Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

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Black Silent Majority: Race, Class, and the Politics of Punishment

Wed, January 30, 2019
Dinner Program
Michael J. Fortner

Michael Fortner, assistant professor of political science at City University of New York’s Graduate Center and author of “Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment” will address the rise of crime and drug addiction in African American communities in the post-Civil Rights era and discuss the role the black middle class played in the development of mass incarceration.

 

Michael Javen Fortner is assistant professor of political science at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. He received a B.A. in political science and African American studies from Emory University, and a M.A. in government and a Ph.D. in government and social policy from Harvard University.

Fortner is the author of “Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment” (Harvard University Press, 2015), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and winner of the New York Academy of History’s 2016 Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in New York History. With Amy Bridges, he co-edited Urban Citizenship and American Democracy (SUNY Press, 2016).

He has also been published in The New York Times, Newsweek, and Dissent magazine, and his research has been covered in major media outlets, such as the New Yorker, New York Magazine, the Daily Beast, Time, WNYC and NPR.

Fortner is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Urban History and Urban Affairs Review.

Food for Thought: Podcast with Michael Fortner

Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

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