been publicly
“nonviolent.” But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the last few years I have consistently
preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. So I have tried to make it clear
that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or even more, to use
moral means to preserve immoral ends.

I wish you had commended the Negro demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer, and
their amazing discipline in the midst of the most inhuman provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They
will be the James Merediths, courageously and with a majestic sense of purpose facing jeering and hostile mobs and the
agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in
a seventy-two-year-old woman of Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to
ride the segregated buses, and responded to one who inquired about her tiredness with ungrammatical profundity, “My feets is
tired, but my soul is rested.” They will be young high school and college students, young ministers of the gospel and a host of
their elders courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’s sake. One day
the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for
the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage.

Never before have I written a letter this long — or should I say a book? I’m afraid that it is much too long to take your precious
time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else is there
to do when you are alone for days in the dull monotony of a narrow jail cell other than write long letters, think strange thoughts,
and pray long prayers?

If I have said anything in this letter that is an understatement of the truth and is indicative of an unreasonable impatience, I beg
you to forgive me. If I have said anything in this letter that is an overstatement of the truth and is indicative of my having a
patience that makes me patient with anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

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Copyright © 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. All rights reserved.

The Atlantic Monthly; August 1963; The Negro Is Your Brother; Volume 212, No. 2; pages 78 – 88.

• Branch – Montgomery
• Branch – SNCC Sit-ins
• Branch – Freedom Rides
• Branch – Birmingham1
• Branch – Birmingham2
• Branch – Selma

• Montgomery Bus Boycott
• Freedom Rides
• Birmingham

4
5
12

• Selma

8
9
10

• Beloved Community