Black Dispossession Was Designed Systemically. Rebuilding Civic Power Must Be, Too. – Next City

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Op-ed: For 150 years, the U.S. has engineered conditions that destroy Black political power and community stability. A Connecticut organizer explains how undoing those systems begins with the vote.
James Jeter Op-Ed December 2, 2025
(Photo by 7500 RPM / Unsplash)
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This story is part of a series of essays by members of the Black to the Future Public Policy Institute network. Read more.
Since emancipation, the United States and its cities and states have engineered systems of white racial control that meet the legal definition of genocide – not through explicit mass killings but instead a slow-motion destruction of Black communities achieved by voting restrictions, economic sabotage and the weaponization of addiction.
The betrayal of Reconstruction established the blueprint. Less than a year after the promise of 40 acres to newly freed Black people, President Andrew Johnson revoked that promise. White lawmakers trapped Black Americans in sharecropping debt peonage, a system historians call “worse than slavery.” Black Codes criminalized unemployment and land ownership, funneling freed people into convict leasing camps, where, in the most barbaric camps, mortality rates reached 40%.
The 1877 withdrawal of federal troops after the Civil War unleashed white supremacist massacres from Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873 to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, which destroyed Black Wall Streets and murdered Black elected officials. These were not isolated riots but coordinated campaigns to prevent Black political power, satisfying the Genocide Convention’s criteria of “deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to destroy a group in whole or in part.”
Fast forward 100 years, when outright violence became politically untenable, the United States created new strategies to destroy Black people. Richard Nixon’s “War on Drugs” was designed to criminalize Black people and destabilize our communities during the peak of the Black Power movement. This strategy culminated in 1986 when the CIA and its agents trafficked cocaine into the United States and conspired to flood crack into Black communities. In the 1990s, Congress passed laws to punish crack cocaine users and dealers 100 times harsher than people who used and dealt powder cocaine.
The results of these actions are enduringly genocidal:
Felony disenfranchisement laws now bar one in 16 Black adults from voting and creating Black political power.
Predatory policing policies economically strangle Black communities through seized assets and the denial of housing to people with drug convictions.
The creation of the “superpredator” myth usurped academic language and spurred a cultural narrative that justified removing Black children from their families and criminalized Black prepubescent boys, exerting state control through penal systems.
It’s notable how quickly and efficiently white policymakers responded to the threats of Black people building power and economic success. Just one year after the conclusion of the Civil Rights Movement, which ended with the passage of the Housing Rights Act of 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the “War on Crime.” This was followed by Nixon’s declaration of the “War on Drugs” and Ronald Regan’s weaponization of the welfare queen trope in the 1980s, which birthed other laws that stripped Black communities of stabilizing resources. At the same time, “Tough on Crime” policies in states across the country incarcerated Black lives and stole Black votes, permanently in many cases.
Here in Connecticut, these policies translate to Black people making up 11% of the state’s population but 41% of the incarcerated population. This is what happened after the state created a zoning structure that maintained strict segregation by race, income and education. For the majority of Black and Brown families in Connecticut’s cities, where they were forced to live, they experienced feeble housing markets, underfunded school systems, a depressed labor market and overpolicing.
These types of zoning laws – in combination with hundreds of federal, state and local policies that criminalized and caged Black and Brown bodies, including the 1994 crime bill, as well as the proliferation of harmful narratives about children – helped create a new class of disenfranchised people and communities that has endured for generations.
I myself have fallen into every trap that has been set for me. Incarceration sits in my family intergenerationally. I came of age in a prison cell during my 20 years of incarceration, starting at age 17. I was considered to be a child superpredator, deemed unredeemable by a system that never deemed me anything. I committed significant harm in my community and spent two decades figuring out how it happened, the depths of the damage I caused and the depth of the damage done to me.
Given this history, it’s no surprise to see today’s lawmakers across the country going to extremes to maintain power and control. It’s the backlash resulting from our successes in building Black political power, including re-enfranchising more than two million people with felony convictions since 1997.
As part of my fellowship with the Black to the Future Policy Institute, the Full Citizens Coalition helped reverse some of the most stringent felony disenfranchisement laws in Connecticut. Organizers enfranchised 4,000 Connecticut residents on parole in a special legislative session in 2021 by establishing champions in the state judiciary committee, government administration, elections committee and local partner groups without burdening the state budget. The fellowship provided the critical knowledge we needed to navigate the legislative system, collaborate with policymakers – and win.
Though the number may seem small, the implications are enormous. Four thousand people return from prison in Connecticut every year, with over 90% returning to four cities: Hartford, Waterbury, New Haven and Bridgeport. These majority-minority cities suffer from profound civic disengagement, and reintegrating 4,000 active citizens into a voting turnout population that fails to exceed 25% changes the power dynamic of each city.
The systems that we seek to change are the systems that we couldn’t see, but felt sitting upon us. The judgment we saw in the eyes of cops before we ever committed a crime, the poverty that led us to believe that money was the answer to all our problems.
My fight is a fight for the generations lost, as well as the generations to come. We now have the advantage of learning from the past and seeing how the algorithm of the United States has worked against us as we continue to restore rights and change legislation to build power and reverse the effects of all we’ve endured. The ultimate goal is to reverse the policy of felony disenfranchisement and see universal suffrage in Connecticut. Civically-active prisons can become decarceralized spaces and community-oriented space.
The arc of this history reveals not just the persistence of white supremacy, but the even greater persistence of Black survival, creativity and vision for a truly democratic America. Generations of Black people who refused to accept their conditions were permanent or inevitable have shown us what we can achieve if we redirect the same systemic thinking that created genocidal policies toward policies promoting healing and justice.
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James Jeter serves as the founding Director of the Dwight Hall Civic Allyship Initiative housed at Yale. Jeter originates this role and initiative as an alumnus of the Wesleyan Center for Prison Education at Cheshire Correctional Institution, where he spent nearly 20 years incarcerated. Fostering relationships while still incarcerated, Jeter built a network that would help launch his career into social and community impact post release. Through the efforts of a coalition he personally built while still in the “Lifers” program at Cheshire CI which included the Mayor of Hartford, Connecticut’s Chief of Staff, the DOJ’s “Project Longevity” task force, and the CEO of a local Community Loan Fund.
In 2016, Jeter was released a decade ahead of his scheduled date. He hasn’t looked back or slowed down since; first working as a banking and housing public policy analyst at the very same Community Loan Fund, who’s CEO assisted in his release. Since then Jeter has grown and extended his network to include concurrent fellowships at private and public foundations such as Propel and Galaxy Capital and Tow Justice. Jeter’s relationships in academia in addition to Yale include Trinity College and Quinnipiac Law where he houses a research program for students and faculty working with returning citizens.
Jeter is co-founder and director of the Full Citizens Coalition which in June 2021, after a three year campaign won Jeter and more than 4,000 other Connecticut citizens the right to vote, and expandied on this legislative when by securing the ability to cast an absentee ballot for those in pre-trial detention and 2025. James served as the treasurer of the Connecticut Bail Fund, served on the board of Wesleyan’s Center for Prison Education, has been honored with the 100 Men of Color Distinction, led participatory budgeting with Hartford City Council, and has returned to Cheshire Correctional Institution to speak to residents of its TRUE Unit. James is dedicated to the cause of rights restoration and has sought opportunities to apply his own experience to benefit those still incarcerated or returning home.
Tags: racism, incarceration, democracy
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