How and Why Black Male Incarceration is Undermining Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Last Wish"

Abstract

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights activists were imprisoned countless times as part of a deliberate strategy to harass and intimidate them. In 1954, there were just 98,000 Blacks incarcerated in jails and prisons across this country. Since then, the Black prison population has grown to nearly 1 million; disturbingly, 864,000 are Black men. In this provocative talk, Reeves examines how we arrived at this troubling development. He argues that the ambitious policy of “locking up” Black men to combat crime has not been without profound consequences for the social fabric of inner-city families and neighborhoods. Indeed, the magnitude of this crisis is undermining Martin Luther King’s "last wish".