Posted on Wed, Aug. 14, 2002
STANLEY CROUCH: HELP BLACKS BY ATTACKING CRIME, LEGALIZING DRUGS
During a recent visit to New Orleans, I began testing a theory I have about what has to be done to get black people up from the impoverished, crime-ridden and poorly educated extension of slavery into our moment.
I laid it out for Bob Hubbard, who was one of the central figures in the civil-rights movement in New Orleans. He also was in Mississippi during that tragic Freedom Summer of 1964, when James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered by local bigots. Hubbard had driven the car from New York that the three had been in the night they disappeared.
Hubbard is now a businessman interested in real estate and providing bed-and-breakfast lodging for visitors and tourists at his Hubbard Mansion on St. Charles Street in New Orleans.
I told Hubbard that the things I considered essential to black uplift were basic: high-quality public education; removing the burden of heavy crime from communities dominated by it; and legalizing drugs.
There needs to be a national rebuilding of public schools, so that black kids at the bottom will not be left out of the Internet age. Poorly educated, they are destined to become burdens on our society, one way or another.
For people at the bottom to live in civilized neighborhoods, the anarchic criminals who dominate the streets have to go, either behind bars or in honest directions. The civil-rights establishment and local leadership need to work on developing an alliance between the community and police. Such an alliance could result in hot lines that residents could use to report criminals, cops on foot patrols, and support of strong policing by community people.
Hubbard agreed with those ideas but questioned the idea of legalizing drugs. Legalizing drugs, he said, would lead to more chaos, unless all drug addicts were registered and supplied with their drugs through programs provided by the state.
I would argue, however, that we cannot fight a crime business that brings in so many billions of dollars and is responsible for so many of the violent deaths in the streets as well as the presence of so many young black men in penal institutions. Legalized and taken over by our pharmaceutical industry, those illegal plants and substances would bring mountains of tax dollars into the national coffers.
It would not be without costs. There would be those lost to drugs, just as there are those lost to alcohol. But we were able to handle the legalization of alcohol following Prohibition, and we could handle the legalization of drugs.
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Stanley Crouch is a columnist for the New York Daily News.
What are y'alls thoughts on this? I am not sure what my opinion is as of yet.....
Help Blacks By Attacking Crime, Legalizing Drugs - Tell Us What You Think
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