1980s: HIV/AIDS, Incarceration, and Law Enforcement
Big Idea
The HIV/AIDS crises divided Black communities and the war on crime incarcerated increasing numbers of Black men.
What’s important to know?
The AIDS Crises: HIV/AIDS split the Black community and created divisions in what was once a unified political agenda.
Protests & Law Enforcement Retrenchment: The 1980s also solidified the United States’ carceral state, and continued law enforcements attack on Black communities.
Increasing Divisions and Class Politics: As economic gaps increased between White and Black families, Reaganism emphasized "self-help" and personal empowerment often indirectly blaming Black men, in particular, for their situation and financial difficulties.
Life in St. Louis: During the 1980s, African Americans in St. Louis continued to struggle with the lack of educational and employment opportunities.
1: The AIDS Crises
HIV/AIDs protest
Image Source: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
While it has always been a myth to speak of a singular “Black community” the cohesion that Black leaders worked to achieve in advocating for political issues broke down when AIDs entered the political arena. Or as historian, Jefari Allen noted, “The 1980s showed us that one consequence would be the unmasking of the previously stable notion of political cohesion within ‘the Black community’” (Allen et al, 2023, p. 351).
This unmasking came as a result of the HIV/AIDS crises being linked with LGBTQIA+ individuals who were judged in both Black and White communities with Puritanesque rigor. Already marginalized within the existing White social hierarchy, individuals afflicted with HIV/AIDS found few options for support, as prevailing attitudes and institutional structures offered no assistance. They were forced to create resources and support networks for themselves. However, in so doing, they also had to fight within their own communities to be acknowledged and supported. This fight is what led to what Allen calls the “ruptured and then reconstituted” Black political landscape (p. 360).
2: Protests & Law Enforcement Retrenchment
The writing of historian Elizabeth Hinton characterizes this period as critical to normalizing the carceral state. In 1980, when Black communities in Miami erupted in outcry against the acquittal of four police officers who had admitted to beating a Black insurance salesman to death, President Carter visited the city. However, in a telling response, he noted that the federal government would not provide aid in rebuilding or take any action to re-evaluate the criminal justice system that had just silently condoned the execution of a Black man at the hands of law enforcement.
While spending millions on what ended up being a defunct “Star Wars” system to defend the U.S. against the threat of the Soviet Union, President Reagan imposed harsher restrictions on social support for those most vulnerable in American cities. Hinton describes this impact: “In many ways, this continued the long post–Civil Rights era trend toward mass criminalization and welfare retrenchment. But the Reagan administration accelerated this tendency, kicking a half million Americans off the welfare rolls, depriving one million people of their food stamp benefits, and removing nearly three million previously eligible children from school lunch programs” (Allen et al, 2023, p. 352).
In 1992, Los Angeles erupted in a similar fashion after a White jury acquitted four White police officers in the beating of Rodney King, a Black motorist pulled over by police after an 8-mile chase. The resulting arrest was captured on video and created a national stir (Allen et al, 2023, p. 353). The federal government continued to fund the War on Drugs and reinforce existing policies rather than evaluating their potential influence on police brutality.
3: Increasing Divisions and Class Politics
Figure 1: The Black unemployment rate is consistently twice the White unemployment rate
Source: Center for American Progress
In the realm of employment, the 1980s introduced significant challenges. The rhetoric of Reaganism highlighted “self-help” and individual empowerment. This placed blame on Black men, in particular, for their own place in society and their own economic struggles.
Meanwhile, '“[t]he gap in unemployment between African Americans and white increased during the 1970s and 1980s—the same period in which African Americans’ incomes ceased converging with whites” (Bonilla-Silva, 2018, p. 45). For those who were able to find jobs, the gap in wage disparity between White and Black men with similar characteristics (education, training, etc.) was 14 percent in 1980 and had grown to 16 percent in 1985 (p. 45). Further studies have demonstrated that at every educational level White people earned more than Black people and, in fact, the farther up the organizational ladder a Black worker moved the greater the increase between the salary of a White versus a Black person became (p. 46).
In the 1980s, especially in areas where Black voices gained ascendency in politics, a division began to appear around class. Rising Black leaders, afraid of old stereotypes resurrecting, were accused of declining to investigate crime particularly hurting lower class African Americans.
One such example occurred in Atlanta in the early 1980s. A series of disappearances and murders involving Black children occurred leaving many Black parents afraid and without answers. An interview conducted by the local press was very telling. As historian Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor wrote of the episode, “When reporters asked one Black mother of a slain child about her frustrations with the pace of the investigation, the reporter asked, ‘After all, aren’t the mayor, city council president and police chieftains all Black?’ Her response was poignant: ‘It’s not a matter of race, it’s a matter of class.’” (Allen et al, 2023, 356).
