Eventually, however, the economic emancipation achieved by “getting money” became a curse. Families were ruptured by the twin evils of addiction and incarceration. Corner crews fought deadly gun battles over access to lucrative customer bases in public-housing tower blocks, pitting neighbor against neighbor and leaving residents prisoners in their own homes, trapped in fiefs controlled by drug gangs.
Shawn McCray, a basketball prodigy from the Hayes Homes in Newark, was caught with crack and narrowly escaped prison when a judge showed him mercy. He went on to graduate from Caldwell College with a degree in sociology. He vowed to go straight and took on a 9-to-5 job, only to succumb to the gravitational tug of the streets to hustle with the Zoo Crew, one of Newark’s biggest drug-trafficking rings in the early 1990s. (McCray eventually gave up dealing and went on to coach boys’ basketball at his former high school.)
Ramsey aims to give the story of the crack epidemic a human face while telling it from start to finish, a herculean task. By and large he succeeds. With a focus on deliverance for his characters as they get sober or stop dealing drugs, he leaves less explored the homicide epidemic that crack ignited — the violence that was an inevitable part of business for operations like the Zoo Crew. Still, he includes an account of Kurt Schmoke, once a zealous Baltimore prosecutor who sought the death penalty for a crack dealer guilty of gunning down a Black detective. Schmoke went on to become Baltimore’s mayor, and, in an impressive volte-face, resolved to try to halt the suffering brought on by crack by decriminalizing users. His biggest successes came in 1994, when he inaugurated a needle-exchange program and a drug-treatment court intended to help addicts avoid jail.
Yet it was not politicians but, rather, people in crack-riddled communities who finally brought an end to the epidemic. By the mid-1990s a new generation had come of age, determined to reject the drug’s grip on minority neighborhoods. Marijuana, accompanied by the bass lines of Dr. Dre’s triple-platinum 1992 album “The Chronic,” supplanted crack. This younger generation heeded the cautionary tale of the 1991 movie “New Jack City” and the street justice meted out to its murderous protagonist, the Harlem crack kingpin Nino Brown. The movie’s antidrug message was in stark contrast to the glamorization of the heroin-trafficking mafia dons in “The Godfather” — yet more evidence of the disparity with which America defines its anti-establishment idols.
Jonathan Green is the author, most recently, of “Sex Money Murder: A Story of Crack, Blood, and Betrayal.” He is working on a book about a group of politically radicalized Christians who formed a deadly armed militia.
WHEN CRACK WAS KING: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era | By Donovan X. Ramsey | 427 pp. | One World | $30