At the time, the racial politics were not quite what you might assume. Prior to becoming mayor of Atlanta in 1990, Maynard Jackson offered a plan to confiscate the property of drug dealers called “Kick Their Assets.”

As for murderers, Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry wanted police to “hunt them down like mad dogs.” Black leaders like these wanted stern action because it was African Americans who were most likely to be harmed by crime.

“At the height of the epidemic, black political and civic leaders often compared crack to the greatest evils that African Americans had ever suffered,” Yale Law professor James Forman Jr., who is black, wrote in his 2017 book “Locking Up Our Own.”An NAACP official called it “the worst thing to hit us since slavery.”

In his 1997 book, “Race, Crime and the Law,” Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, an African American, argued that “blacks have suffered more from being left unprotected or under-protected by law enforcement authorities than from being mistreated as suspects or defendants.”