4: Life in St. Louis
Despite the efforts of local organizations like the Human Development Corporation (HDC) and federally-funded programs like the Office of Economic Opportunity, Head Start, Upward Bound, Job Corps, and Volunteers in Service to America, African Americans in St. Louis continued to struggle with the lack of educational and employment opportunities.
While White skilled workers benefited from defense industry jobs with contractors like McDonald-Douglas, adept Black workers were continually shut out of such opportunities, relegated to the lowest paying and least stable positions.
Lang found that “98 percent of the company’s black workers were in the most menial, dispensable categories, and of the two thousand people who had been laid off that year an estimated 60 percent were black” (2009, p. 211). Lang further wrote that “In January 1970, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission held public hearings in St. Louis to review the employment policies of not only McDonald-Douglas, but also the Chrysler Corporation and Mallinckrodt Chemical Works” (Lang, 2009, p. 212).
Whether in St. Louis or another U.S. city, the 1980s exposed increasing White-created vulnerabilities within the Black world. “[L]ow-income Black Americans became vulnerable on two fronts: a struggle against one another, and a struggle with the institutions and policies that federal policymakers developed to fight the War on Drugs” (Allen et al, 2023, p. 361).
Your Turn
How did the HIV/AIDS crises change Black communities? Could you argue that the growth of the carceral state continued the pattern of reworking forms of Black enslavement from slavery to sharecropping to imprisonment?
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Overview:
Overview of the 1980s and 90s from the Amistad Digital Resource.
HIV/AIDS:
Explore the website on the HIV/AIDS crises at the University of Illinois website “Redline Collection.”
Read Dan Royles (2022) article in Black Perspectives on “Why Black AIDS Matters.”
Read: Smith D. K. (1992). HIV disease as a cause of death for African Americans in 1987 and 1990. Journal of the National Medical Association, 84(6), 481–487.
Read Howard University School of Lawarticle on the civil rights movement and HIV/AIDS.
Protests and Law Enforcement:
NPR (2017), “A Look Back at the Rodney King Riots.”
The BlackPast on the “Miami (Liberty City) Riot.”
Read: Porter, B. and Dunn, A. (1984). The Miami Riot of 1980: Crossing the Bounds. Lexington Books.
ACLU article reviewing 50 years of the war on drugs.
Read: Hinton, E. (2016). From the war on poverty to the war on crime: the making of mass incarceration in America. Harvard University Press.
Hinton, E. (2022). America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s. Liveright.
Black Culture:
Explore the history of Rap and Hip-Hop from Carnegie Hall.
University of Arizona interview with Stephanie Troutmen Robbins on Black culture in the 1980s.
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Teaching the Reagan Years resources from Oakland Museum of California.
Teaching the Miami 1980 Uprising from Zinn Education Project.
PBS lessons on “African-American Histories Since the Civil Rights Movement.”
The Significance of Black History from Ohio State. (Grades 10-12).
Resources from the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History on the period of 1945-1980.
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Read this article from Eliza Murray (2019) at Washington University in Saint Louis about “Race, HIV/AIDS, and Health Care Access in 1980s St. Louis.”
Read this book by St. Louis resident Calvin Riley and NiNi Harris, Black St. Louis. Reedy Press.
Gordon, C. (2009). Mapping decline: St. Louis and the fate of the American city. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Wright Sr., J. A. (2016). African American St. Louis. Arcadia Press.
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Alexander M. (2012). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press.
Carter, Daryl A.. (Author). 2016. Brother Bill: President Clinton and the Politics of Race and Class. Fayetteville, Arkansas: The University of Arkansas Press.
Cohen, C. J. (1999). The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politic. Chicago University Press.
Guiner, L. (2003). Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback Into a New Vision of Social Justice. Simon and Schuster.
Hartman, Saidiya. (2007). Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Sharpe, C. (2018). In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press.
Marable, M. (1982). REAGANISM, RACISM, AND REACTION: Black Political Realignment in the 1980s. The Black Scholar, 13(6), 2–15. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41066992
——-. (1983). How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America. South End Press.
——-. (1998). Black Leadership.
Troutmen Robbins, S. and Leonard, D. J. (2021). Race in American Television: Voices and Visions That Shaped a Nation. Bloomsbury Press.
Wright Rigueur, L. (2016). The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power. Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Allen, J., Connolly, N. D. B., Fletcher Jr., B., Hinton, E., and Taylor, K-Y. (2023). Roundtable: Defining the Black 1980s. The Journal of African American History, 108 (3).
Bonilla-Silva, E. (2018). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in America. (3rd edition). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Davis, Dána-Ain. 2019. “Trump, Race, and Reproduction in the Afterlife of Slavery.” Cultural Anthropology 34, no. 1: 26–33. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.1.05.
Lang, C. (2009). Grassroots at the gateway: class politics and Black freedom struggle in St. Louis, 1936-75. University of Michigan Press.