A Publication Dedicated to the Cause of Justice as It Is to the Nourishment of Critical Thinking

I have over the years come to regard Social Justice as a constituent element in my own growth and development as an independent-minded, politically conscious scholar. I will forever be indebted to the founding editors of this truly amazing publication for empowering me - by their supreme example - to think, write, and, in my case, to seek to have published thoughts and ideas that generally fall outside mainstream American academic circles. Twenty-five years ago, when what was then Crime and Social Justice first hit the stands, I was a twenty-something sociology graduate student at Howard University, in Washington, D.C. I was sitting in classes taught in, for the most part, the proud University of Chicago tradition. G. Franklin Edwards, a protege of the eminent E. Franklin Frazier, taught two required core courses. (Frazier was the first African American president of the American Sociological Association; he had built Howard's sociology department into one of respectability during his tenure there in the 1940s up through the time of his untimely death in 1962.)(1) So at this preeminent black institution, dominant sociological thinking fell firmly within the mainstream of the American Sociological Association, the ASA. This notwithstanding, of course, a coterie of persistent gadflies - more often than not hired in non-tenure-track positions - would from time to time hurl brickbats at the established intellectual citadels. One praiseworthy encapsulation of their musings was a collection edited by Joyce A. Ladner (1973), which bore the prematurely ambitious title, The Death of White Sociology.(2) But for any graduate student seriously contemplating a career in sociology whether in academia, research, or agency - straight and narrow was the path. You learned to think about social problems in essentially structural-functionalist terms. And you aspired to write in ways acceptable to the American Sociological Review and the Journal of Sociology. Only Alfred McClung Lee's Social Problems appeared to offer some sort of respite - at least at that time. A scant few of us - those fortunate enough to have been taken under Edwards' influential wings - even got to learn directly the business of applied sociology: we got to work as paid interns at the highly regarded Bureau of Social Science Research, a determined procurer of federal research dollars, situated within shouting distance of the White House. If somehow along the road toward bona-fide academic certification you developed unease with the brand of sociological writing and analyses into which you were being ritualistically immersed, you would be told, in stark, dire terms: "You're messing with your future." Because, don't you know, getting a job especially a teaching job - in a "respectable" institution meant building a publication record in respectable publications. Publications, that is, none too eager to give a second reading to heterodoxical epistemologies. There were, indeed, several students like me who felt, as we were coming to terms with our own emerging sociological imaginations, discomfort with prevailing Howard U orthodoxies - although, to be sure, we wanted "good" academic jobs, in those "good institutions." The tentative insurgent sociological insights we tried to put into our writings would typically be flat-out rejected, with virtually no explanation, by editors of journals with seeming life and death power over our careers. The problem of what kind of analysis to engage in was becoming particularly acute for those of us with an evolving interest in trying to understand the ramifications of crime in the American context, with special reference to the condition of blacks in America. African Americans, it was becoming increasingly clear, had been the group in American society that was (and is more so today) the most affected by crime and the criminal justice system. Poor African American young men in particular were being subjected to tangible conditions - economic marginality, drug addiction, police brutality, violent crime, disease, and ultimately early death - that were "sufficiently destructive to amount to an instance of genocide," as Johnson and Leighton (1995: 3) would much later argue, and as I also tried to show, albeit with less grandiose aim than arguing "genocide," in The Atlanta Youth Murders and the Politics of Race (1998). …