“In fact, even when the federal government began enacting laws banning race discrimination in housing, education, and employment, a countervailing government program blunted their efforts. Officially, it was known as urban renewal. Black people called it Negro removal.”
If we had to point to one kind of people as evil based solely on occupation, it would seem easy to single out drug dealers. They provide addictive substances to desperate people! They profit off of human misery! But one needs to look no further than the pharmaceutical industry to see that the provision of habit-forming drugs (like Oxycontin) to people who have become dependent on them isn’t considered a social ill when it’s done by fancy white people in suits, just when it’s done by people of color on the corner. Making money from people who genuinely need the latest and best cancer drug, or even simple insulin, is also tolerated when it comes from a company with a name like Eli Lilly.
It’s never quite as easy as it seems like it should be to mark certain people as “bad” because of what they do for a living. At the height of his trade, Charlotte drug dealer Money Rock gave back to the community inside the housing project where he operated and opened a restaurant for his mother, hardly fitting the stereotype we might have in our heads. Journalist Pam Kelley uses his story of growing up, getting into the game, and then long years of prison as the lens through which she examines the circumstances and policies that gave an ambitious young man few other places to go in her book, named after its subject: Money Rock. If you’ve ever seen The Wire, there will be a lot here that feels familiar in terms of the examination of systemic injustice. But the format of a book gives Kelley more room to really dig deep into the past to get at the roots of the issues.
Kelley traces the development of Charlotte from a Confederate backwater to a fairly well-integrated small city, to further growth combined with the stoking of racist resentment leading to segregation and the red-lining of black people out of the city’s best neighborhoods. Along with other black activists, a woman named Carrie Platt ran for city council in 1969 to try to change things for the black community, but she (and the rest of them) lost. Carrie and her husband Alphonso had several children, among them a son who they named Belton Lamont Platt. Belton was a hustler from a young age, using his lunch money to buy candy at the corner store that he then sold for a markup at the (very white) elementary school to which he was bused. It was that same entrepreneurial drive that got him into the drug market, though Belton himself never used. On the street, he became Money Rock, and despite initial success, a bad sale (combined with newly toughened sentencing laws and a strict judge) landed him in prison for over 20 years. It was there that the one-time Money Rock found God and became a preacher, a calling which has sustained him since his release.
Platt’s story is in and of itself compelling: a smart, driven kid who gets a little off track when he discovers girls as a teenager, finding himself with “drug dealer” as one of his most viable options for success. A perfect storm of circumstances landing him in the courtroom of a notoriously harsh judge, just after drug sentencing became much stricter for crack cocaine. And finally, a prison conversion, leading him to unlikely but stable marriages and the establishment of a successful ministry from the ground up. It’s an interesting story, and one that doesn’t usually get told. But what really takes this up another level is the skill with which Kelley weaves in the larger social movements that impacted Platt’s life: racist housing policies, the impact of “urban renewal” on black communities, school busing for integration, the so-called War on Drugs, and mass incarceration, among others.
These are problems that can seem so big as to be almost impersonal if you’re not exposed to them, so what she’s able to do in bringing them down into the scale of the life of one man and his family really hits home. These aren’t just theories, the course of the Platt family’s lives were changed forever because of them. Kelley highlights this without haranguing, building her argument about the impact of discrimination without ever seeming argumentative. This balancing act requires a lot of talent from Kelley to pull off, and she executes it beautifully. I was completely drawn into this book and found it really rewarding to read. I would highly recommend it to all readers!