I felt that threat personally and persistently, even though no one ever made it and even though I wasn’t actually the target of much violence. I had a backpack jacked once. A few hats, I think. The only time I was actually attacked was on the night of a school dance. I was walking with a bunch of girls, the lone boy, feeling cocky, when a boy roughly my age came up to me and said, “Yo, can I see your bus pass.” I hesitated. “I said, run your fuckin loot!” I had the thought in the moment to correct him: he hadn’t actually said “Run your loot.” But that thought was interrupted by him punching me in the chest and then knocking my wallet out of my hand as I withdrew it. He then whistled to a large group of friends, who appeared out of nowhere to ransack the contents. They took the few bucks in there and my bus pass (a city-issued pass for students that let them ride for free) and took off laughing.
Years later I can still conjure the shaking rage that consumed me, the burning humiliation and emasculation of being punched in the middle of the street for all to see. The city, seen through my teenage eyes, was spectacular but also ominous and exhausting.
I was bright enough to know that the same kids who jacked my backpack had had their own items jacked, and that they, too, lived in fear. But what was exceptional for me and my mostly white friends—violence—was far more likely to be routine in their world. That is: they were like me, scared teenagers full of bravado and terror in equal measure. But my actual feeling in that moment was that the space above the East Ninety-sixth Street border was an undifferentiated foreboding mass, a looming tower.
As I type this now, it all sounds ridiculous, overly dramatic. Was it really that bad? Well, at one level, yes. Those were the Crack Years, when crime, danger, and safety, consumed the city’s politics and media. And not just because of irrational fear—the city really was more violent than it had been in many decades, perhaps ever. Lifelong New Yorkers of all races and ethnicities had never experienced anything like it. (Not that it was experienced “together” across racial lines in any meaningful sense.) In 1991, the year I started riding the bus down to Manhattan to attend a magnet school, New York City set a record with 2,245 homicides. In 2015, it had just 352. The year before I started junior high school, it had 100,280 robberies compared to 16,931 in 2015.
This was just one moment in a longer story. In a remarkably short period of time, America got much more dangerous for its citizens. In 1960 there were approximately 160 violent crimes for every 100,000 Americans. In a decade the violent crime rate more than doubled to 360, and by 1980 it reached nearly 600. The rate dipped briefly and then peaked in 1992 at around 750—an increase of more than 450 percent in less than four decades.
The brunt of the great American crime wave of the late 1960s and 1980s was borne not by frightened white people like myself but largely by poor people of color. In Washington, D.C., a majority-black city, drug-related homicides went up 500 percent in a single year, from 33 in 1988 to 154 in 1989. Ta-Nehisi Coates describes his own upbringing on the Westside of Baltimore during the Crack Years as drenched in fear.
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 correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear. The law did not protect us.
Fear of crime may have been preconditioned by centuries of the American experience; it may have taken its particular forms due to the pathologies embedded in America’s racial hierarchies. But that does not mean the fear was manufactured or invented as an excuse for what came after. Starting in the 1960s, crime in America skyrocketed at an unprecedented pace. And not just the kinds of crimes that in later years we would overpursue, the petty patrolling of traffic violations and outstanding warrants and nonviolent drug arrests. No: assaults, rapes, murders all went up.
And this violence created fear among citizens of all races, as well as calls from deep within the Colony to do something to stop it. This was certainly true in the Bronx of my youth. My father Roger Hayes, a Jesuit-seminarian-turned-community-organizer, co-founded the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition in 1974. These were the days when the Bronx was burning, when the borough had become a global symbol of urban blight. The mission of the NWBCCC was to try to prevent what had happened in the South Bronx—arson, abandonment, violence, and devastation—from happening to the Northwest Bronx. The group organized residents—black, white, and Latino—to take on slumlords and organized tenants to demand services and repairs. It coordinated investment capital in places teetering on the brink of being reduced to rubble.
Key to the Alinsky-inspired method of community organizing that my dad and his colleagues practiced was that neighborhood residents set the priorities and made the demands. And as the Crack Years dawned in the late 1980s, community members became preoccupied with drugs and violence. Similar organizations around the country shifted their focus from redlining, affordable housing, and community investment to violence, crime, and drugs. “Organizing comes from what people are concerned about,” my dad told me. “It wasn’t that people weren’t concerned about crime in the 1970s, but it really ramped up in the 1980s. And the crack thing was really huge. It was causing a lot of panic among people. People were seeing all of a sudden . . . all these people on the corner, all these people selling, all these people using. Whatever the low-level endemic drug issue was, it was ramped up a lot.”
As James Forman, Jr., demonstrates in his excellent Locking Up Our Own, in the Crack Years black citizens, politicians, and activists understood drugs, crime, and violence as a near existential threat, one that rivaled the marauding destruction of earlier eras of white supremacist terrorism. “We have allowed death to change its name from Southern rope to Northern dope. Too many black youth have been victimized by pushing dope into their veins instead of hope into their brains,” Jesse Jackson would say in 1991.