How President George H.W. Bush Sent A Black Teen To Prison For 8 Years To Set Up A Political Talking Point

On September 5, 1989, Bush showed America a bag of crack cocaine purchased in front of the White House, but the human cost behind that talking point has been largely forgotten.

On September 5, 1989, President George H.W. Bush — who died on Friday at the age of 94 — delivered his first nationally televised address from the Oval Office, a speech designed to announce his administration’s anti-drug policy. During that speech, preserved for history by C-Span, Bush illustrated his point with a dramatic prop. He held up a bag of crack cocaine that he said had been “seized” in a city park directly across from the White House.

The moment was a memorable one and helped Bush rally support behind his “war on drugs,” but as historian and author Joshua Clark Davis recounted in a detailed Twitter thread compiled by the Thread Reader site on Saturday, there was a human story behind Bush’s now-famous visual — the story of a 19-year-old African-American Washington D.C. teen named Keith Jackson with no prior criminal record, and who didn’t even know how to get to the White House until he was lured there by drug enforcement agents specifically to make the drug sale that would give Bush his bag of crack — a bag of crack that was purchased for $2,400, not “seized” as Bush claimed.

When Jackson was sentenced to 10 years behind bars more than a year later, after two juries deadlocked and failed to convict him, even the judge in his case lamented the legally required length of the sentence, and implored Jackson to appeal to Bush for a commutation that would shorten his sentence, as the Washington Post reported at the time.

https://www.inquisitr.com/5189609/george-h-w-bush-keith-jackson-prison-crack/