13th Page #2

And I think we should start now preparing

for the inevitable.

Yeah!

And let us,

when that moment comes...

go into the situations that we confront

with a great deal of dignity,

sanity and reasonableness.

They want to throw

white children and colored children

into the melting pot of integration,

through out of which

will come a conglomerated,

mulatto, mongrel class of people.

Both races will be destroyed

in such a movement.

We just got a report here

on this end that the students are in.

Negroes were trying

to integrate the bathing beaches.

And the Florida Advisory Committee

to the US Civil Rights Commission

warned that the city was becoming

a racial superbomb with a short fuse.

Civil rights activists

began to be portrayed in the media

and among, you know,

many politicians as criminals.

People who are deliberately

violating the law,

segregation laws

that existed in the South.

For years now,

I have heard the word "wait."

It rings in the ear of every Negro

with piercing familiarity.

This wait has almost always meant never.

Justice too long delayed

is justice denied.

I think that one of the most brilliant

tactics of the civil rights movement

was its transformation

of the notion of criminality.

Because for the first time,

being arrested was a noble thing.

Being arrested by white people

was your worst nightmare.

Still is, uh, for many African Americans.

So what'd they do?

They voluntarily defined a movement

around getting arrested.

They turned it on its head.

If you looked at the history

of black people's

various struggles in this country,

the connecting theme

is the attempt to be understood

as full, complicated human beings.

We are something other than

this, uh, visceral image of criminality

and menace and threat

to which people associate with us.

We're willing to be beaten for democracy,

and you misuse democracy in the street.

Let us lay aside irrelevant differences...

and make our nation whole.

The Civil Rights Act

and the Voting Rights Act said,

"Finally, we admit it.

Though slavery ended in December 1865...

we took away these people's rights,

and now we're gonna fix it."

For the first time,

you know, promise of equal justice

becomes at least a possibility.

Their cause must be our cause, too.

Unfortunately,

at the very same time

that the civil rights movement

was gaining steam,

crime rates were beginning to rise

in this country.

Crime was increasing

in the baby boom generation

that had emerged

immediately after World War II.

Now they were adults.

So, just through sheer demographic change,

we had an increase in the amount of crime.

...and became very easy

for politicians then to say,

um, that the civil rights movement itself

was contributing to rising crime rates,

and that if we were to give

the Negroes their freedom, um,

then we would be repaid,

as a nation, with crime.

The prison population

in the United States was largely flat

throughout most of the 20th century.

It didn't go up a lot.

It didn't come down a lot.

But that changed in the 1970s.

And in the 1970s, we began an era

which has been defined by this term,

"mass incarceration."

This is a nation of laws,

and as Abraham Lincoln has said,

"No one is above the law.

No one is below the law."

And we're going to enforce the law

and Americans should remember that,

if we're going to have law and order.

Breaking rocks out here

On the chain gang

Breaking rocks and serving my time

Breaking rocks out here

On the chain gang

Because I've been convicted of crime

Hold it steady right there

While I hit it

Each moment in history

is a fleeting time, precious and unique.

But some stand out

as moments of beginning...

in which courses are set

that shape decades or centuries.

This can be such a moment.

It's with the Nixon era,

and the law and order period

when crime begins to stand in for race.

If there is one area

where the word "war" is appropriate,

it is in the fight against crime.

Part of what he talked about

was a war on crime.

But that was one of those code words,

what we might call

"dog-whistle politics" now,

which really was referring to

the black political movements of the day,

Black Power, Black Panthers,

the antiwar movement,

the movements for women's

and gay liberation at that time,

which Nixon felt compelled

to fight back against.

Once the federal government,

through the FBI, moves into an area,

this should be warning

to those who engage in these acts

that they eventually

are going to be apprehended.

There's this outcry

for law and order.

And Nixon becomes the person

who articulates that perfectly.

There can be no progress

in America without respect for law.

Many people felt like, uh,

we were losing control.

We need total war

in the United States

against the evils, uh,

that we see in our cities.

Federal spending

for local law enforcement will double.

Time is running out

for the merchants

of crime and corruption

in American society.

The wave of crime is not going to be

the wave of the future

in the United States of America.

We must wage

what I have called "total war"

against public enemy number one

in the United States,

the problem of dangerous drugs.

"A war on drugs."

And that utterance gave birth to this era,

where we decided to deal

with drug addiction and drug dependency

as a crime issue

rather than a health issue.

Hundreds of thousands of people

were sent to jails and prisons

for simple possession of marijuana,

for low-level offenses.

America's public enemy number one

in the United States is drug abuse.

In order to fight and defeat this enemy,

it is necessary to wage

a new, all-out offensive.

This call for law and order

becomes integral to something that

comes to be known

as the Southern strategy.

Nixon begins to recruit Southern whites,

formerly staunch Democrats,

into the Republican fold.

Persuading poor

and working-class whites

to join the Republican Party in droves...

By speaking to,

in subtle and non-racist terms...

...a thinly veiled racial appeal...

...talking about crime,

by talking about law and order

or the chaos of our urban cities

unleashed by the civil rights movement.

We have launched

an all-out offensive against crime,

against narcotics,

against permissiveness in our country.

The rhetoric of

"get tough" and "law and order,"

um, was part and parcel of the backlash

of the civil rights movement.

A Nixon administration official

admitted the war on drugs

was all about

throwing black people in jail.

He said, quote,

The end of the Reagan era

I'm like 11 or 12 or

Old enough to understand

The sh*t'll change forever

They declared the war on drugs

Like a war on terror

But what it really did was

Let the police terrorize whoever

But mostly black boys

But they would call us n*ggers

And lay us on our belly

While they fingers on they triggers

Raise your right hand and repeat after me.

I, Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear...

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