Media advisory: Professors can discuss perceptions of 1994 crime bill

LAWRENCE — Two University of Kansas researchers are available to provide historical context on the debate over how generations of African-Americans perceive the 1994 crime bill and its significance with organizers and black activists.

As part of the Democratic presidential primary, protesters recently criticized former President Bill Clinton for the 1994 bill that set lengthier prison sentences and increased the number of police officers in the streets. Media reports have focused on some generational differences of opinion on the bill, including older African-Americans defending it.

Clarence Lang, chair and associate professor of the Department of African and African-American Studies, is author of the book "Black America in the Shadow of the Sixties: Notes on the Civil Rights Movement, Neoliberalism, and Politics." He is an expert on African-American working-class and labor history and was recently named to the Organization of American Historians' prestigious Distinguished Lectureship Program.

Lang said that while there are some generational differences among African-Americans on the overall legacies of the 1994 crime bill, concerns on these issues are not recent.

"While it is certainly true that police violence and misconduct, and racialized mass incarceration, have become the defining issues among today's young Black Lives Matter organizers, black activists did not just discover these problems a few short years ago," he said. "In fact, concerns regarding the growing numbers of people of color incarcerated as a result of harsh drug-sentencing policies go back to the 1990s during the Bill Clinton presidency."

Lang said while younger activists today are more apt than their elders to reject respectability-oriented politics, many Black Power activists in the 1970s — and even a number of liberal Civil Rights activists in the 1960s — also criticized the idea that their strategies, tactics and goals had to conform to white expectations and sensibilities.

"This isn't to suggest that black activist politics are no different today than they were in the past," he said. "The point is that we need a more careful assessment of those differences."

Shawn Alexander, associate professor of African and African-American studies and director of KU's Langston Hughes Center, can speak about African-American social and intellectual history of the 19th and 20th centuries in connection to present-day race relations. He has published an anthology of civil rights leader and journalist T. Thomas Fortune's writings, a book on the origins of civil rights organizing in the United States. Alexander is also is author of the book "W.E.B. Du Bois: An American Intellectual and Activist" that details the famous Civil Rights leader's political advocacy, including condemnation of presidential candidates Adlai Stevenson and Dwight Eisenhower for not criticizing those who flew Confederate flags at campaign rallies in the South.

"The varying interpretations of President Clinton's 1994 crime bill and its effects on the black community is not surprising," he said. "To quote Du Bois, 'History records not what really happened, but only what we wish to remember.'"

To arrange an interview with Lang or Alexander, contact George Diepenbrock at 785-864-8853 or gdiepenbrock@ku.edu.