Ultimately, however, the economic emancipation achieved by “getting money” became a curse. Families were torn apart by the twin evils of addiction and incarceration. Corner crews fought deadly firefights to access lucrative customer bases in public housing tower blocks, pitting neighbors against neighbors and residents leaving prisoners in their own homes trapped in fiefdoms controlled by drug gangs.
Shawn McCray, a basketball prodigy from Newark’s Hayes Homes, was caught with crack and narrowly escaped jail when a judge showed him mercy. He then graduated from Caldwell College with a degree in sociology. Vowing to go straight ahead, he took a 9 to 5 job, only to succumb to the gravity of the streets to interfere with the Zoo Crew, one of Newark’s largest drug trafficking gangs in the early 1990s. (McCray eventually gave up dealing and went to coach boys’ basketball at his former high school.)
Trying to put a human face on the story of the crack epidemic and tell it from start to finish, Ramsey is a formidable task. In general, he succeeds. With a focus on liberation for his characters as they sober up or stop dealing drugs, he’s less likely to explore the murder epidemic that ignited crack — the violence that was an inevitable part of business for operations like the Zoo Crew. Yet it includes an account of Kurt Schmoke, once a zealous Baltimore prosecutor who sought the death penalty for a crack dealer guilty of shooting a black detective. Schmoke subsequently became the mayor of Baltimore and, with an impressive face, decided to try to end the suffering of crack by decriminalizing users. His greatest successes came in 1994, when he started a needle exchange program and a drug treatment court designed to help addicts avoid prison.
Yet it was not the politicians, but the people in crack-riddled communities that finally ended 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 basslines of Dr. Dre’s 1992 triple platinum album ‘The Chronic’ supplanted crack. This younger generation listened to the cautionary tale of the 1991 movie “New Jack City” and the street justice did its murderous protagonist, Harlem crack kingpin Nino Brown. The film’s anti-drug message contrasted starkly with the glorification of the heroin-trafficking mafia in “The Godfather”—further proof of the inequality with which America defines its anti-establishment idols.
Jonathan Green is the most recent author 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 Folk History of a Misunderstood Era | By Donovan X. Ramsey | 427 pp. | One World | $30
